THE BEST ALBUMS OF 2007:
Part Two

HELP SHE CAN’T SWIM – THE DEATH OF NIGHTLIFE (Fantastic Plastic)

I wrote pretty extensively, and not entirely coherently, about this album earlier in the year, and I’m a bit worn out on it to be honest. So let’s just say it’s a strong second album from a really great, furious post-riot grrl punk/pop band, and see what the cut up machine has to say about the rest:

“A bit muddled. Then there's the roll-call: take no prisoners cow to death of an essay, so hold on. Resigned to adulthood riff/rhythm mode. Clearer and smashier than on a free jazz/poetry band, love while you exist, and don’t you forget it. The same rock Liar machine gun style. Help She be a common trait amongst of the confusion; gloriously covering her eyes I saw fingers. That’s all fine and passes here even bigger. Any questions? Bolts covering her eyes.
We know. Shot down the melodies whilst the remaining guitar thrashes like an elastic band about to snap, and dreams. Boring; don't see on my universal teenage freedom trip. Pretending they’re let down primarily by the failure, getting pretty close.
Teenage best fucking shot. That’s why I like music as "rock n' roll"; if pushed, drums and easy melody – enough to give lo-fi warriors, like, up, recalling one running through all. Lost with cats the neuroses, musical maturity or breathe when you're always wearing they give it their best. But "rock n' roll" will to regret, but in charging in, I increasingly consider medicine – The words are taken up by keyboards - and total fabrication is an aesthetic part of good too.”

Any questions indeed.

Mp3 > I Think The Record’s Stopped


HERMAN DUNE – GIANT (Source Inc / EMI)

It's hard to find anything particularly objective or new to say about an album that seems to have soundtracked the whole year, getting spun in every living room, shop, gig, mp3 player or radio I’ve been near, whether I felt like listening or not. For better or worse, 2007 certainly turned out to be the year in which Herman Dune made the well-deserved leap from being long-standing cult heroes to being a major label signed, Broadsheet-approved breakthrough act. At first, I really didn’t like ‘Giant’ at all, for myriad irksome reasons. Obvious singles ‘I Wish That I Could See You Soon’ and ‘1-2-3 Apple Tree’ just seemed too obvious and cloying in their sentiment, their Jonathan Richman-derived charms wearing thin with repeated listens, whilst the rest of the album seemed to mount a slightly contrived attempt at ‘serious’ Cohen/Dylan styled song-writing, ditching the band’s perfect guitar/guitar/drums line-up in favour of an unconvincing world tour through indie-boy takes on brass and ‘ethnic’ percussion, making half the songs on what already seemed an overlong, unfocused record sound like ropey outtakes from ‘Graceland’.

That was back in January and February. Clearly, I was being a big idiot back in January and February. The real root of my displeasure was that, having established a pretty big emotional connection with the hot-off-the-press confessional sentiments of previous Dune albums, I was really not in the right frame of mind to dig ‘Giant’s 'pining-for-a-lover-across-the-ocean' vibe at all.

Well joke’s on me as it turns out, because looking back from the more objective perspective of the end of the year, ‘Giant’ is obviously a fine, fine album. Still possibly the ‘difficult’ entry in the Dune’s catalogue of recorded hits, it’s a little too long and has a couple of weak tracks, but nevertheless, it’s an inspired step forward for a band who had already pretty much perfected what they do, and an album of great emotional depth and open-hearted musical spontaneity. The subtleties of the full band arrangements are a slow-burning joy, and David-Ivar Herman Dune’s continuing transformation of his personal life into timeless, romantic pop is as epic and affecting an undertaking as those helmed by the aforementioned Mr. Richman and Mr. Cohen. Like Dylan at his best, every seemingly tossed off rhyme and guileless singalong chorus is handled with a master’s touch, and if their qualities are perhaps not always immediately apparent, it would take a heart of stone not to be eventually moved by songs such as 'Pure Heart' and 'When The Water Gets Cold'. And some of Andre’s more laidback, whisky-sipping musical travelogues are pretty great too (“Glory Of Old” especially), but ‘Giant’ is David’s show really.

And as to those hit singles... well, I’ve been lucky enough to see the new incarnation of the band play a few times this year, and as their record company continue to push them toward a segment of the music market in which legions of unshaven men write songs about nothing in particular by rote, invoking Beach Boys and Beatles and bulk-blocking studio time in pursuit of dread mid-afternoon festival slot tedium, let’s just say that seeing David up there with a crowd of thousands clapping along, singing “You say you dyed your hair black since you were seventeen / cos it goes well with your eyes so green / well I’m losing my hair and my eyes are blue / and you know how bad I like to be with you!”, and then leaning back to twist the knobs up on his amp for an off-the-cuff guitar solo, just like in the old days, equals… wow, just wow.

Let’s make Herman Dune pop stars in 2008.

Mp3 > When The Water Gets Cold


JESUS LICKS – TERRIBLE BEAUTY (Post Records)

You’ll recall that I wrote a little bit about Jesus Licks in my singles reviews post a few weeks back. What I said about them then still applies, so if you’ll allow me a gratuitous recap;

“The first time I saw [Jesus Licks] play, it struck me that they might have been formed in a remote Welsh valley by the four people in the local area who liked music. As it transpires, they were formed in entirely different circumstances and actually come from proper, big places, like London and so forth, but nonetheless, the feeling is there. I suppose ‘weird folk’ is an appropriate summation of what Jesus Licks do, but it’s a million miles away from the kind of ‘weird folk’ practiced and aspired to by [most of the rather pretentious types involved in such things]. To get a handle on Jesus Licks variety of weird folk, perhaps imagine The Marine Girls taking a holiday to some distant rural locale, and joining forces with their hippie uncles to sit by the riverside and sing odd, quiet songs about highwaymen and sharks and murdering people.”

This is their album, and I really dig it. It features gentle guitar strumming and banjo plucking and minimal percussion and sometimes other things, like violins and melodicas and choirs and echoing noises of uncertain origin, but mainly just high, shaky female voices singing really simple, strange, sinister-yet-comforting songs about stuff. Like Gorkys before them, there’s sometimes a danger of descent into unsavoury quirkiness, but also like Gorkys, they have enough charm and smarts and lovely sounds to win the race, and end up just being good instead. Thirty years from now, end of civilisation permitting, some record geek will be busily ploughing through dusty boxes of unwanted CDs by dodgy Beta Band spin-off groups, and he’ll find a copy of this, and he’ll think “hmm, this looks interesting”, and he’ll play it on his lovingly maintained vintage CD player, and he’ll be like “wow, this is great! What were these guys all about??” And he’ll reissue it on his boutique label, and all the other record geeks will love it too, so why not get in before the rush and buy yourself one now? If you don’t like it, you can sell it for loads of money in 2040.

Mp3 > If I Accidentally Murdered You


JEFFREY LEWIS – 12 CRASS SONGS (Rough Trade)

When I interviewed Jeffrey Lewis for Beard magazine in 2006 and he mentioned he was in the process of recording this album, I thought he was joking. Hearing him play a whole set of Crass covers for the first time at End Of The Road, it sounded like a joke taken too far, and I was not convinced that this was really a good move for anyone concerned. By the time I actually got hold of the album though, things had clicked; I’d seen Jeffrey and his band play an absolutely storming show at the Windmill, and as a bunch of privileged 21st century boho indie kids yelled along with the choruses of ‘I Ain’t Thick’ and ‘Big A, Little a’, the essential righteousness and universality of Crass’s songs, and Jeffrey’s determination to communicate them to an audience beyond aging anarcho-punk lifers hit home hard.

It helps that the album *sounds* so great. This is definitely the most successful and imaginative Lewis record to date in terms of recording and arrangements, from killer acoustic punk/hippie jams on ‘Banned From The Roxy’ and ‘Systematic Death’ to the sprawling, fully realised strings & electronics backing on ‘Where Next Columbus?’ and ‘Demoncrats’. Even if you can’t relate to the agit-prop lyrics and are wary of being lectured to in drowsy NY beatnik monotone for forty minutes, on a musical level this album is a blast, full of charm and energy and invention, and I'd defy anybody who is still uneasy about the concept to emerge from a cursory listen having not enjoyed it. But Crass deserve at least half the credit here for providing the source material, and, as was probably the original intention of the project, their song writing is a revelation. Admittedly, my personal politics tend to veer toward the extreme left already, but still, I’m blown away by the basic righteousness of the lines Crass were lying down here. Although still obviously polemic and somewhat paranoid in their approach, these songs rarely resort to the easy “fuck the system” banalities that I’d always kind of assumed bands like Crass would base their lyrics around. Instead they remain smart and engaging even at their most strident, and their nail-head-hitting ratio is pretty spot on, whilst songs like ‘..Thick’ and ‘..Columbus’ manage to punch home some universal profundity re: individual self-determination and free will vs. societal destiny/responsibility on a level that extends way beyond that of brute political struggle. For all of the ceaseless revolutionary rhetoric, Lewis’s interpretations of these songs make it clear that Crass were intelligent people, that they believed what they believed for a reason, and that they weren’t just pissing around.

As such, it’s interesting yo note that little of the abundant press or blogwrite about this album has really engaged with the politics of the songs. I mean, here’s one of the current generation’s most talented and entertaining songwriters going back to the darkest days of the 1980s to sing to us in no uncertain terms about totalitarian state control, government brainwashing, state-sponsored genocide, the political monopoly of the ‘privileged classes’, systematic police brutality and all the rest of it, and most people seem content to limit their discussion to observations about how ingeniously he bends the songs to his own performance style and emotional range, or to view the whole thing as a post-modern exercise ala The Dirty Projector’s baffling 'reimagining' of Black Flag’s ‘Damaged’..?

Well I don’t have time or space to fully articulate the things which could be said about the reasons behind this album’s existence or why it feels so refreshing and enjoyable, but maybe just pause to consider whether the sidestepping of the politics issue by most of the current musical community maybe says something about why Jeffrey decided it was worth risking his own career and putting in a year’s time, money and effort to bring this album into being.

But whatever. As ’12 Crass Songs’ shoots up a lot more best-of-year lists that any previous Jeff Lewis albums, and antifolk kids around the world sit in dorm rooms trying to work out tabs for ‘Do they Owe Us A Living?’, I think we can probably count this as a roaring success. If I were to pick one album of the year, this would probably be it.

Mp3s >
I Ain’t Thick, It’s Just a Trick
Punk Is Dead

Labels: album reviews, best of 2007, Help She Can't Swim, Herman Dune, Jeffrey Lewis, Jesus Licks

SINGLES ROUND-UP 2007

So I don’t buy many singles these days. Certainly not as many as I should. But I do still retain my love for the 7” single, and with the dawn of digital / computer-based music opening the floodgates to a steady stream of cheap or free music and thus allowing my actual purchases of music to become more strategic and object-based, I plan in future to make a deliberate effort to pick as many cool-looking singles as possible, thus hopefully providing a bit of scratch to the heroic independent record labels who still insist on making them in defiance of all commercial rationale. And hopefully discovering some good new bands in the process too, of course.

Before this plan reaches its full fruition though, here’s a round up of a whole year’s worth of singles. The vast majority of these I bought from shops, for money, but a couple were given to me for free, for which thanks.

No Mp3s of course, because these are mostly on vinyl, and, like, who do you think I am? Some rich guy with one oif those…uh… reasonably priced and increasingly common USB turntables..? Ok, maybe I’ll get one in time for next year.

The Belly Buttons – Introducing.. EP (Ken Rock)

All the information I have on this band can be gleaned from their cover art, reproduced for you here. All you need to know about their music is that they cram four songs onto one side of a pink 45 (the other side is blank), and don’t care a great deal for hi-fidelity recording. They favour the sounds of cheap fuzzboxes turned up to maximum, super-fast robotic drum-beats and unintelligible high-pitched shrieking, and clearly eat WAY, WAY too much sugar. If I squint my eyes and stare real hard into the lamp-light, I can almost catch a glimpse of a headspace in which this is clearly the best music ever made, but… oh, actually I think I’ve been playing it at the wrong speed. At 33 it sounds a lot more like recognisable sub-5678s Far East girl garage action, but the recording quality is still abysmal, the record label’s logo is still an unsavoury caricature of a Chinese man for some reason, and whoa, this is the worst pressed vinyl I’ve ever encountered. I know my stylus is no great shakes, but man, it’s skipping all over the fucking place… sorry Belly Buttons, this is just not happening for me right now. Maybe I’m getting old.

Helen Love – Junkshop Discotheque (Elefant)

After 2005’s supreme comeback ‘Debbie Hearts Joey’, here’s… Helen Love’s next single! Obviously it’s by Helen Love, so it’s thus a maximum fun explosion of the highest order, but I don’t think the A-side is one of their best numbers to be honest. It’s one of their homemade happy hardcore hits, ala ‘Jump Up And Down’ from a while back, and perhaps takes Helen’s policy of constant self-recycling to it’s unsatisfactory conclusion, mixing up lyrics from about a dozen previous songs into a mass of compressed glitter-pop glossalia. It’s still good though. On the B, we get a lovely remix of ‘Debbie..’ by somebody called Kid Karate – it’s still a KILLER song, even with bouncy mid-tempo beats replacing the fuzz – and an ace new song in the Helen Love punk mould, ‘Shut Your Mouth’. Nice! This one’s on pink vinyl too.
(..I can’t believe I actually took the time to describe a Helen Love record this late in the game..)
(Helen Love website)

Jesus Licks – Dalek Chorus (Post Records)

One of my favourite musical discoveries of the past year, Jesus Licks never fail to manifest a sense of gentle homemade weirdness and unself-conscious naivety which is a rare and wonderful thing in the current musical climate. The first time I saw them play, it struck me that they might have been formed in a remote Welsh valley by the four people in the local area who liked music. As it transpires, they were formed in entirely different circumstances and actually come from proper, big places, like London and so forth, but nonetheless, the feeling is there. I suppose ‘weird folk’ is an appropriate summation of what Jesus Licks do, but it’s a million miles away from the kind of ‘weird folk’ practiced and aspired to by, say, the contributors to the Phosphene record reviewed below. To get a handle on Jesus Licks variety of weird folk, perhaps imagine The Marine Girls taking a holiday to some distant rural locale, and joining forces with their hippie uncles to sit by the riverside and sing odd, quiet songs about highwaymen and sharks and murdering people. And, in this case, Dr. Who. Taken from their rather marvellous album ‘Terrible Beauty’, ‘Dalek Chorus’ sees vocalist Dominique Golden slowly intoning a lyric written from the point of view of the Dalek hive-mind, addressing their greatest foe, accompanied by the barest minimum of banjo and acoustic guitar. “We made ourselves from debris / one thousand years before / we grew up and evolved / and now you’d like to take it all” she sings, tugging at the heart strings of Tom Baker as he sits there in ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’, agonising over whether or not to let those two wires touch to trigger the explosives. An echoing, psychedelic chorus of beautiful simplicity proceeds to rise and fall and rise again, and it’s easy to imagine poor old Tom forgetting the whole business and drifting off into a happy slumber as the Jesus Licks float by on the breeze, calling his name again and again.
(Jesus Licks website)

Lawrence Wasser – Der Lift / Der Frog (Le Vilain Chien)

Belgium post-punk renegade Lawrence Wasser here turns in two slices of furious no wave dance party skronk that would make James Chance shit himself. Both tunes are instrumental, and the rhythms frantic and fragmented, yet laid down with a mercilessly strict hardcore sensibility, kinda like being coerced onto the dance floor by club-wielding boot boys. Only that makes it sound bad, and this actually really rules, redeemed by a wild, screaming energy that conveys the pure joy of a guy lost to the world, beating down on drums, guitar and keys as hard and precise as is humanly possible in search of big fun.
(Lawrence Wasser website)

The Leatherettes – Johnny Thunders EP (Filthy Little Angels)

Lovers of all things lo-fi and snotty, Filthy Little Angels are one of the only labels who ever bother sending me promos, so it’s about time I gave them some love on this weblog. Not that anybody actually had to pay for this EP, as it came out in June as a free download rather than an actual 7” or CD (still available form here). Shame, as this is precisely the kind of band whose work would come across best on a real cool 45. According to the press release, The Leatherettes are a duo comprising ‘Becca Bomb’ and ‘Johnny Yenn’, who reside in Dundee and share a love of The Cramps, Gun Club, Stooges, Dolls and all the usual suspects. And… well, they sound exactly like you’d expect a couple of Dundee students who give themselves punk rock stage names and call their debut EP ‘Johnny Thunders’ to sound. Shallow, trashy, entirely wrought from watered down 10th generation rock n’ roll clichés… and thus COMPLETELY GREAT, for those of you slow on the uptake. The four songs here showcase some terrific Helen Love style fuzz guitar, some meandering DeeDee basslines, sneering boy/girl vocals sounding like they’re being recorded through an overloaded practice amp and - ah - here’s where The Leatherettes let themselves down; drum machine. Really bad drum machine. The kind that sounds totally unnatural, and renders all the other playing robotic and clipped where it should be chaotic and flailing. Seriously dudes, in the unlikely event that you’re reading; I like your band, but PLEASE get some proper human drums, even if it’s just your mate banging a tom-tom with his fist, it would beat this.
(The Leatherettes myspace)

Phosphene & Friends – See A Sign Defined / Ask No Questions (Pickled Egg)

John Cavanagh, aka Phosphene, has been quietly knocking out music that vaguely fits the remit of ‘folktronica’ since before the term had ever been uttered aloud, and here he teams up with a full compliment of ubiquitous Glasgow types to present a tribute of sorts to sixties folk singer Bridget St. John. The A-side sees Bridget herself singing a Cavanagh composition with accompaniment from Bill Wells and Isobel Campbell, and it’s really rather nice, in a ‘huddling by the fire in a dark Victorian cottage and getting all poetic about ash and dirt and the wild patterns thrown out by the sparks’ sort of way. Featuring both a stately chamber-folk arrangement and an arsenal of malfunctioning space synth uneasiness, yet still giving the impression of there being masses and masses of dark, unconquered space between each sound as St. John’s soft vocal melody hangs in the air alone like a lifeline to drag a lost astronaut back to humanity, it’s… pretty fucking sublime actually, and demanding of repeated listens. Yet another quiet triumph for Pickled Egg Records’ particular aesthetic. Reading that back, I think it’s probably about time I went and had a nap, but no, the other side of the single await, and it is largely given over to the members of Nalle, who take on Bridget St. John’s ‘Ask No Questions’. Things begin promisingly enough, with a full helping of the chaotic mesh of droning stringed things that this band do so well, but the dense layers of sound soon fall away, leaving the trio’s vocals to do the hard work, and with no disrespect to their no doubt venerable and bardic tonsils, it’s a bit bloody tedious. Must these hipster folkie types always intone everything so damn gravely in that over-earnest, faintly accusatory tone of theirs…? This is a nice tune written by a lady in the 1960s; no need to drag it out like it was the bloody last words of John Barleycorn himself, laid down in the year dot. I suspect the folk for whom Folk Music was originally named would have been liable to kick these guys out on their arse, had they started groaning away like this in ye olde alehouse a few centuries ago.

The Pleasure Seekers – What A Way To Die (Norton)

I guess this shouldn’t really be eligible for this column, seeing as how it was recorded in 1965 and even this Norton reissue dates from 2001, but no matter! For whatever reason, Rough Trade got one in stock this year, and I bought it, and that's good enough for me. The Pleasure Seekers were an all-girl rock n’ roll band who played club gigs around Detroit in the mid-‘60s. They featured a very young Suzi Quatro on bass, they cut this lone 45, and wow, they kinda rocked! “What A Way To Die” is a tremendously sleazy rave-up celebrating the joys of alcoholism and cheap sex, and the girls bust through it in super raw fashion, with a great frat party rock n’ roll pulse, tons of energy, twangy lead guitar, pounding Vox organ and gloriously untrained vocalisin', complete with plentiful sandpaper rough “AAaarghs!!” and “Woo!!”s. A flat-out perfect garage single, pretty much. The song, written by producer/svengali dude David Leone, is pure killer and has rightfully inspired sundry cover versions from subsequent garage combos, including a recent take by my new heroines, The Micragirls; “When I start my drinking / my baby throws a fit / so I just blitz him outta my mind / with seventeen bottles of Schlitz… Oh baby come on over / come on over to my side / Well I may not live past twenty one but – WOO! – what a way to die!” Before I hop off to work out the chords for my own cover version though, a quick word on the flip-side. “Never Thought You’d Leave Me”, which is slightly more subtle affair with a melody that oddly recalls the Ronnie Cook-via-The Cramps classic ‘Goo Goo Muck’, and a slightly baroque guitar/organ arrangement. It’s pretty nice, but the a-side is the one I’ve just gotta keep playing again.

Rocket Uppercut – This Beautiful Tragedy (Filthy Little Angels)

Not actually a single, but a full album, thus rendering the stated purpose of this round-up pretty irrelevant, but this is my weblog, and I can do what I like. This is another FLA release that’s been knocking about since about June, and I want to give it a belated mention before I forget, cos I kinda like it. Rocket Uppercut are a two girl / two boy outfit who play high energy, processed cheese punky power-pop, and whatdoyaknow, they’re actually pretty good at it. There’s something about this band that seems very uncool, what with the slightly dubious band/album names, the fact the two fellas in the band really don’t dress the way fellas in a band should, the fact they sound quite fun and prefabricated and unchallenging in a way that indie rock fans are unlikely to really appreciate, even the dodgy fonts on the cover art…. I dunno, whatever, this all makes me want to come out in favour of Rocket Uppercut and say, YES, I really dig what they do! What they do strikes me as essentially a bit of a homogenised, non-angry take on Help She Can’t Swim territory – preppy distorted guitar riffs, shouting, keyboard, hand claps, bouncy beats etc. – with a bit of welcome garage influence creeping in too (they cover The Sonics ‘Cinderella’, and indulge in some distressing Gerry Roslie inspired yelping from time to time). They also remind me a little bit of similarly uncool B52s/Blondie styled Welsh band The Hot Puppies, only more.. simplified and streamlined I guess. Anyway, I think this band would be a blast to see live; I wanna make friends with them and jump around! Thanks for sending me this one Filthy Little Angels, I’m real sorry it took me six months to write about it.
(Rocket Uppercut website)

The Vicious – Obsessive EP (Feral Ward)

A Swedish band (I think), these guys suckered me in as I idly browsed in All Ages Records in Camden with their cover artwork featuring a hot punk rock chick with a Rickenbacker. Imagine my annoyance to discover she’s actually merely the guitarist in a three quarters male band who have cynically stuck her on both the front and back covers in order to cruelly entice us pathetic record-browsing boys. No worries though, because this is a cracking little record, and Sara’s clean-toned downstroke thrashin’ riffs are the best thing about it (think Johnny Ramone playing with no distortion on a really lovely, chiming guitar). And Andre the drummer plays like a demon, and looks like a bit of a dude too, so it’s all good. High energy, late ‘70s style punk rock is the name of the game, and on the basis of the five or so minutes it takes for these four songs to whiz by, we may consider the game WON. The vocals are snotty cartoon punk dude nonsense, but this band’s sound has a real kick to it that would make me want to pogo like crazy should it come on in, say, a crowded, non-pogo-friendly bar situation. Maybe it’s the way that great, clean guitar sound is still tough as hell and burrows straight into yr rock pleasure centres, but at the same time lets you pick out all the other instruments…? I dunno. I like this one anyway.

Labels: Belly Buttons, best of 2007, Helen Love, Jesus Licks, Lawrence Wasser, Phosphene, Rocket Uppercut, singles reviews, The Leatherettes, The Pleasure Seekers, The Vicious