I Like All This Stuff! Part # 3

The Barbaras

Some geeky lookin’ guys, all rejoicing in those endearingly whiny voices that as a non-American I thought only belonged to comic relief characters in teen movies, The Barbaras are possessed of a singular vision of homemade pure pop Or rather, a not at all singular vision, since heavy elements of such are creeping in all over the map, particularly with groups like Smith Westerns etc…. but I think it’s The Barbaras who are perhaps tking this notion furthest and doing it best. What notion, you ask? Well “Budget Spectorisms” proclaims their myspace headline, and that’s hard to beat as a two word descriptor. For yes, unlike scary uncle Phil’s productions, there is usually a rock band heart still beating behind The Barbaras songs, but beyond that they sound like they’re way into some wonderful and strange ‘studio as instrument’ perfectionism… only without the studio. It’s a fine sound they’ve got going, sounding psychedelic by accident rather than by intention, with just enough bubblegum rock n’ roll backing to keep things solid, but balanced out by vocal harmonies, overdriven xylophones and bouncing, lurching, cosmic sugar. Mini pop symphonies hewn from the same sonic infatuation experiments that Spector and Brian Wilson used to define the sound of ‘60s pop, but without all the sleaze, egomania and cynicism that followed, all sounding like it’s being worked out with just a tape recorder, some outboard effects and the contents of a school music room. It’s terrific songs like ‘Flow’, ‘Topsy Turvy Magic’ and ‘Heaven Hangs’ that really seal the deal though – beautiful, straight-faced, innocent odes to the joys of looking at yr girl’s hair and visiting her house, with real world creepiness left over the hills and far away. So well do these guys capture a 21st century geeky boy equivalent of The Crystals and Ronettes Wagnerian teen-romance universality, it’s hard to imagine them ever getting wrecked or cracking dirty jokes or hanging around with Jay Reatard or any of the other stuff that 21st century geeky boys in bands like this presumably do. Lovely, lovely stuff from a simpler, happier world that you’ll want to file next to Bob B. Soxx & The Blue Jeans instead of Psychedelic Horseshit.

http://www.myspace.com/thebarbaras


Fergus & Geronimo

More atavistic ‘60s purity reasserting itself here I think – Ruan of ‘Nick Thinks’ recommended these guys in the comments after my last post, and good grief, I nearly fell off my seat when I got back from the pub and hit the link. Fergus & Geronimo are, I’m assuming, a kind of vocalist & keyboard/instruments duo from Denton, Texas, and OMG, they’re AMAZING! Everything about their sound communicates a love of early ‘60s soul, but rather than the tedious, gurning, horrid pastiche that you’d fear might result from the meeting of soul homage and lo-fi white boy capers, this music sounds fresh as the breeze – foot-stomping, up-with-people love songs carrying that same unquestionable FUCK YEAH spirit as vintage Sam Cooke and Otis Redding. So ok, maybe some random kid from Texas stretching his voice to hit the high notes doesn’t equal the greats, and some guy with a casio and a tambourine doesn’t equal Tamla Motown, but they’ve got the feeling and they’re putting in the fucking effort to make it work when no one else is even daring to try, and that’s what counts – an out-of-time blast of jump blues, gospel honesty, pop melody, and now with added punk rock, as righteous as a true love’s kiss.

http://www.myspace.com/fergusgeronimo


Pens

For a thoroughly scrappy DIY trio who started playing out in London scarcely more than a year ago, Pens have gone pretty far pretty quick – a US tour, an album forthcoming album on LA label De Stijl, name dropped in all the right places… we could be seeing the crest of another tedious Vivian Girls / Wavves style hype washout here, but let’s not dwell on such things. Pens absolutely killed when I saw them at that Upset The Rhythm thing on the Old Kent Road a few months back – definitely the best band I saw there, although I never would have expected record labels and tastemakers start agreeing with me about stuff like that, y’know? With one foot in the same deconstructionism and 100% rejection of book-learned male musical orthodoxy as The Corey Orbison and Ethical Debating Society, Pens are a thoroughly self-taught, self-sufficient proposition, banging it out with a raw, organically developed thunk, shaved of the artificial barriers of chops and reference points for some direct anger/noise/fun/listener/hit/face connection, if you will. Added to that, they’ve got a big, fuck-off metal-derived noise of distortion pedal casio and viciously fuzzed guitar to fall back on, and a really winning pop sensibility that becomes clear on repeated listens, from Troggs/Monks style love chants to fascinating densely-packed, ambiguous urban chaos laments – that’s CONTENT by any other name, chaps. At their best, Pens is like the kind of The Fall that every forty-five year old bloke ever bangs on about, only it’s a three-headed girl and it’s happening now. We’ll see what transpires, but world-beating, potentially. Did I really just say “urban chaos laments”? – urgh, I need a holiday.

http://www.myspace.com/penspenspenis


Mazes


Also currently turning up on all the right rackety bills and picking up a fair amount of UK press, it’s nice to discover that unassuming home-recording trio Mazes are actually pretty good. Guided By Voices and The Clean are the self-acknowledged chief reference points here, and whilst obviously Mazes aren’t remotely as revelatory as either of those groups, theirs is a straight up blend of roaring, rough-hewn subterranean power-pop that hits all the right buttons. At worst, file under “thoroughly satisfactory”, and at best, songs like "Bethesda" are f-ing superb; strong song-writing, goofy immediacy and a killer sound that recalls GBV’s ‘Propeller’; crashing drums, churning guitars, clear vocals and EQ-pushing skree – the kind of totally efficient blare that makes you wonder why any self-respecting guitar/bass/drums band would feel the need to venture beyond the 4-track or do overdubs. But then of course, you just need to listen to any number of crappy, unlistenable 4-track bands out there to remind yourself that, oh yeah, that’s what studios are for. Mazes are just getting it right, that’s all, and god bless ‘em for that.

http://www.myspace.com/mazesmazesmazes



The Sock Puppets

I’ll admit there’s maybe a little bit of self-interest here, as The Give It Ups are playing with these guys in Copenhagen next week, but heck, that aside, I really like ‘em! Full of enthusiasm, and coming from the punkier end of European indie-pop (my favoured end), they remind me of a rougher, lo-fi Those Dancing Days, with swearing and shouting and metronomic drums. Thumbs up to all that, needless to say! It occurs to me I don’t actually know much Danish music… hopefully our forthcoming holiday can help rectify that.

http://www.myspace.com/socksandpuppets



The Traditional Fools

Ah, The Traditional Fools! You know what you’re getting with a name like that. Idiocy with a pedigree. Looking back over these posts, I guess I’ve been heavily hinting at the notion that all this stuff is kinda modern day garage rock, perhaps to the point of tedium. The great thing is, this is not so much through direct imitation and pastiche, ala the ‘80s Garage Revival (who always tended to be overproduced and have 3 minute+ songs anyway), but simply because it’s just coming from the same place and speaking the same language as all those legendary teenage cavemen. Listening to the second volume of Pebbles the other way, it suddenly struck me that cuts like ‘Feathered Fish’ by the Sons of Adam and ‘You Rub Me The Wrong Way’ by The Roads, (along with any other punk-ass ‘60s relics that happen to be free of the usual period tells like harmony backing vox, wiggy organ etc.), could just as easily have been made in 2008 as 1968, but probably NOT at any point in between. Surely this forty year disjuncture is unprecedented. I mean sure, people go about reviving moribund musical styles ‘till they’re blue in the face, and that’s great… but for a whole generation to end up sounding *exactly* like their grandparents, without even particularly trying to? That’s just weird. Further evidence can be gained from the fact that if you’d told me that The Traditional Fools’ killer version of Love’s ‘Flash On You’ was taken from a long lost ’65 bootleg of Arthur Lee and co, I’d probably have taken you on your word, been flabbergasted by it’s noise and ferocity, and begged you for a copy on bended knees. But I don’t have to beg, because The Traditional Fools (featuring current it-dude Ty Seagull) are here, and they’re drinking beer and growing beards, and making funny skateboarding based videos, and probably playing the beach party near you, if you live where they live. Alright! Isn’t this so much more fun than when everybody was trying to be like Shellac? And it’s easier too – nobody needed the second-string Albinis, but every town should have some Traditional Fools.

http://www.myspace.com/thetraditionalfools

Labels: Fergus and Geronimo, garage, I like, Mazes, Pens, punk, soul, The Barbaras, The Sock Puppets, The Traditional Fools

WORLD SAYS: ALRIGHT.

So I should get a post down on the U.S. election, for sure. I know I’ve managed to put pop music aside for a few minutes each time there's been a US or UK election over the past five years to chip in with a bunch of hand-wringing, cursing and venomous cynicism. So to ignore the one where, suddenly, against all the odds, something unexpectedly good happens, would make me out to be an inveterate humbugger of the highest order.

But you see, given the ceaseless nightmare of corruption, greed, vote-theft, lies and horrifying stupidity that we’ve all got used to politics in America (and elsewhere) being over the past decade or so (not that it was any great shakes before that), it’s almost EERIE to have something good to say the day after an election; it’s not something my young mind is used to. My standard litany of Reagan-era punk bands and Hunter S. Thompson quotes will not help me to find anything well-balanced and original to say here, in this stunningly uncynical circumstance.

Such is my political pessimism, I spent the first few days of November just *waiting* for some contrived "turning of the tables", for some colossal unforeseen (OR WAS IT?) fuckup or unexpected shift in the voting, for The Ugly American to raise his head and say "what, you didn't REALLY think we were gonna let the black guy win did you?"

But no; I checked once, I checked twice – and whilst I fear the ‘rat-bastards’ of HST’s comic book worldview are still out there planning something nasty, for the moment it looks like he actually made it.

I mean, politically-speaking Obama's obviously no utopian anticorporate revolutionary or anything, but having a vaguely left-leaning Democrat in charge after near a decade of neocon chuckleheads still feels like a huge relief from at least some of the madness and chaos hanging over the world, and it'll be great just to be able to hear things like 'Secretary Of State' and 'Whitehouse Spokesperson' and not have to hate yourself slightly for immediately wanting to launch a psychic axe at the face of whoever appears on the TV screen. But, as has already been repeated a million times over, in purely symbolic terms, Obama's election is MASSIVE.

Just to think that a man who looks like - as my Dad might put it - "the guy who'd always die first in all the war movies" is now in charge, insofar as anyone can be, of the system that made those movies (and the wars for that matter)…? As a dude I’m going to get onto in a minute once put it: ain’t that good news!

And, whilst Obama's words thus far have stuck closely to the accepted 'I want to win an election' school of vague, optimistic rhetoric, that acceptance speech was sounding pretty good. Yeah, the ‘equality for all’ style of blather may be well played out in American political vocab, but an incoming president explicitly pledging his support for Americans “male and female, black and white, gay and straight”? – THAT’S not something I remember hearing before. And I don’t recall any previous president-elect paraphrasing Sam Cooke either. If he’d just taken the trouble to get photographed in a Ramones shirt too, I’d be 100% sure me and Barack were gonna get along.

Stupid I know, but it’s the Sam Cooke thing that really blows my mind.

I mean, even if you find the overly sentimental approach to politics a little cringeworthy, just check this out from a music fan’s point of view:

“I was born by the river, in a little tent
and just like the river, I’ve been running ever since
It’s been a long time coming, but I know
A change is gonna come”
- Sam Cooke, 1964

“It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, a change has come to America.”
- Barack Obama, 2008

....

So you've got this great, unspeakably beautiful, noble yet desperate song of hope for the future that everybody loves. And everybody listens to it, and they think “ah yeah, one day....”. And yesterday morning, this dude got on stage in front of millions and effectively said “HEY – IT’S TODAY”.

Obviously I know that at heart the whole thing's as cynical as any other political 'victory', and he's only there thanks to the fact he raised shitloads of money, had a few good lines, deliberately avoided raising any divisive issues and was lucky enough to face an opposing team who were an even bigger bunch of clowns than usual, and I know that the grim economic/social reality of race relations in America probably isn't going to change very much, but still..... how often in a lifetime do you get the chance to take the message of a famous, rhetorical hope-for-the-future song and, for a moment at least, declare it DONE?

It’s like if an international panel of experts announced that a man only has to walk down one road to be called a man, or if somebody started issuing certificates of land ownership signed by God and Woody Guthrie’s grandson, or if the silver spaceships started flying in the yellow haze of the sun.

Crazy, and wonderful.

Now of course, I’m duty bound to post the song. I guess I should have had some smart-alec obscure cover version lined up really, and well, I hear Baby Huey’s version is a blast, and The Wave Pictures recent rendition is beautifully executed and reassuringly heartfelt, but…. if you’re up against Sam Cooke, Sam Cooke wins, y’know?

I don't know if I've mentioned it as often as I should have done on Stereo Sanctity in the past, but man, I love Sam Cooke SO MUCH. If you've ever had a party where this guy's recorded works weren't close at hand: well, you could have had a better party. Enjoy.

Sam Cooke – A Change Is Gonna Come
Sam Cooke – Ain’t That Good News

Oh, and hey, let’s remember:

Sam Cooke – Rome (Wasn’t Built In A Day)

Labels: political shit, rambling, Sam Cooke, soul