Blues Control –
Valley Tangents
(Drag City)

I’ll be honest with you: despite having set myself the task of writing about this new Blues Control record, I don’t really want to write about it. I’m not really sure what to say. Critical consensus seems to be equally undecided on quite what angle to take regarding the music herein, with Patrick Masterton at Dusted framing the album as the group’s slide toward introspective comfort following their relocation to the Pennsylvania suburbs, whilst Noel Gardner at The Quietus instead heard them embarking on a ruthless attempt to stay ‘one step ahead of the game’ in their particular corner of the music world.

And if neither of these interpretations quite jibe with what I’m hearing, well… aesthetic uncertainty has got to be a plus, right? In fact, a good challenge is precisely what we’ve come to anticipate from Blues Control, a duo who have been consistently redrawing the boundaries of the kind of music they make since their self-titled in 2004, and have scarcely put a foot wrong yet. Despite initially growing out of the kind of free-improv noise-psych stuff that often finds itself mired in myopic self-indulgence and repetition, Blues Control’s music often seems headed in precisely the opposite direction; everything I’ve heard from them as I’ve caught up with their catalogue over the past few years has been powerful and deliberate in both conception and execution - inventive, captivating and just, well… good satisfyin’ listening really. I guess things reached an apex of sorts with the record that first bought them to my attention, 2010’s superb ‘Local Color’, whose mixture of sheet metal guitars, Eno-ish drift and weirdo swamp ambience gets about as close as an ambient/drone album can to kicking ass and taking names.

Which brings us to ‘Valley Tangents’, hotly anticipated follow-up for the relative big boys as Drag City. And…. yeah. It’s a bit of a puzzler really. Surprises are to be expected by this stage, but whereas Blues Control’s pretty handbrake turns have been pleasing, refreshing and fun, this stuff is a bit more obtuse. Not ‘bad’ or disappointing as such, but it swiftly becomes very difficult to quantify what constitutes ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in a sound-world like this.

It’s there, it happens when you press play, and it’s fully of odd and noteworthy noises, but there are no threads you can really drag out of this - no easy context or visceral engagement to hang yr hat on. It’s a bunch of sound that it’s very difficult to really form an opinion on, and nothing gets a critic’s back up like not having an opinion.

So, probably best just fall back on a straight description.

‘Love’s a Rondo’ begins promisingly enough, with a woozy ‘evil triad’ type riff picked out on fuzz guitar, anchored by a looping pattern of low end piano notes. More curious is the emergence of a clean, overdubbed electric piano track, playing uncertain modal jazz improvisations, much in the manner of a precocious teenager nervously showing off in a school assembly. There’s a kinda naivety to it that is quite refreshing, but it’s an odd inclusion for sure. And if that wasn’t enough to raise our hackles, they only went and made a video with a fucking mime in it:

Track two, ‘Iron Pigs’. is pretty nuts, opening with what sounds like someone teaching a ‘Final Fight’ arcade machine to sing in tune, adding deliberately flat synchronised horn riffs and further ‘exploratory’ butter-fingered guitar-work, the various elements eventually harmonising to startling and pleasing effect. Probably my favourite track on the record.

‘Opium Den – Fade to Blue’ furthers this album’s deliberate reclamation of “cheesy” sound sources, conjuring a bizarro kung fu fantasia of Casio panpipes and wittering space-flutes. Drum machine hums like a hovering insect, and… there’s that damn piano again.

Rhythm track on ‘Walking Robin’ sounds like a reverbed basketball being dribbled across an empty hall, which is nice. Yet more common room Chick Corea worship subsequently predominates however, with perma-stoned bass jumping on-board for a trip to a swinger’s party I think I’d rather avoid.

Distracted solo piano hi-jinks open ‘Open Air’, sounding much like an evening practice session you might hear wafting across on the breeze from a neighbouring house on a quiet evening. Some manner of elfin woodwind joins in for a kind of relaxed, instinctive improv jam that is actually rather pleasant. An experience at least on par with sticking your head out of the window at night and listening to the sounds outside.

Oh no, we’re back at the swinger’s party for ‘Gypsum’, and things aren’t going well. Far be it from me to cast aspersions on a musician’s technical ability, but when the pianist just starts clumsily running up and down a scale a few times, we’ve all got to question what we’re doing here. Thankfully more interesting stuff waits in the wings, and the halfway mark finds us stuck in some kind of slowed down k hole of drifting abstract sound waves… until the pianist and his/her pals crash back in to reclaim their stage, ending the album with a few minutes of lolloping hippie-funk and a weird tingling sensation in the back of our brains, where our preconceived notions about what kind of music is good used to be.

So there ya go. Strangely enough, my overall impression of ‘Valley Tangents’ is that it kind of resembles a collection of obscure Ennio Morricone or Bruno Nicolai deep cuts. Not their ‘hits’ or the kind of main themes that people know them for, but more the kind of oddball “track # 6 on the OST of some forgotten sexploitation movie no one outside of Italy has ever seen” eyebrow-raisers where they let it all hang out. Viewed as such, ‘Iron Pigs’ and ‘Opium Den’ certainly achieve lift-off on a kind of “whoa, this’ll blow minds on my next mix tape” nerd appeal level, whilst others stay safely within the “well…. at least it’s unexpected” zone.

Beyond that, I make no claim toward knowing what the hell was going on in the minds of Blues Control during the making of this record, so - it is what it is. Enjoy it if you see fit. Somehow I doubt its creators would demand any heavier analysis than that from us.

Labels: album reviews, Blues Control, late night listening

Motion Sickness of Time Travel –
self-titled double LP
(Spectrum Spools)

Staunchly ‘experimental’ music fans liable to find themselves bored and annoyed by the faithful reiteration of electronic musicks past might be well-advised to approach Rachel Evans’ prolific recordings under the MSoTT name with caution. For those of us in the ‘ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ camp however, her stuff remains a solid sender, with these four side long tracks adding up to her biggest, most consciously ‘ambitious’, musical statement to date.

For Side A (perhaps knowingly titled, ‘The Dream’), we’re in pure Tangerine Dream territory, no apologies offered. Two silvery synths at work, one holding down a clean, sustained drone whilst the other tinkles across one of those bleepy-bloopy little note patterns that’ll make those of us raised in the ‘80s instantly think COMPUTER. The tone here is futurist – not post-, not retro-, just completely straight up, like Vangelis and Jean-Michael high-fiving as they look over the Tokyo skyline.

Until you drift back into consciousness a few minutes later that is, and realise that suddenly it’s all desert….

Before digging into these LPs, it’s helpful to read up on the methodology Evans used in constructing them, as elaborated in this interview with The Quietus. Basically, sides A, B and D were assembled from the kind of shorter pieces that have featured on her previous records, threaded together into twenty minute ‘suites’ in time-honoured ‘70s fashion. Side C – ‘Summer of the Cat’s Eye’ – meanwhile is a one-take live improvisation, and maybe that goes some way toward explaining why it’s my favourite track here. Not that the other sides aren’t great too of course, but ‘..Cat’s Eye’ is really something, by-passing the kind of snidey “sounds like..” comparisons used earlier in this review for a really engrossing trip into the unknown, steady tremoloed signals crashing headfirst into waves of chattering chaos and unknowable space-voices, like original series Star Trek unexpectedly drifting into a Tarkovsky-esque realm of terrifying alien beauty. So that’s pretty good.

As to the other tracks, the whole ‘suite’ concept seems the like kind of thing tailor made to annoy the hell out of me, given my general distaste for stop/start dynamics and liking for distinct, self-contained pieces of music, but in actual fact it works pretty well, to the extent that you probably wouldn’t notice the methodology if not informed in advance. The run-off from each ‘bit’ is nicely calibrated with the rise of the next, further building the established mood rather than upsetting it. Gradually, contrasting layers and textures fuse into odd and engrossing new patterns, successfully diffusing the whole shoddy ‘been there / done that’ comparison biz that each side's opening minutes may evoke, as is demonstrated when ‘The Center’ (side B) kicks off with a wonky organ pattern straight outta Terry Riley circa ‘Poppy Nogood..’ - obvious to fans of this sorta thing perhaps, but it becomes less of an easy touchstone as soon as the volume of Evans’ wordless sunrise-in-the-desert vocal line rises like a shapeless city on the horizon, and the track takes off on a different journey entirely.

There is a kind of hermetic purity to Evans work that I think really sets her apart from the potential tedium of the ‘mystic synth explorer’ aesthetic. I may have thrown around plenty o’ names in the paragraphs above, but the truth is that there is absolutely NO “he he, yeah, Tangerine Dream dude” type intent going on here. It sounds instead as if she’s simply sitting down in front of her gear, taking a deep breath and firing it up to make some wide-screen, expressive music, the way it naturally comes out, filtered through the technology, not defined by it – and the celestial depths scraped by the results speak for themselves.

Labels: album reviews, late night listening, Motion Sickness of Time Travel

Peaking Lights – Lucifer
(Mexican Summer/Weird World)

Beyond the questionable hippie blather they’ve been dishing out in interviews, Aaron Coyes and Idra Dunis remain extremely canny music makers. In pre-release, they pegged ‘Lucifer’ as a “nocturnal” version of their ‘936’ LP’s blazing day-time, and indeed, it sounds as if the group have pulled a straight aesthetic switch here without actually changing a thing, solarising the negative of their sound - same basic ingredients, but with the colours and contours completely reversed for deep night-time ambience. Clever buggers.

The first thing fans of ‘936’ will notice when hitting up ‘Lucifer’ for the first time is that it’s a lot less immediate than its predecessor. The melodic hooks and monster bass lines that stood out there are submerged here, boiled down into a flat, sleep deprived kind of haze. Initially, this is worrying – the preponderance of wind chimes n’ wood blocks in the intro cut do not bode well, and when the main vocal line on proper lead-off track ‘Beautiful Son’ kicks in, sounding like a pale and slightly cloying echo of ‘936’s triumphant ‘All The Sun That Shines..’, things are not lookin’ good.

First couple of listens, ‘Lucifer’ sticks stubbornly to the background – thin and vaguely insipid. Give it time though – sip some whisky, open the windows for a bit of summer night breeze – once you’ve lived with it a few days, there is much goodness to be unlocked. Through their career to date, Peaking Lights have specialised in making tracks that sound kinda bulbous and disconcerting for their first few bars, but that will have you transfixed by the 30 second mark, convinced the song’s been playing in yr head since the dawn of time. Here they’re just working that technique on a grander scale, dialling down immediate eyebrow raisers like stuttering lo-fi drum loops and lumpy bass blurts in favour of gentler mood-wobblers – electric piano, slightly shakey tremolo guitar – and waiting for you to come to them.

Dig for the detail beneath the wipe-clean surface though, and before you know it you’ll be lost in the byzantine detail of the stunning ‘Dream Beat’ and the bonged out echo drift of the aptly-named ‘Cosmic Tides’. The most whacked of black ark-era dub once again becomes a viable touchstone, as disconcertingly dense lost-in-the-street-market kinda vibes start to hit heavy on ‘Midnight (in the Valley of Shadows)’. By the time the full-on alien exotica of ‘LO HI’ kicks in, it’s clear that if ‘Lucifer’ is a bit more elusive in its appeal than previous Peaking Lights records, it’s also a heck of a lot weirder, with the second side in particular full of deliciously peculiar textures that flit in and out of the mix like passing asteroids, anchored only by Dunis’s sing-song vocal lines, flattened here to the point where they almost acquire a sinisterly robotic edge, only regaining their previously comforting aura once they’ve been whacked through the echoplex, lone syllables hurtling off into deep, dark space.

Thinking about it, it’s odd that they should choose to name their ‘night time’ record after Lucifer the light bringer. But then, he’s also the ‘falling star’, which is kind of a night time thing? I guess..? And….. fuck it, who cares. Maybe you can ask them about it if you ever up doing an interview. Or read an old Alan Moore comic or something. I dunno. In the meantime just settle back and enjoy the tunes.

Labels: album reviews, late night listening, Peaking Lights

Late Night Listening for Midsummer Malaise.

I wish there was a generally acknowledged catch-all name for this kinda stuff. Y’know - sorta psychedelic, but not heavy or way-out enough to flip anyone’s wig; sorta ambient, but too eventful and attention-grabbing; sorta dance music indebted, but not very dancey or purely electronic; sorta experimental, in the generic sense, but not jarring or challenging enough to really justify the label as a descriptor. Sort of in the right ballpark for “hypnogogic pop”, but not really pop, and not ‘80s obsessed, fashion conscious, ultra self-aware or predominantly shit.

So a bit of everything and a whole lot of nothing really. What is this stuff that’s split itself off from the early ‘00s psyche/drone/whatever underground and taken up root somewhere around the central hub of Not Not Fun / 100% Silk etc, gradually migrating across to slightly bigger labels as time goes on? I dunno. Maybe somebody who still reads The Wire can tell me. I just tend to file it as “late night listening”, for reasons as dull as they are self-explanatory. I’ve been listening to a lot of it over the past few years anyhow, and finding it very rewarding.

Cringeworthy intro aside, it occurred to me the other week that all of my current favourite practitioners of this vague form have put out new releases recently, and that it might be nice to throw down some thoughts about them all now, rather than waiting for my end-of-year round up, as is traditional. So without further ado, let’s throw some cushions together somewhere near the turntable and spend the week seeing how this shit stacks up…

Labels: late night listening, series intros

God Less America # 1

In honour of 4th July, I thought it might be a good moment to instigate an occasional (weekly? monthly? whatever..) series, highlighting tracks from God Less America, an out of print compilation of morbidly unhinged novelty country records put together by Tim Warren of Crypt Records.

There have been dozens of similar collections over the years of course, and the sheer volume of warped novelty blather that’s been doing the rounds in the internet era has pretty much reached saturation point, but, as is the case with Crypt’s immortal ‘Back From The Grave’ series, no one has ever scraped quite the same barrels nor assembled their troubling findings with quite the same care as Mr. Warren, leaving us with a brief but extraordinary playlist that takes us to some very dark and curious places indeed, exhibiting a far, far higher potential for fascination and longevity than might usually be encountered with this sort of shtick.

Key to this I think is that, with a few exceptions, the tunes (well I say tunes, quite a few of them are just weird spoken word kinda things) on ‘God Less America’ are compelling and well-executed listens rather than one-play ‘snigger and move on’ kinda spins, and a few are just flat-out brilliant.

Beginning with one of the latter, here’s ‘Down & Out’, performed by Chuck Wells.

Taking the received wisdom that a good country song hinges on death and tragedy to its natural conclusion, ‘Down & Out’ is a masterpiece of narrative efficiency, working from the blueprint of a generic Johnny Cash-style ‘story song’ and cranking things up to a truly fevered degree, somehow managing to cram real estate fraud, gun-running, incarceration, true love, marriage, murder, despair, vengeance, more murder, drug addiction and more despair into three minutes and five seconds, still leaving room for choruses, instrumental breaks and a healthy dose of doom-stricken, Satan-based philosophising.

Songwriters: listen, learn and cry tears of awe. That’s all I’ve got to say on the matter.

BEST BIT:

After repeated listens, I’m very keen on the neat way the final verse is turned, but for sheer immediacy the “KILL KILL KILL” moment is hard to beat.

HISTORY:

My five whole minutes of research suggests that info regarding Mr. Wells is pretty scarce. Not to be confused with the Carolina soul singer of the same name, it seems likely that this Chuck Wells was the native of Jaspar, Alabama who recorded numerous sides between 1952 and 1954, sixteen of which (not including ‘Down & Out’) are collected on a CD entitled ‘The Complete Hillbilly Collection’, released in 2006 by UK label Cattle records. Though it would be a hair-raising number in any era, I couldn’t help thinking ‘Down and Out’ sounded a bit too modern for the early ‘50s, and indeed, this handy discography reveals that it was actually the B side of a one-off comeback single issued on the Rice label in 1965; the A-side is the promisingly titled ‘Good Morning Fool’.

Labels: Chuck Wells, country, God Less America