With legions of career-minded, pedal-board bothering prannys (or their publicists at least) busy abusing the ‘psych’ label everywhere you turn just at the moment, City Yelps’ triumphantly self-deprecating manifesto of PSYCH ON THE CHEAP hopefully speaks for itself. Not that their music is much more than marginally psych-y, to be honest, but I like the concept so much, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. Like their most immediately recognisable ancestors (The Clean, Swell Maps, The Prats, The Index), our heroes aim to prove that you don’t need snazzy equipment and retreats in woodland cabins to blow minds – cramped urban spaces, determined awkwardness and the cheapest crap in the shop is what really gets the damage done (and appearing to be the kind of people who could reduce press & PR representatives to ash merely by breathing in their direction probably helps).

‘On The Cheap’ these recordings may be, but by god, they sound magnificent – drums n gtr really ‘popping’ in bright analogue splendour. They may have joked about sounding like “the shitty Go-Betweens”, but for the first minute or so of ‘Psych on the Cheap’ they’re not so far from the real thing, guitars ringing out violin-like as the melody soars and dives.

In fact, dealing with the constituent components on this music, it’s difficult to put your finger on what makes City Yelps so pointedly removed from all the other nostalgia-nourishing jangly guitar types doing the rounds. From the 10th generation Byrds-y rattle to the strummy bass lines to the Hamish Kilgour type homemade-motorik drumming with that little ‘catch-up beat’ every four bars, it’s all here present and correct, all stuff you feel you’ll never, ever get sick of again when it’s banged out this splendidly. The playing is excellent & varied (the instrumental section of ‘Awful Prizes’ almost seems to be stumbling off into proggy realms for goodnesssake), the recording is bright and the songs are simple and appealing, leaving only Shaun A’s parent-proof slurred bark (“thass not singing, I’m telling ya”, quoth some who should know better) and a strange, indefinable blanket of smudged, smothered otherness to explain why City Yelps sound so inherently separate from the mainstream, so alien to the streets of large population centres, so utterly and gloriously removed from anyone who deals in ego or money or music, so much of a potential OUR BAND (NOT THEIRS) moment for any/all scruffy, over-smart kids lucky enough to hear them.

Why, why, why – I don't know, and I’m sure they don’t care (except that they so obviously do), which is perhaps the secret. You know sometimes when you're walking down the street, and you see a complete stranger and just think, 'hey, I like that guy, he's got style', even though he betrays no sign of concern about his appearance and is just taking the bins out or walking to catch a bus or something? Same thing. No reason. It’s just spirit I guess, or auras, or leylines or something. City Yelps must live on a big fucking leyline. I feel like they could walk on stage, do pretty much anything, and I'd enjoy it. No idea. Maybe it all just stems from how much I like their photocopied sleevenotes and 'newsletters' and stuff. I dunno. I'll just shut up  now and enjoy the music they do do when they walk on stage, which conveniently is very good.

Listen and buy from City Yelps.

Labels: album reviews, City Yelps

As the Vernal Equinox stomps on by and the signifiers of ‘Spring’ seem to come and go on an hourly basis, I realise that we’re about one quarter of the way through the year already, and, contrary to impression you might have acquired from reading this blog recently, I’ve not spent the past three months wholly occupied by esoteric soundtrack reissues, random second-hand vinyl and weird old acid rock shit either.

In fact there have been a spiriting number of NEW THINGS that have attracted my attention, and here to prove the point is a quick run-down of them, thus clearing the deck of all this stuff that deserves your attention / support, but that I haven’t quite had the time or impetus to write a full-length-blog post on.

 
Habibi – self-titled LP (Burger)

A really solid LP of catchy, non-clichéd guitar-pop from these Brooklynites, delivered in deliberate, straight-faced fashion and sitting a good notch or two up from the swamp of sloppy, indeterminate, indiefied gack that the majority of young people’s guitar music has devolved into over the past few years. To various extents, Habibi recall assorted alumni of the 2009-11 golden years – Grass Widow, Yellow Fever, Fungi Girls, Vivian Girls - but never for quite long enough for me to really get a bead on ‘em. Even within these tightly patrolled waters, they’ve managed to stake out their own little corner, which they inhabit with confidence and panache, groovy and self-sufficient mermaids just daring the music industry to come and bother them. Exactly the kind of quietly perfect, unremarkably remarkable band that could have grown up out of New Zealand 1982 or, well, North America 2010, and you’ll want to get on this quick if you miss those halcyon days.

‘Detroit Baby’ is the best neo-girl group tune you’re liable to hear this year, and it’s not the best song here by any means. I really like it when they go all-out on the reverb and twang and throw in some longer instrumental passages (‘Persepolis’, ‘Sweetest Talk’). There’s a slower, indie-er number at one point that’s kind of a bummer, and a few songs towards the end that don’t appeal to me much, but you can’t have everything. I just did the maths and this is 80% gold. Check it out.

(Listen on Soundcloud & buy from Burger.)



Sapphire Slows – Allegoria LP (Not Not Fun)

I very much liked Sapphire Slows’ ‘True Breath’ EP from a little while back, and now the first proper full length from this mysterious Tokyo dweller proves an absolute joy, fully delivering on the promise of those earlier tracks, as Ms Slows (if I may) barely puts a foot wrong from beginning to end, drawing heavily from the foundations laid by former label-mates Peaking Lights (nothing wrong with that!), but also often investing her ragged, homemade dub-pop with an absolutely luminous dose of hyper-melodic pop optimism, like the gigantic vocal chorus / breakdown bit of some cheesy, long-forgotten house anthem distantly reflected back to us in dreams, through veils of glass-fronted, urbanite dreamland.... just a lovely, lovely, undemanding little trip. A fucking HAPPY album, if you can believe such a thing legitimately existing in 2014, this one’s still making me contentedly smile n’ nod after a ton of repeat spins. Perfect comfort music.

(Listen on Soundcloud, buy via Boomkat.)





The Love Triangle – Clever Clever LP (Static Shock)

Some certifiable Good Punk here, from a trio led, somewhat inevitably, by the bloke who used to sing in The Shitty Limits. Fully energised approach reminds me slightly of my still-beloved Royal Headache, but with a more downbeat, British feel always in evidence. They probably won’t much thank me for invoking The Jam alongside Eater, Buzzcocks and The Lurkers, but that’s where my thoughts keep heading here – well-composed, content-packed songs blasted through fast and sloppy and angry and smirking and don’t-give-me-that-shit-mate-let’s-just-get-it-recorded. Spirited, that’s the word.

As the eye-rolling reference-points thrown out above might suggest, this resembles the compressed residue of all the good ’77 UK punk bands and none of the shit ones, whilst also somehow ducking the accompanying nostalgia bear-trap - and as such I like it a lot.

(Listen & buy from Static Shock.)





Irkallian Oracle – Grave Ekstasis tape/LP (Nuclear War Now!)

It was Neil Kulkarni’s (consistently wonderful) blog that hipped me to this one (none more KVLT!), and of course he sings the praises of Irkallian Oracle a lot more eloquently than I could attempt to, so instead I’ll just give in to this record’s function as a hyperbole magnet and just say: holy fucking shit. This is the most purely devastating, world-swallowing thing I’ve heard from the realm of black metal in years. The sort of music that’s so overwhelming it just… make.. all… words.. stop, like the stuttering, ellipsis-filled end of a Lovecraft story, as ill-judged metaphors flail hopelessly, aware of their inability to ever really capture the totality of.. this.. goddamn… thing. The bone-shattering, practice room brutality of ‘80s Napalm Death, the gravesoil-caked pagan tape-hiss of the most funereal BM, the cosmic/hypnotic maximalist wipeout of The Boredoms or Oneida in their prime – all of these things are here, sublimated into something new and staggering.

For a long time now, many metal bands of a more forward-thinking variety seem to have been lost in bombast, endlessly trying to recreate that uncomfortable, tummy-churning Surround Sound OOF that comes from watching a giant monster lay waste to a city in some epic 3D folly. Irkallian Oracle are no exception, but where most contenders just end up creating the sonic equivalent of a Michael Bay Transformers headache, these guys actually walk the walk, conjuring the sound of the stars aligning as Cthulhu himself breaks the waves. And they do it themselves on fucking TAPES. None of this bloody drivel really does it justice, but… just… [speechless].

(Listen and buy from Nuclear War Now!)



Slum of Legs – demo tape (Tuff Enuff)

Definitely one of the most interesting/exciting bands I’ve caught live so far this year (not that that’s saying much, I’ve only been leaving New Cross Gate about once a month), this Brighton six piece are one of those bands that seem to function as a kind of volatile, open-ended brain-trust rather than as a pre-planned “this is what we’re gonna do” type venture, with each member seemingly bringing in a quite different approach & set of influences, mixing it all up into a pleasantly dissonant brew that could head off in any number of directions at any moment. From a basis in artfully self-taught Raincoatsy guitar/viola skree and Mo Tucker thud drumming, we are apt to experience unsignposted diversions into anguished punk yelling, atmospheric soundscaping and totally-out-of-leftfield burbling analogue synth business, never quite cohering into a verifiable ‘THAT’S THEIR SOUND’ sound, but then why should it? I mean, who wants to go around listening to bands that “cohere” all day long, y’know what I mean? And since I already seem to be digging myself into a hole re: the whole only-comparing-women-to-other-women trap, might as well go whole hog and also throw in passing reference to ‘80s feminist oddballs like Androids of Mu and The Fates, whilst concluding that they also often end up sounding a bit like a far rougher, gnarlier version of token Flying Nun lady-band Look Blue, Go Purple… and that can only be a good thing, right?

(As a ‘Big Sigh’ type aside, this is the problem after so many years of intensive music-listening: however hard a new white-ish, guitar-ish group might try to do something a bit different, it is now scientifically impossible for me to hear them without going “oh yeah, that’s pretty cool, but you know it basically sounds a bit like [insert obscure old bands A, B, C and D here], right?” It’s a dreadful affliction that makes me feel like one of those hand gesturing, arsehole celebrity wine-tasters whom we all used to laugh at before middle class consensus rendered them normal - please make it stop.)

Anyway, despite the fact that it has been distributed and sold for money by a third party label, it’s worth noting that the three tracks on this Slum of Legs 'demo tape' do function VERY MUCH as a demo (yes, it’s that same semantic query I had with previous Tuff Enuff releases). Giving only a fleeting, muffled impression of the kind of rampant creativity this unit is capable of, this is a real chunk of old fashioned “wow, I can’t wait to hear what they’ll come up with next” type demo tape excitement, exactly the kind of thing you could imagine John Peel tearing up his schedule for and jamming straight on the airwaves, back in ye olde halcyon pre-internet days. The best thing you will be able to buy for 50p (!) in the whole of the rest of your life, in other words.

(Listen and buy from Tuff Enuff.)

Labels: Habibi, Irkallian Oracle, Sapphire Slows, Slum of Legs, The Love Triangle

1. Iggy’s constant self-mythologising may provide quite a wall for beginners to cut through, but as anyone who’s spent sufficient time with the records will know, the Asheton Bros plus Dave Alexander WERE The Stooges. Now they’re all gone.

2. People writing about punk/rock/garage music often fall back on talking about ‘caveman drumming’, ‘primal thumping’ etc, and most of the time it’s all so much automated cliché, but if you want an example of some PUREST UG, check out Scott A. on the first Stooges album; sounds like they’ve just let him out of his cage in the zoo to lay down some thud! It's like he learned his chops watching the bigger apes beating their chests.

3. Well, that’s on the SURFACE at least…. dig further into the rhythm tracks on any of those songs (bar the long, shit one of course) and you’ll hear what a vicious, unconventional and totally single-minded approach this guy took to rock drumming – rarely equalled, not that many people dared try. Beneath the simplistic/untutored façade, he’s got the Charlie Watts pulse down, plus the crash & band of a big Motown influence, and it is flat-out amazing to hear things come into full-bloom on ‘Funhouse’. Of course, absolutely every element of ‘Funhouse’ is so amazing that it’s easy to overlook the drums, but they are HEAVY man, rolling and crashing and *right there* at the exact second the song needs a push. The sheer PLAYING from everyone on that album, jesus christ, the field of “rock”s not seem it’s like before or since, but… well, there are about a thousand ‘Henry Rollins picks his favourite albums’ interviews where you can read all this crap, so I’ll not go on about it too much.

4. From what I recall from my years studying ye olde history books, Scott was the younger brother, wild and dumb and impressionable, real ‘drug-hoover’ type, and he was very much Iggy’s drug-buddy as the band (or 50% of it at least) plunged heavily into smack. (Seems Alexander was more into the booze, and Ron was the straight man trying to pull them all together.) I believe Scott was also the one at the wheel when the band ploughed their van into a low-headroom bridge, putting a suitably destructive end to Stooges Mk. 1. (Correct me if I’m wrong in any of that.)

5. After the ‘Raw Power’ years, Scott put in some fine (if slightly more conventional) work drumming for Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith’s Sonic Rendezvous Band, whose scattered recordings remain essential listening for anyone with a yen for rough, punk-spirited heavy rock, way-out ‘70s guitar noise and the like. Wikipedia tells me that in the ‘90s, he recorded four whole albums with The Testors’ Sonny Vincent, in a line-up that also featured Captain Sensible on bass. I did not know that.

6. So in summation: a brilliant drummer and key member of probably the greatest capital letters Rock Band of all time, he will be missed.

Labels: deathblog, Scott Asheton, The Stooges

It’s been a little while since I’ve done one of these, so let’s sing loud and stand proud for a border-demolishing comp of world-spanning psych-rock delirium, featuring contributions from India, Turkey, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Brazil, Australia, Yugoslavia and Iran (with plenty of room left over for US / UK business too), all united by the international language of fuzz, smoke and the mysteries of the Fender bass. Beyond that, no real concept at work here really, so, in the words of the Captain: JUST DIG IT.

Labels: mixtapes, Psychedelia

Whilst I’ve not attempted much research into her background & career of  ‘60s/'70s singing sensation Carmen Maki, the general feeling I get from her music & it's presentation is that of her being seen as a slightly more ‘serious’, rock / folk-based artist than as a conventional pop star, and indeed the two songs on this excellent 1969 single very much reinforce that idea, rejecting the ubiquitous orchestration and studio polish of most vintage Japanese pop for a stark, acoustic approach that at times almost recalls the sterner end of the British folk revival.

Anyone who picked up Maki’s collaborative album with the band Blues Creation when it was reissued by a few years back will have heard her wrapping her tonsils around a heap of mechanised, Zepplin-esque heavy boogie, sounding a little like Japan’s cooler and less annoying answer to Janis Joplin in places, but here we find her at completely the other end of the late ‘60s musical spectrum, delivering gentle, understated folk that sits very well with the ‘gambolling with goats’ cover art (well, I guess she was that much of a pop star, at least).

Accompanied only by a soft acoustic guitar, a flute and a single, lonesome horn, ‘Faraway Country’ finds Maki perfectly capturing that very particular spirit of haunting, minor key melancholy that makes Japanese pop so unique, the sparse arrangement allowing her to tap into the rural, folk-based roots of the enka tradition without ever giving way to the melodramatic bombast that often drags such material down when it hits the city. A definite keeper, this one is all wind whistling through the snow-capped mountains of the North country, Meiko Kaji or Junko Fuji walking away sword in hand from some harrowing showdown as children play amid the scrubland…. and not one parping trumpet or cheesy orchestral flourish to get in the way. Really beautiful.

‘Just Two, Alone’ on the B is a slightly more laboured and ornate affair that perhaps doesn’t captivate me quite as much, though I still like it a lot, with Maki’s exquisite vocal delivery and the surprising presence of some Morricone-western-soundtrack style clip-clopping hooves both pleasing me greatly. There is an odd kind of ‘marching band and spoken word’ interlude in the middle of this one that leads me to believe it must be a narrative ‘story song’ of some kind, and presumably not a happy one. My sub-Kindergarten level Japanese allows me to inform you that the lyrics at least partially concern two children, possibly going to school…. but beyond that, you’re on your own. Just like they are, if the translated title is to be believed. Sad stuff, no doubt.

Labels: Carmen Maki, Japanese Record of the Month

If I say to you, ‘Forbidden World’, 1982, one of the bargain basement ‘Alien’ rip-offs produced by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, what’s your first reaction liable to be?

If it's something along the lines of “Yeah, I remember that movie – it had GREAT music!”, then congratulations, you are part of what I imagine must be a very exclusive club. I’m a member too, and, for the purposes of this blog, the conversation would end right there, were it not for the fact that the bloke who runs the Death Waltz record label is also on the club membership roll.

Having hit the zeitgeist right between the eyes over the past few years with their slightly-more-expensive-than-I-can-really-afford deluxe vinyl reissues of classic horror movie soundtracks, Death Waltz presumably now have the capital to allow them to branch out into some more quixotic and interesting ventures within the realm of horrory synth business, and one of first items on their agenda has been to seek out the master tapes for Susan Justin’s unique score to Allan Holzman’s slightly-better-than-you’d-really-expect carnivorous alien quickie, and to slap ‘em onto wax for the very first time. Huzzah.

As members of the aforementioned club will recall, Justin’s music (together with Holzman's direction, but that's not really our concern here) adds a huge dose of class to an otherwise pretty daft venture, but without ever giving the impression that the composer felt herself ‘above’ the material at hand. Basically, this is music that sounds completely at home soundtracking a trashy sci-fi/horror flick, but that also manages to incorporate all sorts of fun elements that sit completely outside the sort of thing you would normally expect to find in such a context.

Justin, needless to say, was not exactly yr average low budget movie composer. Though she also provided music for the 1983 slasher ‘The Final Terror’ and subsequently worked on numerous TV documentaries, her self-description as a “Los Angeles-based New Wave composer/performer” perhaps more accurately reflects her interests at the time this soundtrack was created, working hard as the prime mover behind unknown-to-me synth-rock group Pink Plastic.

This certainly makes sense when cueing up the Main Theme for ‘Forbidden World’, which, taken out of context, could be more in keeping with a stroll through a high tech shopping mall or a utopian display of dazzling, Madonna-esque fashions than a leery, slime-drenched monster flick, with a fist-pounding electro-beat, breathy, wordless vocal echoes and a brash, major key melody all locking in that particular ‘dawn of a new era’ hyper-‘80s feel with just a little bit of homamde murk lurking beneath to keep it real.

After that, the ‘Opening Titles’ music pulls a bit of a bait & switch on us, sounding like a funeral march from a fascistic intergalactic empire, whilst subsequent tracks return to a more fitting world of lurking corridor tension and text-book suspense movie piano motifs, but always with a definite hint of otherness about them – rumbling surface noise drones, beautifully unexpected counter-point melodies and knob-twisting radiophonic oscillator blasts all demanding the attention of attuned ears.

Very much at one with their era, the more experimental outbursts in the middle of side one could easily have found a home on Slava Tsukerman & Brenda Hutchinson’s utterly demented "non-musicians go nuts on a community access synthesizer" soundtrack to ‘Liquid Sky’, a film whose aesthetic of extremist new wave / sci-fi proto-cyberpunk fashion terrorism perhaps more closely resembles Justin’s overall vision here than anything you’d normally associate with a Roger Corman monster movie.

At the end of the first side though, we’re back in business with ‘Mutation’, which proves a total banger - sorta like John Carpenter tooled up with a tricky, middle eastern melody and a squelching, on-the-one shuffle-beat – the perfect accompaniment to zapping stop-motion beasts in yr egg-box coated space station.

Shrieking noise, bubbling ooze, basic piano exercises and dialogue extracts from the movie dominate the first half of side two (ooh, the soundtrack purists won’t be happy about that), whilst the second half plungess us into an abyss of truly impolite mechanoid terror as the shit hits the fan for the movie’s doomed characters, culminating, brilliantly, in a blast of full spectrum noise that sounds like an active electric fan hitting bathwater, and an unearthly space-siren wail fading into oblivion. (The album’s instrument credits mention use of something called a ‘Blaster Waterphone’, which I’m guessing came in handy here.)

Then, a moment of silence brings us back to a triumphant, closing credits reprise of the main theme, crusing through the cosmos on a wave of chopped up, reverbed vocal samples and waving us off with a truly bitchin’ synth-flute solo. Superb.

I don’t know if even in our wildest dreams we could claim “radioactive corridor music” as a legitimate genre, but if you’ll allow me the leeway to do so, Susan Justin’s work here formed a key pillar around which such a style could be retrospectively inaugurated. Recommendations for other examples welcomed, because I’ve sure been jamming the hell out of this one since it appeared in the post last Saturday.

Hopefully a more affordable CD/digital release will be along at some point in the near future for those out there who don’t relish staring at Kimberley Holladay’s rather icky artwork in its full 12” x 12” glory (no disrespect or anything guys, but I think I’ll keep the enclosed giant poster out of sight this time around); so come on in, join the Forbidden World Soundtrack Club: the sauna's lovely and we’ve got plenty of room.

Labels: album reviews, soundtracks, Susan Justin