Well, aside from starting with a song called
"Sunrise" and ending with a song called "Ending", this
playlist, in accordance with usual practice, comes to you with absolutely no rhyme or reason.
And it is a year old.
"Sunrise", by Cherubin. Now is probably the right
time to mention that, for the whole of 2013, the dj/crate digger known as
Turquoise Wisdom blogged one song each weekday, and given the excellence of many of
his choices you will see an unhealthy number of those songs in these playlists
until we get to 2014. (I'm feeling its loss already.) (He did it as a New
Year's Eve resolution, which is silly enough; that he pulled it off without
faltering is just insane. We are grateful for his efforts. And his good taste.)
This is one of those songs. It's from 1974, the year that just keeps on
sounding better and better.
"Houses", by Elyse. What do the words "guitar
by Neil Young" mean to you? To me they mean "listen up". The
song itself is otherwise perfectly fine but not shout-from-the-rooftops-great
hippy-trippy folk rock, typical of its vintage (1968), but it is certainly
livened up by the short blasts of "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere"
Youngian electric-guitar splendour.
"L'Espace D'Une Fille", by Jacques Dutronc. This
is like listening to Serge Gainsbourg's slightly more burnished, slightly less nicotine-stained,
cousin. The echoes of this song in Serge's own "Harley Davidson",
recorded and released as a single by Brigitte Bardot only a year later, are
either coincidental or not. And Serge isn't saying.
"Hesitation", by Honk. The way this song starts,
you think you are in for another unwanted jazz-lite-fusion outing. And that sax
line does reappear throughout the song, but elsewhere it's a kind of Doobie /
Alessi Brothers vocal harmony extravaganza (from 1974, as if you hadn't
guessed) and the world and its hard drives have always got room for one more of
those.
"The Good, The Bad and The Ugly", by Llans
Thelwell and His Celestials. True story: In olden times, when my associate and
I spent unhealthy amounts of time digging through piles of other people's
discarded vinyl in search of Arthur Lyman, Martin Denny and Manuel records (and
the elusive V Balsara), we took home more than enough Klaus Wunderlich albums
to last any normal person a lifetime. (We still have them all.) The back covers
of some of these records gave, tantalisingly, the track listings on other of
his records, and we were particularly intrigued that one of the "Hammond
Pops" series that we didn't have (No. 3, to be precise) included Klaus's
take on "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly". (You can see how that would
get us excited.) Thus, we were beside ourselves when, one day, "Hammond
Pops 3", with its typically alluring cover photo, appeared, like a miracle, before our very eyes. It seemed
too good to be true. And it was. Foolishly not checking the record itself
before rushing it home, we discovered to our disappointment that someone had
put a different "Hammond Pops" volume in the wrong sleeve. And so our
search continues. In the meantime, it is nice to have this ska/bluebeat version
to get us through the lean times.
"Love Can Run Faster", by Robert Palmer. I don't
even like this. So what is it doing here? Because I have been searching for a
long time for the reputed song that Robert Palmer recorded with Lee
"Scratch" Perry at the Black Ark. And this is it. Musically, it is a
typical Black Ark production. There is nothing wrong with that. But Palmer's
white-boy soul shtick over the top of it isn't a good fit. I much prefer Perry in an all-Jamaican context and I much
prefer Palmer on his album of the following year, "Clues". C'est la
vie.
"Fool for a Valentine", by The Gist. Following the
demise of Young Marble Giants after one (perfect) album, Stuart and Philip
Moxham re-emerged as The Gist. They released one album, and it seems that
Philip then went off on his own to do a number of different things, some
surprising (David Thomas and the Passengers, in the company of one Richard Thompson)
and some not so surprising (Weekend; a stint with Everything But the Girl),
leaving Stuart as the gist of The Gist (ahem). This song, the A side of a Rough
Trade single (of course), is, therefore, Stuart Moxham's baby. It is also the
final Gist record. It is, too, an example of white-boy reggae done right,
perhaps because its gentle lilt doesn't seek to draw too much attention to
itself.
"Trees and Flowers", by Dum Dum Girls. Generally
speaking, I ain't got time for cover versions of the songs that mean the most
to me. "Trees and Flowers", by Strawberry Switchblade, is one of
those songs. Hence, I listened to this cover through gritted teeth. I got to
the end, listened again, and then again. The world didn't end. Maybe it began
again. This is a very different take from the original: it is a bit like being
submerged in an densely glooping sonic bath. (If that could be a good thing.) Following
on from their take on The Smiths' "There is a Light That Never Goes
Out", one can only conclude that Dum Dum Girls have a way with other
people's songs.
"Blind Myself", by Rosemary. And so we find
ourselves back in the wondrous days of do-it-yourself bands playing untameable
analogue synths and rogue drum machines, a lone female vocalist shining a beam
of light into the darkness. Except this song is from 2013. Incidentally, it
reminds me of what I loved so much about the early Nite Jewel records.
"(Don't) Turn Me Away", by Rexy. And speaking, as
we were, of Young Marble Giants, this might be what YMG would have sounded like
had they used electronic instruments rather than, y'know, like, guitars and
stuff. (Okay, they did use a drum machine.) This, like all of the best records,
is from 1980. I wish I had known about it at the time, but better late than
never I guess.
"Fingers", by Cyclopean. This is on the Spoon
label, the home of your Can records. Which isn't so surprising, because, as
well as Burnt Friedman, Cyclopean features Jaki Liebezeit and Irmin Schmidt,
names you might know. "Fingers" is a lovely piece of music in its own
right; but it also puts me in mind of a couple of things: (1) not surprisingly,
the "Snake Charmer" EP, from 1983, which also featured Liebezeit
along with Holger Czukay (another member of the Can axis); and (2)
surprisingly, last year's album by Dawn of Midi (I am thinking in particular of
the attenuated string sound -- superficially tagged as "Eastern" -- that
is common to both records).
"Modern Driveway", by Luke Abbott. Come for the
gorgeous chord sequences. Stay for the, um, gorgeous chord sequences. This
knocks me over in a similar way to the way Caribou's "Swim" album
knocks me over. I probably could have expressed that better.
"White Noise", by Disclosure. By the end of 2013
Disclosure had acquired ubiquity. But back in March, not so much. See how hip
we are? (After the event ...)
"Magnifique", by Jersey Devil Social Club. AKA
Morgan Geist, of whom we haven't seen so much lately. "Magnifique"
was a disco burner from 1979. Is this a cover? An edit? Part of me has to know;
the rest of me just wants to dance.
"Pearly Dew", by Lena Hughes. Queen of the flat
top guitar, apparently. Reissued on the Tompkins Square label, so you know it's
good.
"Wakin on a Pretty Day", by Kurt Vile. "Kurt
Vile", it seems, is his real name. That may well be all you need to know. ("Wakin" does not have an apostrophe on the record cover. You probably don't need to know that.) This song, which stretches out over ten minutes on a laid-back yet industrious
bed of electric guitars, seems to have no tickets on itself. It exists for its
own sake. I don't know if I've heard a better song in a long while.
"Ending", by Bruce Langhorne. Langhorne, I
discovered when looking into who the hell he is, seems to have worked with Pete
Seeger, so it's timely, if coincidental, that this list goes up in the same
week that Seeger left us. This haunting piece is from the soundtrack to Peter
Fonda's 1971 film "The Hired Hand", although the soundtrack seems not
to have been released until the early oughts, courtesy of Blast First records
(another label to which we owe so much). It would be perfect for a warm night
around an open campfire, although it might scare the children.
