Summer Singles, part # 1

Boy, oh boy – what a fine haul of singles I’ve accumulated recently! For the first time, a couple of the items that follow are downloads/digital singles, but the majority are still ones I’ve got on plastic.

Cheap Time – Woodland Drive b/w Penny & Jenny (In The Red)

You may recall that I ranked Cheap Time’s debut album, like, 29th or something in my run-down of 2008 albums, but it retrospect it definitely deserved to place higher. It’s been growing on me ever since – a 0 to 60 masterclass in raucous, spiked power-pop. By contrast, “ After the Ball”, this year’s solo album by band leader Jeffrey Novak, won’t be making it anywhere near my 2009 best of list, for the simple reason that it’s quite horrible – a shrieking, hectoring mess of galumphing, harpsicord-addled Brit-psych whimsy, but one entirely devoid of the charm, tunes and wit that still keep us tuned to obvious inspirations such as messrs Ayers, Wood, Davies, Stanshall, Innes etc. forty years after the fact.

So, a potentially salty character, this Mr. Novak. And in view of the above, where exactly is this new batch of Cheap Time material throwing down? Answer, unsurprisingly, is somewhere between the two known poles of the Novak temperament. The strutting punk momentum and insensible racket of the CT album is present and correct, as is that record’s brevity (both songs are, like, seventy seconds or something), but here it finds itself combined with a strutting, stop/start theatricality and a faintly unhealthy ‘nightmare nursery rhyme’ approach to melody, particularly on ‘Penny & Jenny’, which starts off sounding almost like a lost Jennifer Gentle song, but swiftly sours our initial enthusiasm, bounding heedlessly into the arena of the irritating. ‘Woodland Drive’ fares better, a pacy ol’ mod stomper. Splitting the difference, let us conclude that Cheap Time 2009 = Todd Rundgren on a budget. I think we can agree that’s some kinda result. I mean, Todd’s been doing this shit for over forty years and his latest tour poster portrayed him as an axe-wielding barbarian standing on a rocky outcrop beneath a storm-wracked sky, so… I’m not gonna argue.

http://www.myspace.com/cheaptime
http://www.intheredrecords.com/

Julie Doiron / Calm Down It’s Monday – split 7” (K)

Ah, Julie Doiron – blessed in the books of all known gods; the eternally awesome, ever-comforting earth-mother to all of our converse-wearing, bespectacled brood. One of my favourite live music memories of recent years was seeing her play at the Windmill a while back. She introduced her cover of ‘Shady Lane’ SO wonderfully earnestly, like: “hey, do you guys know this song ‘Shady Lane’, it’s so good..”, and then she danced around the stage playing all the requisite Malkmus twiddley bits, pausing to join the whole grinning room in singing along off-mic with “…and the overfriendly concierge!” A magic moment rendered from elements that would have been cringeworthy on the part of any other performer, brought about by Julie’s awsomeness – all serving to demonstrate why she remains one of the few introspective singer-songwriter types that it’s always worth finding time for. Her achingly beautiful voice helps too, and, should you need further proof, the two unaccompanied songs on her side of this humble disc close the case, quietly crushing and reshaping the heart of any attentive listener with each spin.

“Oh Heavy Snow” is a solemn lament that strongly recalls our heroine’s collaborations with Phil Elverum, letting silence itself play the third man inbetween gentle, scuttling guitar notes. “Oh heavy heart / forgive me / make me feel like it’s all ok” Julie sings, taking words some bearded slacker could toss off like a paycheque, and making them a prayer sent down on the wind from a mountain fortress. Listening to the song for maybe the tenth time, I’ve only just noticed that that silence is quietly forming itself into some drums and organ towards the end, so the song’s not so unaccompanied after-all – that’s understated backing for you, I guess. “It’s Nice to Come Home” meanwhile is simpler, warmer, happier – a song nobody human could hate, as Julie sings about her after-work routine, how she imagines it compares to her man’s after-work routine over in New Brunswick, and how much she’s looking forward to seeing the two routines merge next time they’re together again. A real life love song, free of drama, free of artifice. It almost makes me cry every time. And now it’s time to sit for a minute or two, let the silence sink in, and then reach over to put the needle back to the start again for… well, who knows how many times I’ve played this side since I bought this single. A joy forever.

On the other side, Calm Down It’s Monday (featuring Julie on drums I think, and her drummer on guitar/vocals) do the kind of music you’d rather expect from some guys who called their band “calm down, it’s Monday”. Lethargic, faintly belligerent North-West indie-rock, like Love As Laughter on an off-day, Some Velvet Sidewalk in a bad mood. Not to worry though, Julie’s songs would be cheap at twice the price.

http://www.myspace.com/juliedoiron
http://www.myspace.com/calmdownitsmonday
http://www.krecs.com/

Golau Glau – Soft Silver Young b/w Heartland Half Seizure (Oddbox)

Interesting stuff from this somewhat hermetic Welsh outfit, with a homemade sound anchored somewhere between the eerie border country electronica of prime Ochre records output and the dalek torch songs of Broadcast. Although ostensibly still pop, and song-based, there’s something deeply spooked about Golau Glau. They sound like they’re broadcasting from some soul-dead, suburban seaside town, laptop and vintage mics hidden in the basement beneath a pebble-dashed bungalow where they sit in the dark, thinking about the cliffs down the road. Voodoo drums and Wurlitzer organ, together at last. Soothing sounds for weirdo.

Listen more closely though, and Golau Glau’s initially pretty, chanting space-songs are scarcely very reassuring, quietly addressing themselves to subject matter that would likely appeal to Luke Haines at his most ghoulish. “All our songs are about real events or things that interest us generally”, they say in the accompanying blurb, “not love songs or songs about how miserable we are or how to do a funny dance or anything, and the words can sometimes be abstract but always have meaning as well as sounding musical”. As such, ‘Soft Silver Young’ commemorates a couple who jumped off Beachyhead together with their dead baby in a rucksack, whilst ‘Heartland Half-Seizure’ concerns itself with “..Oswald Mosley, Jeffrey Hamm and the anti-fascist riot in Tonypandy in 1936”. Are you fascinated yet, or running for the exits? If the former, this single is still available as a free download from Oddbox here.

http://golauglau.wordpress.com/
http://oddboxrecords.com

Local Girls – EP (sourpuss)

This nifty little number (price: 99p!) includes six whole songs, a double-sided, fold-out photocopied sleeve with a picture on the back of the band with animal heads photoshopped over their own faces, a hand-stamped, multi-coloured inner sleeve, a download code, a locked groove at the end of side # 1, and a vinyl sticker featuring a picture of some fat, naked women (um, I'll pass on that one I think). Top marks for DIY gusto and value for money, but I’m afraid Local Girls don’t grab me overmuch. In the noble brit-pop tradition, they seem to be a bloke band with a girl singer who (probably) stands at the front in all the photos, and conveniently they also seem to make vaguely dancey, choppy indie-rock that is also very much in the brit-pop tradition. It’s none too bad. It’s got sludgier distortion than you’d have gotten for yr pound in ’97, at least. Lyrics take the default position of cynical bitching (song titles: ‘Eartha Shit’, ‘Nick and Ben are Cunts’), but none of it’s as sharp as it thinks it is. If your soul sighs for a band who sound a bit like Lovelife-era Lush, Powder and second album Elastica, you’ll dig the hell out of this one. I like that stuff just fine too and I love Elastica forever, but man… I lived through the mid/late ‘90s once already, and we have proper girl bands now, and the internet and stuff, so please, can I turn this off now? Local Girls sound like they’re trying to drag me back to that dark era, and that gives me the fear, like seeing the Witchfinder General striding down the high street. Make it stop!

http://www.myspace.com/localgirlsband

Labels: Cheap Time, Golau Glau, Julie Doiron, Local Girls, singles reviews

THE THIRTY BEST RECORDS OF 2008: Part #5

10. Mount Eerie with Julie Doiron & Fred Squire – Lost Wisdom (Southern)


Phil Elverum – alias Mt Eerie / The Microphones - makes a lot of records. And, though he may experiment with everything from harsh electronics to “acoustic black metal”, the focus of his muse is always essentially the same: very austere, introspective vignettes of personal revelation, expressed with a very old fashioned sense of classical Romantic awe. As such, ‘Lost Wisdom’ is, I would wager, the perfect Phil Elverum record. Within it, he plays eleven of his best, most elemental, songs; just quiet-sing and soft guitar strumming, accompanied by Julie Doiron’s sublime vocals (I know I’m not usually one to obsess over vocal styles, but seriously, I cannot express how wonderfully Julie’s voice fits in with these songs), and beautifully understated electric guitar from Fred Squire. All of the elements here are in order: beauty is the result. Any of these songs, most of them under two minutes, contain the capacity to become your entire universe, so be listened to hundreds of times on repeat and to leave you changed as a result, if you could only stand to give them enough time/concentration, or if they were just allowed the good grace to hit you at the right moment – that moment of exquisite calm and collapse that each of the songs represents; the moment that takes us beyond ourselves. And if the songs fail to do that, if they start to sound insufferably precious and weak-ass after a while, and you want to take ‘em off and put something with a bit more of a kick to it…. well that’s not their fault. Let it stand as a condemnation of the noise and chaos and confusion and shit and selfishness of our modern lives, rather than of this record, because it is in essence that rare thing: a perfect piece of human self-expression fully realised in isolation from all else.

Mp3>Voice In Headphones


9. Throw Me The Statue – Moonbeams (Secretly Canadian)


I had a good old ramble about this one back in August, from which I submit to you the following edited highlights:

“…let it be said that I’ve been listening to ‘Moonbeams’ again and again, and enjoying it immensely. Why? Well, what can I tell you; I guess it’s just plain GOOD. Fuck it, perhaps it’s even great! […] And that’s that – I’ll hand in my ‘music writer’ badge at the door. Obviously there are lots of instruments and sounds on here that I really like […]; the fuzzy, clipped weezer-y electric guitars, some really on-point live drumming and wonky, overdriven casios. And in fact, all this stuff, good and bad, is mixed up in a really cool way throughout these songs, jammed as they are with rad riffs, ingenious melodic bits and pieces, inventive rhythms, singalong choruses with pleasantly unlikely chord progressions - a veritable smorgasbord of multitracked musical fun, if you will. I’m not going to win my writer-badge back by stating that the shorter, punchier tracks with the loud guitars are clearly the best ones here, but it’s true, so I’ll say it anyway. 'This Is How We Kiss' is the Obvious Hit Single, should such a thing have any meaning in 2008. iTunes says I’ve played it 36 times, not including mp3 player listens. It’s fucking perfect! Two minutes and eight seconds of the kind of geek-pop gold that wearers of black-framed glasses the world over secretly dream of whilst dutifully listening to their dreary Finnish folktronica records or whatever.

But, the fun doesn’t stop there, oh no - many of Throw Me The Statue’s other songs are almost as good. […] And the key is, of course, the songs. Throw Me The Statue’s main guy sounds like he has something he desperately wants to convey, probably re: failed relationships, or never-happened ones, or imagined ones, only he can’t really blurt it all out in a straight-up fashion for fear of maybe upsetting the people concerned, or making himself look like a jerk, or perhaps just cos that would make for boring songs (all perfectly valid reasons of course). So instead he scrambles his muse up into awkward mouthfuls of veiled meaning and book smarts absurdity that make Stephen Malkmus look like an open-hearted balladeer by comparison, at least until he decides to step out and throw in few lines of plain, descriptive fact before triumphantly scampering back again, as if to say “HA! GOT YOU!”. […] So to all my compatriots out there who’ve ever clutched a Guided By Voices song to their heart as if Bob Pollard’s cut & paste musings were the very sum of cosmic truth strapped to a second-hand Who riff (which they are)… you’d better believe Throw Me The Statue are on to a rare winner.”

I saw these guys play a couple of months back, and they didn’t play “This Is How We Kiss”! Can you believe that? It’s like if you went to see B.O.C. and they didn’t play “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper”! Anyway, never mind.

Mp3> This Is How We Kiss


8. Zatopeks – Damn Fool Music (Household Name)


It’s an odd business, pop-punk. In theory, the best genre ever – the music of suburban delinquents who never got over The Ramones, pushing speed, volume, good humour and obvious pop melodies to their natural conclusion. In practice though, things can quickly be soured by a few too many second rate bands reducing the whole deal to a joyless exercise in genre convention, all seemingly recorded by the same dude, who sets the desk for “a bit too slick” then goes out to get a sandwich. All it takes though is one really good band with a unique voice of their own, and we’re cooking with gas once more, as all the reasons why I love this music come flooding back. Enter South London’s Zatopeks with their second album ‘Damn Fool Music’, one of the strongest and most enjoyable records I’ve heard all year in any genre. They’ve got the velocity, attack and energy of this music down pat, with all the hardcore tempos, processed cheese fuzz guitar, bouncing Deedee basslines and singalong choruses are present and correct, sounding as instinctively right as they ever have done. But beyond that, the band take a slightly more wide-ranging approach to things, incorporating elements of ‘60s pop, rock n’ roll to pleasing effect. And most importantly, they’ve also got a truly great, ambitious songwriter in the shape of frontman Will DeNiro, whose smart and engaging lyrics mark the band out as something special from the word go. Just about every song here manages to kick off with the gut-wrenching immediacy of Jawbreaker or The Replacements, addressing subject matter ranging from broken relationships, depression and getting older via healthy detours into politics and history, to the more traditional punk concerns of getting wrecked and hating The Daily Mail, all approached with a refreshing level of insight and honesty, and a self-effacing English punk-bloke wit you’ll recognise from Milky Wimpshake or early Billy Brag. Oh, and some REALLY kick-ass tunes too. They even do a couple of really great, affecting acoustic songs, worthy of any of the above reference points. Yeah, for real. Perfectly paced, perfectly executed and overflowing with feeling, ‘Damn Fool Music’ is a brilliant piece of work, building up a picture of the band’s ideology and the singer/writer’s inner world that comes pretty close to doing for disillusioned punk blokes in the Heathrow flightpath what ‘Let It Be’ did for teenage delinquents from Minneapolis. I realise this probably isn’t exactly sounding like nectar from the gods to all you cutting edge underground music types out there, but seriously, what we’ve got here is a really fucking great band deserving of an audience way beyond the punk-as-genre ghetto, and if you’ve ever been remotely into the idea of guys with guitars playing loud songs about stuff that’s on their minds, or if you’re just looking for the perfect, unpretentious headphone-blast to get you on the way to work in the morning, I’d recommend giving them a shot.

Mp3s> Radio Marija
Jumble Sale


7. Pete & The Pirates - Little Death (Stolen Recordings)


Speaking as a feckless, overgrown moping indie fool, Pete & The Pirates are a very comforting presence. Come on, their excellent debut album seems to call out, come and have a pint with us; bring your unfashionable shoes and your shitty winter jacket and the bags under your eyes and tedious tales of your rubbish job, and all will be well, for we are feckless overgrown fools too, and we have a load of fast-strummed, jangling guitars like The Verlaines and The Clean used to do, and a drummer who goes off like a rocket, and a basketful of really, really great songs all about girls, and being sad, and girls, and wanting to stay in bed, and… um, well that’s about it really. All topped off with a load of fiendishly wonky pop-genius lead guitar hooks that’ll worm their way into your brain like nothing since all those Pixies songs way back when. Hooks that, along with the inherently anthemic potential of many of their best tunes, would get these fellas played incessantly on the radio were there any justice in the world, gaining them the respect of a fanbase stretching way beyond the bounds of feckless indie fools, and earning them enough shiny pounds to quit their rubbish jobs and to go live a life of comfort in nice big houses just like, I dunno, Blur or somebody. But as all us moaning, dissatisfied bastards know, there is no such justice to be found, which is exactly why we need bands like Pete & The Pirates to make us feel better by singing beautifully sad songs about the indignities of having to get up in the morning, and, ironically, giving us a perfect kick up the arse to get us out of the front door in the process. Thank you Pete & The Pirates! Long may you continue to sail the suburban seas, making ‘indie’ – sans suffix – seem no longer a dirty word, but once again like a great, righteous thing we can wrap around us like a big ol’ blanket.

Mp3>Knots


6. Jonathan Richman - Because Her Beauty Is Raw And Wild (Vapour)


That every Jonathan Richman album is, taken on its own terms, a thing of beauty and a joy forever, goes without saying. But, as the uncharacteristically downbeat cover art eerily suggests, this one has a quite different feeling to anything he’s done in the past. From the outset, Jonathan’s voice sounds more distant, less self-assured, than he ever before, his guitar playing softer and more fragile, as his sole accompanist Tommy Larkins manfully attempts to lay down the quietest drums ever set on record. Befitting this change of pace, Jonathan has turned in perhaps his darkest and most questioning set of songs since he was working out his adolescent angst in The Modern Lovers. As fans and admirers of Mr. Richman, this change is initially disconcerting, making us worried for his ongoing health and happiness. But as selfish music fans, we can enjoy one of the most vital and affecting record he’s made in years. In many of the songs here, Jonathan expresses frustration with his homelife, or maybe just with growing older in general. “You are the light of the world / so why is your world so grey?” he pleads on the unspeakably tender ‘Our Drab Ways’, whilst other songs find him reflecting on young love from a distance, acknowledging for the first time that that’s not really his place in the world anymore. “They’re gonna take this sterile place and make it live”, he declares, welcoming in the protagonists of ‘The Lovers are Here and They’re Full of Sweat’. There are two renditions of one of my favourite new songs, and perhaps the most angry and controversial song Jonathan has attempted for a while, “When We Refuse To Suffer”, in which he rejects the use of anti-depressants in no uncertain terms, even shredding on an overdriven electric guitar for the first time in decades on the second version, as he spits out the lyrics with frightening passion; “..that’s when the air freshener wins, and the moon outside is the loser!” Make of that what you will, but personally, I say right fucking on Jonathan, and thanks for having the guts to sing this one for us. The same sentiment applies doubly to the album’s closing track, and the one that will mean the most to many listeners, ‘As My Mother Lay Lying’, in which he sings about speaking with his mother on her deathbed. There’s not much more I can say about that one – if your eyes are dry by the end of it, you have a far harder heart than I. For all that this is a harrowing and unhappy collection of songs though, Jonathan’s ongoing faith in the beauty of the world around him still shines through every pore of it, and my favourite song here is definitely the title track. I mean, it’s just an old fashioned love song I guess, just like some other ones he’s done in the past, so simple in its construction it’s like it’s barely there at all, it could blow away in the breeze, but… oh man, does he ever nail it. For over thirty years now, Jonathan has been a master of turning exactly what’s on his mind at any given moment into great and life-affirming art, and, though he’s clearly been having a bit of a rough time of recent, he has once again succeeded wonderfully. I hope that ’09 proves a bit more of a fun time for him and his nearest and dearest, but either way, I’m sure there are many of us out there who have been reminded by the strength of this album that, as the excellent (tho sadly defunct?) ‘Concert Haikus’ weblog succinctly put it recently;

There are few people
In this world that I love half
As much as this man

Mp3>Because Her Beauty Is Raw And Wild

Labels: album reviews, best of 2008, Jonathan Richman, Julie Doiron, Mount Eerie, Pete and The Pirates, Throw Me The Statue, Zatopeks

PRIMAVERA 2008: Thursday

Ok, so I guess I should write some stuff about Primavera…. After all, it was by far the most expensive and exhaustive live music thing I’ll be doing this year, and I should probably come up with something a bit more solid than “uh.. it was pretty fun I guess”.

I mean, I haven’t bothered to approach writing about until now simply because the experience as a whole adds up to a whole seven days worth of travel, and people, and events, and non-events, and food, and exercise, and sleep, and emotions, and non-emotions, and geography, and weather, and boredom, and japes, and alcohol, and non-japes and non-alcohol, and sights and sounds and all the rest of it that goes along with a week of continuous STUFF…. But needless to say, I lack the Henry Miller-like writerly prowess needed to transform all of this essentially humdrum business into gripping, fiery prose of some kind, so, this being a musicblog, I’ll stick to the music, but rest assured that I didn’t just jet in and watch bands in a critically detached manner for 72 straight hours then go home again.

Note on the photos: I didn’t bother to take many myself. Stew took the one above, and I ripped the others off from Pitchfork – hope they don’t mind too much (they were taken by Shannon McClean ).

Right!

Primavera takes place at the Parc del Forum, about a 45 minutes walk East from the city along Barcelona’s Olympics-ravaged coastline. An imposing complex of purpose-built concrete auditoriums (auditoria? auditori? – you tell me) constructed around a barren heat-trap of a central square, and so initially impressions are somewhat unwelcoming, to put it mildly. I can well imagine the place becoming some desperate Ballardian nightmare come July or August… all empty space and shadows that go on for miles, dehydrated dogs limping across the endless concrete in search of a place to die, lone entrepreneurs huddling ‘neath lead-lined umbrellas sipping carefully guarded H2O and contemplating the possibilities for their next boatshow, that sort of thing. But thankfully, Primavera takes place in May when it's cooler, and the brutalism of the surroundings is diffused by throngs of cheery people, SO IT’S OK.

But the festival is also a far bigger, and more corporate, affair than I’m used to. There’s one kind of beer on offer, one kind of soft drink, and one kind of spirit (the festival’s sponsors, natch). Searches at the gates ensure that the only water available on-site is bottled, costs a Euro, and they twist the cap off for you so you shall drink it straight away, buster. Punters are required to queue to exchange their money for pointless drinks tokens, to queue to exchange Thursday’s tokens for Friday’s ones, and to queue to buy (yes, BUY) tickets for the sets taking place in the seated indoor auditorium, before they queue again to get into it in time to catch said sets. A giant, diesel-powered inflatable Coca-Cola bottle provides the festival site’s clearest visible identifier and natural meeting point.

I know, I know, I’m moaning unduly and accentuating the negative…. I’m sure Primavera is utterly idyllic compared to all those huge European festivals where toilets explode and innocent people get crushed to death etc., but maybe End Of The Road and ATP have given me unnaturally high expectations re: the potential for comfortable and enjoyable alternative music festivals. If nothing else, Primavera is certainly extremely well-organised on a practical level once you’ve navigated all the queues and shite; the site is clean and friendly, even at 5am after twelve hours of continuous racket and inebriation, and toilet and waste disposal facilities are perfectly decent. Crowd-size is rarely an issue, and the auditorium set-up and unfailingly BIG, BOOMING sound allows latecomers to a set (or those who just want to sit down) to generally get an equally good experience to those down at the front. Throughout the weekend, bands start on schedule almost to the minute, and despite being split across five or six stages, sufficient gaps and easy mobility allow one to check out a wide variety of different stuff, socialise and eat/drink, without having to worry unduly about fencing out a good spot for the next must-see band. Despite my reservations above, it’s actually a pretty amazing festival experience once you get used to it, although it should be noted again that it’s the high quality of the music and the good feeling of the crowd that brings the fun here, rather than the location or the sponsors.

ATP have called shotgun on what’s probably the site’s best outdoor stage – it has the best acoustics, is most removed from noise-leakage from the other stages and even has a rare patchy of scrubby grass for people to sit on – and it is here that the festival begins for me on Thursday afternoon with a marathon set from The Microphones / Mt. Eerie. I’ve always found listening to Phil Elvrum’s music to be a slightly odd and draining experience in the past – for the first few songs on any given record, I’m awed into mental silence by the presence of what could well be a singular genius, but as he works his way through one of his (on the whole excessively long) song cycles, the singlemindedness and thematic repetition with which he approaches his application of starstruck spiritual romanticism to minimalist indie-folk inevitably leads to a bad case of diminishing returns. The overall effect is a bit like going to an exhaustive retrospective of the work of Caspar David Friedrich; the first painting you look at will be breathtaking, but by the time you’ve seen eighteen of them you’re likely to just be thinking, yeah, I see - this guy was sad, and looked at the sky a lot, what’s next?*

But, for a variety of reasons, this particular Elvrum set proves utterly captivating, a thing of endlessly reassuring beauty that I’m just beginning to sink my soul into when he finally winds it up near ninety minutes after he started. For one thing, he is accompanied for most of the set by the ever-beautiful tones of the eternally awesome Julie Doiron, singing harmony and occasional lead, and a second electric guitarist who plays some gorgeous cosmic blues style drift, creating a far richer and more engaging sonic palette than that of Elvrum-alone. For another thing, their set happens to coincide with a sudden bout of inexplicable washed-out misery on my part, and thus hits the spot perfectly, dragging me out of it like a guiding hand – thanks Phil; your music has done what music is for.

After that I catch a couple of songs by The Notwist, playing on the big, main stage. And, having heard their name bandied around a lot a few years ago but never being sufficiently bothered to check them out, count me pretty damn impressed – this is fantastic stuff, fusing hypnotic krautrock rhythms to blissed out indie guitar/synth textures and big,melodic songwriting like a more muscular take on Yo La Tengo’s ‘And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out’ blueprint – nice!

Eric's Trip

Time enough to make a mental note to get hold of some Notwist records when I get home, and it’s time to dash across to another stage to rejoin Ms. Doiron, who is bassing and singing in the recently reformed Eric’s Trip (it’s a shame Primavera couldn’t find the time to schedule a solo set from her too, but such is life). The Eric’s Trip guitarist dudes both look like they’ve just awakened after sleeping on some promoter’s couch since 1996, and, muddy festival sound aside, they would seem to be rockin’ all the better for it. Although Eric’s Trip are sometimes unfairly maligned as a derivative or second-string grunge-era band (the name doesn’t help), it must be said that if you are willing to accept college radio-friendly early ‘90s American alternarock as a genre in it’s own right and spend some quality time nestling within the folds of its established conventions (which I certainly am, having been raised on a steady diet of the stuff), they do it as well as anyone ever has, busting out a steady stream of perfect Posies / Teenage Fanclub power-pop augmented with Dinosaur Jr histrionics, heart-on-sleeve Sebadoh lyricism and ripping Dirty-era SY skronk, if you can dig that…. and if you can’t, well, good luck to ya. Yes, on one level it’s all your indie-rock needs under one roof, but rather than just presenting a cut-price pastiche of their heroes, Eric’s Trip are solid guys who feel no shame in playing genuinely great music in within a noble tradition of great music, and they can boast more than their fair share of startlingly affecting songs to go with it, so what else do you need to know? – get down!

At the opposite end of the early ‘90s cultural sphere, the next thing that hits us is Public Enemy, owning the main stage and reigning over the whole festival complex like benevolent global dictators declaring a particularly furious party-time. Checking back over my Primavera schedule, let it be said that my heart goes out to British Sea Power and The Shipping News, who were unfortunate enough to have been playing at the same time, because trying to make it through a set in competition with Chuck and Flav blasting out ‘Bring The Noise’ at about a million decibels can’t have been much fun.

To be honest, I wasn’t particularly bothered beforehand about whether I caught PE or not. I mean, yeah, I, like everyone else in the world, dutifully bought ‘..Nation of Millions..’ and ‘..Black Planet’ back in the day, after hearing the hundredth music journo declare them the best albums in the history of the world, and indeed, it would take a prize fool to try to argue that they don’t remain staggering achievements of raw power, sonic invention, furious intellect and righteous spirit, unequalled to this day. But, you know me, for better or for worse I’ve always been a fair-weather hip-hop fan, and they’ve always been the kind of band I’ve appreciated from a distance rather than loved on a personal level. I’d assume a lot of the other people milling about chatting or getting a bite to eat at the top of the auditorium steps as PE take the stage are equally ambivalent, but, as they are about to remind us, ‘ambivalent’ and ‘Public Enemy’ are not words that really deserve to be used in the same sentence. For, as my friend Pete succinctly puts it, “oh my god, these guys are fucking SHREDDING!”

Public Enemy

Pete also sagely notes that PE are essentially the hip-hop equivalent of The Ramones in the ‘80s and ‘90s, in the sense that no one bar the hardcore fans is ever really going to pay much attention to whatever recorded material they’ve produced since their ‘classic’ period, and they know it, but it’s on stage that they truly exist, blasting out the finely honed essence of What They Do Best with a near inhuman level of commitment and energy that renders any question of ‘new material’ laughably irrelevant… why fucking bother, when you’ve already got two hours worth of tightly compressed, massively amplified greatness that makes even the best of your competitors look like clueless amateurs? Like I say, it’s probably about eight years since I last played ‘..Nation of Millions..’ all the way through, but isn’t it great how I still know all the words, and how, when Chuck D demands to know what the name of his DJ is, I’m one of several thousand non-committal indie kids ready to tell him at the top of my voice.

Anyway, who else did I go to see on the Thursday…. oh yeah, Boris, that’s who! They kicked off before our tired eyes and ears at midnight on the ATP stage and they played an absolute blinder. Unlike a lot of the bands playing this weekend, a loud, booming outdoor festival soundmix suits Boris perfectly, and, clearly aware of the FESTIVAL element, tonight they ditch all that drone crap and decide to totally max out the OTT rock cliché moves of ‘Heavy Rocks’ and ‘Pink’, and, well, you know the rest: Boris is as Boris does; an overpowering juggernaut of windmilling doubleneck guitar posing, the purple smoke, the swirling black hair, the gong, screechin’ wah solos, thunderin’ sub-bass , plentiful “Ho YEEe-AAaH!!!”, riff after riff cranked through absurd space echo and more Orange cabinets than anybody could ever really need…. too much, man. About halfway through Boris’ set, and I swear I didn’t imagine this, I’m stunned to see an actual, literal juggernaut – a huge articulated lorry of some kind – emerge from within a few feet of the left hand side of the stage, rumbling off into the night along some previous unnoticed narrow track along the waterfront toward god knows where. A perfect visual metaphor.

Boris

Shortly after all that, we’re again sitting on the steps above the main stage, chatting to some friends. Some disappointingly obnoxious bellowing announces the start of De La Soul’s set, and, at 2am or whatever this is, I frankly don’t care whether or not this dude was on ‘Three Feet High & Rising’ (which the deliriously poorly translated and typo-ridden festival booklet reminds us hit the scene back in 1889), I can do without him yelling at me for another ninety minutes, so that serves as my cue to call it a night and head home.

Mp3s >

Mt Eerie w/ Julie Doiron – Lost Wisdoms (live at Helm Gallery, Takoma WA, 18/04/08)
Eric’s Trip – Sunlight
Public Enemy – Rebel Without A Pause
Boris - Karuso


*This point works nicely as a comparison, but I should make clear that it is somewhat unfair to the works of Mr. Friedrich (one of my favourite painters), who also took the time to paint forests, and rocks, and monks, and ruined churches and all kinds of other gnarly stuff, as well as sky.

Labels: Boris, Eric's Trip, festivals, Julie Doiron, live reviews, Primavera, Public Enemy, The Microphones, The Notwist