As I struggle forlornly to find a few minutes to get this stopped clock styled Best of 2016 “count-down” back in action, I have of course been aware that, like some awful annual ritual, a lot of people who fall within this blog’s orbit have passed away since Christmas.

January always feels so horribly medieval, doesn’t it? It gets cold, so the older or more infirm among us start to die. Hospitals buckle under a further escalation of their now-continuous “crisis”, comedic Dickensian undertakers rub their hands together in glee, and even the most chilled of Saturnine cult rock musicians, living (one hopes) in relative comfort, surrounded by the warmth and respect of their peers and loved ones, are not immune to the remorseless progress of death.

(Jesus Christ, always a barrel of laughs on this blog at the moment, isn’t it?)

Anyway. As I like to make a habit here of marking the passing of those whose work has made an impression upon me over the years, there follows a short round up of remembrance for the recently departed – all deserving of far more space than I have allocated them here.


There comes a point in every music fan’s life when he or she will cut through the derision engendered by Live Aid, ‘Whatever You Want..’, slicked back ponytails and that time they sued Radio One for not play-listing their new single, and realise that Status Quo were and are *A-OK*. And, given that the past few years have found me wearing double denim and listening to monotonous boogie-rock as a matter of almost daily routine, this liberating realisation has hit me with hit me particular force of recent.

As John Peel recognised, if ‘Caroline’ and ‘Down Down’ don’t get your dancefloor going, you need to have some serious words with your dancefloor, and indeed, extensive testing has shown that the Quo’s output remained certifiably bad-ass throughout the first half of the 1970s. (If you need further evidence, begin here.)

(As an aside, the band’s perpetual uncoolness has meant that key LPs like ‘Piledriver’ and ‘Quo’ remain among the few first rate, Vertigo-swirl era ‘70s rock records that can still be picked up for peanuts at the time of writing. As such, my PRO-TIP for any cash-strapped record collectors is to head down to Oxfam and fill yr boots before the wind changes. You won't regret it.)

Though Status Quo’s best work relies too much on a collective, unified groove for me to be able to hymn Parfitt’s individual contributions to their oeuvre with a great deal of certainty, he shares many song-writing credits for their best shit, and his unrelenting dedication to the art of high gauge Telecaster hammering should surel;y earn him legendary status amongst rhythm guitar players. As a key member of such a monster unit and (by most accounts) a lovely chap, he will be missed.


A relatively recent discovery for me (and for many others, if the proliferation of the ubiquitous ‘Who is William Onyeabor?’ compilation is anything to go by), Onyeabor was an entirely self-sufficient Nigerian musician, producer, record mogul and “industrialist” whose trademark combination of irresistible disco/funk rhythms, Stevie Wonder-esque keyboard/synth wig-outs and soulful, understated vocals delivering mighty, no nonsense themes of peace, togetherness and humility – delivered in the form of eight self-released LP between 1977 and 1985, at which point he apparently abandoned music altogether and became somewhat reclusive - created just about the happiest, most affirmative and immediately likeable sound I’ve heard in many a year. And apparently he achieved all this whilst dressed like JR from ‘Dallas’ too, which is awesome.

Tracks like Better Change Your Mind, Atomic Bomb and Why Go To War go off like wonky, eight minute smiles of DIY disco ecstasy, and whilst I’ve yet to spend enough time with Mr Onyeabor’s work to eulogise him further, I was very sad to hear that he passed away last week.



Well if you’re going to be a one hit wonder, this is the way to do it.

I’ve probably written before here at some point about how, before I was “into” music, when my age was still in single figures, the songs that initially captivated me and stuck in my mind during long, Radio Two-soundtracked drives with my Dad tended to be “story songs” with some kind of heavy, dramatic atmosphere – ‘House of the Rising Sun’, ‘Ode to Billie-Jo’, and of course, ‘Where Do You Go To, My Lovely?’.

Just like those other songs, I still love it too, and offer no apology. It would be my first choice in Karaoke, if the machines ever had it (I guess, being primarily lyric-based, it wasn’t a bit hit in Japan), and I could probably recite most of the verses for you straight off the bat.

At one point in my ill-starred past, I had a yen to record some sort of horrifying noise deconstruction of it, but, returning to Sarstedt’s original, I concluded that it remained absolutely great, and as such didn’t deserve to be subjected to any kind of “deconstruction”, despite its comedic flourishes and manipulative melodramatic turnaround.

These days in fact, the song carries more potency for me than ever, as it’s exhaustive litany of mid-century cultural reference points – which all sounded so mysterious and enticing to me as a child, suggestive of the wondrous promise of adulthood – now feel incredibly sad; fading memories of a world of guilt-free, Riviera-tanned European privilege that sat ready for the taking, tempered by just the right amount of quasi-Bohemian aesthetic daring to add substance to the argument that, for the lucky few at least, the time and place hymned by Sarstedt represented the pinnacle of Western civilisation.

In fact, there’s quite a thorny dialogue going on in the song vis-à-vis the way that the excesses the singer chronicles are ostensibly dismissed from the POV of (we presume) a penniless, working class troubadour grounded in a ‘reality’ unmentioned until the final turn-around - but at the same time, the aspirational, near mythical, glamour his subject represents is so absolutely irresistible that he cannot hide his covetous awe.

And, it is this grudging celebration of an era in which, in stark contrast to the conduct of the assorted paranoid shitbirds currently stockpiling the world’s capital, the privileged few still gave at least a surface level impression of being stylish and culturally sophisticated, that I believe most strongly resonates with the song’s audience, then as now.

Meanwhile, I’m sure Peter Sarstedt lived a fine and fulfilling life, enjoyed much happiness, many romantic adventures and indelible friendships, wrote bucketloads of other magnificent songs, and so on….. but I’m afraid I can’t tell you about any of that, because I have no idea. As far as his influence on my life thus far goes, he is The Song, and, whilst it is difficult to imagine that seeing him in concert would have been anything other than the most excruciating hour of “PLAY THE HIT” imaginable, I am nonetheless saddened by the way that his death sends the kind of world he delineated in The Song further and deeper into a soon-to-be-beyond-living-memory past of dry historical record.


Well… what can you say? If you know anything of Can, you know Jaki, and if you know Jaki, you know he was one of the most extraordinary drummers ever to grace the “rock” idiom. (And if, conversely, you don’t know anything of Can, it’s about bloody time you rectified that, don’t you think? [Try here for a compendium of good starting points.])

Because seriously folks, there is no way I can talk about the drums on most prime-era Can tracks without resorting to hyperbole – they are just phenomenal. Of all the preternaturally gifted members of that most gifted of bands, I’m inclined to think he was the most so.

(I’ve also always liked the fact that – as was pointed out in the hand-drawn caricatures of Can members that graced the set of Can CD-Rs that an extremely generous contact posted to me fifteen-odd years ago [I really must dig those out and scan them, they were great] – Liebezeit translates as “love time”, which is a sublimely good name for a drummer.)

In essence I suppose, Liebezeit was a key exponent of the idea that, if music is going to break new ground, the rhythm behind it has to break new ground, but that it can only do so by means of a killer groove. So if the killer grooves you’ve done before sound old – find new ones.

He was still playing too I believe, scheduled to participate in some kind of semi-Can reunion this year with Schmidt and Mooney, so…. just a terrible loss. R.I.P.


Lastly, and of a rather different character from the losses discussed above, perhaps this month’s saddest and most unexpected of news concerns the death of Mark Fisher, the writer and academic whose tangentially music-related K-Punk blog, and his subsequent books, offered what for many, myself included to some extent, proved a jumping off point into a new realm of critical thought, and a new lens through which to view the troubled era we find ourselves living through.

Although it must be said that I haven’t managed to engage with Mark’s writing quite as deeply as I might have done – reading his stuff purely online, rather than on paper, thus far – I have nonetheless always been very impressed by the directness of his writing, and his pointed avoidance of the kind of obscurantism that often blights such “theory”-based work, even whilst setting out some extremely challenging ideas. The broadness of his approach when it comes to approaching the contextualisation of the present (as opposed to the past) from a variety of entirely new directions is likewise remarkable – a difficult and potentially dangerous task without the safety net of hindsight, but one for which he possessed a uniquely sharp aptitude.

Now more than ever, as the slow descent into entropy and social collapse he often discussed seems to be picking up speed at a terrifying rate, Fisher’s absence over the next few years will be painfully felt in many quarters.

Whilst I never met Mark face to face, my day job sometimes entailed my contacting him in regard to some entirely tedious administrative matters, and I always meant to follow up one of those emails with a “by the way, love your writing” type note – but, hating the awkwardness of those “uh, I’m a big fan” type conversations, and aware of the fact that I had very little of use to add by way of commentary on his work, I never did – a decision I now regret.

To be honest, I still have little of use to add, beyond a gnawing sense of one-step-removed sadness of the variety that I daresay Mark may have found time to address in his final book, ‘The Weird and The Eerie’, whose online sample chapter I found extremely interesting, skim reading it between tasks at work in the days immediately before I heard the bad news.

All I can do is point you in the direction of some more worthwhile tributes – here, here or here – and also point out that a fund has been initiated to help Mark’s wife and son keep things together through this difficult time. From my position of one-step-removed abstraction, my heart goes out to them.

Labels: bad news, Can, deathblog, Mark Fisher, Peter Sarstedt, Status Quo, William Onyeabor

Popping up with little fanfare in the early part of 2016 as a download/CD only release (can’t say I blame them for skipping the vinyl, economically speaking) and propagated online via the usual haunts through which one may expect to discover such things, this hefty chunk of folk-horror-y “rave” music could easily be accused of shamelessly pandering to the odd predilections a specialised UK audience whose preferred aesthetic signifiers should in theory have hit the point of creative redundancy some time ago, in the wake of Burial, Hecker, The Caretaker and innumerable other miners of the “sad old ravers get spooky” demographic.

In practice however, there’s still much eerily fluorescent water in the well, and ‘Creaking Haze..’ has stuck with me throughout the year, simply on the basis that, stripped of any theoretical/cultural baggage and taken on its own merits, it is a great listen. For one thing, and unlike the other artists cited above, Assembled Minds have the advantage of making what is essentially still dance music.

Probably not in the sense of surefire bangers for 1am at a provincial night-spot admittedly, and whether or not it could credibly be labelled ‘rave’ music is something I’ll have to leave to disco biscuit historians more confident on the subject than myself, but nonetheless - as a compendium of bass-shuddering, 4/4 beats and reverby electric piano stings, this does the business. And, when said elements find themselves threaded through with kaleidoscopic reveries of BoC eeriness, Simonetti synth blasts and strange, carnivalesque folksy melodic fragments, redolent of maypoles and all manner of pagan cavorting, the results are extremely compelling.

With track titles like ‘Call to the Shining Man’ and ‘At The Hands of the Woodland Governor’ (not to mention the alarming ‘Morris Horror’) displaying an admirable lack of subtlety when it comes to exploiting their chosen aestehtic to its fullest possible extent, the work of Assembled Minds veers constantly toward a heady, mushroom-peaking overload of sensation in which communal euphoria and imminent, bloody terror are but a split second apart, creating a thunderous bacchanal of proudly psychedelic ‘tronica freakout that is assuredly not for the faint-headed.

Listen and buy from Patterned Air.




I might as well admit it, I’m really not sure how to sell you on this one, wherein a quartet of disconcertingly professional, Berlin-based musicians (The Necks’ Chris Abrahams among them) convene and set the tape running, apparently with the aim of jamming out something ‘cinematic’.

Personally, I would contend that they largely fail in this intent (for their work here is just too involved, jazzy and meandering to do much soundtrackin’ in the post-Barry/Morricone realm to which they may or may not aspire), but they nonetheless succeed in summoning up a pile of rich, noir-ish business that more or less functions as a nice, warm bath for tired & discerning ears – letting soothing, conventionally pretty riffs, drifting tone flurries and the simple, unmoored tones of reassuringly expensive instruments played in a manner that is assured, on-point and ‘cool’ to the nth degree tumble by, just the way they should.

I particularly enjoy the way that the players here are not afraid to fall into unashamedly melodic, somewhat sentimental patterns and phrases that would be absolute anathema to most ‘experimental’ or serious jazz musicians, with the “soundtrack” conceit allowing them to give voice to some seriously lovely variations on familiar moods, picked out in taut and muscular fashion reminiscent of the very best ‘60s movie jazz.

Indeed, Miles Davis’s ‘Ascenseur Pour L'échafaud’ might well be a valid reference point, even as Rico Repotente’s guitar echoes the knotty peregrinations of The Dirty Three’s Mick Turner and Abrahams’ unmistakable thinking-mans-drizzle of unresolved piano notes spreads itself across the tracks like some tidal pulse.

Another jazz milestone worth a mention too of course is Alice Coltrane’s eternal ‘Journey in Satchidananda’, whose influence can be most keenly felt in Derek Shirley’s sonorous, slow-stepping bass – particularly when he pretty much rips Cecil McBee’s moves wholesale to provide the backbone for my favourite piece here, ‘The Early Bird’, perhaps inspiring Abrahams to give us his keyboard’s best approximation of Alice’s cascading harp runs, as Repotente journeys ‘cross the fretboard in search of some sweet spot the ‘Dead never dreamed of. In a profound sense, it is all just *really, really nice*.

In fact, the whole of this LPs second side is pretty damn keen – a veritable aural spa day that leaves us centred, refreshed and ready again to face the world and start listening to some god-awful, bleating rock music – particularly given that Repotente is thoughtful enough to get us in the mood for just that on the closing ‘The Ecstatic’, finally hitting the overdrive and letting the feedback ring, the rest of the ensemble holding down a simple, melancholic riff as the guitar man lets it all hang out, double- / triple-tracking himself into the most happily harmonious expression of chaos 2016 had to offer.

As he is the only band member I’ve not mentioned by name thus far, we’ll close by noting that Steve Heather played the drums, produced and provided the artwork, and managed all three tasks extremely well insofar as I’m qualified to tell. Nice work everybody.

Buy from Bronzerat. Listen once you’ve bought it, I suppose. (Old school.)




For all that music may have become a big ol’ post-modern free-for-all these days, it’s still difficult to think of a more gloriously ridiculous wheeze than the idea of a guy from The Dead C recording a disco album and naming it ‘Saturday Night Fever’ – and indeed, whilst I am happy to be corrected on this point, I’m inclined to believe that Michael Morley had only the most nebulous conception of “disco” in mind when he set out to record these tracks.

Certainly, the miasmic clouds of broken electronics, abusive guitar skree, mind-numbing classic rock riff-loops and Morley’s tremulous, death-bed voice (which at one point announces that “you should me dancing” like a message from the beyond) all constitute such far-edge outliers within even the widest possible definition of “disco” that I think it’s safe to assume he missed the board entirely here, genre-wise.

Whether or not he cares is of course another issue though, and the sound of Morley forcing elements of his established MO in both Gate and Dead C through a filter of lo-fi dancefloor backbeat and sampled horn stabs on the opening ‘Asset’ is extremely pleasing – enough so to make it one of favourite cuts of the year, in fact. Somewhat like Jim Shepard hitting Arthur Russell’s mutant dancefloor, it’s an acrid, pale-skinned riot of introverted neon strutting that never fails to cheer me up.

Remaining resolutely drum-free, the following ‘Licker’ apparently chose to duck the disco concept altogether, veering closer to established Dead C territory, but the dense web of rhythmic loops that Morley constructs here (perhaps in naïve deference to the methodology of electronic dance music, perhaps not) gives it a feel of Astral Social Club-esque “exploding sequencer” infinity that likewise remains very satisfactory.

‘Caked’ on Side 2 sounds more authentically “disco”, if admittedly like the kind of disco that a shotgun-wielding basement shut-in might have made, almost daring us to determine how much of the taxi radio fidelity track Morley is crooning over is some genuine Studio 54-era sample, and how much of it originated within his own gear… although, as the delay knobs are cranked and the beat disappears into a lengthy bout of elegiac synth-choir rave come-down, such questions become somewhat irrelevant – which is just as it should be.

Decidedly more entertaining than yr average disc of maximalist electro-noise splurge, Morley’s attempts to stretch a bit beyond his comfort zone pay-off handsomely on ‘Saturday Night Fever’, and if only person amid the massed ranks of humanity ever accidentally puts this on expecting The Bee-Gees, his work will not have been in vain.

Listen and buy via MIE.




One of the few (perhaps the only?) contemporary record I actually managed to review in 2016, I wrote quite a lot of rambling nonsense about this one here. I am not proud. Still a great record though!

Buy via Upset The Rhythm.




T.O.Y.S (not to be confused with mersh shoegaze band Toy) are a band I have admired for a long time on the – ahem – “live circuit”, and that I have meant to find an opportunity to tell you about on this blog for just as long.

I recall when I first saw T.O.Y.S, a number of years ago at a small indie-pop gig, my initial thought was “wow, these guys won’t be hanging around on this level for long”, and indeed, I continue to be slightly amazed that they haven’t yet broken through to a wider audience, given the obvious accomplishment and popular appeal of the music they play.

I suppose an inevitable decline in the number of label owners/A&R types ready to reach for their chequebooks after a few pints, combined perhaps with some admirable modesty and/or ethical grounding on the part of the band’s members, must be to blame. Whatever the case though, the mainstream’s loss is “our” gain, and it is splendid to have a band this obviously great and potentially massive still humbly knocking about on the DIY scene.

Whilst “a lo-fi New Order” has long been my go-to soundbite when it comes to trying to sell people on T.O.Y.S’ combination of propulsive bass/drums/keys beat-downs and defiantly melancholy pop song-writing, ‘Sicks’ sees them upping their game to the level of “a punk Pet Shop Boys”, emerging as by far their best recording to date, if I’m any judge.

Readers familiar with the band won’t need reminding that Eddy Lines (real name? – maybe) is an astoundingly good drummer, who could have absolutely cleaned up in one of those early ‘00s Rapture/!!! style dancey post-punk bands. In combination with bassist Adam John Miller (real name? – probably), who must be congratulated for side-stepping the obvious Hook-isms that accompany this style and hammering down distorted root chords as if he was in a straight up punk band, the songs of David Kitchen (real name? – doubtful) are propelled forward here with a power and velocity that many more ostensibly aggressive bands would die for.

Atop this certifiably bad-ass backing, I suspect just about anything would sound good, but, whilst I’ll admit that Kitchen’s nasal voice has proved a bit of an acquired taste on past releases, I suppose I must have acquired it, because his lyrics and phrasing here hit home harder with me than they ever have in the past, suggesting narratives with a few choices lines and shimmering waves of Yamaha chordage that send my mind reeling in a way that precious little song-based pop stuff manages to now that I’m a jaded, emotionally-dead grown-up.

Unaccustomed as I am to finding ways to write about this kind of music in this day and age, I think I’d probably best give it a rest before I drivel off into some kind of PR piffle, but suffice to say – if anything I’ve said above piques your interest, give this album a listen, because it’s *great*.

The first three songs in particular are an absolute knock-out, perfectly capturing the spirit that has always so impressed me in the band’s live sets, and whilst I might initially have advised that the long, slower selections that follow dilute their impact somewhat, repeat listens have found them growing on me until I have become very fond of them indeed, revealing some right proper song-writing suss set to metronomic dancefloor backing.

In short then, this is just fantastic, committed homemade pop music of the best possible kind. Please do whatever you can to help make these guys famous, for they richly deserve it. (If you hold a label cheque-book though, perhaps best keep it to yourself, because it would be lovely if they stayed with Oddbox through their long-delayed ascendancy to whatever the 2017 equivalent of Top Of The Pops is.)

Listen and buy via Oddbox.

Labels: Assembled Minds, best of 2016, Dog Chocolate, Gate, T.O.Y.S., The Still