THE FORTY-TWO BEST RECORDS OF 2011:
Part # 4

30. The Mountain Goats – All Eternals Deck (4AD)

That this is my least favourite Mountain Goats album since John Darnielle signed to 4AD all those years ago should be self-evident from its placement this low on the list. Deprived of a central concept to work around, it seems to find his songwriting flailing around in a number of odd and unsatisfying directions, as the band’s sound falls back on a competent but uninspiring strain of MOR acoustic indie-rock that’s getting pretty damn old, its few self-conscious attempts at experimentation (in particular, the Disney-ish dude choir on ‘High Hawk Season’) emerging as unwelcome embarrassments – the kind of thing that reinforce all the worst clichés about this band and its fans.

Nevertheless, there are many good and worthwhile songs here. ‘Estate Sale Sign’ is an immediate favourite - a breakneck sprint through ritual sacrifice, decrepit shopping malls, fading movie stills and birds of prey circling on high, it sticks around just long enough to throw up hints of a cruel and bizarre story beneath whilst remaining thrilling and elusive – a perfect Mountain Goats song really, recalling the fractured narratives of “We Shall All Be Healed”. ‘Beautiful Gas Mask’ is a similarly killer tune, threading lyrical non-sequiturs into a great bit of “no idea what it’s about, but it sure gets the blood pounding” goodness. The self-explanatory ‘For Charles Bronson’ is almost an absolute stormer, it’s momentum sapped somewhat by over-polite production and an unnecessary middle section, a fate shared by the half-great ‘Prowl Great Cain’. Perhaps tellingly, two of the best cuts here recall the more brooding, relatively low-key approach of 2009’s ‘The Life of the World to Come’ – piano-led opener ‘Damn Those Vampires’ (which fleetingly conjures the dusty desert-horror fables of movies like ‘Near Dark’) and, probably the overall highlight of this record, the richly evocative ‘Age of Kings’, which perhaps breaks interesting new ground for Darnielle, building it’s atmosphere not through any blood-curdling lyrical invention, but simply through its elegant, burnished gold string textures and stately melody.

A lot of the other songs here I don’t really ‘get’, but that’s ok, really, I mean, that’s fine – after all, a lot of the old boombox era records only mange maybe a 50% hit rate in all honesty. Darnielle has had an absolutely spectacular run since ‘Tallahassee’, and it would be churlish to expect it to last forever. What’s more worrying is that the crazy passion and fury that’s fuelled The Mountain Goats for twenty odd years seems to be dissipating here. Like many successful songwriters before him, Darnielle is starting to feel the effect of his being a guy who sits in an office all day with a piano writing songs for a living, rather than some desperate ne’erdowell trawling the highways trying to make a buck, or whatever. Basing one’s career almost entirely on compositional chops is always going to be a uneasy balance between “that’s an interesting subject, I should probably write a song about it” and “here’s something terrifying that happened when I picked up the guitar this evening, I don’t know where the fuck it came from”, and if you insist on being prolific, that balance is always gonna get a bit off-whack sometimes.

Then again though, a lot of people seemed to like this record just fine. The reviews were good. Is it weird that for some reason I think the songs on last year’s throwaway Extra Lens side-project way overshadowed even the best ones on this album? On what side of the band/listener divide is the energy really draining away here? Are The Mountain Goats changing, or just me? Something to ponder in the dark hours of the night. Whatever - # 30 dudes.

Beautiful Gas Mask




29. Maria Minerva – Tallinn at Dawn tape / Cabaret Cixous LP (Not Not Fun)

Two whole albums of laptop transcendence from the prolific Ms Minerva, rising above blog-hype and cool-label-anticipation-disorder and “TRIVIA FACT: interned at The Wire” to really make her mark on the world of…. whatever the hell you call this kind of thing.

‘Tallinn..’ is ostensibly the weaker of the two sets of recordings, but there’s a stark naivety and sketchy pop minimalism to the songs herein that I really love. It’s just awesome, untutored homemade songs really, assembled out of little more than random samples, midi synth lines, Maplins-mic vocals and cheap effects, but within this evidently limited framework, Minerva reveals a great knack for sound-assembly and an uncanny ear for a really haunting melody. All of the record’s strengths are fully in evidence on the tremendous ‘Sad Serenade (Bedroom Rock n’ Roll)’, one of my favourite tracks of the year, which fuses chunks of some long lost youtube rock star interview to bass and drum patterns that sound weirdly organic despite never claiming to have known life outside a harddrive, spinning swathes of psychedelic burble like week old memories of some euphoric nightclub moment, topped with a shivering vocal like something out of one of Marianne Faithful’s weed-inspired greenhouse dreams. Or something. I dunno. Point is, it’s great. Twenty seven iTunes plays and counting.

‘Cabaret..’ is a far more elaborate affair, often a bit too amorphous to really get an angle on, on first listen seeming like an endless blissout of disconnected, muffled-through-the-walls club music and pan-cultural East End art blather that’s engrossing without ever manifesting anything really distinct. On repeated spins though, attention is drawn once again to the strength of Minerva’s tricky vocal melodies, and their central role in organising the dubbed out clouds of this sound into something not just tangible but pretty damn magical, as heard on the superb ‘Honey Honey’ - not so much blissful as a second-hand descriptor but more, y’know… actually blissful, heavily phased vocals fading into a haze of reconstructed Indian street-singing as the track progresses. Again, it never really sticks around long enough to sign off on its beauty, but fleetingly there’s something pretty special there. Similar feels can be felt in ‘Soo High’, submerging mixing skeletal r’n’b structure under heavily processed ice-cream van chimes and reverb layers to sublime effect, and ‘Pirate’s Tale’, a fully-formed masterpiece of this nameless whatever, taking us from Spitalfields out to sea, knocking on the doors of all the adjectives I’ve thrown around in this review in the process.

Ineffable, irreducible DIY hypnogogical cosmopolitan collage-pop of the highest order, Maria Minerva’s records will inevitably sound dated as shit to our stupid ears five years down the line. All the more reason to enjoy them now then, I’d suggest.

Sad Serenade (Bedroom Rock n’ Roll) [from ‘Tallin at Dawn’]


Pirate’s Tale [from ‘Cabaret Cixous’]




28. Yeh Deadlies – The First Book of Lessons (Popical Island)

From May:

“Come on in and relax, these songs seem to say (without getting too happy-clappy about it), everybody’s welcome. Maybe life’s not perfect – in fact we are going to tell you in lyrical form about all manner of awkward situations and personal upsets - but the sun’s shining and it’s a quiet afternoon and we’re all on the same page here, so grab a pint and we’ll weave our merry tunes for ya.

And fucking merry they are too, full of great, interesting melodies and attention-grabbing little musical bits and pieces, and they tell us about a bunch of stuff that’s maybe taken from their lives or maybe just made up, and for once you actually care. As Yeh Deadlies have moved away from the more overtly folky approach of their earlier recordings and assumed the mantle of a full electric pop band, joint singers/writers Padraig and Annie have correspondingly developed a real knack for cramming odd and personal details into the songs whilst never letting them meander too far from their core function as strong, emotionally resonant pop songs. Most song lengths remain on the right side of three minutes, tempos remain upbeat, and collapses into diary entry banality are strenuously avoided, but each number still succeeds in communicating the essence of a situation, an idea, a feeling, whatever. So, uh, I’m no expert or anything, but I think that probably adds up to official Real Good Song-Writing. Well done everybody!

Although Dublin is a big city, this really sounds like a rural album to me. Or it really hit the spot when I put it on whilst barrelling through the countryside last month, at least. Maybe I’m just projecting, but the songs seem to pull together to create an agreeable picture of life in a small-ish provincial music scene, from the reflections of a DJ at a small town club night surveying the 3am carnage in “Disc Jockey Blues” to the tale of a kid growing up and joining a band in, er, “The Kid’s in the Band”, and so on.

If ‘The First Book of Lessons’ was a movie, I think it would probably be one of those ‘90s British indie movies where young people in brightly coloured clothes live amid drab, dilapidated surroundings, and they go to transport cafes, and go surfing, and sit together on the cliffs and stuff like that. Hopefully it wouldn’t be shite (because most of those kind of movies were shite), but y’know what I mean.

In a field submerged ‘neath a flood of bilious careerists and terminal hat-wearers, Yeh Deadlies sound like good people playing good music, and that’s really something to be thankful for.”

No Rock n’ Roll Dreams (in Empty Beds)




27. Jeffrey Lewis – A Turn in a Dream Songs (Rough Trade)

Jeffrey Lewis’s previous LP ‘Em Are I’ was my favourite record of.. when did it come out again? Year before last? Ok, yeah – 2009. In particular, admired the way that Jeffrey managed to take the fallout from what was obviously a pretty devastating break-up and turn it into a set of songs that was enjoyable, profound, funny, musically ambitious and generally optimistic, transcending the moansville routinely occupied by about 98% of spurned singer-songwriter types.

Kind of sad then to hear him returning this year with a record as thoroughly down-in-the-dumps as this one, nixing the raucous punk and rock n’ roll outbursts the gave colour to his previous albums in favour of what is largely a one man acoustic trawl through different flavours of listless self-pity.

Anxiety and morbid self-examination have always been at the heart of Lewis’s songwriting of course, but in the past he’s always managed to put a good spin on it, using humour and weird, homespun wisdom to engage with a more universal sentiment – a talent that often seems to elude him here as he offers a number of dreary strumathons bemoaning the fact that girls don’t like him and he’s forced to go to restaurants on his own and aimlessly wonder the streets and stuff and DUDE, for christ’s sake, it’s sad that you feel so bummed out, but carrying on like this in public isn’t going to help matters! Pull yourself together, go play some great shows and draw some awesome comic books, you’re great at it and you’ve got loads of wonderful friends, and everybody loves you! Jeez, some people.

Thankfully though, this is still a Jeffrey Lewis album, and Jeffrey Lewis is awesome, so there’s plenty here to enjoy. For one, ‘Cult Boyfriend’, a perfect example of the kind of instant classic yeah-you-got-my-number-buddy pop culture referencin’ hits that got us loving him in the first place. For two and three, there’s ‘Krongu Green Slime’ and ‘So What If I Couldn’t Take It’ , intricate, image-packed rambles that seem like weirder tangents from some ‘60s underground comic in audio form, telling tales of primordial retail economics, cosmic entropy, hallucinogenic suicide rampages and flunked mafia executions. ‘Time Trades’ is a good one too, vaguely recalling Richard Hell’s similarly named song and stretching a dark-hours-of-the-night philosophical tangent into a convincing trail of reassuring wisdom, bypassing our cynicism in a way that only Lewis can really get away with. Opener ‘To Go And Return’ is real nice as well, a gentle, shimmery folk-psyche fingerpicker enlivened by droning, discordant brass.

In fact, who am I kidding – at least 50% of ‘A Turn In The Dream Songs’ is really great, and it’s at least 100% better than it would have been if some other bearded jerk had made it. It would be easy to pull apart the threads of depression and narcissism that underpin even the best of these songs, but why bother, they’ve always been there, they’re part of what makes Jeff Lewis the writer/performer he is, and here’s hoping he can take some inspiration from the noble sentiment of songs like ‘Time Trades’ and work up a more positive frame of mind for the next time he hits the studio.

Cult Boyfriend





26. Y Niwl – Album (Aderyn Papur)

Behold – the best Welsh language surf album of the year!

But seriously folks, even if there were dozens of Welsh language surf albums to choose from (and I sincerely wish there were), I’d like to think Y Niwl would still be riding high on the hog with this lovely effort.

I should admit that I’ve actually been listening to a lot of surf music this year. I really like it, in fact I think it’s one of the greatest musical forms around.

It’s a genre that works best I feel when completely disconnected from all the mouldering aesthetic bumpf that goes along with it. I remember once hearing an old interview with The Pixies, where they were talking about their fondness for surf music, and how when they listened to it, they weren’t thinking of hotrods and beaches and Californian dudes surfing and all that stuff, but instead of “crazy little people, running around, doing stuff!” That just about sums it up I think. It’s evocative, exciting music that deserves a wider framework of imagery to work with. Thus I really appreciate the fact that Y Niwl play great surf music without making any effort to try to harness the ‘surf’ aesthetic. No stripey shirts or tiki lounge kitsch for these guys – in the one press shot I could find of them, they’re standing in somebody’s back garden in the rain, next to a conservatory, having a cup of tea. Stubble and bobblehats and rain macs – classic SFA/Gorkys Welsh stoner guys really. Much respect to them for taking this fine music wholly on it’s own merit, and playing it so well, devoid of period goofery.

On the scale of surfitude, I suppose you might say Y Niwl are more on the relatively laidback side of things - the kind of surf band one imagines might enjoy a quick joint or two before practice. Not for them the rip-roaring fretboard theatrics of Bambi Molesters or Los Straitjackets. Largely, Y Niwl prefer to explore a woozier, more psychedelic take on surf conventions, their sound crisply recorded as the genre demands, but swathed in a heavily atmospheric undertow of beautifully cavernous reverb and echo, rolling in across the tunes like Aberystwyth sea mist, genre-defying electric organ riffs chiming in too to add a whole other layer to a beautiful sonic, uh… layered thing? By which I mean, a brilliantly recorded, imaginatively rendered, good-natured, instantly enjoyable pile of vaguely trippy instrumental rock. Nice work!

Undegpedwar

Labels: best of 2011, Jeffrey Lewis, Maria Minerva, The Mountain Goats, Y Niwl, Yeh Deadlies

Albums Catch-Up:
Yeh Deadlies –
The First Book of Lessons
(Popical Island)

Creators of one of my favourite singles of 2010, Dublin’s Yeh Deadlies have come to occupy a pretty unique space in my current listening habits. Just as I was completely excising from my life the possibility of enjoying earnest, painstakingly well-produced folksy indie featuring lots of harmony vocals, xylophones, proper middle eights, literate big-hearted lyrics and so on, along comes a band proffering earnest, painstakingly well-produced folksy indie featuring lots of harmony vocals, xylophones, proper middle eights, literate big-hearted lyrics and so on (EPSWPFIFLHVXPM8LBHLetc, if you will), that I really, really like.

And, I mean, I usually have a kneejerk hatred of this stuff these days, so it stands to reason that all you guys out there who still have a lot of time for EPSWPFIFLHVXPM8LBHLetc should REALLY dig Yeh Deadlies, and make them at least sorta-famous so that they can get booked by Ear Your Own Ears and come to London to do “ ‘ proper’ ” shows in big venues with security guards on the door and an awful, murky sound mix.

It may already be a totally played out comparison that I probably used the last time I wrote about Yeh Deadlies, but they give me a feeling similar to early Herman Dune, back when they were still real special. Not that there’s much similarity musically of course – “The First Book of Lessons” is full of keyboards and gentle fuzz guitar and lively chord changes and ‘80s pop influences and all sorts of other things far removed from the erstwhile ‘Dune playbook – but they share the same… I dunno - intent? atmosphere? whatever. Come on in and relax, these songs seem to say (without getting too happy-clappy about it), everybody’s welcome. Maybe life’s not perfect – in fact we are going to tell you in lyrical form about all manner of awkward situations and personal upsets - but the sun’s shining and it’s a quiet afternoon and we’re all on the same page here, so grab a pint and we’ll weave our merry tunes for ya.

And fucking merry they are too, full of great, interesting melodies and attention-grabbing little musical bits and pieces, and they tell us about a bunch of stuff that’s maybe taken from their lives or maybe just made up, and for once you actually care. As Yeh Deadlies have moved away from the more overtly folky approach of their earlier recordings and assumed the mantle of a full electric pop band, joint singers/writers Padraig and Annie have correspondingly developed a real knack for cramming odd and personal details into the songs whilst never letting them meander too far from their core function as strong, emotionally resonant pop songs. Most song lengths remain on the right side of three minutes, tempos remain upbeat, and collapses into diary entry banality are strenuously avoided, but each number still succeeds in communicating the essence of a situation, an idea, a feeling, whatever. So, uh, I’m no expert or anything, but I think that probably adds up to official Real Good Song-Writing. Well done everybody!

Although Dublin is a big city, this really sounds like a rural album to me. Or it really hit the spot when I put it on whilst barrelling through the countryside last month, at least. Maybe I’m just projecting, but the songs seem to pull together to create an agreeable picture of life in a small-ish provincial music scene, from the reflections of a DJ at a small town club night surveying the 3am carnage in “Disc Jockey Blues” to the tale of a kid growing up and joining a band in, er, “The Kid’s in the Band”, and so on.

If “The First Book of Lessons” was a movie, I think it would probably be one of those ‘90s British indie movies where young people in brightly coloured clothes live amid drab, dilapidated surroundings, and they go to transport cafes, and go surfing, and sit together on the cliffs and stuff like that. Hopefully it wouldn’t be shite (because most of those kind of movies were shite), but y’know what I mean.

In a field submerged ‘neath a flood of bilious careerists and terminal hat-wearers, Yeh Deadlies sound like good people playing good music, and that’s really something to be thankful for.

“No Rock n Roll Dreams (in Empty Beds)” and “The Present Perfect” are some of my favourite songs on the album, so here are Soundclouds of them;




The whole album can be streamed or purchased from http://yehdeadlies.bandcamp.com/, and you can learn all about Popical Island at http://popicalisland.tumblr.com/About.

Labels: album reviews, Yeh Deadlies

SINGLES ROUND-UP: 2010 Thus Far, Part # 2.

Brilliant Colors – Never Mine b/w Kissing’s Easy (Slumberland)

New wax from Brilliant Colors is always welcome round here, and hopefully always will be, but arriving off the back of their brilliant LP last year, this little outing can’t help but seem, well… slight. Dialling back both the punk rock propulsion and brutalist fuzz guitar that made the album such a blast, these two brief tunes see the band regressing back towards the homemade, Beat Happening-y vibes of their early EPs. Not that there’s *anything* wrong with that of course, and they still hold it together nicely enough, but with most of the energy, charm and killer tunes that set them apart (and make this kinda shamble-core a good time generally) also somewhat lacking, this four and a half minute artefact that can’t help but seem rather half-arsed in view of what’s gone before. GREAT band, no doubt (I’m going to see ‘em in June, with Thee Oh Sees!), so I guess you might want to grab this if you’re a completist re: Brilliant Colors or Slumberland or cool pop groups in general, but for anyone whose primary interest lies in listening to the damn thing: get the album instead if you’ve not already; this is strictly leftovers.

http://www.myspace.com/brilliantcolorssanfrancisco
http://www.slumberlandrecords.com/

Lil Daggers – King Corps EP
(Livid Records)

Taking up the consideration of unguessable sociological/aesthetic shifts from my Flight review in the previous post, it’s worth noting that something very different is seeping into the water at the other end of the garage-verse from the shimmery, dislocated bliss-out we’ve recently come to accept as standard. Back down South, ideologically speaking if not always geographically, we can find an increasing number of groups swinging their lassos and taking the wild leap back toward authentically swampy roots rock drama, hanging onto some particularly fateful Dylan-via-The Gun Club axis of bluster, rattle n’ twang, and generating better results than you’d care to expect. Not that I’d want to get mixed up the journalistic dead-end of after-the-fact, thousand-miles-removed scene-building you understand, but sometimes you just gotta. Strange Boys, Demon’s Claws, The Mantles, Bridport Daggers… and now here’s Miami’s Lil Daggers, fitting right in.

Lunging around with a cataclysmic, red-eyed sound meant to be heard at a deafening whack in darkened, sweatbox clubs, Lil Daggers churn and weave in rabid Birthday Party fashion around a powerhouse drummer, duelling electric organs, frenzied string-bending guitar and bludgeoning low-end, howling through the requisite phone-line vocal filter about how they “hear the end is near”, in search of a constant, bloody climax.

For all that they’re covering distantly familiar territory here, this is still a pulverisingly BIG music, rich in an undeniable power n’ drama that belies the unimaginative band name, if you can only take a deep breath, say YES to the outlaw clichés, and let yourself get swept up in it. A lot of people were lurking about in this stubble-and-duster coats terrain back in the ‘80s, and god knows, a lot of people sucked at it. But this is 2010 buster, and if you still happen to be making movies about tough guys trudging ‘round the desert pointing guns at each other, get these dudes on the blower (probably the same one they do the vocals through) and they’ll be able to knock you up a real kick ass soundtrack full of holy fury and catharsis for you whilst Nick Cave and Warren Ellis are still lazing about in bed scratching their beards, wondering what the hullabaloo downstairs is all about.

http://www.myspace.com/lildaggers
http://www.lividrecords.com/

Octagon Control / Doctor Scientist – split 7”
(FDH Records)

My fault, this one. I took a chance on it just cos I like the cover photo, and think ‘Doctor Scientist’ is a really funny name for a band. The shop label said something about it being ‘synth-punk’, and I thought I could go for a bit of that good old retro-futurist fun right now – I’ve been catching up on a lot of vintage synth-heavy stuff recently in fact, and really enjoying it, so prob’ly about time I checked out what all these ‘cold wave’ kids are up to.

Oh dear – getting home and putting it on was like having to explain to an enthusiastic interview candidate that he’s applied for the wrong job.

“Uh, ok guys, I think we’ve got a misunderstanding here – see maybe it’s just me being a closed minded dumb-ass, but when I read ‘synth-punk’ and see a b&w photo of a girl with a goofy pre-Neuromancer VR headset, I kinda presuppose something that sounds a bit like The Screamers or Suicide or Gary Numan, y’know? That’s fair enough, isn’t it? You on the other hand, Octagon Control and Doctor Scientist, kinda sound more like bush league early ‘00s emo/metalcore bands who added a keyboard player for a bit of variety. I wish you well in your future quest for an audience who cares, but… well you see my problem, right? I’m sorry.”

Now I just feel all awkward.

http://www.fdhmusic.com/
http://www.myspace.com/doctorscientistband
http://www.myspace.com/octagoncontrol

Plasto Beton – 7” EP (SDZ Records)

Aah, now when I take a chance on some ‘synth-punk’ record in this day and age, THIS is more the kinda fucked up shit I have in mind. Not that these guys sound remotely like The Screamers or Suicide or Gary Numan or anything, but…

Well let me put it this way for you: French punk/indie/whatever type music has always seemed like pretty mysterious and fragmentary territory to those of us who’ve rarely gone out of our way to investigate, but you knew, didn’t you, that out there somewhere there’d be a whole gang of sick French fucks who worship Mark E. Smith and Throbbing Gristle and Pere Ubu, making horrible sub-underground type sounds infused with the grand perversity and defiance of their countrymen? Just stands to reason doesn’t it? And isn’t it a fine thing to think about of an evening?

Well duck you suckers, here they come – what seems to be more or less the same bunch of malcontents operating under such monikers as A.H. Kraken, The Anals, and now these guys, furiously mixing up dull-witted, ultra-repetitive caveman thud with chopped up Digital Hardcore noise-fuckery, random machine gun bursts, eerily detuned analogue synth tones and the kind of unhinged distortion pedal ranting that I daresay I wouldn’t be able to interpret even if I spoke French fluently.

It’s grotesque and upsetting and belligerent and wonderful, and I wouldn’t wish exposure to it on anyone who hadn’t specifically requested such in advance. Politicians take note: create a country characterised by strange and frustrating labour laws, new build suburban sprawl, mass unemployment, a rich but entropied cultural heritage and an uncommon reliance on nicotine, and sooner or later your youth will start making noises like this. Think on.

http://www.myspace.com/plastobeton
http://www.myspace.com/sdzrecords

Music and Dialogue from Sandy Harbutt’s Australian Motion Picture ‘Stone’ 7”
(Finders Keepers)

Seems pretty redundant to say “well this is a strange one”. Ever the pioneers, Finders Keepers throw caution to the wind and bring us a compressed burst of exactly what the title states, melted onto vinyl. I’ve been vaguely aware of Sandy Harbutt’s film ‘Stone’ for a while now re: it’s status as a landmark Australian exploitation/counter-culture artefact, and I enjoyed watching clips from it in the excellent Ozploitation documentary ‘Not Quite Hollywood’ last year. But if the evidence presented on this 7” is accurate, clearly I need to track down the complete movie ASAP, as ‘Stone’ sounds far-fucking-out!

Motorcycle engines roar through krautrock echo chambers; petrol tank explosions ricochet through slapback delay; morbid funk-rock blares; Australian bikies yell about worshipping Satan and initiating outsiders into the rites of their master. “Man, I love The Gravediggers – they are too cool”, says some guy in a pub, accompanied by strange, staccato musicbox jingles. “One night they came in here with The Orgasm; some of them had laid some really good acid on The Diggers, cos The Diggers used to travel with ‘em”… and so it goes on. “I guess we all just… CAME together”, says some drugged sounding girl. More echoed explosions. ‘Stone’, ladies and gentlemen – I can scarcely wait.

Quite what purpose this 7” serves is harder to quantify – would weirdo DJs drop this mid-set? Will people play it on their internet radio shows? Are cult movie fans gonna play this to their friends to convince them to watch the film? Or are malcontents like me just going to cackle over it in the privacy of their own homes? Overall the experience is similar to spending five minutes watching weirdo movie trailers on Youtube and then blinking and trying to bring yourself back to reality. And that’s something I like to find time for pretty much everyday, home broadband connections allowing, so HALLELUJAH, and thank you again Finders Keepers/B-Music – my life would be a far duller place without you.

http://www.finderskeepersrecords.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lloTd45PFPg

Yeh Deadlies – Magazine b/w Constitution Hill (Poltergeist / Fake Indie Label)

An absolute joy of a single from this Dublin group, prominently featuring Annie Tierney ex of Chicks on guitar and co-vox, so all you folks who helped make the post I did about Chicks a few years back this blog’s most popular item by a factor of about ten should clearly pay attention!

I very much enjoyed listening to Yeh Deadlies on myspace a while back, their predominantly gentle, folkie approach sounding rich and genuine and full of love, hitting the same sweet spots that the early Herman dune albums used to do for so well, and that 90% of modern ‘folk’ artistes manage to miss by a landslide. The best kind of folksie music, I think, is always the kind that sounds like it was made outside of consideration of any kind of music scene or industry, by some kinda generous and warm-hearted people who know each other well, just doing some songs with sounds and words that they like. It’s a difficult balance to maintain, but Yeh Deadlies seem to fit the bill perfectly.

So a single with a couple of examples of that on it would have been dead nice, no question, but imagine my surprise when ‘Magazine’ revs up with a punk drum beat, fizzy fuzz-tone guitar and a lead vocal from Annie herself, an absolutely beautiful nugget of super-optimistic, shambolic, sugar-rush, we-can-do-anything, distantly wistful, cardigan-wearin’ power-pop that bounces around like sitting on a freshly mown hillside with your friends on the last day of school in July, throwing chewing gum at passing cars… or something. Man, it’s almost as good as Chicks, or Mary Lou Lord, or pre-major label Kenickie, and only a *bit* more grown up. It’s so great I could cry.

The B-side, ‘Constitution Hill’ is really lovely too – more in the folksie sorta vein described above. I don’t have much to say about it; it’s about leaving a party prematurely and walking on a hill and feeling sad, and it’s approximately a hundred times better than every other song you’ve heard this year about walking on hills feeling sad. It makes me feel funny in my tummy, in the way these kinda songs are always meant to, but so rarely ever do.

Incidentally, the few real life Irish people I know are all apt to describe things as being ‘deadly’, in the same way we in this country would say ‘cool’ or ‘awesome’ or whathaveyou, so that’s presumably where these guys take their name from. I always find it really interesting, the way that slang like that does or doesn’t spread from place to place, the same way that some of the weird jokes and tricks and stuff that spread around the playground when you were at school seem to be universally recognised around the country, while others are meaningless to anyone who didn’t go to your specific school, and…. well anyway, who cares – please listen to this single, it’s really, really special.

http://www.myspace.com/yehdeadlies
http://www.myspace.com/poltergeistrecords
http://www.myspace.com/fakeindielabel

Labels: Brilliant Colors, Doctor Scientist, Finders Keepers, Lil Daggers, Octagon Control, Plasto Beton, singles reviews, Yeh Deadlies