Launching into a full, superlative-laden, free associative ramble on the subject of Makoto Kawabata & J. Francois Pauvros’s duo set at Café Oto earlier this month would seem surplus to requirements really, so instead let’s just say, it was a hugely enjoyable performance that, whilst it offered nothing particularly surprising or unexpected, nonetheless served to forcibly remind me of how much I love sounds make using electric guitars, and of how exhilarating and just plain fun live improvised music can be under the right circumstances.

Helpfully, Satori took some videos on her magic telephone, which you can see here and here.

If that’s not good enough for you though, randomly numbered ruminations follow.

1. Kawabata-san and M. Pauvros make a great duo, just visually speaking. Very much a “hey, you are your country's version of me” sort of pairing. Whereas Kawabata is quite a stocky gent, Pauvros reaches gangling, Joey Ramone-like proportions, with a permanently drooping head that one imagines developed early in life after the first few dozen damaged door frames. Beyond that though, they’ve both got the same mass of distressed black / grey curls piling over their faces, the same all-in-black combo of loose silk shirt, tight jeans (Kawabata favours flares, Pauvros drainpipe) and pointy black shoes that seems to comprise the internationally recognised uniform of the damaged guitar-god. Kawabata seemed to have raided Café Oto’s cellars for a nice bottle of sake (presumably a rare treat for a touring Japanese musician), and pre-set could be seen strolling around the vicinity of the venue, bottle and glass in hand, in search of a quiet spot in which to enjoy a few sips. I didn’t notice Pauvros drinking anything. Internet research suggests the two of them have been playing and recording together since at least 2000, if yr interested.

2. It’s a guitar thing. I can’t stress that strongly enough. Though much of this set leaned heavily on noise and drone, it is the physical presence of the instrument that keeps it real for me. Much of the time, electronic noise generated from computers or keys or non-input mixers or whatever leaves me cold, unable to connect. But somehow, when I aware that this or that mass of sound is the result of direct human manipulation of this electrified thing made of wood and wire, channelling physical movement and energy-release into what we hear, drawing arcs through that magical space between the pick-up and the amp speaker, it makes me incredibly excited. Even on a noise record, where the sound is likely processed to such an extent that its origin is entirely obscure, it is the knowledge that there’s a guitar (or, I suppose, other stringed instrument) in the mix that gets me hopping. You’d be hard-pressed to identify yr average Skullflower or Sunroof! Record as “guitar playing”, I suppose, but I’d still take Matthew Bower over Merzbow any day, just because, you know – guitar.

And when you can see that guitar, and follow the player’s journey physically as well as sonically, well… all the better! The more noise-inclined segments of M. Pauvros and Kawabata-san’s set proved a great demonstration of this, and their performance proved far more of a *performance* than is often the case when two people sit on chairs to manipulate a bunch of noise-making equipment. For those close enough to the action, watching the pair scramble and wrestle with their gear and props whilst hearing the results of their exertions shrieking all around was a pleasure that went far beyond mere “oh, he turned that pedal off and that one on” type guitar nerdery. It was closer in fact to the kind of enjoyment you might get from watching a real out-to-lunch free jazz ensemble… you know, physical. Dancing on the spot with buttons and wires and strings. Just with a hell of a lot more wah and fuzz and feedback and loop-ery and all that other good stuff that the jazzers don’t really care for, but that keeps pulling us meatheads back to the eternal mysteries of those little sweatshop-built 9V boxes and brand name amplifiers.

3. I get the feeling that those coming to this set from a more serious avant background may have been far more dismissive than I, via a vis issues of predictability and use of gimmicks. And indeed, the duo’s sets was very much factored around demonstrations of the players’ favourite tricks, split into pre-ordained segments of a certain length in a manner liable to bum out the improv heads. “Ok, first we’ll do the thing where I have that bronze disc underneath the strings for about ten minutes, then we’ll do a big storm of noise thing, then I’ll do the drone thing with the screwdriver for a while. Then we can both get our bows out and do some bowed guitar until that gets boring, then we’ll build up slowly to some more noise, then hit some wild shredding for a bit and we’re done. What do you think?”

I appreciate how such pre-fab technique demonstrations may seem inherently corny to some listeners, but from my own point of view, it was the fact the players were approaching things from a more bawdy, rockist perspective than is usual in this music that helped make it so much fun. I always appreciate musicians who level with their audiences and keep their machinations transparent, and the unspoken “hey, you thought that last bit was good, check this out” dialogue of Pauvros and Kawabata’s set chimed with me perfectly.

4. I’d never heard of Pauvros before. Sadly, the linguistic chasm that renders much French culture inaccessible to us monolingual dolts seems to have kept his work pretty obscure, but he proves to be a really great player. He has big hands, his guitar has thick strings, but he plays very soft, winding nets of slow, gentle, clean-toned twangs through this set’s absolutely stellar opening section, before, cued in by a sudden rise in the level of racket Kawabata is kicking up, he grabs the twang bar and hits hard, setting off an apocalyptic blast of Spaghetti Western fuzz-twang that knocked my block off. Intermittent problems with his appropriately battered looking array of pedals added interest and randomness to the set, and his elegant reaction to such setbacks – relaxed, slightly miffed, gently kicking jack plugs back into place with his cowboy boots – was a joy to behold. (English speakers can attempt to find out a bit more about Pauvros here.)

5. Tension was maintained throughout the set by the players’ refusal to really ‘bust loose’ on what we know (or assume) is their mighty shred ability. ‘Wanted Dead or Alive: SPEED GURU’ proclaims Kawabata-san’s merch table t-shirts (sadly they didn’t have one left in my size), but sound over technique is the order of the day here, concentrating largely on tone and noise, with Kawabata often falling back on his screwdriver drones as Pauvros occasionally breaks out shaky, clean-toned note scrambles here and there, whilst the closest to conventional interplay the pair get is trading dreamy, post-rock-ish riffs in one of the drifty down-times between noise outbursts. Until that is, at the height of the set’s third or fourth apocalyptic noise meltdown, they heed some unseen signal and GO FOR IT, diving into an absolutely breath-taking thirty seconds of high velocity macho free-shred so staggering it almost has me literally staggering, backward into the side of Café Oto’s long-suffering piano. Whoa.

6. LAST WORD: This was a seventy minute set of improvised music performed by two seated men who didn’t look up or engage with the audience at any point, but to me it felt like twenty minutes max. They had me captivated throughout, never even thinking of looking at my watch or wondering whether I fancied another drink, and they left me feeling energised, flipped out, happy. I don’t know whether this is something you regularly experience with such music, dear reader, but for me it’s been a while. It’s good to be back.

Labels: J. Francois Pauvros, Kawabata Makoto, live reviews

Since it began creeping in on 2005’s ‘City Fallen Leaves’, the “wistful look back at sepia-tinted past” approach has become one of the dominant modes of Comet Gain’s song-writing.

On that album, this nostalgia (of the personal rather than cultural variety, you’ll note) came spiked with blind anger, loneliness and despair – a kind of late 30s rage against the dying of an unfulfilled youth, pushed toward a bleak and equally distraught middle age.

By the time we reach ‘Paperback Ghosts’ a decade later though, things have obviously changed a lot. The band has settled into a far more gentle and contented brand of contemplation, repeatedly reflecting on the need to pull beauty out of life in the here and now without forgetting the past, and so on and so forth. And like the doting relative sinking into a big armchair in a posh pub after dinner, they are disinclined to leave this particular spot without good reason.

Whereas ‘City Fallen Leaves’ saw David Feck channelling a battered and bruised night-bus refugee from some hellish weekend of spiteful London disaster, feedback of some shit club ringing in his ears as he staggered off into the night, now his songs feel more like the musings of a comfortably settled former hipster [hopefully I don't need to tell you that I mean the older, more positive useage of the word], relaxing in his flat on a leafy street of a Sunday afternoon, as his wife potters about in the garden. Pulling dusty paperbacks off reassuringly wooden shelves, re-reading the sleevenotes on the back of old LPs, endlessly cogitating on memories of the triumphs and nightmares that have brought him here - the character at the heart of these songs has made good, insofar as such characters ever can. But where the hell does that leave his rock band, that’s the question.

Well rest assured, the opening track here, ‘Long After Tonight’s Candles are Blown’, is magnificent – a song that works so well, capturing the overall mood and message of this album so beautifully, it makes much of what follows it feel pretty surplus to requirements. This is stately, grown up indie guitar music of a quite glorious vintage, each lyric drawn out just right as it falls against the gossamer backing of overlaid guitar-tangle, lonesome violin and brushed drum shuffle, hitting a level of affirmative poignancy that matches the band’s very best moments from the past, as it mixes up the universal and the personal carefully enough to really hit us hard; “..from Beverley Road to Junction Road / and on the stage tonight / the guitars break / we make mistakes / freeze-framed in our own dawn light / we are holding on to life / because heaven, is a lie”. It’s like a happy ending to all the strife that’s come before. A real knock-out.

After that, it’s hard to know where the record can go really. ‘Sad Love And Other Stories’ and ‘Behind The House She Lived In’ jangle away in pleasant enough fashion (those who liked ‘An Arcade..’ and ‘She Had Daydreams’ from the previous album will enjoy them), and ‘Wait til December’ provides some sketchy, heart of sleeve meandering that seems of-a-piece with the slow, less successful songs on ‘Howl of the Lonely Crowd’. But with the first song having set out the album’s stall so powerfully, it’s hard to escape an “our work here is done” sort of feeling, as side one absent-mindedly wanders on.

Indeed, the album is so settled into its reflective, low key kinda mood by this point that the group’s sporadic attempts to rouse it into action begin to feel a bit forced (like that aforementioned relative painfully extracting him/herself from the upholstery when the dogs are barking or the children are making a mess). As such, the LP’s more lively excursions begin to just feel like character studies - curious tangents lifted from random page openings of those prized Oxfam finds, too distant to really foster much emotional engagement.

For ‘Breaking Open The Head (part. 1)’, I assume our hero is flicking through some decadent chronicle of ‘60s counter-culture psychonautic daring-do, as this direct cousin of the previous LP’s Velvetised psyche-punk beatnik biog ‘Herbert Huncke’ swiftly stomps through references to Philip K. Dick and Brion Gysin, dream machines and invisible universes. It’s perfectly good, but more “gosh, that’s quite interesting” than something that’s really going to put a crack in your noggin (or even lead you to reassess your plans for the afternoon).

The chipper indie-pop of ‘Avenue Girls’ fares better, with David turning back to some of his beloved British New Wave – a Penguin edition of ‘A Kind of Loving’ or ‘Georgy Girl’ perhaps - full of lost girls with blonde bangs in their mothers’ borrowed overcoats, staring out to sea after an altercation at the fairground - all that kinda shit. We’ve been here before, far too many times, but the sweet whirl of the song pulls us in, at least for a minute or two, reminding us that, actually, this kind of music is quite nice sometimes, isn’t it? When it's done well, I mean.

Somewhere within that organ swirl and jangle, I can feel that particular cultural anchor, forever pulling me back (because yeah, I’ve got all these books on the shelf too, even if I’ve not read them for a while). In the same category, the chorus to ‘The Last Love Letter’ invites us to embrace “the first words, that I thought of”, in the spirit of which I'll just say: lovely. No other word needed. Shut off your twee-deflectors for a while, and enjoy a really good song, nicely done.

The spirit of random shelf browsing spills over into the more mellow numbers too, as Feck’s apparent increasing interest in esoteric subject matter and disinclination to give a fuck now that his cult songwriter cred is firmly re-established sees all kinds of weird allusions popping up in the midst of what would previously have been the strict social realism of his more introspective moments. Pirate ships, minotaurs, John Dee, The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band and a rather torturous metaphor built around Blake’s ‘The Ghost of a Flea’, all get a look in, whilst the scarlet shadow of Marjorie Cameron herself is apparently evoked at one point (or so says the press release). The elliptical ‘Sixteen Oh Four’ meanwhile concerns itself entirely with Rosicrucianism, insofar as I can tell. Let’s hope that all this succeeds in putting the wind up at least one or two blinkered indie-pop purists, but to be honest it often stands out as pretty bulbous and peculiar within the neat n’ shiny, string-enhanced shimmer of these songs’ somewhat overwrought, wedding cakey production.

Even the dogged punk grind of closing track ‘Confessions of a Daydream’ – a noble attempt to send us off on a defiant eterna-groove, ala the title track of ‘Realistes’ - doesn’t quite spit and snarl the way it should, as a few bracing minutes of impassioned stream of consciousness wordplay trail off into a murky cod-psychedelic disaster (including a spoken word guest slot from that bloke out of The Yummy Fur) that would have been hilarious if they’d blundered into it on stage, but feels a bit ‘off’ when closing an otherwise obsessively scrubbed up & mannered long-player.

Well, at least I suppose it leaves us staggering off into the dark again, reassuringly unsure of ourselves, even if you get the feeling that this time ‘round, David’s just taking out the bins before returning to his armchair, rather than marching off headfirst into a troubled and tormented night. And good for him, and good on the rest of the band too – like the past 20 years’ worth of Teenage Fanclub records, there is a happy feeling at the heart of ‘Paperback Ghosts’ that’s hard to begrudge its creators.

Taking my “long-standing Comet Gain fan” hat off for a moment, ‘Paperback Ghosts’ is a not record that I can objectively defend or recommend to any great extent. In terms of sound and song-writing it is almost certainly the band’s weakest LP to date (which admittedly makes it the weakest in a very strong field), and, one or two stand-out tracks aside, I’d probably advise those who aren’t diehard CG fans to approach with caution. If you’re not on the bus already, this isn’t the best place to buy a ticket.

For those of us in for the long haul though, to feel disappointed at the relative failings of an album as assuredly warm-hearted as ‘Paperback Ghosts’ seems churlish by this stage - like receiving a holiday postcard from an old friend and complaining about the hand-writing.

Labels: album reviews, Comet Gain

So you probably already heard about Tommy Ramone over the weekend, I suppose. It’s interesting to note that the stature of The Ramones has apparently increased in recent years to the point where even the squarest of mainstream news sources were compelled to cobble together a tribute. (And rightly so, of course.)

It’s not been a great year or so for The Best Bands of All Time, has it? No more Stooges left, even if it looks like Iggy is set to live through a nuclear winter, Lou Reed’s passing puts a big full-stop on the story of the VU, and now The (original) Ramones are 100% gone – the recording of that first album is now lost to living memory, secondary sources only, not much closer to us than the Boxer Rebellion or Napoleon’s exile. It’s almost eerie, the totality with which these four guys – of whom Tommy was the oldest, at 62 – have met their maker in untimely fashion.

Those scanning a canned obit in the Sunday papers and shrugging it off with “oh, drugs, rock stars blah blah blah” may wish to recall that DeeDee was the only Ramone to die from the results of drug abuse, and indeed the only one who ever suffered from such problems to a noteworthy extent. Tommy by contrast always seemed pretty healthy and sensible guy (I particularly like DeeDee's admiring comment in his autobiography, that Tommy was the only member of the band who was able to buy meat and potatoes and single-handedly cook himself dinner, as if that was some ability completely beyond the ken of the others), and he hadn’t even toured with the band since the late ‘70s. Bile duct cancer isn’t the kind of thing that zeroes in on bad boys in leather jackets – like the vast majority of cancer deaths, it’s just random, and sad, with no ill-informed talk of fate and lifestyle guilt needed.

Though he was only officially ‘Tommy Ramone’ for a few years, Thomas Erdelyi always seemed like a great guy. Here are but a few of the things he did, beyond setting the template for punk rock drumming for decades to come.

1. Like most truly great bands (I suppose?), each member of the original Ramones line-up was an integral part of the whole they created. Their contributions can be chopped up equally, more or less – 25% each – and I have no time for bickering arguments about who was the more or less important among their number. Remove any one of them and the entity we know as “The Ramones” would not have existed. Tommy, as those who even remotely care will no doubt be aware, was the *organiser* - the guy who did pretty much everything to make the band happen during their first few years together. Booking practice, getting equipment, convincing the others that their songs were actually good and that being in a band was worth doing, booking gigs, recording demos, recording the albums, random managerial duties… you name it. Seems likely the others would never have got past the ‘pissing about on a Saturday afternoon’ stage without his input.

2. He also wrote ‘I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend’, and provided the initial draft for ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’, so surely that alone makes his life worthy of celebration.

3. The production on the first album – what can you say in the face of such utilitarian rock n’ roll genius? Bass on the left, guitar on the right, drums in the middle – no worries. Back when I was a teenager and a friend first lent me a Ramones tape, he told me that they’d recorded it that way because that’s where the amps were placed in the studio, and they put all the mics in the middle. I don’t know whether or not that’s true, but it’s a good story. I seem to recall reading that, having hired this big, empty studio for the band to record in, Tommy and Craig Leon just figured it all out from scratch, doing whatever seemed to work. It’s definitely got that sound about it – a straight, functional document of the band playing, figured out piece by piece with no external meddling or extraneous sounds whatsoever, and the results will live forever.

Whereas other good ‘70s punk records tend to present a dense, mad racket or a riot of screeching blather (which is great, don't get me wrong), ‘Ramones’ has a pure minimalism to it that sometimes seems closer to ESG or Young Marble Giants, and that, at the time, must have sounded completely new in rock music – everything on show with zero flash, instantly understandable and copy-able to the kids back home. It is this sound, as much as the simplicity of the songs and the performances, that lent ‘70s punk its WE-CAN-DO-THIS-TOO, ‘levelling of the land’ effect. How many bands across all sub-genres in your record collection might never have been formed if teenagers across the world hadn’t put this on, and realised they could play along?

4. And, just a few years after he was scratching his head over where to put the mics, ‘Road To Ruin’, also recorded by Tommy, takes the complete opposite approach - a big, classic, professionally produced rock record that just sounds AMAZING. I have an original pressing of this one on vinyl, and I am consistently stunned at how brilliant it sounds compared to other records of its era – such a bright, bold, monolithic sound, exhilarating but also quite nuanced, with all these lovely touches on the slower songs. As much as I usually tend to fall on the side of the lo-fi in my listening preferences, this is a perfect example of a band taking a big step up in fidelity and totally winning. Purely from an emotionally neutral, audiophile POV, I think it totally buries the subsequent album they recorded with Phil Spector, which has got to tell you something.

5. By contrast, I continue to think that the albums Erdelyi later recorded for The Replacements (‘Tim’ and ‘Pleased to Meet Me’) sound absolutely *terrible*. In fairness, it’s difficult to gauge how much of this was his fault, as I can’t imagine that working on major label albums in the mid ‘80s for a notoriously unreliable and inebriated band was exactly the most conducive environment for quality music recording. At least he got his groove back for Redd Kross’s ‘Neurotica’ in 1987, which I seem to remember sounds pretty great.

So, there ya go. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you to raise a glass to Tommy Ramone, but maybe raise another one to Tommy Erdelyi whilst you’re at it, and ponder what we might have missed out on without his contribution to the past 40 years of rock n' roll.

Labels: deathblog, The Ramones, Thomas Erdelyi, Tommy Ramone