Anyone who has visited a record shop in the past five years will no doubt have noted, attractively repackaged collections of ‘70s African music have been claiming ever more space in the reissue racks, and, by this point it is probably a fair bet that most open-minded (read: financially solvent) music fans will have taken the bait and started to give ‘em a go.

Whilst there is no doubt much opportunity here is begin moaning about the excesses of first world ‘boutique’ vinyl snobbery and context-free assimilation of other cultural forms etc, I’ll leave that to others, because personally speaking, the process of digging this stuff (as processed via the reigning comp-lords at labels like Now Again, Soundway etc) has proved an extremely rewarding process, hepping me to all manner of intoxicating sounds whose varied nature and significance I shan’t strain your patience by listing and unpacking here.

In a similar spirit of conciseness then, let’s just say that if, like me, you have developed a particular taste for that sweet spot where indigenous African pop/folk traditions collide head-first with the overriding influence of Anglo-American rock and soul, this new compendium represents The Motherlode as far as Nigeria’s post-civil war ‘afro rock’ boom is concerned.

Though it was the epochal World Psychedelic Classics 3: Love’s a Real Thing comp that first drawn my attention to cuts like OFO The Black Company’s incendiary ‘Allah Wakbarr’, and Soundway’s mammoth Nigeria Rock Special may have filled in the gaps, familiarising me with names like Ofege and The Funkees, focus and context is nonetheless the key when it comes to this sort of thing, and this is what puts ‘Wake Up You!’ ahead of the pack.

From the gut-punch of Gilles Caron’s cover photograph to the extensive historical background outlined in Uchenna Ikonne’s near book-length liner notes, there is I think much to be said for Now Again’s decision to tackle head-on the kind of uncomfortable realities surrounding this music that other African reissues can be a touch too shy about fully acknowledging.

And I don’t need to say much more on that score really – you’ve listened to Fela, you’ve read around a bit - you know the deal. When investigating African rock, jazz and highlife for the first time, Western listeners (myself included) will often tend to feel disappointed that so little of this music is overtly angry or political, but, as a few spins of this comp and a perusal of Ikonne’s text will make clear, such a train of thought is an exercise in grievous point-missing. With a hellish civil war and corrupt authoritarian lockdown bookending the period of relative freedom within which the groups represented on this comp flourished, many of the musicians herein faced down the worst of both no less than any of the country’s other citizens, and the fact that they came out of it smiling and ready to party is in many ways the only political statement required.

Without wishing to labour the point, there is an argument to be made that the kind of aggression and anguish that overflows from – and indeed, increasingly defines – the rock music of stable, democratic countries is entirely surplus to requirements in an environment in which the eventual results of such self-destructive social currents must be dealt with on a day to day basis. Whilst Ikonne’s text inevitably soon falls back into a familiar pattern of chronicling the kind of management entanglements, ego-clashes and band break-ups that render ‘rock history’ a drag the world over, none of this hum-drum backstage business carries across into the music itself – and neither, more pointedly, does the musicians’ rather varied experiences during the war. (Amongst other things, I was astonished to read in Ikonne’s text that pop music was considered such a vital aid to morale in the Biafran conflict that fighting units on both sides were encouraged to ‘adopt’ their own regimental rock bands, and that it was in this context that many of the outfits represented here received their first exposure.)

If such a background played upon the minds of the band members, there seems to have been a collective understanding that their audience – whether military or civilian - simply didn’t want to hear about it, and as working musicians, probably struggling to make the weekly payments on their rare & precious equipment, the groups didn’t feel much inclined to force it upon them. (A welcome counter-point to the introspective, heart-on-sleeve drudgery that was becoming increasingly prevalent in Anglo-American rock of the same period.)

At one point, Ikonne describes the heavier, post-civil war sound of pioneering ‘60s pop band The Hykkers as “..rugged and murky, pulsing with the threat of barely contained violence; Guitars screeching like low-flying fighter jets, bass lines thrumming like trundling tank tracks”. With the best will in the world however, listeners accustomed to the bombastic hullabaloo of post-1970 Western rock will have trouble identifying such intent within the highlife-indebted James Brown shuffle of the group’s mild-mannered anti-drugs anthem ‘Stone The Flower’ - or indeed in most of the other selections included on ‘Wake Up You!’.

Indeed, “anger has no place on the dance floor” would seem to be the unspoken message of many of the cuts featured herein, and, as cloying as direct hymns to love and togetherness may have become in Anglo-American rock culture in the aftermath of the collapse of the ‘60s counter-culture, here by contrast they maintain a power and strength of feeling which suggests that irony, ennui and easy cynicism had precious little relevance for musicians and listeners who have just spent a few years at the mercy of all-too-real hunger and violence.

From the opening chords of Formulars Dance Band’s ‘Never Never Let Me Down’ – gentle funk strumming and fudge-thick, spiralling organ notes breaking through the patina of surface noise alongside a heart-breakingly earnest, imperfect declaration of undying love - to the everyone-on-the-floor inclusive funk throw-downs of The Hygrades and The Funkees, the Zam-Rock-esque riff lullaby of Waves’ ‘Mother’ and the exploratory, Fela-indebted groove-outs of Aktion’s ‘Groove the Funk’ and Wrinkar Experience’s exquisitely melancholy dance floor smash ‘Ballad of a Sad Young Woman’, this is music that sinks into your soul like cosmic butter, forcibly reminding you that, however bad life on this planet may become, however much soul-withering, genocidal shit might go down over the next few years, as long as somewhere in the world there is a generator, a stage, a PA, some amps, and a bunch of people up there willing to give of themselves as generously and joyously as the guys in these bands did whilst an audience eats and drinks and smokes what they please, as long as there is one foot being placed in front of the other as the dance begins – things are still gonna be alright.

And then, just when you’ve finally reconciled yourself to the outlook described above and given up hope of ever finding The African Stooges, an outfit named War-Head Constriction suddenly come crashing in with the most assaultive outbursts of  fuzz-wah whiteout I’ve heard all year, like Mizutani-San himself just got up on stage for a guest spot. Holy shit.

So, in closing – the next time you find yourself sinking into ennui, sick of festivals, sick of bloody gigs, sick of records – just put this on for an immediate reminder of what the fucking point is, and more importantly, what it sounds like.

In fact, I still have volume # 2 of this comp lying untouched – saving it up because volume # 1 is just too good.

Available direct from Now-Again in the US, consult yr local dealer elsewhere.

Labels: best of 2016, comps & reissues, Nigeria

Though it was not new to me in 2016, the unexpected reappearance on vinyl of this little number gives me the opportunity both to experience one of the most remarkable artefacts unearthed by the post-hippy/x-tian rock obscurity-collectin’ community in the form of spinning black plastic, and just as importantly, to tell you all about it.

And, to be honest, I don’t really know how to get started on this one without alienating a fair swathe of my hypothetical readership right off the bat. I mean, if I tell you that, sometime in 1972, some mysterious dude who styled himself as “D.R. Hooker” rounded up some local musicians in New Haven, Connecticut, laid down a bunch of songs and pressed 99 copies of an LP containing the results with a grainy picture of (presumably) himself in full Jesus Christ get-up wielding an acoustic guitar on the cover, then apparently disappeared off the face of the earth…. well, you’ll already be conjuring up a very specific idea of what this record probably sounds like – but frankly you should check their expectations, because our man Mr. Hooker had a hell of a lot more up his sleeve than yr average gospelisin’ private press misfit.

Pointedly failing to fully adhere to any known genre template at any point, “The Truth” is in fact a slinky, street-walking masterpiece of casually devastating quasi-psychedelic groove-pop that has never failed to please me immeasurably.

On first exposure, the vibe here seems predominantly mellow, with brushed drums, unhinged, dub-like echo and phase effects, meandering, head-nodding bass lines and a kind of shufflin’, understated lounge feel that almost Hooker and his buddies were subject to the gravitational pull of then-contemporary landmarks like ‘What’s Going On?’ and ‘Superfly’.

As with those records though, it soon becomes clear that, whilst the playing itself is light-touch, the groove beneath it is H-E-A-V-Y – as best befits Herr Hooker’s stoned, vibrato-laden, baritone drawl, which drifts through the ether like a kind of ego-less, faintly nerd-ified Jim Morrison, shifting from strip joint pick-up routines to earnest spiritual reflections to baleful condemnations of human excess on the turn of a dime, as weird subtleties of the musical backing follow his lead. Regardless of what his ‘deal’ may have been in real life, for the forty-odd minutes of this LP, D.R.H. sounds like the coolest, most confident motherfucker ever to stalk these strange musical back waters – a legend and a true star, a smooth-talkin’ scholar, unlikely musical genius and a genuine, 24-carat enigma.

Tracks like ‘Weather Girl’ (cascading chimes, thunder samples and a groove so relaxed it should be illegal) and ‘A Stranger’s Smile’ (“nice weather we’re having lately / wait, tell me your name..” D.R. intones in strange, robot/research scientist speaking voice) are pure, libidinous pop, like the Jesus Man on the cover flashing you his pure white teeth and standing you a drink in the hotel bar. Just don’t expect it to be a strong one though, as Hooker opens Side B with the cut that is arguably his masterpiece, ‘Forge Your Own Chains’, a spectacularly sinister slice of stoned easy listening paranoia in which hip society’s impending doom at the hands of self-inflicted intoxicants is delineated in a manner whose strange mixture of gut churning unease and jazz-inflicted pastoral beauty recalls the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band’s Bob Markley at his sublime freakiest. “Maybe one more cigarette, will clear your head,” Hooker deadpans as finger-picked electric guitar fades in and out of the track’s dense wash of sound; “Today you’re living / tomorrow you’re dead” he continues, as a spectral clarinet rises from the void to celebrate “your” imminent demise. Like I say – HEAVY.

Uniquely amongst reborn hippy weirdo types, there is not a trace of wide-eyed naivety in Hooker’s persona here. Though he never breaks out into to full-blown aggression, he comes across as a canny, soft-spoken hustler just as likely to finger the wallet straight from your back pocket as to beseech you to leave it on his collection plate.

When he does deign to bust out the fuzz though, he really goes for it, dredging up time-worn, cyclopean riffs and epic, damaged soloing that would be the envy of any ‘70s Heavy contenders. More bestial weather sound effects and startling, feedback-drenched synthesizer(!?) squiggles lend an almost Eno/Ubu art-rock feel to the vast, degraded distorto-riff that anchors opener ‘The Sea’, and if reading ‘The Bible’ was actually half as exciting as Hooker makes it sound via the ass-blasting majesty of his song of that name (“..father of the dragon / and the son of man!”), I’d probably be writing this from the reading room of the nearest Jehovah’s Witnesses temple. Seriously, I don’t care how much the Xtian stuff outs you off, if you like slightly off-kilter rock music, you should look it up – it’s awesome.

And, well, I mean… what else can I tell you? I must have listened to this album a hundred times over the years (on mp3 before I acquired the vinyl this year, natch), and still it leaves me speechless. D.R. Hooker, if you’re out ther somewhere, you strange, chemically-altered Jesus-imitating, guitar-strumming mystery motherfucker, know that you RULE, and that I love you for it.

---

A note on the label that put this out: as far as I can ascertain, the original D.R. Hooker LP was issued on the amusingly monikered “VAG Records”. To my surprise meanwhile, it turns out that the somewhat unsavoury sounding “Veals and Geeks” label is actually a spin-off from a record shop of the same name in Brussels, and they have previously released a number of other things. Therefore, I can only assume that the fact their name allows them to re-use the ‘VAG’ acronym on their ‘almost exact repress’ style packaging of “The Truth” is nothing more or less than a happy coincidence.

Anyway, whatever - you can stream and buy it from them straight from their Bandcamp here.

Labels: best of 2016, comps & reissues, D.R. Hooker

It’s funny, when Satori asked me this morning about this ‘Leonardo Cohen’ who’d died*, one of the first things I managed to mumble was “well, I liked a lot of his stuff, but I’m not really a big fan or anything…”.

Well, maybe it’s the timing, or maybe sometimes you just don’t realise you’re a ‘big fan’ until the moment arrives, but nine hours later I’m finding it difficult to keep it together and remain dry-eyed today.

The more I think back on his songs – bits I recall from them, bits I’ve looked up online or seen quoted in tribute – the more I realise how serious this guy was about his job as a poet, an artist, whatever you want to call it, and how much of an example his success must set for others who would purport to assume such a role.

Whilst I’ll admit that much of his stuff can be overly personal, or ridiculously obtuse, or even somewhat cringe-worthy, when he had a mind to, he could craft couplets or stanzas that hit like hammer blows. A few painstakingly chosen words in a casual pop/folk rhyming pattern that could alter people’s understanding of their position in life, could shift their moods from bottom to top or vice versa, could re-arrange entire worldviews, could remind people what their priorities need to be.

And, we’re not just talking *some* people here. I don’t think Leonard Cohen was writing for some sub-set of the population, some particular demographic or age/geography-defined cult following. His words (especially in his later years) were explicitly aimed at *all* people. Whether he achieved it or not, the ‘tent pole’ songs in his catalogue (and many of the deep cuts besides) aspire to a kind of universality that I think is the highest goal a creator of human culture can seek.

I don’t need to point you toward quotes and examples – just go google some up, they are everywhere.

Of course, each of his albums has its throwaways and its goof-offs and missteps, but you feel that if he came up with a batch of songs whose lines didn’t hit that mark often enough, he’d probably have just thrown out the whole lot and started again. For all the humour in his work, he wasn’t messing around.

It sounds ridiculous, but reading his lyrics on the page today (as I have rarely done in the past), they remind me more than anything of William Blake – that particular mixture of frustrating obscurity, chest-beating melodrama and absolute, crushing directness – and I’d almost go as far as to say that his “greatest hits” have entered the collective lexicon in a similarly indelible fashion.

I don’t know quite where I’m going with this – it’s all going a bit “gripping the lectern and shaking fist at the heavens”, isn’t it? Sorry about that. I don’t have an ending or a final sign off planned, or any gags. Perhaps there is more to come. This plus a BBC World Service panel discussion of the incoming President’s likely foreign policy agenda has all proved a bit too much to take in today, so we’ll leave it there for now. As Cohen reminded us, buried amid the apocalyptic visions of the song I linked to in the post below,
“love is the only engine of survival”.


* Apparently Leonard Cohen is almost entirely unknown in Japan, which I suppose is understandable given the extent to which the appeal of his work relies upon knowledge of the English language, although I’d imagine outfits like The Jacks must have cultivated at least a passing familiarity with his output…?

Labels: deathblog, Leonard Cohen

In happier times, perhaps I’d have been rustling up a proper Deathblog right now, ruminating about how I first discovered Leonard Cohen, and of all the things my younger self did or didn’t get out of listening to his records, and of all the friends I listened to them with. Of how in recent years I’ve instead found myself sniggering somewhat at the pomposity and earnest inscrutability of the early records I used to love, whilst being slowly drawn toward the weirder, wonkier charms of the later stuff I used to dismiss, even whilst a handful of those early numbers still slay me, and so on. Maybe I could do you a top five favourite moments, or top ten.

But today I just don’t have the heart.

As one or two people have no doubt already noted, Field Commander Cohen was so cool, he somehow managed to record the perfect song for 2016, back in the relatively care-free days of 1992.

I recall hearing this song on the radio a few years back and finding its lyrical bombast absolutely ridiculous. This week? It fits like a glove, and its prescience is terrifying.

Labels: bad news, deathblog, Leonard Cohen, worse news

Labels: bad news

By this stage in the game, we might well have assumed that the glory-days of ‘60s garage/psych excavations are well and truly over (at least with regards to the US and UK). I mean, surely by now even the most dogged collectors and researchers of such material must have felt their brains finally turning to mush as they cue up that only-known-copy acetate of the 84,000th gang of Arkansas teenagers to knock out a shaky Bo Diddley rip-off in 1966 and/or the 604th mob of swinging London toy-town chancers. The well is dry, the dust is toxic, the ruins are earmarked for demolition, and the vast majority of more canny comp-lords have long since moved on to play and pillage amongst the relatively untouched realms of regional ‘70s heavy rock.

(Expect that market in turn to bottom out in the next year or two, given the speed with which it’s being exploited, and, with outsider punk, post-punk and ‘80s goth already being strip-mined from the other direction, where can they run to after that? God help the poor lost souls, they might have to start listening to music from non-English speaking countries, or stuff that’s not white guitar rock, if you can imagine such a thing..)

BUT, we would do well to remember the first rule of any form of retrospective cultural obsession: THERE IS ALWAYS MORE.

Just as the last stragglers in ‘60s-ville prepare to pack their bags and move on though, Ace Records have come out of nowhere and dropped ‘Golden State Psychedelia’, a collection of largely unheard recordings made on-spec for potential sale to labels and distributors at Leo Kulka’s Golden State Recorders studio in San Francisco between ’66 and ’69. The only familiar name here to genre fans will be The Gants (of “I Wonder” non-fame), with the other tracks consisting of largely or entirely unknown outfits, and - take a deep breath here folks – the bulk of this stuff is *really good*.

Beginning in eye-opening fashion with a grizzled, proto-Hawkwind intro burn, The Goody Box’s ‘Blow Up’ explodes into a delightfully punkoid Standells stomp, and many of the following numbers here provide a similarly thrilling bolt from the blue for long-jaded garage fans, running the gamut from The Carnival’s hyperactive choral psyche (which sounds a bit like The Fifth Dimension played at the wrong speed) to the bleary-eyed dawn-after-a-night-lost-in-the-forest atmos of The Bristol Boxkite’s superbly desolate ‘Sunless Night’.

Lashings of PROPER PSYCHE follows, as the faux-communal freak out vibes of The Immediate Family’s ‘Rubaiyat’ open up like a goldleaf sunflower into a chorus melody that could slay saints; joint male/female vox enliven the punked up Jefferson Airplane stylings of The Short Yellow, whilst the aptly named Celestial Hysteria come on like a witchy, female-fronted Iron Butterfly. Actually, it is the Airplane influence can be felt most strongly felt throughout this comp – as I suppose is only natural, given the time and place in which these tracks were recorded. If nothing else, this seemingly encouraged the participation of a number of ballsy, deep-voiced female vocialists in the bands represented here, which is certainly a welcome development, with The Seventh Dawn’s ‘Don't Worry Me’ in particular standing out as a dead ringer for a lost Great Society recording.

Best of all though is ‘Fuck For Peace’, as performed by “Magician” – an absolutely first rate fucked up, drug-freak hipster nightmare blaster, about as wilfully uncommercial as you’d expect of a group who seemingly rocked up at a pro studio in 1968 and start dropping the F-word over blasts of fuzz-tone that sound like a cat frying against an electrified wire fence.

I’d continue with “…and that’s just the first half!”, but, to be honest with you, the track list here is somewhat front-loaded; additional cuts from many of the acts mentioned above betray a more-of-the-same / deliberate B-side quality, but nonetheless, at least two thirds of the cuts here are keepers, which is a frankly astonishing feat for a never-before-heard garage comp in 2016.

Historically speaking, the Golden State material presents a fascinating insight into a sub-set of professional-ish musicians (well, I mean, not regional high schoolers at any rate) who still had one foot in the producer/studio owner-guided, Top 40-orientated pop scene, whilst the toes of the other curled outward toward the new world of the ostensibly ‘underground’ psychedelic ballroom culture that was exploding just across town, bridging the transition toward rootsy, album-orientated Woodstock-era rock that would render these kind of colourful, three minute psychesploitation smilers a terminally square anachronism by the close of this comp's timeframe.

Happily, the results of this aesthetic mix-up proves exciting and unpredictable enough to delight and confound even today, serving to remind us – if only for a minute or two here and there - just how rich and unhinged and exciting all that Nuggets/Pebbles stuff was back when we heard it for the first time all those years ago.

Sounding at its best moments like ‘Epitaph For a Legend’ force-fed through a letterbox of jittery Nuggets bounce, this is probably my favourite psyche comp since Now-Again’s fabulous Forge Your Own Chains, and come to think of it, that one was mainly a ‘70s affair, so… I think that makes this the best purely ‘60s comp in donkey’s years. Just remember, the next time you don't quite have the heart to give ‘Back From The Grave # 15' that third listen it probably deserves - THERE IS ALWAYS MORE.

Buy directly from Ace Records.

Labels: best of 2016, comps & reissues, garage