THE FORTY-TWO BEST RECORDS OF 2011:
Part # 8

Almost there, folks.

10. The Beets – Stay Home (Captured Tracks)

“One day I was just a yellow yolk / then I grew up bigger and I broke..”

I wouldn’t have put good odds on one of my most played songs of 2011 being an acoustic ballad written from the point of view of an unfertilised egg yolk, but here we all are, and The Beets ‘Hens & Roosters’ seems to have taken on a mantra-like quality for me over the past twelve months. Not that I particularly relate to its woolly childhood/adulthood metaphors or anything, but… it’s just a really nice song, y’know? Moving without being moving, catchy without being catchy, it’s a perfect example of what makes The Beets such a special and inexplicably refreshing proposition in the current musical landscape. Just a nice little song. Simple and humble, it just works, y’know?

What could it possibly be, that can draw us back month after month to the ostensibly unappealing sound of a couple of shrill, whiny guys strumming chords on acoustic guitars whilst another shrill, whiny guy bashes a snare drum, as they sing rudimentary 90 second songs about “laying on the ground, yeah yeah” and “watching television, watching television”? How, in the second decade of the 21st century, when anyone with half a clue is sick to fucking death of indie-lifer earnestness and contrived, self-conscious geekery, can this possibly be a good idea for a band?

Don’t ask me man, but it seems to work. There is a kind of Vonnegut-like universality about what The Beets do: an understanding of the centrality of communication, and of the power of the obvious, well-stated. It will take them far. You could hear it distantly in the lolling, toe-tapping comfort of their earlier “Spit In The Face of Those Who Don’t Want To Be Cool”, and, now that they’ve at least figured out how to put the microphones in the same room as the performers when recording music, the essential strength of their songwriting shines through.

How often these days do you hear a band made up of culturally-informed white people, in which notions of influence and intent are both unknowable and largely irrelevant? Listening to The Beets, I have no idea what kind of records these guys like listening to, or what kind of music they are trying to make. Their music sounds like it simply is - instinctual and obvious and pre-existent. Clutching at straws, to could maybe tie them in aesthetically to the original ‘80s/‘90s strains of American ‘lo-fi’, in sound at least. Far removed from the tormented, egomaniacal face-pulling of all that Sebadoh or early Mountain Goats stuff though, The Beets have a lapsidaisical ‘so it goes’ take on life that seems far healthier, far more appealing somehow. Far more fun too.

Because yes, just to beat up on their enigma further, The Beets are out to entertain, rather than to wallow. Try as you might, you will be unable to deny the beat group swing of ‘Cold Lips’, or the horny hollers of – uh, I swear this song gets away with not being creepy somehow – ‘Young Girls’. I hate to tell you this, but with their beat up acoustics and their nerdy whining, The Beets are making you dance. What the hell?

Going a long way with very little, The Beets already have another LP out at the time of writing. I’ve not heard it yet, but I bet it’s amazing. I guess by this stage we can add them to the likes of chocolate-covered liquorice, Woody Allen and The Rolling Stones on the list of ‘things that shouldn’t work, but really do’.






9. Let’s Wrestle – Nursing Home (Merge / Full Time Hobby)

I like Let’s Wrestle. I listen to them a lot. I feel a deep kinship with their sense of humour, and their continuation of a particular lineage of self-deprecating British shambolism that can’t help but still align them to some extent with Swell Maps, TVPs and Half Man Half Biscuit, even as their musical prowess and career decisions take them across the pond to engage in more direct and efficient emulation of yr actual Dinosaur/Huskers type indie royalty.

It’s nice in a way to be reminded that groups who seek to honestly reflect the grim and strange peculiarities of the way we live in this country – and the stranger and grimmer things we choose to laugh at - do not necessarily need to do so whilst sounding like a lesser line-up of The Fall playing hungover krautrock in a condemned bingo hall. It is oddly spiriting to hear Wesley Patrick Gonzalez singing about inconclusive arm wrestling bouts, computer games, walking his mum’s dogs and “two Greek men fighting in a pharmacy” over compositions which – bar new bassist Sam Pilay’s sing-song bass lines and the lack of stubbley ‘90s earnestness – could have fitted in nicely on a Jawbreaker or Nirvana album.

Given how much I enjoy listening to about 60% of it, I would have rated this album even higher, but after a great first half I'm afraid it hits a severe slump in the middle, as Gonzalez’ write-what-you-know songwriting leads him deep into a trough of listless solipsism, incorporating some rather anaemic slow songs and reaching its nadir on ‘I’m So Lazy’ and ‘I Forgot’, respectively concerning the fact that he is lazy, and the time his girlfriend told him off for forgetting to pick her up from the station and do the shopping. And rightly so, the useless git. Don’t write a song about it, just get it right next time, as Bratmobile or somebody might have said were they consulted. Honesty and self-awareness in song-writing is one thing, but I fear that simply stating your faults over some dreary verse chords fails to achieve much on any level.

Let's not accentuate the negative though – after all, such bellyaching clearly comes from the same well as the self-deprecating observational funsterism of Let’s Wrestle’s better songs, and they do succeed in pulling things together nicely for the final stretch of ‘Nursing Home’, with a couple more delightfully ribald punkers and – a first for the band – a really successful quiet song. Written more in character than from first hand experience (presumably), ‘I Am Useful’s tale of an abandoned husband taking stock of his earthly achievements chronicles the inadequacies of modern, middle-class manhood in far more convincing fashion, like one of those real keepers Darren Hayman knocks out every couple of years. A very good song.

Perhaps more imagination and less reportage points the way forward for Let’s Wrestle’s continued maturation, but it pains me to think of such things. As long as they’re still spending at least some of their time bawling out tales of unlikely drunken escapades and supermarket encounters over messy pop punk tunes, I’ll be a willing audience.

Oh, and hey: that Steve Albini guy really knows how to record a great-sounding rock album, doesn’t he? Who knows, if he keeps it up he might be able to make a career out of it.






8. The Feelies – Here Before (Bar/None)

Seems like this record was pretty much slept on this year. Or at least, I didn’t hear much about it. Not sure why this was the case – I mean, everyone love The Feelies, right? I guess they must have just been hit with some of diminished interest/expectation fatigue that tends to greet new material from reformed heritage indie-rock bands. A shame, because I think for my money this is probably the best record they’ve ever made.

Admittedly, twenty years is a pretty big gap by anyone’s standards, but this is after all a band who took five years off between their first and second records, and almost as long again before making their third. This one, by my count, is their fifth, and the band’s unhurried method of operation is perhaps worth bearing in mind, given that ‘Here Before’ sounds less like a desperate grab at past glories and more like a natural progression and refinement of the band’s sound. The work of group of like-minded individuals who have always seemed to operate on the principal of coming together once in a blue moon when the time is right to make some music, and doing so; the kind of album one can presumably step up to make after two decades of selective song-writing and careful contemplation of the subtle mysteries of the indie-rock form.

Like The Bats, The Feelies have become enlightened masters of that form – secret chiefs of the fast-strummed guitar, the elegant chord progression, the casually melodic bass-line. Through the band’s early years in existence, founders Glenn Mercer and Bill Million seemed like rather nervous, retiring presences on their own records, putting The Feelies in the odd position of being a band led by two singer/guitarists but completely dominated by the rhythm section, a circumstance that helped define the unique sound of their ‘Crazy Rhythms’ material. Subsequent albums have investigated other means of fusing meaningful songcraft and guitar blather to the band’s more confident rhythmic muscle, and on ‘Here Before’, they’ve finally hit a perfect balance, leading to some of the most exquisitely exemplary post-VU guitar-pop ever realised.

As is ever the case with these things, there’s nothing particularly special to point out here, no big ‘HEY LOOK’ moments. Like a room full of modest masterpieces by some lesser known impressionist painter, it’s the beauty of the craftsmanship that stands out; everything in its proper place, with minor variations on established themes taking on major significance. On songs like ‘Change Your Mind’, Mercer sounds (and writes) like the kind of warm, fleetingly profound Lou Reed that we’ve always wished Lou Reed would bother to be more often, vague yet perfectly turned couplets intoned with laidback reassurance: “you believe what you believe / that’s alright, it’s fine by me”. Guitars – primarily clean-toned – clang and chime just the way you’d want them to as the chord-borne melodies ebb and flow, delicious fuzz busting out for some soaring killer solos, exactly at the point at which you need one. Factor in one of the most concise and muscular rhythm sections in the indie-realm keeping things sprightly even on the slower songs, and there are few ways in which these kinda songs could possibly get any better. Affecting, ego-free, finely wrought music of a classic vintage is to be found right here – the kind of thing that makes you feel like berating younger musicians for not immediately taking time out from what they’re doing to listen, reflect, and take heed of the myriad lessons to be learned herein.






7. The Dirtbombs – Party Store (In The Red)

From May 2011:

“The idea of recreating techno on rock band instruments is always a notion I’ve kinda liked. I mean if the point of your band is energy and repetition, you might as well go the whole hog, right? Groups who have tried this sort of thing before, such as Oneida, have often done just that, steering straight toward an extreme noise-trance whiteout, so it’s cool to hear The Dirtbombs pulling back from that precipice and remembering to aim for the dancefloor instead, to mix a few metaphors. The album’s title is self-explanatory – far from a crazy experiment or punker in-joke, this is an honest attempt to fuse the rhythmic drive and atmospheric cool of early American electronic dance music with the sound and fury of rock n’ roll, and by and large, a successful one, I’d venture to suggest.

More than just banging through the skeletons of Derrick May and Juan Atkins compositions in garage-punk style, Collins and co have worked hard to meet their source material halfway here, incorporating percussion loops, hissing distorted synths, extreme echos and a relentless motorik pulse into their arsenal, and splitting the difference between punk rock brevity and club-friendly 12” track lengths by sticking largely to a 4-6 minute middleground.

[…]

Let’s just say that ‘Cosmic Cars’ and ‘Alleys of Your Mind’ are your new favourite late night driving tunes, ‘Tear The Club Up’ will make perfect entrance music for your forthcoming wrestling career, and ‘Strings of Life’ and ‘Jaguar’ both sound like beautiful sunrise-insomnia trance-outs that could have been pulled straight off some newly unearthed Arthur Russell/Sleeping Bag session.

As just about every review of this album has noted, the beatless 22-minute fuckaround of ‘Bugs in the Bass Bin’ does stand as something of a stumbling block to overall enjoyment, but if you’ve got the patience to let it play through once or twice then even that starts to make a twisted kinda sense. Exactly WHAT kind of sense, who the hell knows, but I was certainly liking it a lot better by the end than I was at the start.

But basically, if the idea behind this album is one that appeals to you, rest assured The Dirtbombs do it about as well as it can be done, and you can go to the record shop with my blessing for the triple-LP set, just as I will hopefully do when I have a lot of money and have already bought enough Detroit techno records to assuage my aforementioned ignorance. Just like 'Ultraglide in Black' and 'Life, Love & Leaving' served to point me in the direction of a ton of soul compilations ten years ago, funnily enough... hmm, go figure."






6. Charalambides – Exile (Kranky)

Until I saw this up for pre-order at a couple of my favourite record shops, I had no idea there was a new Charalambides album out.

In the five years since their last official album for Kranky, I’ve touched base a few times with Christina Carter’s prolific stream of solo releases, which have veered from the sublime (‘Texas Working Blues’) to the practically unlistenable (‘Masque Femine’), but have largely lost sight of the no doubt many and varied projects Tom Carter has occupied himself with in recent years. Since the band cancelled a bunch of tour dates and more or less faded from view in ’07 (I think?), I’ve had no idea whether or not the two were even still making music together, and, pushed out by new sounds, new concerns, Charalambides’ music had largely faded from my mind.

So to be sitting here looking at these mammoth slabs of vinyl – eight songs, seventy five minutes - is something of a cause for celebration here in my little world. Or at least, I think it is. It occurs to me that I’m a very different person now to the one who has heavily into Charalambides midway through the last decade. Might the more humourless, stentorian folk-recital aspect of their work now just kinda really bug me? Will I really be able to get myself in the appropriate mood for this kind of angst-wracked, spectral blues very often? Might it all be a bit, y’know, demanding for my slovenly, pop/punk loving verge-of-30 self?

Midway through play # 1 of side # 1, as blinding waves of crystalline lead guitar thread their way into ‘Desecrated’s cloudbank of multi-layered string sustain, I get my answer. I’m staring at the speakers, anything else I was planning on doing this evening wiped from my mind entirely. The spell is cast again; I’m in their thrall. This music is f-ing incredible.

It is demanding at times, no doubt about that. ‘Wanted To Talk’ on side four could probably ruin a party five doors down the street – eleven and a half minutes of Christina delivering plain song lyrical lines delineating what seems to be a breakdown of marital communication over a continuously repeating pattern of six guitar notes. Even at their most ‘difficult’ though, Charalambides songs have a kind of mighty, invisible heartbeat behind them, a steady rhythm that continues even when almost no sound at all is in evidence, drawing the listener into the wordless, subconscious intimacy of their self-contained world. And even the pitch darkness you sometimes find there doesn’t seem like too bad a place to be. It’s always calm there, even in the midst of misery and collapse. Real ‘eye of the storm’ stuff.

Then when they do finally tear down the blinds and let the sunshine in – the triumphant guitar pyrotechnics of ‘Into The Earth’, the vast, desertscape string drone of ‘Before You Go’, the tangled bliss of ‘Words Inside’ - the effect is almost indescribable.

In fact, ‘Exile’ for the most part strikes me the most immediate and powerful music Charalambides have ever made – a monumental testament to everything they’ve ever set out to achieve. Perhaps their masterpiece, if there’s anyone out there still listening.

Or that’s what I think at the moment, anyway. I only got this record last month, and I’ve not really had the time to process it properly, to immerse myself in it as much as I would like to.

Y’know what I should do more often? Lie on the floor and listen to music. I mean just lie there, no cushions or anything, not doing anything else, and just listen. I used to do that quite a lot, now I barely ever do. This would be an extremely good album for that kind of immersion I think.

After all these years, the heaven-scraping splendour that this duo can pull out of two guitars and one voice is still a staggering and terrifying thing. It would be an unfathomable cliché to say that it makes my hair stand on end, except that it really does.

This is an album that deserves to have many more words written about it, only listening to it makes words seem so stupid.

Labels: best of 2011, Charalambides, Let's Wrestle, The Beets, The Dirtbombs, The Feelies

THE THIRTY BEST RECORDS OF 2008: Part #4

15. Christina Carter - Texas Working Blues (Blackest Rainbow cassette)


Following the recorded output of Charalambides / Christina Carter can be a frustrating business. Anyone who’s seen the Carters live, or heard their best records, will know the extraordinary depths of power and catharsis their music can draw upon. But pick the wrong selection of product off the shelf, and you’d be forgiven for thinking they’re the most pretentious and self-involved musicians who ever walked the earth. For instance, Christina’s ‘official’ release for 2008 – ‘Original Darkness’ on Kranky – seems to me to be an unsatisfying and difficult affair, piecing together disjointed musical fragments and spoken word monotone into a confounding and uncomfortable failed(?) experiment. This micro-label cassette release meanwhile (no I don’t actually own a copy – I copped a sneaky download), is just plain beautiful - one of the most engrossing and satisfying solo Christina joints to date. In contrast to recent stark, brittle outings, the sound here is instantly warm and welcoming – maybe that’s deliberate, to suit the songs, maybe it’s just the fuzzy, analogue cassette factor. Either way, it’s a winner. This is exactly the kind of music I always WANT Christina to make, and those familiar with her work will know the score by now I’m sure; dense, happy spiderwebs of heavily effected, finger-picked electric guitar notes hanging in the air like bright yellow smoke, tracing ghosts of divine melodies that never quite seem to coalesce, whilst sustained vocal syllables cut through like hot knives, comforting and settling, telling you exactly what’s up, even when you can’t make out the words. To say nothing of some of those star-gazing Garcia-esque solos you always assumed Tom was responsible for on the Charalambides records. Blessed with more in the way of form than is often the case, this is fascinating, wholly honest and idiosyncratic songcraft with a strange, non-linear psychedelic desert drift that recalls nothing so much as the testimonies of earlier Texas psyche-blues travellers Cold Sun. I think this would sound amazing whilst stoned; y’know, where you get into that headspace where you’re listening to music, and the spaces between the notes seem to stretch out, becoming more important than the notes themselves..? This is the kind of record that gets you to that stage whilst sober. “I want to use my voice for good, however small the good, in this world of foolish dreams”, Christina sings on ‘Preserve Our Face’, and so under the spell are you by that point, there’s nothing to do but to spit our a slurred, delay pedal “HELL, yeah” from deep within yourself, and slip back down to dig the sunrise, or something.

Mp3>A Blind Eye

14. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks - Real Emotional Trash (Matador/Domino)


Back in May, I said:

“Were this not the work of a man with so much history and expectation still hanging over him, we might even be able to appreciate it for what it is. And what it is is an extraordinary, bold and deeply STRANGE concoction of sweet, stoned fuzz and vertiginous audiophile thunder, cross-pollinating full band progressive rock blowouts with more hallucinatory, laugh-out-loud wordplay than ever before, all assembled like some grand architectural folly, with Malkmus’ perfectionist production aesthetic searching the studio console as usual for some manner of rock perfection that is never quite ‘old’, never quite ‘new’, but is certainly pretty oblivious to the social/cultural context of making a record in 2008. The results are meandering and monstrous in equal measure, an hour or so of genuinely multi-faceted, imaginative music that makes perfect, goofy rock n’ roll sense but is at same time completely off the map, answerable to nothing except the inscrutably odd logical-musical pathways of the hallowed Malkmus brain. Previous solo Malk escapades may have paid reference in passing to such comfortingly dusty fetishes as Turkish psych, obscure folk rock and European prog, but it’s only on ‘Real Emotional Trash’ that he’s really dared to step fully out of his own ‘indie’ shadow, putting together the kind of powerhouse band you kinda suspect he’s always wanted to have backing him up (that’s veteran Jicks Joanna Bolme and Mike Clark, with Janet “she-is-so-awesome-we-don’t-even-need-to-bother-pointing-it-out” Weiss taking over on drums of course), and playing a brand of big-in-every-sense, capital letters Rock Music whose central axis veers between CLASSIC on one hand and WEIRD on the other, and proceeds to take no prisoners.
[ … ]
There’s a definite feeling on ‘Real Emotional Trash’ that this time Steve’s got his Orange amp and his boutique fuzz pedals and fingers itching to get busy. His scrabble board keeps on delivering the goods, he’s got a band behind him who could chase Robert Fripp round a labyrinth all day, and he’s gonna fuckin’ JAM, regardless of what anybody wants or expects. And I for one say: bring it on Steve, I can dig it!”

Well, don't know about you, but here at the end of December, he's still got me "dancing like a pitbull, minus the meat".

Mp3>Hopscotch Willie


13. Hotpants Romance – It’s A Heatwave (Happy Happy Birthday To Me)


“You said my lipstick was the best you’ve tasted / c’mon baby let’s get wasted!” Yes! Hotpants Romance are here, and their album - 12 songs in 17 minutes - is nothing less than inspiring in it’s wrecked, Ramonetastic, homemade pop splendour. And they cram a pleasing amount of variety and ideas into that seventeen minutes too; “Shake” and “Blow My Fuse” are the perfect grrl-garage party anthems, like if Thee Headcoatees had shaken off Billy and learned to play their own instruments, whilst “Effing & Jeffing” and “We Used To Meet” lurch more toward shrieking, electrifying noise-punk, and “I Don’t Wanna” is the purest and most touching forty-five seconds of DIY pop yearning you’ll hear this year. It’s always a thrill to hear a band who set enthusiasm at ‘10’, technique and musical know-how at ‘who cares’, and kick your ass into remembering that that’s exactly how it should be. Can’t sing? – just shout! Got a guitar? – whatta you waiting for, hit the fucking thing! And if you’ve got the songs in your head and the awesomeness in your heart that these girls have, you’ll be the best band in town within minutes. Magic. With a fucking ‘k’, if you must.

Mp3>Effing & Jeffing


12. Congregation - s/t (Bronzerat)


This year, Congregation played for a capacity crowd of about twenty people in the really nice vegetarian cafe down the road from my work, and they were very loud and very good. I enjoyed it when a late-working co-worker walked past the front window and stared in with a classic ‘these damn beatniks with their rhythm & blues!’ type expression. Congregation also brought out their first album this year, and it is also very good. It’s got a real professional sounding production job and, whilst my initial instinct would be to want to hear this band in a more garagey live-with-one-mic set up, it works well for them. There’s some big echo, heavy delay and slap-back on the guitar, some overdubs and suchlike, but, most importantly, Victoria’s songs are allowed to stretch out into some darker territory than is communicated by their live show, with a very real sense of vicious depression creeping in between the more raucous r’n’b footstompers; songs such as “Dose Of Hell” and “Never Forgive” deliver as their titles promise.

Reviewing Congregation’s first single, I ventured: “This is some vitally genuine, minimal electric blues right here – not ‘genuine’ in the sense of paying cack-handed homage to some never-existed traffic jam of blues cliché, but genuine in the sense that it’s music with guts and heart, wrought from exactly the elements it needs to hit your own personal spot, wherever you are in time & space, and not or note nor beat more.”

And, after seeing them at 2007’s End Of The Road festival (although probably with memories of a couple of other shows I saw them at in mind too), I got a bit carried away and cranked out the following; “Benjamin Prosser is a shit-hot rhythm/slide guitarist, playing consummate electric blues and boogie that raises the spirits of Bukka White and John Lee Hooker, recalling just how propulsive, spine-chilling and flat-out awesome this sound was before the late-‘60s generation drove it headfirst into formalised, shrieking self-parody. Victoria Yeulet sings sweet, subtle and impossible to ignore, with the commanding authority of an Irma Thomas or a Bessie Smith. A bass drum thump and Victoria’s leg bells bring the mama-heartbeat. Basically, Congregation jam together some of the best elements of some of the best fucking music ever made, and bring it straight back to us, ragged and powerful in a way that never goes out of fashion. ”

I think all of that still basically holds true, so why repeat myself? I think these guys are fucking great, essentially.

Mp3>Hard To Bear


11. Howlin Rain - Magnificent Fiend (Birdman)


Earlier this year, I said:

“Howlin Rain’s less-is-NOT-more restatement of the grandest ‘70s rock truth is a thing of absolute beauty when it comes together, and it’s a shame that the rabidly enthusiastic review I had planned of their ‘Magnificent Fiend’ album ground to a halt upon the realisation that however, well, magnificent the record’s first side may be, the second half sadly loses it’s focus a bit and drifts off into confusion. But on those three hefty tunes that open proceedings – BOY HOWDY, do they ever get it right!

The way than Ethan Miller has grown into a singer is in itself a wonder – from being the babbling, echoplexed drunk nearly ruining all those early Comets On Fire jams a few years ago, he’s now got his tonsils exactly where he wants them, moving effortlessly between a laidback Jerry Garcia croon and a fearless Fogerty bark as the music dictates. And thankfully, in Howlin Rain, that’s exactly what the music dictates. Take all the best bits of early ‘70s ‘Dead and Creedence, add a heroic dose of Blue Oyster Cult’s skyscraping high concept weirdness and a healthy reverence for the dusty, meaty tones of the Hammond and Fender Rhodes, combine with a spirit of positive and reckless invention, as opposed to aimless pastiche, and happy days are here for one and all!

And the lyrics – dear god, the lyrics. Let’s just say that if those of us who value truly extraordinary and inexplicable rock lyrics were to band together and form a club (and perhaps we should), there’d be little doubt that Ethan Miller would be getting our annual grand prize (perhaps the much-coveted B.O.C. medallion?) for this one. The Moorcock-inspired ‘Dancers At The End Of Time’ is pretty cool, but ‘Lord Have Mercy’ takes the biscuit. Whatever headspace Miller inhabits that allows him to belt out stuff like this without fear of ridicule, I want to get there. Lord have mercy indeed.”

So for any aspiring songwriters out there wondering how to do a real proper chorus…

“Mrs. Amelia Underwood,
Carry my heart in your hands!
Jesus will shine on your journey,
Into the Hollow Lands!”

…is how to do a chorus.

I’d pass on Howlin Rain’s advice on the verses too, but it’s still blowin’ my mind too heavily man. Listen and learn.

Mp3>Lord Have Mercy

Labels: album reviews, best of 2008, Charalambides, Christina Carter, Congregation, Hotpants Romance, Howlin' Rain, Stephen Malkmus, The Jicks

Charalambides / Pocahaunted – Bored Fortress split 7” (Not Not Fun)

(DISCLAIMER: I don’t actually own a hard copy of this - I came across it on thee interweb. I won’t post the tracks, as giving away the entirety of a recently released record seems like poor form. But, as is inevitably the way with this sort of nonsense, it was issued as part of a monthly singles club scheme to which entry is now closed, thus already rendering it unavailable for us mere mortals to legitimately purchase, so if you’re interested in hearing it, drop me a line.)

As you may have gathered, I’ve been pretty down on the whole noise/psyche/drone/“kneel-core” (gotta love that phrase) world over the past year or two. As the initial euphoria surrounding the discovery of such goings-on wore off and my priorities in life and music began to change, I have gradually come to the conclusion that a lot of this stuff is lazy, self-regarding, emotionally deadening or actively negative, often relying on phony mystique and audience projection to disguise a dire lack of content, and, well, basically it does nothing for me, a few key artists aside. On paper, the bits of info I’ve picked up on Pocahaunted would seem to suggest that they are a textbook example of a shitty, arrogant psyche-noise band. Witness a reliance on ‘primitive’, pedal-based electronics jams, a goofy name and thoughtless adoption of Native American imagery, a bewildering array of limited-to-nothing self-released tapes and ‘artyfacts’ cut with guest appearances by everyone under the sun of this particular scene, obligatory schmoozing with Thurston, subsequent hype from all the usual subterranean suspects, and so forth.

But the proof is in the pudding as they say, and thus I’m delighted to report that the Pocahaunted side of this single is actually really, really good, and a great reminder of the essential qualities that this kind of music can embody when it puts in the effort. Entitled ‘Time Fist’, it’s built around some genuinely eerie Double Leopards-esque cosmic horror atmospherics, looped vocal echo and and slooooow, carefully orchestrated knob-twisting, backed by a thick mist of warm fuzz hovering across the horizon. Then, a couple of minutes in, crisp bass and drums enter, playing a straight up space-rock groove that could have been sampled off a Loop record. It’s a daring decision for a band like this to add such a linear rhythm to their strictly chaotic proceedings, but it turns out to be an inspired one, as the two elements fuse perfectly into a mighty fine exercise in enveloping hypnosis. So congrats to Pocahaunted for taking a chance and hitting the psychedelic bullseye, this time at least. In fact I wish it went on for longer, and how many recent free-form pedal-murk excursions can you honestly say that about? Top stuff indeed, and it was nice of them to give my shitty preconceptions a good kicking too.

Charalambides were of course the act that suckered me into listening to this thing though, and whilst their tune here is very much the slighter contribution, we always enjoy a nice bit of understatement around here, so that’s no criticism. Maybe this is though, in part: ‘Memory’ is another brittle, anxious folk mutation much in the spirit of last year’s ‘Likeness’ album, hanging more toward the chilly, formal end of currently hip British folk than the multi-faceted expression allowed by American traditions. So you know what to expect by now, I’m sure: a web of minimal post-Garcia/Connors guitar figures from both Carters, and a brittle, lonesome, perfectly pitched vocal from Christina – this one is heavily echoed and near wordless. Lovely on a musical level, but in the emotional stakes, it’s cold, so cold…. I guess the power of Charalambides at their best (eg, live) has always leaned heavily on the tension between repression/release, but at the moment they seem to be making music that’s keeping it all inside, y’know…? It’s music a bit like being given the brush-off by someone you used to tell your troubles to, a connection severed, and I don’t know if that’s really a feeling I enjoy having piped out of my speakers all that often, to be honest.

Labels: Charalambides, drone, Pocahaunted, Psychedelia, singles reviews