Labels: best of 2012, Dinosaur Jr, G Green, Guided By Voices, Heavy Cream, Umberto

I’m sure you could have guessed as much, but it’s worth stating plainly: the insidious canonisation of ‘golden-era’ indie-rock that has taken place over the past few years sticks in my craw something rotten. The whole “classic band play their classic album” mentality that has congealed across festival line-ups and concert schedules around the world pretty much marks the point at which any contemporary relevance this music may once have had is permanently severed, the body left writhing around as the stump is burned clean.

And yet this reverence continues unabated, feeding into this absurd, depressing notion that seems to have developed that ‘indie’ as a style/genre is something to actually be celebrated and aspired to. Thus it finds itself slavishly reproduced by those (young & old) who have assumed its perceived stylings as a conscious decision, tragically failing to appreciate its true historical status as a wholly accidental, inherently self-deprecatory category into which people like me (and, I assume, you, dear reader) are thrust more by some horrible accident of birth than anything else – a perpetual ‘none of the above’ box tick within which pale white misfits of one variety or another conduct their business outside of the stylistic rigours demanded by other, more clearly defined varieties of ‘rock’ and ‘pop’.

Once ‘indie’ attains said rigours, becoming a self-conscious category with its own pantheon of classic recordings and off-the-peg dress code, the whole thing becomes such a gigantic joke that it’s fucking sickening. You there, young man hanging about outside Rough Trade East, why in GOD’S NAME would you wish to become something as inherently lame as INDIE? The world is your oyster, the opportunities to look like a tool are limitless, and yet you choose THIS? I did not choose it, I just ended up being it, and yet here you are, listening to Sonic Youth in 2012 as if that somehow *matters*, failing to appreciate that that puts you about on the same missed-the-boat level as some flea-bitten flower-child listening to The Grateful Dead in 1985, convinced that they’re still the bee’s knees, as hardcore and hip-hop and thrash metal explode all around.

Not that there’s anything wrong with listening to The Grateful Dead in 1985. I sure wish I was listening to The Grateful Dead in 1985 instead of sitting here in work writing this bollocks as global destruction looms. But my point is that in 1985, the omniscient arbiters of cultural taste would not have countenanced that decision for any remotely engaged young person. And yet Sonic Youth 2012? Sure, come right in, says the dude in the shop, we’ve got all their ‘classic albums’ lined up right there and we still play ‘em all the time. What the hell is going on? That Reynolds guy whose book I can’t be bothered to read must be right! Time has stopped! And… well you get the idea.

Hopefully ill-conceived, unwanted diatribes like the one above will go some way toward demonstrating the way my heart has hardened to such things to the extent that when legendary and prodigiously talented men and women whose work I’ve spent a good chunk of my life obsessively listening to pitch up in my town to perform their lauded classic works with their reformed classic line-ups, I can barely summon up the energy to acknowledge their existence or snort in derision, let alone actually consider the relative merits of dragging my carcass to some corporate shithole excuse for a medium sized concert venue.

Guided By Voices is different though. If the reactivated classic line-up GeeBeeVee deigned to play in this country (a promise that was issued then cruelly withdrawn last year), I would tear up what I’ve just written, abandon what remains of my self-respect and proceed to lose my shit. I would be up in the front row with all the other crumbling, beer-swilling omega males, determined to have the time of my life, regardless of what actually transpired on stage. Even seeing an ad-hoc GBV tribute ensemble play a one-off 20 minute set last year got me so giddy I spent the remainder of the evening in a state of reverie. Imagine seeing THE REAL THING. Imagine them playing for hours, doing the hits. Too much, man.

But wait a minute – aren’t GBV the very epitome of everything that is ugly and mediocre in ‘indie’ culture, of everything that reduces the joy of musical expression to a bad throat and a hangover, an ill-advised beard, an entry on a spreadsheet? All those endless catechisms of awkwardly monikered, poorly recorded, obtusely self-pitying songs hidden behind slabs of poorly executed GCSE collage artwork – aren’t they precisely the kind of thing I should be trying to tear myself away from, having shaken my fist in its general direction in the above paragraphs?

No, they are not. Laugh if you will, but whilst the Pavements and Yo La Tengos of this world remain happy to wallow, GBV were all about transcendence. When they missed the mark, they missed it wide, but when they hit (and in their hey-day they were capable of knocking out bulls-eyes for ten songs at a time), they hit hard, taking all the detritus that circles around the lives of aging, disgruntled nerd-men trapped in suburban pitstops – the scrap-books full of scrawled nonsense, the mis-read road signs and slurred, half remembered conversations about old records, the hissing, dust-covered pile of cables in someone’s neglected basement home-studio set up – and transforming it via the alchemy of rock n’ roll into moments of towering, cosmic celebration. As synonymous as they may be with all that lo-fi indie-rock aesthetic bullshit, GBV were not about celebrating it, they were about CONQUERING it – acknowledging it as their natural state of being, then channelling it into something bigger, stronger, more universal… and then celebrating that instead, cos why the fuck not?

So yes, to be able to check in on that celebration once again, with the now-probably-approaching-actual-old-age membership of the collective that gave us ‘Propeller’ and ‘Bee Thousand’ and ‘Alien Lanes’ would be a great and special thing, and I wish they’d change their mind and get a Big Tour in the diary whilst the demand for one is still there. Hearing them make new records though..? No, that I think I could live without.

Labels: album reviews, Guided By Voices

THE FIFTY BEST RECORDS OF 2009: Part #4


35. The Loves – Three (Fortuna Pop)

Ah hell, what can one say about The Loves? They were here a few years ago, recording wonderful sessions for Peel as a gaggle of bubblegum pop crazed Welsh teenagers, and they’re still here a million line-up changes and the best part of a decade later as a gaggle of ‘adults’ doing more or less the same thing, and it’s still fucking brilliant. Basically, if you’re in a band, and your set-list doesn’t look like this..

…better find out what the problem is, and FIX IT. Ask The Loves, they can probably advise.

Mp3> Ode To Coca-Cola

34. Peaking Lights – Imaginary Falcons (Night People)

Peaking Lights is Aaron Coyes and Indra Dunis (she used to sing and bang drums in Numbers, if you remember them; I don’t know what he used to do). It’s difficult to really explain the appeal of their first proper album, but I do know I’ve played it incessantly – far more than a lot of the other albums on this list, if iTunes is to be believed. And I’m confident that if you have a copy, you’ve probably played it incessantly too. It’s hard not to. Anchored by cheap, comforting drum machine and electronic burblings, phased out wordless vocals and beautifully enticing guitar and keyboard textures, I’d say Peaking Lights essentially resemble, oh, I dunno – a version of Harmonia raised in the ‘00s tape-trading underground, making soothing sounds for a very weird baby..? Try that out for size. I keep biting my tongue, because I don’t want to say that this album is pleasant; that’s the worst back-handed compliment there is, and it wouldn’t speak for the frequent invasions of hissy, metallic scuzz or warped echo labyrinths into this music, the stuff that’s constantly jumping out, demanding your attention. But Peaking Lights manage to pull off something here that has eluded most makers of long-form psyche/drone/whatever music through most of the decade – namely, they make music which is welcoming, harmonious, non-snobbish and, well, happy, but that also never cops out and fades into ambient boredom or druggy new age drek. Layers of instrument/noise are built up carefully and deliberately over the central metronomic pulse, so that they complement each other perfectly, fusing into songs (they do occasionally resemble songs) that are just lovely, lovely patchworks of sound, drifting off and around and taking you places and coming back again and smiling and gurgling at you and letting you know you’re safe, like crazy electronic lullabies from a warm, caring place. It makes me happy before I go to bed on weekdays, like hot chocolate – I’m gonna go put it on again.

Mp3> Wedding Song

33. Boston Spaceships – Zero to 99 / The Planets are Blasted (GBV)

The period immediately following the final dissolution of Guided By Voices in 2005 will likely be remembered by devotees as Bad Times In The Church Of Bob (a song title I hope Mr. Pollard will get around to one day). Verily, it did hurt to see our hero, his energies now free to dedicate wholly to his solo projects, knock out album after album (six a year? one every two months? – I dunno, I lost count), each more dispiriting than the last, each trying vainly to stretch fragments of the kind of inspiration he was blowing his nose with and discarding fifteen years ago across twenty or thirty tiresome stabs at tunes… or else twelve four-minute plus trad-rock groaners. Was ANYONE other than the reviewers still listening? Well, you may have noticed I’m speaking in the past tense, which is perhaps a tad premature, but I’m crossing my fingers here as I say, rejoice ye faithful: these two discs from Bob’s new trio Boston Spaceships are pretty damn good. Not quite up to the level of a turn of the century GBV album, needless to say, but our man seems to have brought a renewed sense of energy and, most importantly, some killer tunes to these sessions. Maybe not many for the greatest hits (unless your greatest hits is pushing beyond the seven disc mark), but we’re talking at least a 60-80% hit-rate here, and that’s good enough for me. Generally speaking, ‘Planets Are Blasted’ seems to concentrate more on the bittersweet, mid-western janglepop end of the Pollardverse, with ‘Dorothy’s A Planet’ and ‘Queen of Stormy Weather’ hitting all the buttons that used to make critics reach for the erroneous R.E.M. comparisons, whilst ‘Zero to 99’ instead revs up some of the ol’ windmilling, British invasion thrash and Sydian quirk, and I mean, who the HELL would imagine he’d still be getting mileage out of all that after all these years? If the answer’s not you, just take a listen and tell me keepers like ‘Exploding Anthills’ and ‘How Wrong You Are’ lie. I know I’ve largely spoken in numbers and percentages in this write-up, rather than my more characteristic impressionistic blathering, but Pollard’s borderline autistic comings and goings have long given his fans reason to learn to speak in the most heartfelt and emotional numbers and percentages known to man, and it’s good to have him back on-message.

Mp3>
Dorothy’s a Planet (from ‘Planets are Blasted’)
Let It Rest For A Little While (from ‘Zero to 99’)

32. Micachu & The Shapes – Jewellery (Rough Trade)

As you may have gathered by now, this blog is not a big advocate of chasing ‘originality’ in music for its own sake, but that’s not to say that we don’t like it when something genuinely new-sounding marches in of its own volition. As such, let us welcome the arrival of Micachu & The Shapes with a superb album that stands out as one of the best slices of experimental pop since people started casually throwing the phrase ‘experimental pop’ around. Much of Micachu’s palette of sound seems to stem from East London ‘urban’/club music and the early ‘00s ideal of commercial/avant pop, with throbbing, distorted bass pulses and menacing, chopped up drum programming thundering around all over the place, but these elements are mixed roughly with a sharp strain of art school DIY pop, as characterised by the weird, otherly tuned plunkings of Mica’s home-modified acoustic guitars, random looped racket from vacuum cleaners and kitchenware and a sense of oblique, emotionally raw lyricism that sits at the heart of just about all these songs. There’s something Beefheartian about the way Micachu puts her songs together – attempting to derail that ‘ol’ mother heartbeat’ with a mix that pushes harsh frequencies, jolting discords and maximum clatter. Also like The Captain, she manages to marshal a collection of sounds and techniques that would be absolutely insufferable in the hands of any other musician, but her surety of purpose helps steer the whole strangely articulate mess to a more than satisfactory conclusion, with her songs throwing out stinging vignettes of distrust, infidelity, disappointment and all the rest expressed through weird, brute simple modern day imagery (titles like “Guts”, “Golden Phone”, “Calculator”, “Curley Teeth” and “Worst Bastard” tell their own story), leaving you unexpectedly moved and involved with these semi-abstract tales, just as surely as Beefheart’s batshit ramblings always, somehow, manage to hit the heart of the matter when you least expect it. To write off the astonishing creative energy behind ‘Jewellery’ simply as the product of “talent” would scarcely do justice to the possibilities Mica and her pals are bringing to the table here.

Mp3> Vulture

31. Chain & The Gang – Down With Liberty… Up With Chains! (K)

Observing the unsavoury developments of the past decade, Ian Svenonious and his comrades have clearly taken some time out to reconsider their strategy and develop a whole new concept in “the responsible use of rock n’ roll”, the musical/aesthetic results proving as didactic, lateral, inscrutable and inspired as ever. In whoe name, Svenonious seems to be asking, have the corporate and governmental atrocities of the twenty-first century been committed? In the name of freedom, of course. And what is it that has stopped us, the citizenry, from rising up against the prevailing system of exploitation and brutality? The freedoms that the system has provided us with of course; the ones we’re loath to lose by biting the hand that feeds us. Thus, the only remaining route to change: ‘Down With Liberty… Up With Chains!’ Befitting this new austerity, Chain & The Gang have traded in the queasy, anything-goes funk/glam/psyche stew of Weird War, and retreated back to the DIY pop bosom of K Records in the cold North-West, recording an album with seemingly little more on hand than a drum kit, Calvin Johnson at the controls, some bass or acoustic guitar (rarely both at once), and the girls from Finally Punk dropping in for some backing vocals. The results, it must be said, are a mixed bag. Some tracks come off as hokey, undercooked jams, begging for a few more instruments or a more developed melody to render them worthwhile, but hearing Svenonious taking advantage of his new ensemble’s open spaces to let rip on some stream of consciousness jive is an absolute joy - “What Is a Dollar?” and “Interview With The Chain Gang” are cool as fuck, and album centrepiece “Deathbed Confession” is just about the best song he’s ever written. And when Svenonious is on form, the rest of the band seem to follow suit, throwing together some riotous, threadbare soul and ‘60s-influenced pop on the best tracks, fusing inevitably into the same flaming, declamatory fun-fests that have helped keep us hooked on Svenonious’ output over the years. As ever, those who like their party music and political statements to be clearly sign-posted and delineated will be infuriated beyond words by Chain & The Gang’s glorious jumble of sounds n’ symbols, but as the man himself says; “What’s my stance? Y'know I like to dance… and smash things up when I get a chance”.

Mp3> Deathbed Confession

Labels: best of 2009, Boston Spaceships, Chain and the Gang, Guided By Voices, Ian Svenonious, Micachu, Peaking Lights, The Loves

Um Tributo ao GBV!

This week, for reasons hazy at best, I found myself listening to a Guided By Voices tribute album put together by a bunch of unknown Brazilian bands.


The very existence of such a thing brings a tear to one’s heart and warms the cockles of your eyes, doesn’t it? Just to think that fifteen or twenty years ago, a bunch of scraggly lookin’ 30-something dudes in a nowheresville rustbelt town were getting together in a windowless basement to write and perform a seemingly endless series of weird rock n’ roll classics called things like “Jar of Cardinals” and “At Odds With Dr. Genesis”… and a decade or two later a whole community of kids on a whole other continent (well, kinda) who were probably in primary school when ‘Propeller’ came out, with English as a second language at best, are sufficiently inspired to collectively pay tribute to their efforts. That’s a pretty good measure of musical success for you, right there.

Of course, such is the power of Guided By Voices. My own GBV fandom has been growing steadily ever since Matthew of Fluxblog first introduced be to their stuff via the wonders of a 120 minute mixtape around the dawn of this decade, from initial 'hey, these guys are ok' interest to the point where it now borders on obsession. Just as British music fans of a certain age will never, ever be able to get enough of (or stop talking about) The Fall, instead I have GBV. Man, just don’t even get me started on them, if you value your wakefulness. I guess they’ll never be my #1 Official Favourite Band, so long as The Ramones and the Velvets exist, but given their voluminous output, I almost certainly listen to them more frequently than any other band; all the more so since the internet has allowed me to track down a whole secondary canon of rare EPs and odds & ends releases, Fading Captain side-projects, fan-curated rare tracks compilations and the like. According to iTunes, I know have 2.5GB of GBV/Robert Pollard related material stashed away, and I don’t even have any of those ‘Suitcase’ box sets yet. I’ve actually been thinking about putting together an all-GBV Mp3 player that I can carry around and just stick on ‘shuffle’ whenever I feel the need. I should be pitied, probably, but clearly I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think the band were consistently amazing, exhilarating, moving, funny, majestic, fascinating etc. etc. to an almost unprecedented degree.

And it’s always good to be reminded that I’m not the only one still in that frame of mind, even as Bob Pollard’s recent avalanches of disappointingly dreary new material are scarcely helping to win him any new admirers... so let’s get back to this Brazilian tribute album.

Look, here’s the back cover:


Amazing stuff.

As is inevitably the way with these things, the vast majority of the tracks are pretty underwhelming. Many of the bands represented sound like fuzz guitar/drum machine/4-track solo projects, and few of them add much to the GBV legacy, just running through basic chord n’ lyric arrangements with less gusto and conviction than the original recordings. Perhaps taking advantage of GBV’s rep as ‘godfathers of lo-fi’, some contributions sound hasty and tossed off to the point of embarrassment, with a first take, ‘reading lyrics off the screen’ quality to them; poor Grasiela Piasson in particular sounds like she’s being forced to get to the end of ‘Motor Away’ at gun point. Most of the tracks are pretty good natured and vaguely enjoyable though, and it’s nice just that this album exists.

And as is also inevitably the way with these things, when genius strikes, it strikes hard.

To wit:

Sabia Sensivel – June Salutes You

I’m also rather fond of Telerama’s version of ‘Game of Pricks’. It’s just real nice; reminds me a lot of The Breeders take on Shocker in Gloomtown. And is it just me, or does a female vocal put a nice twist on this weirdly universal anthem of open-heartedness vs. cynicism? Neat little melodic guitar break too.

Telerama - Game of Pricks

Of course, this album also allows us the fun of spending a few minutes going “Wot, no ‘Postal Blowfish’? No ‘Do the Earth’? No ‘Shocker in Gloomtown’? No ’14 Cheerleader Coldfront’?” etc. etc., but criticizing a GBV tribute album for not finding room for everyone’s fave songs is like criticizing a paperback movie guide for no including every single motion picture ever made.

Ok, one more: I like this version of “Unleashed! The Large Hearted Boy”. I dunno why really, it’s pretty much just a slightly less good version of the original, but it makes me think more bands should play this song. The way those wrecked guitars plunge in over the opening bassline in that completely dissonant yet completely awesome way: who wouldn’t want to hear a live band unexpectedly launch into that? It’s just ON.

Tape Rec – Unleashed! The Large-hearted Boy

Anybody want to start a Guided By Voices tribute band? Aptitude for transcribing chords and drinking beer an obvious advantage – give me a shout.

“Don’t Stop Now: Um Tributo ao GBV” can be downloaded for free from Transfusão Noise Records.

UPDATE:

The kids in Ireland are way ahead of us on this one:



http://www.myspace.com/voidedbyponces

Labels: album reviews, Guided By Voices, tribute albums