In some ways, my awarding the top spot this year to a Mike Vest bands is more of a token thing than anything else – an acknowledgement of the fact that my relationship with the voluminous quantities of music put up for sale by this modern day renaissance man of ear-splitting guitar noise is somewhat akin to that of Homer Simpson and the “lady, he’s putting my kids through college” hotdog vendor.

Maybe other listeners may beg to differ, but for my tastes, between Mr Vest’s work with Bong, 11 Paranoias, Haikai No Ku, Drunk in Hell, new outfit Melting Hand and numerous other more tangential/one-off projects, there is scarcely a weak link to be found. If not exactly reinventing the wheel at any point, Vest’s understanding and apparent mastery of numerous previously established modes of heavy rock/psych/noise guitar is a remarkable – and more to the point, hugely enjoyable – achievement, making his Visual Volume web store an almost inexhaustible resource for those of us who are more or less constantly in search of stuff that sounds a bit like Skullflower, Les Rallizes Denudes, White Heaven, Earth, Chrome, Burning Witch or whatever other specialised flavour of six string extremism you’re currently in the mood for, more than likely.

That said though, 2015’s two Blown Out LPs are nonetheless very much on another plain vis-à-vis their position as nigh-on perfect exemplars of the space-rock idiom. Building on the foundations laid by 2014’s Drifting Way Out Between Suns, both of these albums see Blown Out’s rhythm section (John Michael Headly / bass, Matt Baty / drums) coming to the fore, laying down a loose, muscular and thoroughly blissful backbeat, pitched somewhere between ‘Funhouse’ and ‘Jack Johnson’, that presents Vest’s perma-stoned, echo and fuzz drenched interstellar excursions to their best possible advantage (think maybe Dave Brock on ‘Space Ritual’ if he totally forgot to return to the riff and just went way out there).

Beyond that, there’s not really a great deal of point in picking out individual tracks or moments amid this morass of highly refined jamage, other than to perhaps advise potential consumers that whilst ‘Jet Black Hallucinations’ contains the heavier, more propulsive, riff-based jams, ‘Planetary Engineering’s first side ventures more into the abstract, favouring hypnotic, trudging tempos and enhanced by a plethora of overdubs and appropriately trippy ‘outer space’ studio effects (subtly applied, mind you), tempting me to add the first Ash Ra Tempel LP to my above roll-call of psych guitar heavies, whilst the B side returns to ‘the riff’ with great force and directness, sounding perhaps like the awesome mega-jam that a band like Nebula or Spirit Caravan might end their set with in an alternate world where they were considerably cooler and more daring than they are in our own reality. Then it goes into a kind of extended ‘breakdown’ section that sounds, inevitably, like something off ‘Space Ritual’, and all is right with the world.

And, that’s that really. No great emotional significance or existential revelations to impart here, just a reminder that, when I’m sitting at home of an evening doing whatever, I currently enjoy this kind of music more than just about anything else in the world of sound organised by humans. If you know what I’m talking about it the paragraphs above, get on it. If you don’t, or simply don’t care – no matter. Let’s get suited up, hit the escape pod, and see what 2016 has to offer. More of this kind of thing probably, but I’ll try not to bore you with it too much.

Listen and buy from Mike Vest/Visual Volume via Bandcamp.

Labels: best of 2015, Blown Out

Well, what can you say? More specifically, what can I say?

I’ve set myself a precedent here for doing posts of this nature on the occasion of significant deaths, so can’t really bow out of this one.

Well, given the mountain of material we’ll shortly be chewing over from massive fans and self-proclaimed experts (for DB must be second only to BD when it comes to those guys) when the quote-unquote “music community” picks itself up off the floor over the next few days, I thought it might prove interesting to throw together a few thoughts from a… well, not a ‘non-fan’ exactly. Certainly not a hater or resenter or non-enjoyer, but just, well, y’know, he’s never been a big deal for me, the way he has for so many others. An ‘almost-fan’ let’s say. A ‘tipping-over-the-edge-into-fandom-not-quite-there-yet’ sort of deal.

Could such a piece be interesting? Well it probably wouldn’t be for most artists, but the sheer breadth and depth of Bowie’s hold over popular music is such that he still had an effect – dozens and hundreds of little effects, direct and second hand, all overlapping – on my enjoyment of music, and indeed yours too. Those of sufficiently wide listening who claims otherwise are probably either lying to themselves or playing an aggressively contrarian a-hole position for reasons best known to themselves. So…. Yeah. I have no particular conclusions to make here, but perhaps these formless reflections might amount to something. Let’s just see how it goes.

One thing you realise as you grow older as a music fan is that hating Bowie, like hating The Beatles, is a mugs game. The more time you waste bellyaching about their allegedly unjustified ubiquity, the more untenable your position becomes, as warm memories of melodies, lyrical flourishes, funny ideas and likeable images flood the minds of those you seek to convince, whilst your continued banging on rings hollow. Do us all a favour, leave it behind with the craftily rolled bedroom spliffs, UCAS forms and MOR emo-rock. ‘Suffragette City’ is on the radio. Drop your defenses and just smile, you twat. Life’s too short, etc.

Through teens & early’20s, I was disdainful of Bowie. I know that for many people (especially those raised in the ‘70s of course) he acted as a “gateway drug” in much the same way that Sonic Youth did for me, bridging mainstream-ish pop/rock and more challenging/underground concerns - but I came at him from the opposite angle. Already familiar with The Velvet Underground, Kraftwerk, Iggy, Syd Barrett et al by the time I began consciously considering his music, I largely saw him as some kind of magpie-like art-rock Machiavelli, cherry-picking ideas from all my messy, misunderstood faves and watering them down for tidy public consumption, reaping misappropriated plaudits for godlike originality from the uninformed in the process.

The fact that, at the time, he seemed largely concerned with making decidedly iffy ‘cyberpunk’ drum n’ bass tracks and telling everyone how much he liked The Pixies a decade after they split up only served to fuel this narrative, and as such I closed the case.

When, sometime around the turn of the millennium, NME did a big thing voting him “the most influential artist of all-time” or somesuch, and someone sent in a letter the next week saying “Sorry, all we had him down with is fucking up the production on ‘Raw Power’, signed, The Kids” I not only found it highly amusing, but more or less agreed.

The thing that changed my mind, basically, was song-writing. Specifically, a scratched up double A-side of ‘Life On Mars’ b/w ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ that I pulled out of my Mum’s long-neglected record collection whilst bored and in search of interesting stuff one summer. Now, say what you like about the big picture, but you can’t argue with material like that. Both songs remain shiver-up-the-spine-inducing to me to this day, not due to any memories or associations or whatnot associated with them, but just in and of themselves, as compositions and recordings. He wasn’t copping anyone else’s moves (as far as I know) when he sat down and knocked those two out, and even the most embittered Bowiephobe would be hard pressed to deny that they display the touch of an exceptionally gifted writer/arranger/performer.

I further began to contemplate the idea that DB was pretty damn good at this song-writing lark when considering the credits and background to an album I liked (and still like) a great deal, Iggy Pop’s ‘The Idiot’. What swiftly became clear upon closer examination was that this album was a Pop/Bowie joint through and through, with Dave’s generosity toward his troubled buddy being the only thing that allowed the Ig to take sole credit. In fact, with Bowie sharing a writing credit on every tune, producing, arranging, probably selecting and briefing the musicians and god knows what else, ‘The Idiot’ is arguably about 75% his gig, with Iggy merely contributing some lyrics, vocals and a slightly more nebulous sense of ‘attitude’.

Possibly not the most promising division of labour given the aforementioned flubbing of ‘Raw Power’s initial mixes, but somehow, it works splendidly. A perfect halfway meeting between Bowie’s consummate professionalism and Iggy’s feral wild man antics, ‘The Idiot’ presents a darker, more damaged and rockist take on many of the same tropes found in Bowie’s mid-‘70s output, and as such, it appealed more immediately to my punkoid sensibilities, further increasing my one-step-removed appreciation of Bowie’s talents.

The next step was a random VHS viewing of D.A. Pennebaker’s Ziggy Stardust documentary - a film whose visibility & historical significance has suffered hugely from the fact that it wasn’t widely released until over a decade after the events recorded within it (a particularly chronic failing where ol’ Chameleon Bowie is concerned). Taken on its own merits though, I think it’s an absolutely fantastic concert film, and one that I highly commend to fans of such things who may have overlooked it.

Although Bowie’s trotting out of songs by The Velvets and Jacques Brel (via Scott Walker) in his stage-show here does seem motivated more by an opportunistic attempt to steal their thunder than by a need to introduce his fans to the originators, I’ll nonetheless admit that the performances captured in the film still blew me away. Again, the feeling of grudging respect intensified. Well you can’t say he didn’t put on one hell of a show…etc.

Perhaps because some of the turns in the movie were so unexpectedly mind-blowing (‘Moonage Daydream’ with Mick Ronson contributing the most ludicrously OTT guitar solo I’ve seen in my life whilst the entire audience of teenage girls appear to lost in the throes of sexual ecstasy is pretty hard to beat as an absolute apex of never-to-be-repeated rock star ridiculousness), my subsequent belated acquisition of the Ziggy Stardust album felt like a bit of an anticlimax.

Well, I say that, but… mixed feelings, y’know? I mean, there’s certainly nothing anticlimactic about ‘Five Years’, that’s for sure. Jesus Christ. If he’d recorded that song and never done anything else in his entire life, I’d still be writing a generous old deathblog here today. Breathtaking. In fact, purely in terms of songwriting, most of the record is indeed the masterpiece people often claim it as. ‘Ziggy Stardust’, ‘Suffragette City’, ‘Rock N Roll Suicide’ of course, and the hilarious first few minutes of ‘Moonage Daydream’ (although the live version in the movie was much better). Oh, and ‘Lady Stardust’! My god, yeah, fantastic. Yes, there are five or six (or seven or eight) songs on there that are not to be messed with.

Nonetheless though, it’s not an album I’ve really felt the need to put on that often. I don’t know, it’s just…. something about the sound of the whole thing just bugs me. That oh-so-early’70s mixture of plinky-plonky pub piano, big ‘parody’ gestures and flat, “careful now, watch the levels” type production. It frustrates me in much the same way all those ‘70s Springsteen albums do. For all the rock n’ roll posturing, there’s just not a great deal of rock n’ roll happening here. Too much piano; too much saxophone; not enough guts. The material might be exceptional, the players might be great, but the performances sound way too neutered for my taste, dry and cold, and it’s no fun. You will disagree, of course, but what can I say?

To be honest, similar discrepancies between material and recorded sound compromise my enjoyment of most of the ‘70s Bowie albums I’ve taken the time to listen to front to back over the years. ‘Ziggy..’ aside, ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ is probably my favourite – some great songs on there, and quite a weird, tough sound, followed by about half of ‘Hunky Dory’, and after that he kinda loses me. ‘Aladdin Sane’ I couldn't hang with at all (although I like ‘Jean Genie’), and ‘Diamond Dogs’ gets WAY too overcooked / underpowered for my liking, much as I might love the artwork and concepts behind it. Never got that whole ‘thin white duke’/’Young Americans’ era either – I find it hard to get beyond the idea of it being a particularly contrived pastiche of a great form of music that really did not need his intervention.

Throughout all this, I suppose he just had an idea of what his records should sound like that was just a *little* too complacent and mainstream-acceptable for my liking, saturated as I am with what audiences at the time would have considered the real weirdy beardy stuff (Beefheart, Eno, Sabbath, Can etc.)

So then, I should love the ‘Berlin trilogy’, right? Well, I don’t really know, to be honest. These albums are so critically lauded and loaded with storied mythology of pre/post-punk gloom (of which I have little interest) I can barely even dare to approach them as an agnostic, uncommitted listener. Maybe one day I’ll finally put them on back to back and get the point? I hope so.

I mean, I’ll cop that if you’ve not heard ‘Heroes’ pop up unexpectedly on the radio and felt you’ve been hit in the stomach with a brick at least once or twice in your life, you must have a hard heart indeed, but beyond that… I dunno. They’re on the waiting list. Thereafter, I like ‘Ashes to Ashes’ and ‘Let’s Dance’ because they sound so weird, and… let’s cut the embarrassment and end this thing now shall we?

What this is all leading up to really is the horribly snide realization that, in the spirit of Alan Partridge, my favourite David Bowie album is probably ‘David Bowie’s Greatest Hits’ (yes, I do own it – I got it for DJing). Play that in isolation and you’d be hard-pressed to deny he was a real big fish in the small pond of chart-orientated white pop for most of his career, however much I personally might struggle with the deeper mysteries of his wider catalogue.

So where does all this mealy-mouthed hot n’ colding on the subject of Bowie’s recorded work leave me? I don’t know. An almost-fan? Is that an applicable status?

Actually, the more I’ve thought about it over the past few days, the more it seems to me that the veneration of Bowie is very much a generational thing.

As far as I know, most music fans in a vaguely similar age braket to myself take a similar approach to Bowie as the one I’ve outlined above. We like Bowie - maybe we even own a few of his records, and we’re happy when we hear his songs on the radio. But in no way can we comprehend the experience of really loving Bowie, the way that so many critics and musicians and DJs and pundits who were raised in the ‘70s clearly do (or did).

Growing up in the ‘90s, when the man himself was a bit of a has-been, headmaster-like figure, whilst the charts were frequently topped by ‘indie’ bands playing blatantly Bowie-derived material* and shops and libraries offered whole pantheons of ‘alternative’, non-mainstream music for us to explore on cheap CD reissues, we could take or leave his overriding influence really. His ‘meaning’ to us potentially didn’t extend much beyond that of some guy who did some good songs in the ‘70s.

For that older generation though, he was a BIG DEAL, a singular entity, an absolute game changer in a largely bland and stifling media landscape, where that particular combination of style, intelligence and transgression had no counterpart anywhere on the TV or in the mags. For a kid growing up in Britain in the early ‘70s, if you didn’t like heavy metal or prog or sensitive singer-songwriters, he must have been IT (T. Rex being unfairly dismissed by many as ‘kiddie stuff’, but that’s another story). And once you’ve got Bowie of course, you can find your way to Lou Reed, to Iggy, to Eno and Roxy Music and John Cale and Nico – inquisitive minds look further, doors to intoxicating new worlds open up. Like I say, a perfect gateway drug for that particular generation.

What percentage of early punks morphed out of an earlier identity as Bowie kids? Off the top of my head, I know members of bands as unlikely as The Germs and The Fall initially coagulated around their Bowie fandom… how many hundreds more did too? Of course, the best bands did not pass Go and went straight to The Stooges, but with three TV channels and the NME (or nearest local equivalent), many weren’t lucky enough to have that option. In short, the scatter-gun spread of his influence over those who defined half-decent music culture through the late ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s is incalculable, even if it is often unrecognisably diffuse.

Which leads me to wonder, if he was no great shakes for us ‘90s kids, how does he continue to figure for generations AFTER my own, who have largely grown up with him as a lauded cultural icon, curating festivals, wearing sharp suits and delivering ‘honest, disarming’ interviews left, right and centre?

Again, I don’t know. I suppose in the past few years, we’ve seen a big resurgence – led from the top of course - in the idea of the pop star as a kind of grand artistic visionary (witness second/third winds for the likes of Kate Bush, Laurie Anderson, David Byrne et al), and true to form, Bowie’s been all over this, meaning that it is likely to be in this mode that many obits will see him. Is this good, bad, appropriate, accurate, irrelevant? Will it mean anything to a 19 year old, a 90 year old, a 40 year old? I don’t know. I’ve said my piece, and just about run out of steam here I think.

R.I.P. David Bowie. He was never really my guy, but he seemed like a nice bloke, and he sure made some good songs.

Actually, you know what one of the best ones was? ‘Little Liza Jane’, by Davey Jones & The King Bees, 1965; I heard that on the radio yesterday for what I think might be the first time. Totally bad-ass! Sounds like Vince Taylor singing for The Yardbirds or something, brilliant rock n’roll….. and off we go again…..



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*One thing that occurred to me whilst listening to about four hours of tributes on the radio yesterday whilst doing the cooking & housework was that, alongside his myriad of cooler innovations, Bowie’s ‘70s material pretty much wrote the book for what eventually became ‘brit-pop’ – something I’d never much bothered to think about before. Consider: four minute plus ‘big singles’ in which mild-mannered rock arrangements are beefed up by horns, strings, keys and what-not; off-beat/culturally resonant verses matched up with immediate, ‘anthemic’ choruses; conscious attempts to fuse popular and critical appeal. It’s all there right? Not just Suede’s more obvious imitations, but Pulp, The Manics, Supergrass, even second-stringers like The Boo Radleys, Sleeper etc etc… Bowie owned that shit, far more than he did anything related to ‘krautrock’ or ‘the avant garde’ or whatever else his more high-falutin’ defenders may claim.

Labels: David Bowie, deathblog, rambling, thinkpiece

Never sell out, never turn down, stick to the plan, even when the engine’s gone up in flames. The world may not love you for it, but I probably will. Arguably the best album from arguably the best British punk/rock/whatever band of the 21st century. R.I.P.?

From the review I posted here in November:

“Like Comet Gain, The Make Up and no other popular music groups, Black Time ducked the all too obvious trap of ‘60s retro-fascism and saw how they could use its stifling vision to their own ends, stripping it down and reassembling the pieces in their own image – a protective shell against the contagious rot of 21st century disappointment, powering forward toward a bleak future whilst Out-Cooling the opposition at every turn.

[…]

Clattering, frustrated, chaotic and impassioned, wreathed always in an aura of mildewed tape decay and careless abandon, Black Time’s music certainly makes for a challenging listen, but there is a kernel of white-light awesomeness within it that further reveals itself on each new spin, like wallpaper stripped from brick, unveiling a blueprint for a whole new order of unfiltered, subterranean rock n’ roll, cut almost too raw for public consumption.

Listeners who express alarm at the thought of clipping levels, incomprehensible vocals and one mic drum recording are advised to avert their eyes and just keep walking, but, for those of us who still get unreasonably excited by moments on records when someone hits a fuzzbox and everything just goes beserk, Black Time are/were a god-send - a ‘for madmen only’ brew of trash, blare and discontent that makes me rue my repeated failure to experience it happening at close quarters just a few years ago.”

Listen and buy from Förbjudna Ljud, and don’t forget to check out this essential odd & sods tape whilst you’re at it.

Labels: best of 2015, Black Time

Another year, another untouchable masterpiece from Bong. Same old, same old, but if you’re waiting for my enthusiasm for this band to fade with time, seems you’re in for a long wait. I probably don’t need to tell you that they sound all better now that I’ve actually got SPEAKERS.

Following the tongue-in-cheek apotheosis of last year’s ‘Stoner Rock’, the aesthetic hand brake turn the band perform here is something of a stroke of genius, as the bulbous, mutant mushroom-filled sci-fi dreamscapes depicted on the former album’s artwork are replaced with a twelve inch square detail from J.M.W Turner’s ‘Thompson’s Aeolian Harp’ - gentle, rolling plains stretching out like some visionary recreation of the Thames beneath the band’s sigil-like logo. That it is my favourite album cover of 2015 almost goes without saying. (Fuck all these ‘portraits’ egotistically clogging up the fronts of contemporary LPs, you’ve got to love a band that’s into landscapes.)

Correspondingly, this time around Bong take their source texts not from Lovecraft or Dunsany, but from a few brief stanzas that I take to be of the band’s own composition; simple statements of cosmic positivity of a stripe rare in these dark days, and of course, they have to musical weight needed to back them up.

As I’m sure the Bong would appreciate given the previous fun & games they’ve had with genre signifiers and expectations, ‘We Were..’ expands their sonic palette to the extent that, by the end of side # 2, using the term ‘doom’ as a shorthand for this music seems utterly ridiculous. Indeed, ‘We Are..’ must be Bong’s least conventionally ‘heavy’ set to date, rivalled only by 2013’s ‘Idle Days on the Yann’ or their off-beat 2009 debut ‘Bethamoora’.

As I’m sure I must have opined previously in these pages, Bong’s ‘metal’ ancestry becomes distant indeed when they’re in this mood, setting sail instead for the realms of what I personally prefer to term ‘pure psychedelia’ – the same kind of non-denominational, maximalist ‘head music’ that served to take such prior explorers as Alice Coltrane, The Boredoms or Parson Sound well beyond the radar of their respective source genres.

On the A side here, ‘Time Regained’ does at least ground us with a familiar distorted rumble of sub-bass, decaying notes flat and placid as the gentle waters depicted by Turner, as a glacial locked groove rhythm from drummer Mike Smith keeps nerves soothed and clocks slowly ticking beneath. By the time Dave Terry’s magisterial proclamations enter at the half-way mark, sounding more assured and less potentially comical than at any point in the band’s prior catalogue, we been lifted to a mighty, head-nodding plateau of cascading, eternal echoes, room reverberating like a giant delay pedal, leaving us perfectly placed to chew over his words; “Friends, do not fear for the future / We are, we were, and we will have been / We are giants in time / Astride the ages”. Heavy in the ‘60s sense of the word. I think I hear Michael Moorcock knocking out there somewhere, if I could only but reach the door handle…

Suitably revived, we move on to the flip, where ‘Find Your Own Gods’ opens with an equally stark pronouncement from our narrator; “Find your own gods / not in dreary chapels and dismal shrines / but under the stones and streams / in faint mist on familiar hills / through soft morning light / behind the shadow of trees.”

For the track that follows, Bong dispense entirely with their conventional walls of amp roar, leaving the way open instead for a sprawling, open-skied jaunt down-river, conjured largely from phased string warble, crystalline synth drone, eerie cymbal swish and frail, woody, echoing tones wracked judiciously from Ben Freeth’s augmented Shahi Baaja set-up, before the drums eventually enter once again, like a bosun’s yelled instruction, pointing the way, ever forward, like the pulse that might have echoed through an alternative version of ‘Aguirre: The Wrath of God’ in which Kinski’s fevered quest really did lead him to a lost city of gold....

Another year. Another tax return. Another optician’s appointment. Another pay freeze. Another Bong LP. Life in the eternal now’s not so bad.

Listen and buy from Ritual Productions.

Labels: best of 2015, Bong

No doubt you will be familiar with Kawabata Makoto from his indefatigable ‘speed guru’ guitar heroics in Acid Mothers Temple, and perhaps for his endless stream of collaborations and one-off live sets too, but solo studio recordings under his own name have proved both rarer and more unique propositions in recent years. (I believe that ‘We're One-Sided Lovers Each Other’ from 2013 was his last one?)

Like most Kawabata solo joints to see release on ‘proper’ record labels, ‘Astro Love & Infinite Kisses’ continues to explore the sensei’s propensity for crafting blessed out, devotional cosmic drones of exceptional beauty, and in my opinion in contains some of the best such material he has produced to date.

Stretching out across the first two sides, ‘Dos Nurages’ begins by building up short, harmonising guitar phrases and eerie sustained note drones into a Terry Riley-esque web of organic sound, densely woven as a psychedelic fairisle jumper, then expands into a vast open plain of extremely enjoyable meditational drift before succumbing slightly to the temptations of Leyland Kirby/’Carnival of Souls’ style shimmery organ paranoia through it’s second half.

On the second disc meanwhile, the title track proves absolutely gorgeous, building from a cyclical acoustic riff that could be a distant cousin of AMT’s ‘Pink Lady Lemonade’ and a nest of buzzing electric tamboura and chaotic string-scraping to create an extraordinarily potent stew of atmos, like a set of temple curtains eternally parting to reveal some unspeakably vast and ancient altar chamber of shimmering, golden dreams.

Closing proceedings, ‘Woman from Dream Island’ proves the darkest and least immediately intoxicating piece on the album, but still provides a winning twenty minutes of slow-burning sitar / shruti box hypnosis, sympathetic strings winding and grinding to the gates of infinity.

In conclusion, throwing around further superlatives about a release like this seems surplus to requirements really. I don’t feel a great burning need to try to sell you on it or anything, beyond merely reminding you that it exists. This kind of music plays an important and beneficial role in my life, and ‘Astro-Love & Infinite Kisses’ provides a particularly wonderful example of it that I know will remain in frequent rotation for a long time to come.

Available to buy or stream from VHF in the U.S.. Consult local dealers for hard copies elsewhere.

Labels: best of 2015, Kawabata Makoto