Francis Lai, “Bilitis”: what better place to start than soundtrack music for a late-70s "erotic" movie with plenty of girl-on-girl fun. The cover shows two barely clad females in the early stages of "sexual awakening". The inside cover shows one similarly unclad girl up a tree and-or in the early stages of some arboreal action. Don’t ask me about the music ... (Actually, do ask me about the music, which is sometimes gorgeous but too often stuck in a seventies soft-focus timewarp. Francis Lai wrote “A Man And A Woman”, one of the most-covered songs in our expansive collection of old easy-listening records. It sounds perhaps best on the Hammond Organ but can be profitably adapted to many different styles.)
Interpol, “Antics”: unlike the DFA crew, and bands like Vive La Fete and Out Hud, Interpol are content to take elements of the post-punk sound/ethos and do absolutely nothing with them. It’s a bit like the umpteenth mod/ska/rockabilly/garage-punk revival, where the object is to stay as close to the original template as possible without breaching any intellectual-property laws. But post-punk was never about respecting the past. It was about either smashing the display cabinet into a million pieces or skirting deftly around it. So, to me, this both misses the point and is pointless.
Bloc Party, “Silent Alarm”: as above, so below, only more so.
Billy Bragg & Wilco, “Mermaid Avenue”: on the other hand, if you are going to exhume Woody Guthrie you might as well choose people in the nature of Bragg and Wilco, artists who both, in their own ways, forged new paths through the witchy thickets of established musical genres, maintaining a healthy scepticism and a lot of ’tude while at the same time paying the best kind of respect to their elders.
The Hives, “Tyrannosaurus Hives”: on yet another hand, The Hives show that, in certain situations, sounding like the past isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. I probably wouldn’t choose to listen to a record like this too many times, but each time I did I would smile, which in this rotten world is no bad thing. In any event, I can't get enough of that gloriously counterintuitive riff on “Walk Idiot Walk”.
Camera Obscura, “Underachievers Please Try Harder”: the hazards of random downloading of music, part 225: you stumble unexpectedly upon a song as astoundingly good as “Teenager” by Camera Obscura. You know nothing about them, but the song quickly worms its way to the deeper recesses of your central nervous system. You find a copy of the album from which it sprung. Your expectations are high. And yet. And yet. You work hard at it. Perhaps a little bit too hard. Each time you listen, you can’t get past “Teenager”. Of course, you feel guilty. “It’s not me, it’s you”, you say. But you can’t really be sure. The rest of the album seems pale in the shadow of that one song (as would a high proportion of pop songs released in any given year, admittedly). But where would the rest of the album be without it? It’s impossible to tell. You are already too badly smitten to be able to take a step backwards and admire it from a sensible distance. So you give it a “fail”. And hate yourself for that. But you keep listening to “Teenager”. And you will continue to do so.
