Saturday, March 30, 2013

Hypothetical mixtape: April 2012


I listen to stuff. I think about it. Briefly. I type some words. April 2012 wasn't a year ago. Yet.

"Are You Gonna Waste My Time?", by Zeus. If you believed this song was the product of 2012, well, you would believe anything. And yet it's true! A totally unexpected breath of fresh air that squarely hits that unlikely mid-point between Matthew Sweet and Queen. Not to mention a band name that suggests late 1960s Greek prog rock.

"Compare and Contrast", by Matt LeMay. And speaking of Matthew Sweet, there must be something in the ether, because if you had snuck this power-pop gem onto Sweet's "Time Capsule" album while nobody was looking, you would probably have gotten away with it. Which, in nobody's language, is a bad thing.

"How Deep Is Your Love", by The Rapture. This one-sided 12" from 2011 is not quite "Happy House", but it's in the ballpark. It makes me feel the way I felt when I first played the second, crucial DFA "Compilation" set: that here are a bunch of hipsters who have been listening to, and distilling into their own sound, something not unlike my own ideal record collection.

"Night And Day (Daphni Mix)", by Hot Chip. I'm not that much of a fan of Hot Chip. They do one type of song really well (viz., "Over and Over") but they also do a lot of other songs. Man of the moment Daphni takes one such and flips it on its ear. It ends with a minute of free-jazz-style skronk of a kind that you wouldn't expect to hear on a Hot Chip record. The preceding six minutes are pretty surprising, and, in fact, exciting, too.

"Rained the Whole Time (Nicolas Jaar Remix)", by Shlohmo. In the absence of anything new from Jaar himself, it's nice to be able to hear him add his distinctive electro/acoustic tinkerings to someone else's music. I haven't heard the original of this, but there isn't much here that doesn't sound like the work of Jaar. What's not to like?

"Soul Vibrations", by Dorothy Ashby. Not a song that can easily be translated into words. Check it.


"Never Let It Go", by Dolly Mixture. There is a particular type of honesty, of not being afraid to expose your own frailties, that makes much of the music recorded in the aftermath of the "punk rock" eruption a joy to listen to even 32 years later. That, and a knack for an irresistible melody. That particular, brief moment, linked in my own mind with smudged copies of the NME as it was before colour printing allowed them to better affix the text to the page, didn't last long. It probably couldn't have. See also The Marine Girls. *Sigh*.

"Angie La La", by Nora Dean. It is on the Treasure Isle label, but it doesn't bear much resemblance to what your or I would immediately call "reggae". It is certainly exotic -- including, but not only, in the Martin Denny sense. Released, evidently, on the back of a U-Roy seven-inch. Insane! (In an odd kind of way it puts me in mind of Broadcast.)

"There's A Reward", by Joe Higgs. Whereas this is reggae through and through. (Although you don't actually find that out until about 15 seconds in. Wait for it. And while you're at it could somebody please construct a song out of a loop or loops from those first 15 seconds? Thanks.)

"Clouds", by Deep Time. And thus we are thrust back into the present day. I don't mean to be unfair here by latching on to the observation that the singer can't help but be compared to Laetitia Sadier. There is much more to the song than a lazy comparison like that. But hey, it's Saturday afternoon.

"Call Me Maybe", by Carly Rae Jepson. The trouble with being behind in your writing by a year is that a song that you, maybe, recognised as something special while it was still in its embryonic phase, is that, well, by the time you finally get around to putting pen to paper it has been all over everywhere and back again. So that even you probably don't entirely want to hear it again. (At least one of your children threatens to kill you if you don't turn it off.) And yet here it is, and you are surprised, and yet also not, to discover that it can still give you goosebumps. What's with that?

"I'll Be Your Man", by Anna Calvi. We also, sometimes, like a nice twang in our guitar. This would be one of those times. It would appear that Anna Calvi did the twanging herself. Impressive. There is a certain earnestness here, or seriousness of intent, perhaps, that makes me think, "Nineties". There may well be an essay to be written about the lyrics, too. But since when have I taken any notice of lyrics?

"Girl You Need A Change Of Mind", by Eddie Kendricks. It's not only the weirdness quotient, or the ubiquity, of a song that makes it impossible to write about. A song as absolutely perfect in every way as this one resists all efforts to wax lyrical. Again: check it. (Consumer advisory: the full 7.5-minute version is even better.)


"Distillation", by H. Tical. Once upon a time, and I think it was mostly in Europe and to a lesser extent the UK, a bunch of musicians would get together in a studio and spend what by today's standards would be unfeasibly extravagant budgets recording short pieces of music in the hope that some of them would be picked up for use in film or television. Small runs of vinyl albums would be released, not for commercial sales purposes but because, well, it wouldn't make much sense to make these recording and have no way of getting the right people to hear them. Then the world forgot all about them, and these recordings, now known as "library music", grew dusty in a corner somewhere, as movies and television shows came to be populated by music specially written by one of a handful of essentially rote composers (obviously not a blanket statement; you're not going to find me dissing Morricone, for example, or Nino Rota, or Bernard Herrmann, or to be specific Jonny Greenwood's score for "There Will Be Blood" -- oh boy, now there's a doozy), or by pop songs chosen by what seem to be called "music consultants". (That's a gig I wouldn't mind.) Today, as with everything else, people collect these records and share them via the internet. They can be fun to listen to, and the record covers tend to be pretty groovy in a sixties design kind of way, and without their influence Stereolab and Broadcast, to name just a few, would sound (and look) quite different from the way either of them turned out. This is one of those tracks. It has some spirited electric guitar.

"I Only Have Eyes For You", by Beck. Evidently this was generated for an artist's installation project. If, like me, you have been lamenting the recent paucity of recorded Beck, this will remind you of what you have been missing. You might say it is doo-wop filtered through the fevered mindscape of a David Lynch movie. Or you might not.

"I Am Not Waiting Anymore", by Field Report. It may put you in mind of Phil Ochs' "I Ain't Marching Anymore". (The name might be the only reason for this. On the other hand it might not be.) It also puts me in mind of the underheralded Peter Case, which is kind of a nice surprise.

"Mirrorball", by Nisennenmondai. One is inclined to think that if Can had hailed from Japan in the early 21st century they might have sounded something like this. (Perhaps Manuel Gottsching has wandered in to contribute some guitar.) It also builds in a way that suggests they have been listening to LCD Soundsystem, masters of that particular form. After a minute or so you might find yourself screaming "Make it stop!" Five minutes later you will have lost all track of time. And there are still six more minutes to go. Who would ever have thought three Japanese chicks could make such a racket. What's that? Oh. You're right. "Shonen Knife."


Saturday, March 23, 2013

Song of the day

"Planet Phrom", by Peter Gutteridge.

On the subject of Dunedin.

It may turn out that one of the reasons I am so fond of the music of Real Estate is that it contains within its crevices the latent influence of the golden age of music from Dunedin. Matt Mondanile plays guitar for Real Estate. Real Estate are not from Dunedin. They are not even from New Zealand. They are from New Jersey, which is not the same thing at all. Mondanile also has his own band/project, entitled Ducktails. Ducktails have just released a new album, called "The Flower Lane". It includes a song called "Planet Phrom". This may or may not ring bells with you. "Planet Phrom" is a song from Peter Gutteridge's Xpressway cassette, "Pure", from 1989.

Peter Gutteridge is from Dunedin. He may not be a household name anywhere, possibly even Dunedin, but his name crops up in a surprising number of places, if you were obsessed by the "DN scene" in the mid- to late-eighties. (As I was.) He appears on assorted tracks by The Chills (of which, in the early days, he was a member), The Clean (ditto), and The Verlaines, all of which are household names somewhere, if only in my own household. He was a member of short-lived almost-supergroup Snapper. He plays keyboards on The Alpaca Brothers' sublime "Legless" EP. (What's that you say? Never heard of it? Where have you been?)

He co-wrote "Point That Thing Somewhere Else". And there aren't many people on this earth who can say that.

When I first heard Peter Gutteridge the file-card system inside my head positioned him somewhere between Suicide and Spacemen 3. In fact he sounds nothing like either of them but the resonances of both are there, if not so much on "Planet Phrom."

Alan Haig plays drums on this track. There is another Pete Frame-type family tree for Alan Haig, perhaps at least as complex as the one sketched out above for Peter Gutteridge. Which is, in any event, far from complete. (Sandra Bell, anyone?)




Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Song of the day

"Christopher Columbus", by David Kilgour and the Heavy Eights.

A new David Kilgour song! Free! On the internet! Man, I love this place.

Visit http://archhillrecordings.bandcamp.com/track/christopher-columbus.

It also turns up three minutes into this clip. (So it's not a completely new song.)



The guys really should try to keep their guitar strings under control.

Monday, March 11, 2013

Song of the day

"Other Thematic Material", by Magazine.

I sometimes read Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck comics. They have been written and drawn over the years by many different people, but always with such a high level of craftsmanship that you never look at a drawing of Donald, or Scrooge, or Huey, Dewey and Louie, and think to yourself, "That's not right".

That is the kind of neat trick that Howard Devoto has pulled off with "Other Thematic Material". It could almost be an outtake from "Real Life". Except that "Real Life" was recorded in 1978 and "No Thyself", on which this song appears, was recorded in 2011.

The bass is not being played by Barry Adamson, and yet is instantly recognisable. The guitar is not being played (obviously enough) by the late John McGeoch, and yet it, too, is instantly recognisable. If anything, the main difference is in Devoto's voice, which clearly can't quite be asked to do what it could do 33 years ago. But Howard Devoto is the one component of Magazine that no amount of craftsmanship could mask the absence of. (Note: I am choosing not to draw attention to the lyrics.)

Okay, so "No Thyself" is never going to have the same pull as the first three Magazine albums, but it was nice, not to mention totally unexpected, to have them back.



[Side note: I heard that Barry Adamson has rejoined the Bad Seeds for the current tour, but that he is playing percussion rather than bass. This strikes me as a bit like hiring Marco Pierre White to do the washing up, but I'm sure they have their reasons.]

Saturday, March 02, 2013

Song of the day

"Weakness and Fever", by The Durutti Column.

And speaking of Kevin Ayers, there are a couple of songs on the new reissue of "LC", by The Durutti Column, that suggest a connection -- which I had never noticed before -- between Vini Reilly and the earlier generation of English pastoral psychedelicists that included Ayers and Syd Barrett. (And perhaps the connection then travels further back to the land of musical Albion depicted by Rob Young in his marvellous book "Electric Eden". But we might be getting ahead of ourselves there.)

I suspect I can also detect a hint of The Cat's Miaow in here, too. But then I would say that.