Stereo Sanctity

I wish the ape a lot of success.

Stereo Sisterhood / Blog Graveyard:
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Other Place. // One Band. // Another Band. // Spooky Sounds. // MIXES. // Thanks for reading.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

The 25 Best Records of 2012: Part # 3.

15. The Choo Choo Trains – tape

(self-released)

One of the best live performances I saw this year was London trio The Choo Choo Trains, in a crowded room full of chattering bodies not paying a great deal of attention. Playing in slow, quiet and determined fashion, the band pretty much ignored their audience and surroundings, building a solid, self-contained universe around themselves amid the chaos, running through a series of skeletal, minor key pop ballads and sad, strange guitar instrumentals, reluctantly allowing us a glimpse into a private world that seemed very special indeed.

From a know-it-all music fan POV, the band possess a kind of wallflower otherness that very much aligns them with Dolly Mixture or The Marine Girls, with a persistent sense of melancholy that seems to come entirely from the latter. But there is nothing deliberately referential going on here. Absolutely none of the contrived scene boosterism or ill-advised C86 nostalgia that so often blights this sort of thing. The world of The Choo Choo Trains seems wholly self-created and self-sustaining. Not precious or arch or garish or ironic, just… simple, and modest, and different. And good, more to the point.

I don’t want to push the naivety angle over-much here, but, rather than carefully composed (ie, boring) album, this lengthy ‘complete recordings’ style tape release is a format that seems to suit this band very well. It has the feel of an unedited collection of things they came up with during a long, long, unhurried practice session, quietly discovering the joy of making music together. And if it could perhaps be argued that, conventionally speaking, we don’t really need to hear a repetitious five minute organ instrumental with snatches of foreign language spoken word (‘Rockabilly Blue’) or an awkwardly executed bit of high school prom night incidental music (‘Something About Dancing’), they all form part of the overall spell being cast, and I’m glad that they are here.

Though the atmosphere remains remarkably consistent across the tape, variety is plentiful. Ramshackle indie-pop bangers (‘Hilma’, ‘Dreaming’), subdued, carefully crafted twangy guitar instrumentals (‘Peppermint Gardener’), hesitant recreations of Buddy Holly-esque heartbroken ‘50s pop (‘Lonely’, ‘(all I Ever Think About is) Rabbits’), eccentric Jonathan Richman style hymns to the everyday (‘Rocket Bicycle’) – all are present and correct.

Touching & inspiring, this is music made with no audience in mind, no real purpose beyond its creators’ own satisfaction. The feeling it conveys reminds me very of such holy documents as Epic Soundtracks’ ‘Debris’ or The Clean’s early EPs – a reassuring flame, and a timely reminder of why I do all this stuff in the first place.

14. Mi Ami – Decade (100% Silk)

I’m really at a loss for something to say about this one, but I’ve certainly listened to it a hell of a lot this year, so there must be something going on here.

Last I heard, Mi Ami were some sort of conceptual art rock duo who released a record with Bob Marley’s face on the front. Now, apparently, they make straight up techno / deep house sorta stuff, and, utterly absurd though it may seem for me to fall back on a couple of ex-indie dingbats for my repetitive beats when there’s a whole churning, ever-changing universe of actual dance music out there, I can’t deny that the results please me greatly.

Opener ‘Horns’ contrasts the gleaming urban sprawl of its glacial synths and echoed hi-hat pulse with an utterly unhinged vocal line buried just below the surface, a somewhat terrifying sounding individual of unguessable gender trying to clamber aboard the hover-car of the music from below, chanting and screaming, “I feel so fucked up, get me out”. The overall effect is akin to pulling into a giant, utopian silver railway station in a hyper-modern bullet train, and looking out of the window to see a disfigured, acid-damaged hobo gesticulating wildly at you. Unnerving, but revealing. Human spirit crushed beneath the machinery and all that.

Second track ‘Time of Love’ lacks such jarring tactics, but I like it even better – a blissful eleven minutes of celestial disco perfection, glass towers of quivering bass rising from the metronomic pulse as dubbed out voices and echoes speed through the side streets in slowed down Doppler effect style.

Years ago I’d probably have despised this record, raging against shitty, inoffensive, backgroundy electronica designed to make graphic designers and fashion students feel better about themselves. These day, 20+ plays on itunes tells you all you need to know, I suppose. S’good, I like it. Look, it’s got a VHS-warped ‘90s straight-to-video sci-fi jacking video, so it must be good:

13. Getatchew Mekuria & The Ex & Friends –

Y’anbessaw Tezeta (Terp Records)

The saxophone is one of those instruments that, like the violin or the accordion, allows no room for amateurs. Either you know how to get a good sound out of it, or you should probably shut up. Getatchew Mekuria knows how to get such a good sound out of it, he seems to throw most accomplished first world players back into the amateur category. His tone is so deep and rich and sonorous that its effect goes beyond the immediate feelings of warmth and welcome and actually becomes slightly queasy and overpowering – an overwhelmingly generous sound, like a Blue Whale stepping out of the ocean to say hello and shake hands.

As is extensively chronicled in the sleeve-notes to this album, the initial meeting
between Mekuria and The Ex seemingly proved a life-changing turn of events for both parties, giving the “grand negus of Ethiopian sax” a new lease of life, allowing him to present his music to audiences around the world after years present playing standards to VIP guests in an Addis hotel lounge, and helping the Dutch punks to undertake perhaps the most rewarding tangent of their long career, reconfiguring the gigantic, cyclical melodies and gargantuan swing of Ethiopian big band jazz for electric rock and avant improv formats, with the earth-shaking results presented on 2006’s incredible ‘Moa Anbessa’ album.

Apparently it was Mekuria himself who expressed a wish to get together with them to make another album – one that the sleeve notes repeatedly refer to as being perhaps his last, the implication being that his health is no longer really up to the demands of performance, and that retirement beckons (proceeds from this album go straight toward his retirement fund). As such, ‘Y’anbessaw Tezeta’ is Mekuria’s record through and through, with his European collaborators often remaining distant in the mix, slightly hesitant to disrupt their leader’s flow, with only the steady, rolling pulse of Katherina Bornefeld’s drumming remaining a constant, as the horn section of regular Ex collaborators interject only for brief, carefully controlled bursts as a counter-point to the central voice of the sax.

Certainly, listeners anticipating something as pulverising as ‘Moa Anbessa’s ‘Ethiopia Hagere’ will be disappointed, as the mood here remains more restrained and contemplative, more in keeping with the original laidback sound of vintage Ethiopian jazz recordings, with the warlike roar of The Ex’s lurching punk rock only occasionally making its presence felt, as the guitarists often fall back on providing more gentle textures of scraping and feedback.

Just hearing Mekuria do his thing is more than enough to satisfy though. His playing here remains as powerful as ever, representing the legacy of a man who has given his whole life over to perfecting and existing within this sound. Stormy discontent brews through the seven slow-burning minutes ‘Ambassel’, a beautiful, expansive track full of mournful trumpet and double-picked guitars, that requires me to use all my self-control to avoid going on about desert winds and shadowy, masked armies. Traditional melody ‘Bati’ presents an even more restrained performance, with The Ex creeping on tip-toes through the undergrowth as Mekuria’s sax turns bewitching, arabesque shapes. ‘Yegna Mushera’ is another definite highlight, remaining similarly low key but somehow overpoweringly bright and reassuring, like the feeling of a joyous family reunion captured in sound.

As my fruity lingo perhaps indicates, this is supremely evocative music, in which the oft-intimidating technique of the players and the strict yet organic lines of the compositions swiftly give way to a heady, transportative effect. Far be it from me to try to define *where* it sends you, but it certainly does send you, and that is very much the point. If this does turn out to be Mekuria’s final recording, it’s a fittingly intense conclusion to an extraordinary career.

12. Motion Sickness of Time Travel – self titled
(Spectrum Spools)

From July:

“Before digging into these LPs, it’s helpful to read up on the methodology Evans used in constructing them. Basically, sides A, B and D were assembled from the kind of shorter pieces that have featured on her previous records, threaded together into twenty minute ‘suites’ in time-honoured ‘70s fashion. Side C – ‘Summer of the Cat’s Eye’ – meanwhile is a one-take live improvisation, and maybe that goes some way toward explaining why it’s my favourite track here. Not that the other sides aren’t great too of course, but ‘..Cat’s Eye’ is really something, by-passing the kind of snidey “sounds like..” comparisons used earlier in this review for a really engrossing trip into the unknown, steady tremoloed signals crashing headfirst into waves of chattering chaos and unknowable space-voices, like original series Star Trek unexpectedly drifting into a Tarkovsky-esque realm of terrifying alien beauty. So that’s pretty good.

As to the other tracks, the whole ‘suite’ concept seems the like kind of thing tailor made to annoy the hell out of me, given my general distaste for stop/start dynamics and liking for distinct, self-contained pieces of music, but in actual fact it works pretty well, to the extent that you probably wouldn’t notice the methodology if not informed in advance. The run-off from each ‘bit’ is nicely calibrated with the rise of the next, further building the established mood rather than upsetting it.
[…]
There is a kind of hermetic purity to Evans work that I think really sets her apart from the potential tedium of the ‘mystic synth explorer’ aesthetic. I may have thrown around plenty o’ names in the paragraphs above, but the truth is that there is absolutely NO “he he, yeah, Tangerine Dream dude” type intent going on here. It sounds instead as if she’s simply sitting down in front of her gear, taking a deep breath and firing it up to make some wide-screen, expressive music, the way it naturally comes out, filtered through the technology, not defined by it – and the celestial depths scraped by the results speak for themselves.”

11. Six Organs of Admittance – Ascent
(Drag City)

Who’d have thought it? A Six Organs record riding high on the list in 2012. After the best part of a decade spent pursuing pleasant but rather inconsequential psych-folky directions on a series of Drag City albums, Ben Chasny’s project would likely have remained very much in the corners of my radar, were it not for the announcement that ‘Ascent’ represents what is to all intents and purposes a reformation of Comets On Fire, a band whose singularly chaotic psychedelic tumult has been increasingly missed round these parts since they faded away sometime in the mid ‘00s.

As you might expect, erstwhile Comets leader Ethan Miller – still mired in the aftermath of Howlin’ Rain’s disastrous mess of a Rick Rubin produced un-breakthrough album – is strictly on second guitar here, following Chasny’s lead as we get a hefty glimpse of what CoF might have sounded like with the positions of the two guitar-slingers reversed. And what it might have sounded like is, you’ll be glad to hear, bloody stunning, as ‘WasWasa’ kicks in with the headiest brew of unashamed heavy-psych fret-mangling I’ve heard this year, afterburners roaring through a text-book perfect emergency descent into a hostile alien world, nerve-shredding solos blearing out like torpedoes across a fearsome High Tide/Pink Fairies groove. Fucking awesome, in other words.

‘A Thousand Birds’, an extended electric reworking of an ancient Six Organs acoustic number, follows suit, with the rhythm section of Ben Flashman and Utrillo Kushner locking down a fine Rallizes style eterno-groove over which Chasny can sprawl and sway as he pleases, intoning verses between cascades of chiming, electrified string texture to fine psychedelic effect – full bore star-dazed rock awesomeness that continues across the hulking landscapes of ‘Close To The Sky’ and ‘Even If You Knew’. Unlike Comets, the sound here is sharp and clear, with more of a progressive edge rounding off the fuzz (kinda matches the outer space concept art), but the playing and the instrument tones are mighty enough so roll with such precision, and the chaos and noise of earlier outings is rarely missed. Quite what all-purpose electronics/effects guy Noel Harmonson adds to proceedings I’m uncertain, but I’m assured that he’s in there somewhere.

A blinding album then, for the most part, but the problem (for me at least), comes when Chasny switches back to his regular solo mode for ‘Solar Ascent’ and the rather anaemic closer ‘Visions (From IO)’. He’s a cool guy and a phenomenal player, and there’s little wrong with these tunes as such, but personally I’ve never been fully sold on this side of his work, and his folkier musings have a slippery, silvery quality to them that I can’t help but find slightly contrived - too overtly studied, veering more toward ‘candle shop mood music’ than the private press cosmic revelations he’s no doubt aiming for.

Still though – for a good 70% of the run time, ‘Ascent’ hits the spot like a battering ram. More please! Official Comets reunion..? C’mon! I’d certainly buy the ticket.

Labels: best of 2012, Getatchew Mekuria, Mi Ami, Motion Sickness of Time Travel, Six Organs of Admittance, The Choo Choo Trains, The Ex

Posted by: Ben / 2:22 PM (0) comments

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

The 25 Best Records of 2012: Part # 2.

20. Pye Corner Audio – Sleep Games (Ghostbox)

I suppose it makes sense that as the whole Ghostbox thing starts to get a little long in the tooth, the label should begin to expand its aesthetic remit slightly, welcoming in a slightly younger generation on music-makers for whom newly-excavated shadows of the ‘80s form the primary source material, as the hallowed ‘70s fall deeper into the semi-remembered past. Hence: Martin Jenkins, whose work here thankfully rises above his somewhat twee recording moniker, building a familiarly Ghostbox-y nest of retro-spook comforts from… well, you can guess where he’s going be going with this, right?

Yes, cry out in delight or bury your head in your hands as you will, but I’m afraid he’s going to John Carpenter town, and there’s nothing you can do about it. As my Umberto review in the last post will have hopefully made clear, my own reaction to such things is still very much in the former category, so I’m good. To reduce ‘Sleep Games’ to the horribly reductive, “in-a-nutshell” style summary it seems to be crying out for, what’s essentially going on here is Carpenter/Howarth synth action put through a Boards of Canada filter. Obviously there’s more to be pulled out of it should you wish, but basically if that sounds like your idea of a fun time, you’ll probably enjoy it, and if not, well, never mind.

And so things progress exactly the way you might expect: simple, hard-hitting synth lines in the foreground, gradually contaminated and warped by that oh-so-familiar brand of comforting, ordered unease, seeding the clean, sharp angles of the neon & PVC riffs with mossy, overgrown beds of artfully corroded electronic texture, sounds that seem to have been planted by some benevolent library music father way back in the mists of time and left to breed and spread within the depths of some forgotten room-sized analogue instrument… ready for when an ambitious horror movie director finally powers it up again and sits at the keyboard to kick some minimalist ass.

Like those old Boards of Canada records, it’s hard to put your finger on Precisely what it is that makes Pye Corner Audio so compelling – there’s a kind of oblique, impersonal quality to the music, a recognition of the fact that he/they isn’t really doing anything that wouldn’t be wholly expected, given the place and time from which he is broadcasting, and yet, for whatever reason, it works, where so many other contenders breakdown, mired in cheese.

Several track titles (‘The Mirrorball Cracked’, ‘Underneath the Dancefloor’) seem to invoke the kind of ‘curdled rave nostalgia’ / haunted dancefloor aesthetic that so many electronic artists have hooked onto in recent years, but in actuality ‘Sleep Games’ bears very little resemblance to any kind of music people ever danced to – it’s lineage is lonely, bedroom-dwelling electro through and through, with even the zombified Detroit techno of ‘Into The Maze’ coming to us via several brick walls at the very least. The Precinct 13 pulse of ‘The Mirror Ball Cracked’ is unmistakable, with only distant, disembodied groans serving to remind us of the time & intent separating Jenkins from his master, whilst ‘The Black Mill Video Tape’ leads us on precisely the kind of Stone Tape-style ghost hunt the title would suggest, perhaps relocated to some mid-80s LA backlot zone, perhaps overseen by…. yes – ‘Prince of Darkness’! You’re one step ahead of me! And we could play this game throughout the album’s fifty minute duration, right until the distant sirens and ominous synth oboe on ‘Chlorine’ take us outside the city, closing on the more familiarly pastoral Ghostbox stylings of ‘Nature Reclaims The Town’.

Now that Ghostbox have caught up with the era of VHS and Snake Plisskin, who knows what delights await as the reconfigured nostalgia wagon rumbles on? Things are moving quickly, as advance guards in the states are already plundering the most lamentable forgotten corners of the ‘90s for inspiration, and a pertinent question for a few years down the line might be: what the hell do we do when it catches up with now?

19. Peaking Lights – Lucifer (Mexican Summer/Weird World)

Well it perhaps didn’t quite hit the same collective pleasure centres that ‘936’ did, but it’s nonetheless a cool and worthy follow-up that benefits greatly from a few relaxed listens. Here’s some stuff from July this year:

“First couple of listens, ‘Lucifer’ sticks stubbornly to the background – thin and vaguely insipid. Give it time though – sip some whisky, open the windows for a bit of summer night breeze – once you’ve lived with it a few days, there is much goodness to be unlocked. Through their career to date, Peaking Lights have specialised in making tracks that sound kinda bulbous and disconcerting for their first few bars, but that will have you transfixed by the 30 second mark, convinced the song’s been playing in yr head since the dawn of time. Here they’re just working that technique on a grander scale, dialling down immediate eyebrow raisers like stuttering lo-fi drum loops and lumpy bass blurts in favour of gentler mood-wobblers – electric piano, slightly shakey tremolo guitar – and waiting for you to come to them.

Dig for the detail beneath the wipe-clean surface though, and before you know it you’ll be lost in the byzantine detail of the stunning ‘Dream Beat’ and the bonged out echo drift of the aptly-named ‘Cosmic Tides’. The most whacked of black ark-era dub once again becomes a viable touchstone, as disconcertingly dense lost-in-the-street-market kinda vibes start to hit heavy on ‘Midnight (in the Valley of Shadows)’. By the time the full-on alien exotica of ‘LO HI’ kicks in, it’s clear that if ‘Lucifer’ is a bit more elusive in its appeal than previous Peaking Lights records, it’s also a heck of a lot weirder, with the second side in particular full of deliciously peculiar textures that flit in and out of the mix like passing asteroids, anchored only by Dunis’s sing-song vocal lines, flattened here to the point where they almost acquire a sinisterly robotic edge, only regaining their previously comforting aura once they’ve been whacked through the echoplex, lone syllables hurtling off into deep, dark space.”

18. Lantern – Dream Mine (Bathetic)

I was first drawn to Lantern (insert ill-advised moth joke here) by their track on the Night People label compilation I wrote about here. A beautifully ragged post-Velvets guitar strum/drone thing, it instantly caught my attention.

As it transpires, nothing on the hunk of plastic named ‘Dream Mine’ sounds remotely like that track, but, given the overall variety and effectiveness of the rather sprawling soundscapes within, I’m fine with that.

Somewhere between the obviously referential cover art and the Purling Hiss-like Stooges-in-a-mineshaft biker punk roar of ‘Out Of Our Heads’, I kinda got the impression that what Lantern is going for here is sort of an American rock n’ roll take on the cloak of mystery than made early Norwegian black metal seem such an exciting and inexplicable prospect, back in the days when dictaphone-through-a-foghorn recording techniques and night-for-night graveyard photo-shoots could seem more like these people’s natural mode of operation, rather than the ridiculous kvlt affectations they clearly are.

Not some Scandinavian ice hell for Lantern though – imagine if you will a kind of depraved biker party, early ‘70s b-movie style. Untested chemicals at play in some benighted spot of waste ground, as unwashed degenerates beat the blues to death from the back of a flatbed truck, lost in distortion. Off in the darkness though, beyond the circle of the headlights, other business is transpiring; the rattling bike chains and ominous bass growls of ‘Fool’s Gold’ go about their sonic creation of some kind of haunted auto-repair yard with a Pelt-like sense of purpose. A skeletal blues built upon a looped sample of a train chugging down some lonesome tracks, the closing ‘Train Song’ itches the same scratch as the work of Jandek or Loren Connors.

Those lacking a correctly tuned ear & heart may deem this a worthlessly self-indulgent release. Do we strictly need a seven minute jam on ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’? Five minutes of low budget drum machine march, or four minutes of deafening reversed guitar feedback? Not really. But for those of us enchanted, it’s all part of the spell, all part of the inexplicable sound mystery Lantern chooses to build here where they could have just recorded some rock songs. Instead, ‘Dream Mine’ sounds as if the rock band, stoned, stumbled off the stage dragging their cables, and turned their mics towards all that they found in the darkness - train tracks, engine oil, dogs, bushes, gravel. And… synthesizers? Why not. Personally, I probably would have been pretty happy with just some rock songs (because the rock songs here rip like bastards), but this? This is even better.

I know I’ll sound like a wanker if I call this “one of the year’s most intriguing releases”, but god knows, it certainly got me intrigued.

17. The Caretaker – Patience (After Sebald)
(History Always Favours The Winners)

Essentially a soundtrack LP, this particular Caretaker records comes to me via several stages of cultural remove.

Grant Gee’s film ‘Patience (After Sebald)’ (with which I am unfamiliar) is a documentary of sorts, in which the filmmaker retraces a walking tour made by the late author W.G. Sebald (with whom I an unfamiliar) across the Norfolk coast (with which I am, at the time of writing, unfamiliar). Charged with providing a soundtrack for the film, Leyland Kirby aka The Caretaker took the decision to base his score around fragments sampled from 78RPM piano and voice recordings of ‘Winterreise’ by Franz Schubert (with which I am unfamiliar), subjecting them to his own unique form of processing and recontextualisation.

So, basically, I don’t know what the hell is going on here. But I do at least know that, taken on it’s own terms, this is the most compelling and rewarding Caretaker record I’ve heard for a few years.

Like last year’s perplexing and underwhelming ‘An Empty Bliss Beyond This World’, there is inevitably a question here regarding the extent to which we are simply listening to poorly transferred selections from Kirby’s record collection rather than the work of the man himself, but thankfully such worries can quickly be put aside, as the precarious balance between past and present that made his older records so extraordinary is immediately reinstated. Within ‘Patience’, the composer and performers of the original music live on, and their craft can be appreciated, but at the same time, the melancholy mind caverns of Kirby’s world pervades all, defining the sound via thick fogs of static drift, unearthly reverb and other more physical manipulations of the records’ surface.

The classical context of the source material generates a very different atmosphere from the Caretaker’s previous excavations of ballroom jazz and popular standards, with the ‘old’ and ‘new’ aspects of the sound often standing out more clearly from each other, as if Kirby is leading us into his darkened realm and summoning holographic spirits of the dead musicians, to sing and play for us whilst he remains in sole control of our environment.

Selectively clipped and reassembled by our curator, Schubert’s indelible melodies are already suffused with a feeling of loss and incompleteness that seems to make them a natural companion to The Caretaker’s central concerns, and as isolated passages of piano are looped and through layers fluff-on-the-needles static to become ‘Everything is On The Point of Decline’, as the sonorous voice of a long-forgotten male soloist is lost amid a well of reverb and occult mist on ‘No One Knows What Shadowy Memories Haunt Them Still’, the results touch gently upon deep, ill-charted regions of the soul… exactly as the work of both composers here present has always aspired to, I suppose.

More directly than ever before in The Caretaker’s hallowed catalogue, ‘Patience’ is very literally the sound of an unhappy past encroaching upon an equally troubled present, and, as ever, it has the power to take the listener to places that are very difficult to define and speak of, so let’s leave it at that.

16. Goat – World Music (Rocket Recordings)

And so we reach the annual moment when my end of year countdown momentary co-incides with other people’s end of year countdowns.

Somehow I still don’t trust these guys, but whether they’re forgotten by next summer or manage to string things out into a rewarding career, there’s no denying this record still goes off like a hand grenade.

Here’s some things I apparently said about it back in July:

“It’s like Goat have identified this particular demographic of people who like listening to OTT heavy rock, weird ’70s occult hippie junk and groove-heavy African music and thought, ok, those guys have got disposable income, let’s give ‘em what they want and PLENTY OF IT. I’m sure they’d like some really wild, raw-throated female vocals too? Hey, why not – that stuff always goes down well.

Here’s an unlikely comparison, but one that I just can’t shake: you know that band The Go Team? The way that they made a career out of putting together lots of tried-and-tested, crowd-pleasing musical ‘good bits’, adding an enthusiastic female figurehead/hype-woman to keeping the energy levels sufficiently high and thus becoming this perfect, one-size-fits-all upbeat festival band..? Well imagine if serious-music-fan dudes who wear black hoodies and go to the Supersonic festival had their own version of The Go Team – that’s basically what Goat sounds like. Which certainly shouldn’t be taken as a criticism – what that sounds like turns out to be pretty great.

[…]

So, with a genuine African Stooges not forthcoming, it was hardly surprising that some white (presumably) guys should eventually set out make their own, and we should praise the lord that Goat have nailed this tricky concept so well straight outta the gate, fusing prime Fela Kuti style funk with a layer of Asheton-worthy fuzz-wah destruction, their vocalist’s formidable, free festival-subjugating bellow simply providing the icing on what is undoubtedly a bloody brilliant cake - pretty much the most immediate, refreshing and quantifiably bad-ass sound I’ve heard all year.

It is with these two cuts that Goat really establish their credentials. After that, the record gets a bit different, spreading its net a bit wider than is really necessary given the quality of the template they’ve already established for themselves, with results that I’m gonna call as… varied, but largely positive.”

Labels: best of 2012, Goat, Lantern, Peaking Lights, Pye Corner Audio, The Caretaker

Posted by: Ben / 7:43 PM (0) comments

Sunday, December 09, 2012

The 25 Best Records of 2012: Part # 1.

25. Heavy Cream – Super Treatment (Infinity Cat)

A useful concept, this ‘Heavy Cream’. Maybe you could rub it on Traffic records and make them good? Requiring no such rubbing are Heavy Cream themselves, a Nashville trio whose second LP roars into town bearing the sonic footprints of ‘Pussywhipped’ era Bikini Kill - all toxic, compressed guitar tone and hectoring, high register vocals – being coerced into belting out the kind of galumphing, girl group-infused glam stomp that Kim Fowley spent much of the late ‘70s trying to convince us equalled ‘punk rock’. And you know what, maybe he had a point, cos the thunderous Phil-Spector-brutalised-with-rubber-hose hoo-hah of ‘79’ and ‘John Johnny’ still sound pretty grand to me. Thematically similar if rather more visceral and to the point, ‘TV Preachers’ and women-behind-bars epic ‘Prison Shanks’ are vintage Killed By Death derangement, pitched somewhere between hilarious novelty slop like The Child Molesters or whatever, and the more heavy-duty dissatisfaction of Canada’s The Dishrags. Musically I guess we’re veering more toward the latter half of the garage-punk equation here, but with a sense of bodacious drunken fun that very much connects with the former aspect. It’s all good rock n’ roll nonsense anyway, even if Ty Segall’s production job sees distortion and compression pushed to somewhat tedious extremes, in a quest for aural excitement that succeeds only in making the whole venture sound flattened & samey, EQed up to give me a right ear-ache when cranked via ear-phones on the morning stagger to work. A real fun record all the same, and I bet they’d be a blast live.

24. Dinosaur Jr – I Bet On Sky (Jagjaguwar)

NOTHING LEFT TO PROVE territory for Dinosaur at this point, as the band’s initially questionable 21st century reincarnation has succeeded not only in kicking the world’s ass pretty thoroughly in what cliché demands I call “the live arena”, but also in recording the best album of their entire careers in the shape of ‘Farm’. With any remaining naysayers long since turned to dust, it only stands to reason that they should take their foot off the gas and chill out a while, and that’s where ‘..Sky’ comes in. More spread out than the full tilt rock of ‘Farm’ and ‘Beyond’, this one’s got a breezy sorta quality to it, rather reminiscent of those ‘90s major label Dino albums that Mascis pretty much made on his own, his vox and guitar leads riding atop lighter, intermittently acoustic backing, with even a goddamn keyboard and plinky-plonk piano sticking their oar in on the opening cut.

Moreso than usual, the Barlow tunes sound pretty much like Sebadoh with slightly better guitar (thus earning a ‘meh’ from me), and as for Mascis, well, he’s got his particular ‘thing’ down to a fine art by this stage, so no surprises from that direction either. Normally I’d continue with some generic comment about how an apparently successful, happily married middle-aged man can still manage to conjure up these tumultuous vistas of inarticulate adolescent angst at the drop of a hat, but actually he seems to have mellowed out a little lyrically/emotionally too, sounding at least a BIT less distraught and untogether than he did when he was twenty one, his raging sorrows increasingly filtering through into a kind of rose-tinted wistfulness for chances missed, good times gone, and so forth.

Of course, we don’t really turn up at a Dinosaur record for any of that shit, so let’s get to the point. Though one may blanch when scanning through the mp3s and noting that many of these songs break the five minute barrier, rest assured that many of those superfluous minutes are dedicated to Mascis cutting loose on some characteristically supreme guitar business, and if you’re as much of a fan of unashamed six string grandeur as I am, what more do you need to know? Dude still tears it up like the bastard son of Neil Young and Wayne Kramer wired up to a rig the size of Krakatoa. Hearing him do what he does is a joy at an time of day, and, speaking of Neil, closing track ‘See It On Your Side’ in particular is frrkin’ awesome, catching the band at their Young-est, indulging in a few ‘Cortez the Killer’ riffs for a suitably sublime, greatest hits-worthy fade out.

23. Umberto – Night Has A Thousand Screams (Rock Action)

Could Matt Hill’s third album under the Umberto name see him abandoning the well-worn tropes of fake-horror-movie-soundtrack-core and exploring a more pastoral, contemplative approach to composition..? COULD IT FUCK. Designed to accompany selected scenes from the infamous Spanish slasher movie ‘Pieces’, ‘Night Has 1,000 Screams’ (an English translation of the film’s original release title) shamelessly revels in its own wholly predictable strain of anachronistic synth badassery, tooling up in the shadow of Carpenter, Frizzi and Simonetti for yet another trek into the analogue-haunted VHS wilderness… again prompting me to wonder just how many times all this stuff can be reiterated before it ceases to sound totally fucking cool. When I find the answer, I’ll be sure to let you know. Given the soundtrack conceit, ‘..1,000 Screams’ is understandably more bitty than 2010’s magnum opus ‘Prophesy of the Black Widow’, victim to the sudden tonal shifts and arbitrary track lengths that define most OSTs. But what it lacks in cohesion it more than makes up for with strict, period appropriate awesomeness.

Unruly, bass-bin worrying oscillations feature prominently, providing appropriately hair-raising counter-point to the chiming, Halloween-like melody lines and pulsing, metronomic beats that stomp into ear-shot like the steady stomp of a knife-wielding maniac’s size tens on the opening ‘Boston, 1942’, whilst elsewhere crafty bass-synth lines, Frizzi-endorsed sunny synth choirs and wet drum rolls rise and fall on cue. Eerie, random scuffling droning tones and peals of noise pervade the lengthy ‘Paralysed’, which begins to sound more like something off Mount Vernon Arts Lab’s hauntological terror classic ‘Séance at Hobbs Lane’ in places and, well I’m sure you get the picture. MAGNIFICO, as the bloody maniac who directed ‘Pieces’ might have exclaimed had his original composer scampered back with something this good.

22. Guided By Voices – The Bears For Lunch (Fire / GBV Inc)

I wrote about this just a few weeks back, but in case you’ve got a real bad memory here’s some things I said about it:

“Returning to Pollard though, since when did his songwriting get so, well…. linear? As much as I might swear by the mighty poetry of his conventional crossword-fucking lyrical style, even his most hardcore followers would have to admit he’s been driving it to the far edges of pointlessness in recent years, so it’s kinda refreshing to find him striking out with some more deliberately constructed material. In fact almost all of the album’s Pollard “hits” - ‘Hangover Child’, ‘She Lives In An Airport’, ‘White Flag’, ‘The Challenge is Much More’ – take the route of establishing a single lyrical theme and sticking to it, much in the way that a “normal” songwriter might do.
[…]
More to the point though, all of the above-mentioned songs – plus rousing opener ‘King Arthur The Red’ - stand as solid GBV fare, tunes that could have fared well had they appeared in slightly scrappier form on ‘Under the Bushes..’, and if admittedly none of them are exactly *spectacular*, with the addition of Sprout’s songs that still gives ‘Bears For Lunch’ by far the best Pollard/GBV hit rate in recent memory. And speaking of memory, I was worried initially worried that these songs would fade fast from it, but no - having just experienced a weekend wherein earphone time was in short supply, I can confirm that fragments of ‘Challenge..’ and ‘..Airport’ kept scraping away at the back of my brain, demanding attention, achieving precisely the kind of compulsive, scratch-that-itch listenability that indie rock has always traded on and thus clearing the final hurdle toward official, canonical GBV golden glory.
[…]
Whether anything on this album will make any kind of impression on listeners who aren’t already fully paid up GBV freaks is debatable, but, given the slim chances of said listeners even getting to hear it, that’s very much a moot point. Beginners are free to walk proudly into the record shops and ask for directions to the sanctified classics of the sainted ‘90s, but for those of us who have listened to them and listened to them and listened to them again already, ‘Bears For Lunch’ provides another nice disc to add to the heap, finding our heroes in sprightlier form than anyone might have expected, with the slow, sad creep toward obsolescence and death that accompanies disappointing comeback records happily vanquished… for a few months, at least.”

21. G. Green – Crap Culture (Mt St Mtn)

Oof. If the 2007-2010 lo-fi fun-punk revival was in need of a requiem, disaffected Sacramento quartet G. Green set out to provide, whether consciously or otherwise. Imagine some Mean Jeans style party punk band convening in their friend’s basement to record their next LP and collectively discovering that they were feeling burned out, worthless and generally couldn’t be fucked – that is the general vibe (if not the musical content) delivered on the pointedly titled ‘Crap Culture’.

‘Your House’ might get things started with a spring in its step – all ramshackle stand-up drumming and muffled shout-outs – but it’s like the last gasp of a party’s energy before the fog descends. ‘Pool of Blood’ and ‘Swimsuit Drugs’ spit themselves into the ether as outbursts of talentless, temper tantrum wimpy kid hardcore, frontman Andrew Henderson shrieking incoherently about the sheer fucking unbelievable frustration of being him, the voice of a man who old enough to know better, who just – you guessed it – couldn’t give a fuck. In fact it’s difficult to really make out a single word he says over the course of this record, but the emotional intent comes across loud and clear. The title track drops the drums, revealing a rather more indie-ish underpinning to proceedings, over-pedalled lead guitar making a mess all over a lonely, hopeless ode that recalls something off Dignan Porch’s first album, or contemplative-mode Robert Pollard in a seriously black mood. ‘Gay ‘90s’ and the delightfully titled ‘Mouth on the Floor’ continue to push the jaded, hacked off malaise in scrambling, sub-KBD fashion, before ‘Sinner Now’ closes proceedings on an incongruously epic note, pushing stone-age ur-shoegaze buttons that recall the brick wall splendour of Australia’s Kitchen Floor.

I’ve used a lot of negative words in this review, cos I feel this is a pretty negative record, but that’s not to say it’s not also a good one. It’s chaotic, homemade aesthetic is extremely pleasing, and its desperate emotional upswing hits hard, particularly on those mornings when you crawl beneath the pavement and die. If ‘Crap Culture’ were a person, it would be wearing a dirty t-shirt and broken glasses, and would be charging at you out the doorway of some rancid student party house, cider can in hand. The sound of realising that the ‘scene’ you’ve been wasting your life serving isn’t worth a damn, of witless First World Problems made flesh, I… uh, I like it quite a lot.

Labels: best of 2012, Dinosaur Jr, G Green, Guided By Voices, Heavy Cream, Umberto

Posted by: Ben / 2:23 PM (0) comments

Wednesday, December 05, 2012

The 25 Best Records of 2012: Intro.

Well, it’s that time of year again and… how to put this. Whilst it would of course be completely fatuous of me to try to draw any wider conclusions about the state of music in 2012 based on my own small, idiosyncratic and probably fairly conservative sampling of it, the fact is that I’ve listened to a lot of music this year that has sucked.

More disappointing follow-up albums than usual. More ‘sorry-guys-this-is-just-not-happening’. more ‘don’t-get-it’. More ‘OK, FUCK THIS’. More reminders that music is hard.

We shouldn’t dwell on the negative though. Enthusiasm for these things always ebbs and flows, and is wholly subjective. I thought my own Buddy Bradley Phase (wherein aging hipsters adopt an attitude of jaded machismo and start habitually berating new music for not being as good as Alice Cooper and ZZ Top) had quietly come and gone a few years back, but turns out that was just a taster. Looks like we have much more fun in that vein yet to come.

All that said though, there HAVE still been a big pile of new records this year that have made me happy. Very few heart-pounding, life-changing discoveries, but that’s ok. I can probably do without them for a while. Just a lot of stuff that’s been really SOLID, y’know? Utilitarian music, that’s what I’m about at the moment. Stuff that does what it does in the way that I want it to do it, and gets me from A to B.

And as such, I’ve put together a TOP 25 of it, all album-ish length things released during 2012 (or in some cases the tail end of 2011) that I heartily recommend, topped off with a final five that I will love til my dying day and actually physically fight for and blah blah blah. So I guess life’s not so bad after all. Noise made by people marches on, and if I find myself just mooching about in a piss-soaked alleyway as the parade passes by, that’s my own business. I’ll jump back on board when I’m good and ready.

Before we begin though, here’s a super-quick run-down of numbers #26 to #30, of which one is flawed but not a total write-off, two are thoroughly decent but I can’t think of anything particularly pertinent to say about them, and the remaining two are dense and interesting records that I only recently picked up and haven’t quite got my head ‘round yet, so they might well increase in my affection as time goes on.

30. King Tuff – King Tuff (Sub-Pop)

29. Sapphire Slows – True Breath EP (Not Not Fun)

28. The Hussy – Weed Seizure (Tic Tac Totally)

27. Rolo Tomassi – Astraea (Destination Moon)

26. Maria Minerva – Will Happiness Ever Find Me? (Not Not Fun)

So congrats for not sucking you lot, and now… on with the show..?

Labels: best of 2012, series intros

Posted by: Ben / 11:23 AM (0) comments