Rip it up and start again?

The opening sentence of Ellen Willis's second "Rock, Etc" column for the New Yorker, in the issue of 6 July 1968, reads as follows:

The sociology of rock and post-rock has been based on three concepts: the star, the sound, and the scene.

So, Simon, remind me again who coined the phrase "post-rock"? "You can run, but you can't hide" etc etc, heh heh.

What's interesting is that someone in 1968, practically at the birth of the thing called "rock", could already have been thinking in terms of what had already come next, and just goes to show that the seemingly instantaneous fracturing/fragmenting of musical genres isn't confined to South London and/or the Aughties.

(I am, as you have gathered, making it my business to read, or re-read, all of Ellen's New Yorker columns. They are uniformly excellent. Period pieces, sure, but from an unusual source - not the usual hippie-centric pot-driven reveries/ranting of Rolling Stone, nor the POV of "The Man" a la, say, Time Magazine, but, rather, appearing in a curious place inside of the establishment with an editor who had enough nous to have someone writing about a particular artform who actually knows something about that artform As It Is Happening, and not merely observing from the comfort of their glass box. Or whatever. (See also Pauline Kael, the magazine's film critic at that time.))

Kuepperfest

Adrienne has, at various times and accurately, accused me of constructing the following shrines around myself: one to the New Yorker; one to Brian Eno; one to Bob Dylan; one to The Necks; and one to Ed Kuepper. And the Ed Kuepper shrine just got a bit bigger, with the discovery on eMusic (funny how often what you really want to download from eMusic is not the stuff they are trying to sell you) of five volumes of what Ed has rather cheekily entitled the Prince Melon Bootleg Series, comprising four sets of live recordings under Ed's own name (including "Honey Steel's Gold" done for that series of Original Artists Play The Original Albums concerts), and one by the Laughing Clowns comprising the 17-minute "Eternally Yours" recorded at Dingwalls (now there's a name from my late-1970s NME-reading past) and featuring the unexpected reappearance of Louise Elliott into the fold.

I propose writing at some greater length about these recordings in particular, and Ed in general, because I don't think Ed gets anywhere near the credit he deserves. But for now I just wanted to mention a couple of songs that came up sequentially a couple of nights ago on the iPod, both of which were heavy on the Kuepper. First was "Over The Hill", by John Martyn, from "Solid Air", which features, coming at you from the left speaker, a furiously strummed mandolin, something that Ed must surely have heard around the latter years of the Laughing Clowns, given its appearance on songs like "Master of Two Servants" and, later, "When The Sweet Turns Sour". Then came someone even lesser sung than Ed Kuepper, at least in this country, namely Peter Milton Walsh, and his long-running band The Apartments. "End of Some Fear", which hails from the glorious "A Life Full of Farewells", draws on the Laughing Clowns in its structure and instrumentation, and is also notable for the appearance of the word "Fear" in the title, a word that appears once or twice in the Ed Kuepper vernacular.

You Make Me Dizzy

Spent a night in hospital. Feel like shit warmed up. But enough about me. Watch this; it will do you a power of good.

The heck. Watch this as well. It's Good Haircut Week.

Song of the day

"Sun Gonna Shine In My Back Door Someday Blues", by John Fahey. Dig, if you will, the title of this solo guitar piece. It is saying, Things aren't going so well at the moment, but one day in the future I am sure that they will be better. Which is a neat way of summing up the way things are at our house at the moment.

The guitar is an instrument the complexities of which I was not able to understand, or even imagine, until I had a fascinating conversation one day with my good friend Rob. Rob knows his guitars. I always thought you played a note and got a sound, and that was about it. Oh, no it isn't. Playing the acoustic guitar in particular, and especially the way John Fahey plays it, involves exponential levels of complexity, almost of a Man Against Nature magnitude. Okay, you have to be able to play the notes. Which Fahey could undoubtedly do, no matter how complicated and/or rapidfire those notes may have been. But on top of that you have the resonating effects of the body of the guitar, the resonating effects of the strings, the type of wood, the mic-ing up, the sound of the room, and who knows what else, to grapple with. There are live recordings of Fahey that sound like a man riding a precision-made billy cart down a steep hill without brakes or steering wheel, and somehow managing to wind up at the designated finishing point with an air of "all in a day's work". I would love to have seen him play. The existence of a recording entitled "Live in Tasmania" suggests the chance may have been closer than I thought.

You need to hear Fahey's playing. There is a lot of it out there. "The Great Santa Barbara Oil Slick" is a particularly good live recording. It may be the one I was thinking of in the previous paragraph. It's a personal thing, obviously, but I'm not sure that the later, experimental Fahey, mucking about with electronics, electricity and the like, is actually all that rewarding. Many will disagree. Whatever. But I think it is at least arguable that all you really need is the 1996 collection "The Legend of Blind Joe Death", which combines the 1964 and 1967 "Blind Joe Death" recordings of the same set of tunes (there is supposedly a 1959 recording, too, but the provenance of Fahey's recordings, particularly for his own Takoma label, can get a bit murky), with a couple of extras thrown in for good but unnecessary measure. That is where "Sun Gonna Shine" comes from, and I am particularly feeling, today, the 1967 recording. It is a bit longer. It ups the degree of difficulty and the corresponding payoff. The recording is crisp and clear. The guitar behaves itself, even if there are moments when it threatens not to. I love it.

Bible stories

Go here. Read the story, which gives a little insight into what went into the making of R Crumb's forthcoming take on the Book of Genesis. Then click on the picture. When it opens on its own page, click on it again. Look closely. Seems like Crumb has been doing his Best Quality Work, to use a Hughes Primary School benchmark.

For the girl who has everything

Therapy?

Or, Write a two thousand word essay on how my thinking got so screwed up.

Here goes.

Many years ago there was a young man called Stan. He grew up an only child on a small family farm at Fish Creek. The farm was run by his parents and two of his dad's brothers. When Stan was growing up, his world was a narrow one. It revolved around his parents, his uncles, and various other relatives, mostly on his dad's side, who would visit from time to time. Those visits were always very exciting for Stan. Of course he also had childhood friends, but they don't enter into this story.

The two uncles never married. Hence, Stan was the only child not just of his parents but also of the entire farming operation. So the world of the farm, it seemed to Stan, revolved around him. And perhaps it did. It was more than just a home to him. It was his life. Even when he wasn't actually working on the farm, it formed the background to his playing, his study, and anything else that was going on. When he wasn't at school, he was at the farm. To him, that was just the way things were.

He grew to understand that the farm would one day be his. In his small world, he had no reason to think otherwise, anyway, and he thought no more about it.

Eventually young Stan finished high school and moved to Melbourne to go to university. Even then, though, he continued to go back to the farm on holidays and many weekends, and when he had finished university he found a job at a law firm 20 miles from the farm. He began forming plans, with his father, for what they might do together on the farm as his parents started to get older.

Around this time a number of things happened. His mother fell into poor health. He met a girl called Adrienne. And his father, after a very short illness, died of leukemia. Into his truncated and sheltered world entered a number of forces that were beyond his understanding and outside of his control. The result of this combination of outside forces was that the farm was lost. And a fundamental part of the young Stan was lost with it.

Looking back now, after many years, Stan finds himself applying his more mature and sophisticated brain to the exercise of dwelling on what happened, what could have been done differently, and, specifically, whether the farm could have been kept going and if, in fact, it was because of his actions that it was not. The problem with an exercise like that is that Stan now is not the same person as young Stan, and applying his current standards and abilities to the Stan that existed 20 years ago is an exercise in futility. But it is not just an exercise in futility; it is also stopping him from being able to luxuriate in his limitless store of fond memories of life on the farm, and life with his parents, because those memories are constantly being intruded upon by the equally limitless re-living of all that he went through.

And he went through quite a lot, for a young and inexperienced man. Even as he was coming to terms with the idea that his father was going to die, and with the burden of having to break that news to his mother, who was too unwell to be in Melbourne with her husband, he had to also try to make sense of what was happening around him: namely, that his dad's two brothers, and other members of the family, whom he had nothing but fondness for, appeared to be keeping him and his mother at some distance from their dying husband and father.

His mother would always, he had thought, be welcome to stay with the Melbourne branch of the family, as they often had as a family. But for some reason, that was going to be too much trouble for them. She was going to have to find accommodation elsewhere. Which was impossible. So Stan had to ferry his mother to the hospital on the second-last day of his father's life, and sit in at what was a terrible, terrible reunion. And then, the following day, having driven his mother back to the country and then driven, without her, back to Melbourne, in the knowledge that his father would die that day, he found himself waiting in line with other grieving relatives for a chance to be alone with his dad. At least he was able to be there, with Adrienne by his side, when his father died.

To re-tell that story now is difficult enough. But it is hard to imagine how this young man called Stan could have navigated his way through it. What skills did he have? The dynamic between him and the other members of the family was always, in essence, that he stood one step behind and to the side of his father. And that all of them, his parents and his two uncles, essentially stood together. Could he have confronted his Melbourne relatives and insisted that they give his mother a bed for a few nights? Of course not. Did they deny her this so as to keep Stan and his mother at one remove from his father, knowing that Stan would have to divide his time between the hospital and where his mother was staying, two hours away, and that she was too unwell to be able to spend any length of time at the hospital? The thought would never have entered his head. He was not an active participant in whatever was going on, but a young man trying to deal with events that he could not understand. Were they trying to send a message to him, and his mother, that his mother was not "real" family? Well, he would have had no idea about anything like that.

He also didn't understand what was happening when, in the days after his father died and before the funeral, he watched another older brother of his father's, visiting the farmhouse to pay his respects, and wandering around looking at things as if taking an inventory, and making no secret of it.

What young Stan gradually figured out for himself was that, unbeknownst to him, the older of his two uncles had never accepted his mother, and that uncle called the shots throughout the family. So Stan never stood a chance, really, because from a very young age he had worshipped that uncle. There was nobody there to explain to Stan that he would have to choose between the family and his mother. But choose is what he was forced to do, and what he did, and of course his loyalty was to his mother. In making that choice, though, the fate of the farm was sealed. His uncle ruled out the idea of any kind of partnership in the absence of his father, and his mother was not prepared to put her own financial security in the hands of his uncle, so the relationship had to end.

His role, really, was to watch the relationship, and the farm, fall apart, and in a practical sense to facilitate that happening. He had the skills, and the legal knowledge, to know the mechanics of what had to be done and to be able to make that happen. What he didn't have was the ability, or the worldliness or maturity, perhaps, to intervene, or to try and wrest control of things from his uncle and the extended family.

One particular task that fell to him, because his uncle had sent them to see him rather than doing it himself, was to tell the sharefarmers that the farm wouldn't be continuing on beyond the end of the season and that they had better look for work elsewhere. He didn't understand why it came to him to do that, because the business of the farm was nothing to do with him. But he did it anyway.

Is it any wonder, then, that as time has passed he has come to place himself at the centre of the story, as an active player, rather than as the inexperienced, well, not victim exactly, but participant in the collapse of everything that had been most important to him? And, of course, all of these things were compounded on top of his own grieving, and coming to terms with his own changed world, and the family history he hadn't known, and hadn't been prepared for, and taking the necessary steps to ensure that his mother was able to be looked after and cared for (itself an unexpected role reversal for which he was ill prepared). And, let us not forget, young Stan had no brothers or sisters to turn to for advice, and his mother was in no condition to take any of the pressure off him. In fact, at the same time as Stan was at the centre of this cyclone, hanging on just enough to make sure that her interests were looked after, his mother was dealing with her own grief and poor health, and taking out her own frustrations on him. So he had, really, nowhere to turn, no one making sure he was alright. Well, he had Adrienne, but she wasn't part of this particular history. It wasn't her approbation he was looking for.

In the wash-up, his mother kept a small part of the farm. As for the family, he walked away. He couldn't really do otherwise. He didn't burn bridges, he just left them behind. There was too much hurt, too much doubt and confusion, for him to be able to just turn back into the arms of the people who had done this to him. For a few years, his mother's part of the farm was leased out to neighbours as a turn-out paddock. But it wasn't viable on its own, wasn't as well looked after as if it had been owner-operated, and, especially after he moved to Canberra with his own family, was too far away to be enjoyed for recreational purposes. So, long after his mother herself had died, he made the final decision to sell what was left of it. But that decision, which was his own, was really only the full stop at the end of the chapter that had written itself when he was only 25 years old.

So, if the Stan of 2009 wants to ask the questions, What did he do wrong? and What could he have done differently?, which, anyway, are questions that are unfair to the Stan of 1989, the least you can say is, he did what he had to do. You should, though, go on to say that in the circumstances he also did the "right" thing, when those whom he understood to be his elders and betters were putting pressure on him to do otherwise, pressure he was in no position to resist, and at a time when, on so many levels, he was trying to get his bearings in a world that had so quickly and so unexpectedly become so different from the one he thought he knew. So the fact that he did resist that pressure, that he supported his mother, when he could see what he thought would always belong to him slipping away from him as a direct result of those decisions, says something, and perhaps it says rather a lot, about how well he performed, at the age that he was, and with the skills that he had, and with the maturity that he didn't yet have. And perhaps it also says that he went through things that very few young adults would ever be asked to navigate, essentially on his own.

When he is able to think back to those times, and what he had to do, and what he did, and in particular when he is able to remind himself that he was not then the person that he is now, well, then he will have untied the knot that has been snarling his thoughts for a long, long time, and he will be as free as a bird, free to soar over the childhood that still exists, in brilliant technicolour inside of his head, and the view will no longer be obscured by clouds.

Song of the day

"Put Down The Ducky", I suppose I should say "by Sesame Street", but that doesn't look right. And yet it is a Sesame Street song. For some reason the boys, in their later primary school years, are having a SS revival, so we are hearing many old favourites (and the occasional clanger) in the car. Sesame Street was responsible for a great many songs that have stood the test of time. Which is something you can't say for, say, Hi-5. "Put Down The Ducky", Carl tells me, is sung by Hoots the Owl. If so, Tom Waits should be instructing his lawyers. This is, in essence, the pre-"Swordfishtrombones" Waits, accompanied by a rubber duck where the saxophone should be. I can't hear it too many times. (Though if you ask me again in a fortnight I may have a different view on that.)

Good Cover Version

I write about Beach House more than is probably good for me. But I like what they do. And I like their version of Queen's "Play The Game", which strips out all of the pomp and bombast of the original and turns it into, well, into a Beach House song. As I understand it, this was recorded for the "Dark Was The Night" charity compilation, a record which was just too pick-and-miss for my liking, but which I would have been more likely to pony up for if this had been included on it. Fortunately the Internet reveals all, sooner or later.

Traffic

What follows is the text of an email I sent today to the person in charge of pedestrian crossings in the ACT. If you are driving in this area, please take care. I would like to watch my children grow up.

Good afternoon.

I work at the High Court. I travel most days by public transport. To catch the bus home of an evening, I have to use the pedestrian crossing opposite the Court on King Edward Terrace. Each of the last three evenings, I have had to take evasive action when using the crossing, in order to avoid being run over.

Twice I have been half way or more across the crossing when cars travelling west have failed to see me or stop (each time they have slowed down after having gone past me, but then kept going). Last night I had stepped out onto the crossing when a car travelling east failed to see me in time and had to swerve into the oncoming traffic to avoid hitting me. (Then, while I was waiting at the bus stop, I observed a man crossing the other way, i.e. from Finance towards the Court, have to stop in the middle of the crossing as two cars in a row failed to either see or stop for him.)

This is not the only time I have had to take evasive action using this crossing, but the fact of it happening three nights in a row prompted me to put my concerns in writing. It is only a matter of time before somebody is killed using this crossing. That person may or may not be me. I don't know what the problem is, the crossing appears to be well lit. Perhaps it is not being noticed because it is in the middle of a sequence of closely placed T intersections, so drivers have a lot to look out for.

Perhaps it needs flashing lights or something else that would attract drivers' attention.

Thank you

(This reminds me of the famous Pauline Hanson "If you are watching this message" tape. "If this is the last entry on this weblog, I was killed this evening on my way home from work." Let's hope not.)

Song of the day

"Remember Me", by Tame Impala. It starts off like you could be listening to an early recording from The Chills or The Clean. But after a couple of bars we're headed straight for the garage. What is it with Australia and garage rock revivals? We can't seem to get enough of them. (And of course we were in on the ground floor, with the likes of The Loved Ones, amongst others.) But when the quality is this good, who's complaining? This particular iteration pushes things a bit further: just before the three minute mark they "take it right down"; then they slowly and tantalisingly "bring it right back up again", culminating in a bit of almost-metal riff-o-rama that one (well, "I") cannot resist. Curiously, the vocals, particularly around that point, sound like nothing as much as the strained warble of Eno on his early sequence of "pop" records. Which, of course, only serves to make it more appealing to some of us.

Link of the day

I don't know why this makes me feel all gooey inside. Well, gooey and just a little bit queasy, to be precise.

(And a welcome return to Mr Ingram, too.)

Song of the day

"The Carny", by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. It is with mixed feelings that I announce that I can no longer listen to this song without thinking of John Ratzenberger's travelling flea circus in "A Bug's Life". Curse you, Pixar.

By the way, the new remasters of the first four Bad Seeds albums do sound nice. I'm not sure whether it is the remastering or the passage of time that has revealed the importance of Blixa Bargeld to the enterprise.

Song of the day

"You Are The Worst Thing In The World", by Telefon Tel Aviv. A fine song from a fine album, an album with such intense depths of emotion locked into the very sound of it that one is inclined to think that it is little wonder that one of their number didn't survive its completion. When I am listening to this album while walking, there are moments when I stagger. Is it just that I am programmed to respond to certain analog synth sounds, whereas you might not be? Or is there something inherently devastating in those sounds?

In any event, the (rhetorical) question must be asked: Why is it that when, in this song, the synth goes out of tune, it is art, whereas when the same thing happens during the live portion of Joy Division's "Still", it is just the synth going out of tune?

Nightmare scenario of the day

Somehow, watching the Battle of Helm's Deep segment of the second "Lord of the Rings" movie (a sequence which I always find inexplicably distressing; it's only a story and I know how it ends, and yet ...) got me thinking about the Taliban in Pakistan. My brain "likes" to play What If. (Sometimes I don't like my brain.) What if the Taliban, with or without the backing of al Qaeda (if that organisation still exists, or in fact if it ever did), did manage to overrun Pakistan, or sufficient of it to get control of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal? What then? The only silver lining that could come out of that would be to relegate my concerns about climate change to a distant second place. (As I have said before, global warming would be counter-balanced by a nuclear winter.) Rogue weaponry is never a good idea, and especially on this scale.

My knowledge of areas, populations, relative strengths, and other relevant factors is insufficient to tell me whether it is even a remote possibility. But assuming, for the sake of argument, that it could happen, that the Taliban are the rampaging horde of Orcs* and the rest of us are cowering in our own Helm's Deep, can we look to the coming of Gandalf on the morning of the fifth day? (Look to the east.) Could Gandalf, in the guise of Barack Obama, spirit away Pakistan's nuclear arsenal to a safe place for the duration? Presumably even the Americans couldn't consider doing so by force, but would Pakistan's generals agree? And what about India? Theirs would need to go, as well, in order to placate Pakistan.

And while we're at it, should we perhaps go one step further and get rid of everybody else's? (I don't know where you could put them. How safe is Fort Knox really?) Yes, I know, now I'm just being silly. And yet it may turn out that the battlements of Helm's Deep would have been a safer bet.

* Here, the eleven-year-old corrects me: they are not mere Orcs, they are Uruk-Hai. It's important to get these things right.

Everybody's Talkin'

... about Sonic Youth. Now it's my turn.

If "Murray Street" was your only Sonic Youth album you would be pretty happy with it. It does all the things Sonic Youth albums do, and it does them quite well. But a band like Sonic Youth is not designed to be treated like a comfortable old pair of slippers, and that is what they seem to have become. If you treat "Murray Street" as one of however many post-"Daydream Nation" albums, it is just another inessential footnote. (I do have a particular soft spot for the sprawling "A Thousand Leaves", but aside from that I have to agree with Marcello, it's what he calls the "solid 95th album" thing of too many, too similar, none really hitting a fresh nerve.)

Speaking only for myself, the time when Sonic Youth really mattered was actually quite brief. Everything before "Sister" was too lacking in any recognisable "structure" for me to be able to grab hold of it. Everything after "Daydream Nation", well, see the previous paragraph. (And they moved to Geffen when I was at an age, and of an attitude, when a band doing something like moving to Geffen seemed like an uneraseable Black Mark, so that it wouldn't really have mattered how good "Goo" and "Dirty" were, I wouldn't have been listening. (Which, yes, might well have been my loss, but really, aside from having been put to good use in a couple of Hal Hartley films, I still don't think, even in my "mature" phase, that either album saw the group trying very hard.))

But "Sister" is where they started to figure something out about what they could do with the things they were doing, and "Daydream Nation", which, from the Gerhard Richter cover art to the final fadeout, is sublimely perfect in every way, is why Sonic Youth matter. I cannot praise any album higher than "Daydream Nation", but nor can I write about it because my response to it is outside of language. (And let us also acknowledge "Into The Groove(y)", where the group briefly emerge from their own cocoon and observe, albeit from an "ironic" distance, the world around them.)

They may be a convenient target for those who need targets (and Kim and Thurston may in many ways come across as A Little Bit Too Cool, A Little Bit Too Perfect), but they have their place in history and I don't think anybody can say they haven't earned it.

Song of the day

"Sad Robot", by Pornophonique. The subject matter is what got me interested. The Flight of the Conchords-style guitar strum made me tune in. The computer-game bleeps and vocoder were the icing on the cake. There is something very distressing about sad robots. Can they even cry?

Song of the day

"Ritz", by Cockney Rebel. If you leave out the accepted wisdom of how Steve Harley had enormous tickets on himself and was all but impossible to work with, all of which may or may not be true, what you have left is the music. The dramatic reach and musical depth of this song, from 1974's second and final Cockney Rebel album (as such), "The Psychomodo", manages to out-Bowie what Bowie was doing at the same time. It also serves to highlight all that was lacking in Harley's soon-to-follow UK Number One single, "Come Up And See Me (Make Me Smile)", which to these antipodean ears has always sounded like a second-rate parody of what an actual Cockney rebel would sound like. (Which is not, really, to say that the latter is not perfectly enjoyable on its own terms (it is), just that those terms didn't contain much in the way of ambition.)

Song of the day

"Something You've Got (Isn't Good)", by Barbara Manning. Barbara Manning would have a right to be a little, shall we say, bemused by the excitement that has been generated by Vivian Girls. Listen to this song; then listen to, say, the latter's "Where Do You Run To". I think you will see what I mean. If we really have gone nowhere since the late 80s, at least it's in a good way.

Fanboy thrill of the day

If you click here you will be taken to a page wherein you can (a) admire the latest addition to Daniel Gillespie Clowes's growing collection of New Yorker covers, and (b) scroll through some work-in-progress sketches for his next book, which is something you can't do every day.

Hypothetical mixtape: January 2009

Welcome to the first 2009 hypothetical mixtape. Sure, it's five months old, but you should be used to that by now. No thought has gone into the sequencing. Build your own.

"Taken Too Young", by TTA. A song from Sweden that echoes both Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and "Sorrow", and features vocals, by Victoria Bergsman of The Concretes, that are from the school of Tracy Thorn. In other words, a lot of personal buttons are being pressed (surely not "cynically manipulated"?) in the course of this drifting, melancholy pop song.

"What Did He Say", by Nite Jewel. I fell in love with this song when I first heard it. If my ardour has cooled somewhat in the interim, that is only because what I have heard of Ms Jewel's subsequent work suggests that perhaps this song's blend of minimalist glamour and cheap electronics wasn't the direction that she intended to go in. Which would be a shame. I can't put a finger on any particular forebears (although the song hasn't just fallen from outer space). So I won't. (Okay, you win: Kathy Diamond if you replaced Maurice Fulton with a very young Boyd Rice.) But its charms, icy, frosty and/or steely as they may be, are all its own.

Pacifika, "Sweet (Quiet Village Remix)". It's hard to tell what's organic and what's electronic here. The acoustic guitar sounds too real to be really real. There's no actual song here, just the impression of one. Ooh look, they're Canadian.

Ducktails, "Beach Point Pleasant". Some kind of otherworldly, disembodied pop music. You could use it as the soundtrack to a children's television programme if you were in the mood to watch kids running away from the screen and hiding under their parents' bed. It reminds me a bit of the non-vocal aspects of the first Broadcast single (thanks, Bart).

I-Robots, "Frau (Kid Alex Minimal to Disco Mix)". It is perhaps strange that I have been attracted to German techno music, as I have long studiously shunned both of its selling points: drugs and dancefloors. But this song has all of the elements that I am drawn to. You can tap your feet to it. You can hear the connections to one particular strand of my beloved post-punk records in the flat German vocals. You can marvel, nay thrill, to the sheer breadth and depth of the electronic sounds that are continually being thrown at you and then shifting, almost surreptitiously, as you try to grasp them. You can allow yourself to be absorbed into the tension-and-release dynamics that are so expertly set up by the music. This particular example also sets itself apart from the seamless one-song-into-another aspect of much of this music by allowing itself to fall apart at the finish.

Jeremy Jay, "Love Everlasting". Rudimentary synths, electric guitar lines, bass playing and drumming conjures something much, much more than the sum of the parts. This is a gloriously expansive bedroom pop number, and the first release on K Records that we can remember getting excited about since, oh, about 1989? Dude looks like he just walked out of a 1979 New Wave Time Warp. We won't hold that against him.

Peter Dundov, "Oasis (Gavin Russom Remix)". Gavin Russom has been quiet since his and Delia Gonzalez's "The Days of Mars" analogue space synth extravaganza. (And whither Black Leotard Front?) Happily, this 12-inch b-side takes up where that record left off. It sounds much like what "Days of Mars" might have if they had pressed it on top of a sheet of vinyl containing modern electronic dance music rather than on a clean piece of acetate.

Cotton Jones, "Gotta Cheer Up". This song wants to be your friend. Not in a needy, clinging-to-your-leg kind of way, but in a gentle, sweet kind of way. It doesn't have any tickets on itself, it just wanders in, does what it does, and wanders out again. Its roots are clearly enough in sixties garage pop, but it also draws on the kind of dreamy driftwood that Beach House have made their own. Also, it takes the organ used on Nick Cave's "Your Funeral ... My Trial" and conjures a gorgeous melody from it.

Emiliana Torrini, "Jungle Drum". Worth it just to hear her sing "doonga doonga googadooga doong goong" (approximate translation). This may be only place in the whole wide Internet where you can see Emiliana Torrini referred to without a corresponding reference to Bjork. Oh, blast.

Ofege, "Gbe Mi Lo". Psych rock funk guitar as it was done in Nigeria circa 1973. We can't get enough of that fuzzy wukka-wukka sound.

Shinichi Osawa, "Star Guitar". Big, fat drum and guitar sounds from the "rock" end of electronica, with some sweeping MBV (or, for a more recent example, M83) style chord changes to knock you off your feet. Leavened, gorgeously, by the voices of those Au Revoir Simone girls.

Coralie Clément, "Samba De Mon Coeur Qui Bat". And I melt. The album cover has her looking stunning in the manner of sixties French film stars. That's enough for me. Or so I thought. But she also sings like an angel. Where have you been all my life?

Muslims, "Walking With Jesus". Yes, it is *that* "Walking With Jesus". What I particularly like about this version, aside from the fact that it picks up the song and frogmarches it promptly back into the garage, is that the whole enterprise, from the sound quality to the cover art, is pure late-80s seven-inch-single heaven.

Real Estate, "Black Lake". Almost Google-proof, Real Estate refuse to reveal any secrets to me aside from this song. It's a quiet gem. The influence of Beach House is turning up in a lot of places these days. One day we will be sick of the sight of them, but today is not that day.

John Carpenter, "Assault on Precinct 13 (Main Theme)". It just seemed right to end a list that relies rather a lot on old and creaky analogue (and, in the case of the Gavin Russom remix, home-made) synths with the real thing. A film director who does his own soundtracks. No, it's not Hal Hartley. (Where did he get to anyway?) According to Wikipedia this was partly inspired by "Immigrant Song". The word "loosely" might be well employed here.

Song of the day

"Gail Loves Me", by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers. Following on from a pretty crap weekend, this song is just what was needed to put a little bit of autumnal bounce back into one's step.

Song of the day

"Paper Tiger", by Spoon. Question: how much can you strip out of a song before it ceases to be a "song"? This is a question that Spoon appear intent on finding the answer to. The answer seems to be: quite a lot. I went second-hand-CD shopping a couple of weekends ago (thanks to Uncle Kevin) and one of the things I came home with was Spoon's 2002 album "Kill The Moonlight". You get the impression, if you listen closely, that Spoon work hard figuring out what goes into each corner of each song, and, even more crucially, what gets left out. "Paper Tiger" stands out for being so minimal as to be almost an abstraction, but it is in fact as strong a pop song as you could wish for.

The more Spoon I listen to, the more impressed I am with what it is that they do. And with what it is that they don't do. It's the "fish John West reject" methodology applied to the pop song.

Song of the day

"The More That I Do", by The Field. This is the first taste of The Field's "Yesterday & Today", the forthcoming follow-up to 2007's "From Here We Go Sublime". (Or not, if you count his "Sound of Light", a collaboration with a Swedish hotel - n.b. not a typo.) As such it is, in and of itself, a cause for excitement. On the evidence of this track, we are in for more of the same, which is not yet a cause for concern, although there must be some danger that Mr Willner could, if he isn't careful, work himself into some sort of a corner. The steel drums at the end are a nice touch. And I swear the vocal sample this time around is taken from somewhere deep within the Cocteau Twins' "Treasure".

Song of the day

"Steinlager", by The Chills. "Mmmmm. Beer."



Elsewhere, today's headline of the day:

"Woman sees Jesus in toast".

Obviously.

Song of the day

"Keeping Us Together", by Keith Hudson. Perhaps as surprising a connection as the one discovered (or "invented"?) on yesterday's Song of the Day, today we bring you Keith Hudson, emerging from the deepest darkest dub jungle with - believe it ... or not - the first line of the chorus of "Macho Man", by The Village People. Although, given those Jamaicans' tendency to borrow liberally from other sources, and given also that Hudson's "Nuh Skin Up" was originally released in 1979, the year after "Macho Man" appeared, you might well think that it is not surprising at all.

Song of the day

"Seerosengiessen", by Thomas Fehlmann. In which German techno channels Snakefinger. Who'da thunk it? (With, I think, a little bit of "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts" thrown in for good measure.)

We Were Rwong

Yesterday we said, having foolishly trusted the sequence of songs as they appeared on our iPod, that "Point That Thing Somewhere Else" was the first song on The Clean's "Mashed". In fact, it sits somewhere in the middle. Which shoots our point about sequencing down in flames, but doesn't weaken the almighty power of the song itself, wherever it might appear.

Also, we did, as promised, listen to The Bats' "Couchmaster" last night, and were horrified to discover that it came into our life FOURTEEN years ago. Wow, where did that go? The good news is the record itself, unlike us, hasn't aged a bit. "For The Ride" I think I have mentioned here before, a very Clean-like propulsive vehicle of the type you would like to see go on forever. And as Adrienne said, "Afternoon in Bed" is the kind of song that really gets you where you live. My response, "What? Canberra?", was neither funny nor wanted.

Song of the day

"Point That Thing Somewhere Else", by The Clean. I try to resist this song. I can escape its clutches for the first two bars, but I always trip on the next note and tumble headlong into its endless corridors and its many rooms. There is something primally thrilling about "Point That Thing Somewhere Else". I can't say exactly what it is. Perhaps it is not so much a song as a template. Certainly, that is how The Clean treat it. There are several live versions floating around, and they all take on lives of their own. The most recent, and the one that prompted this post, is the opening song on "Mashed", a live recording of a recent Clean tour, and presumably the opening song of the set from which it is taken. How a band that gets together briefly once every few years, perhaps plays a few gigs, perhaps makes a record, can instantly hit such peaks of creative intensity is a credit to the Dunedin drinking water, I guess. There are not that many live recordings that genuinely make you wish you had been there.

Meanwhile the influence of The Clean continues to show up in surprising places, e.g. the forthcoming second album from Wooden Shjips, whom I had previously nailed as acolytes of Crazy Horse (itself no bad thing) but who seem to also be drawing from "Point That Thing", or perhaps more accurately "Point That Thing" filtered through a prism of early Suicide.

And another meanwhile: word is getting around that there will be a new album by The Bats (the "other" band of Robert Scott, when he is not playing bass with The Clean) in June. If their last two albums are anything to go by, this should be worth waiting for. "Couchmaster", in particular, which must by now be ten years old, is a key Dunedin recording. In fact, I think I know what I will be listening to tonight.

No More Heroes

Disappointing to have to return from our Easter hiatus with a Death Notice, but such it is, as we mark the passing of J G Ballard, literary titan of the twentieth century and probably the first writer I was able to think of as more than just The Person Whose Name Is On The Book.

I am inclined to remember where I was when I read a book more readily than what was in the book itself. Thus, "The Drowned World" to me will always be inseparable from the Echuca Caravan Park. Which, taking that thought one step further, given the current plight of the no longer Mighty Murray River, it would have been more appropriate for me to have been reading "The Drought" there. (Whereas "The Drought" was actually read at 166 Nicholson Street, Fitzroy, where its title was also borrowed for the name of a band of which I was briefly a member, but which had a longer and richer history without me.)

Reynolds, meanwhile, has posted a collection of dated but evocative (is that what you-all mean by "hauntological"?) covers of Ballard paperbacks. How does he do that?

Regrets

At the start of the Butthole Surfers song "Sweat Loaf", Gibson Jerome ("Gibby") Haynes says (and this, I should point out, is followed by one of the great moments in rock and roll), "It's better to regret something you have done than to regret something that you haven't done". Which may generally hold true, but I can safely say that I have never regretted anything as much as I regret ever having heard "Y Viva Suspenders", by Judge Dread.

We're going to take a short break now, but we'll be back in a while. Happy Easter.

The Biggest Number

Back when oi were a wee young feller-me-lad (well actually it was much later than I thought, 1990 in fact, the year in which I moved to Melbourne and got married) Mad Love Publishing put out the first two issues of what was to be a 12-issue comic book called "Big Numbers", written by Alan Moore and drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz. There was no Internet then, and no real way to find out what was going on. But we waited for the third issue to appear. And waited. And waited. Until eventually we got interested in other things and gradually forgot all about it. Except we didn't quite forget all about it: we held those first two issues tightly to our chest, and maintained a foolish hope, year after year, that perhaps we would one day wake up as if from a dream and find out what happens next.

The story of the story, as far as we can piece it together:

"Big Numbers" seems to have been something of the equivalent of Terry Gilliam's attempt to film "Don Quixote". Moore wanted, typically, to produce something bigger in every way than anybody else could ever have imagined or conceived, let alone pulled off. A 360-page comic book, chronicling the attempt by an American corporation to build an enormous shopping mall in the middle of middle England (Northampton, to be precise, Moore's own tramping ground). And the locals' attempts to fight against it (shades of "Local Hero"?), come to terms with it, live their own lives, and more or less everything else he could get into it, possibly including the kitchen sink. He was also thinking, as we all were then, about chaos theory, and the idea to build this mall may have been Moore's proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon basin or whatever. I seem to recall reading that he was planning on calling it "The Mandelbrot Set". The first issue was all black and white. The second had one splash of colour. By the end of the series, it was going to be all colour. Moore had an entire wall of his house covered with the various plot lines and intersections, and how it might all come together.

Something happened to Bill Sienkiewicz's eyesight somewhere around the making of issue 3. He had to walk away from the project. Mad Love Publishing, which was a by-product of the untold riches made by the creators of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, may have run out of money. The replacement illustrator, which may or may not have been Al Columbia, left the project in "mysterious" circumstances while either working on, or having finished, issue 3, or issue 4, or not, and having destroyed, or not, the entirety of issue 3, or 4, or both, or neither. Moore's hyperactive brain moved onto other things. In short, "Big Numbers" stalled at issue 2 and was never going to progress any further.

Until:

The Freaky Trigger side bar, which has long been the source of most of the best unknown (by us) Internet marginalia and wonder, was updated some time last week with the cryptic words "Big Numbers #3". Those words scratched an itch in our brain. No, we thought, surely not, it's a coincidence, it's something else entirely. It must be. A giant number 3 or something. Somewhat tentatively, we clicked, thinking we would probably wish we hadn't. But as a result of that click we have been able to print out, and savour, and marvel over, and scratch our head in wonder about the provenance of, issue 3 of "Big Numbers". Only 18 and a half years after the appearance of issue 2.

It seems that somebody else with a long memory found on eBay a package deal with issues 1 and 2 together with "rare unpublished xerox Alan Moore". This person took a punt, was the only bidder, and presumably fell off their chair upon opening the package. After apparently seeking Moore's permission, they had it scanned and uploaded. (For which we say, Thank you.)

But what is it? To our amateur forensic eye, it is, clearly enough, "Big Numbers 3". The page count is right, the page dimensions are right, the story follows on, or would appear to, from issue 2, and crucially, it matches panel for panel Moore's own detailed instructions for the first eight pages, which have been floating around cyberspace for a while now. It is only in black and white, so there are no clues about the further use of colour. It doesn't have a cover. The artwork appears to be something more than a rough draft, but something less than the finished article. I would venture that some of it is Sienkiewizc, some of it not. But in the end it doesn't really matter. It is the comic book equivalent of somebody finding manuscript pages in J D Salinger's rubbish bin: the fact of its existence is at least as significant as what it actually says. Sure, it continues the story, but we are still only a quarter of the way through, and presumably that is as far as we are ever going to go, so it doesn't exactly add much to the sum of human understanding.

Unless.

Unless the groundswell of excitement that the past few days have seen on message boards etc. sparks something in Moore, or Columbia, or whoever, to move things along. The story is a time capsule, sure, but the nature of the story is that that would be what it became anyway, Moore would have known and most likely intended this, and its completion 20 years later would really be neither here nor there. And Moore is so notorious for providing novel-length storyboards for his comics that, if they exist for the rest of "Big Numbers" (another mystery), well, any exceptionally talented artist could turn them into comic books if somebody could pay for the printing.

Sigh.

Song of the day

"Exposure", by Robert Fripp. What a remarkable song this is. I am coming at it from a distance of 25 years, possibly more, but I remember it very well from evenings listening to static-y AM signals from Sydney's 2JJ (who knew radio waves could travel so far?). If I had recognised Eno's voice reading out the letters of the song's title I would have been more excited than would have been good for me. (I got way too excited when I picked Eno's voice out of the backing vocals in U2's "Pride (In The Name Of Love)" a few years later, and had to have a lie down.) If I had known it was co-written by Peter Gabriel I would have been a bit surprised (still am). If I had recognised how much, musically, it anticipated Byrne and Eno's "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts" I would have been able to see the future (not, however, as in "I have seen the future of rock'n'roll and..."). Musically, also, of course, it echoes the kinds of sounds Fripp and Eno were coaxing out of the humble electric guitar on songs like "Wind On Water" a few years before. I have never been entirely comfortable with Terre Roche's screamings, but then I have never been comfortable with screaming in general (I think I worry for people who are able to let themselves go to that degree) and Terre Roche, in most other contexts, is to be unconditionally loved, so on that basis she, and they, get away with it.

The more things change ...

This, from an uncredited 1959 New Yorker review of a book called "Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression", by Harris Gaylord Warren (and I'm sorry, but the name Gaylord will forever remind me of "Meet The Parents"):

Enough time has passed to allow us to think about the depression, that fascinating and not yet entirely comprehensible catastrophe, with some objectivity. ... [Hoover] did not cause the depression ... but he did not do much to end it, partly because he did not comprehend its magnitude. The irresponsibility, chicanery, and stupidity that helped bring it about were common on the upper levels of American finance and industry all during the twenties ... When the depression came, Hoover met it with a consistently inadequate set of principles. ... [Warren] suggests that Hoover was not a bad man but that, since he was unwilling to use the powers of the federal government to intervene decisively in an economic crisis, he was a poor President.

Well, hello, what have we here?

Summer camp

The recent spate of extreme hot weather put me in mind of my second experience of spending an extended period of time away from home and away from my parents. It was the end of form 1, I was 12 years old, and Weary and I found ourselves at a church camp in the wilds of East Gippsland, a sparsely populated, isolated part of Victoria that gets very hot in summer, which it then was, and which carries, in the popular imagination, intimations of hillbillies and in-breeding.

The camp was run by two people who, unlikely as this may sound, were both called Robert Luff (leading to much humorous banter along the lines of "which one?" and "will the real Robert Luff please stand up?"). For the first few days we stayed at a shearing shed somewhere outside an off-the-map town called Ensay. The shearing shed sat on the side of a bare hill, with no other sign of humanity visible in any direction. It was infested with huntsman spiders, and rumours quickly took hold as to how, in previous years, girls had run screaming (although I knew, but kept to myself, that it wouldn't just be the girls if it happened to me) from the shed on the discovery of a huntsman in a sleeping bag. Fortunately this didn't happen on our camp, but their lurking presence created a Hitchcockian sense of tension nevertheless.

The toilet, not itself devoid of spiders, was a wooden shed a hundred yards downhill (and, mercifully, downwind) containing a box with a hole in it, resting atop a pit containing about 20 million blowflies. I can only remember making one trip to that toilet in all the time I was there. Is there such a thing as fear-induced constipation?

And have I mentioned the snakes?

It's funny the things you don't remember. I have no idea how we got all the way from Fish Creek to Ensay, even though it is a trip that would have taken a few hours. In fact, I have very little recollection of anything that we did while at the shearing shed, or what we ate. I do remember the heat.

One day we drove to Swift's Creek, where I was able to briefly nurture my addiction to newsagencies, and where there was a much-needed swimming pool. One evening we took a long walk down the hill and along a heavily shaded gravel road beside a creek. It was a lovely spot. I imagine we had a picnic there, but I can't be sure. We did have a swim in the creek, its stony bottom perfectly visible, a bridge just upstream for running along, and jumping off. It would have been close to perfect, except for the fact that at some point along that walk something unpleasant happened.

I suppose I was at an age where hormones start to kick in, and bodies and temperaments do mysterious and inexplicable things. Weary and I had been best buddies since, well, since kindergarten really, and we were practically inseparable. For the second half of primary school Weary was one of a number of kids to be transferred by their parents to Foster Consolidated, on account of the experimental nature of teaching at Fish Creek under a principal and his cohort of teachers who had taken over our school in Grade 3 (a story that remains to be told). So his reappearance in my life when we both found ourselves at Foster High was like a dream come true. Thus, what happened while we were out on this walk was somewhat unexpected. I do know that it happened only inside my own head. Weary may not have even noticed anything amiss, and even if he did, he would probably have taken no notice of it.

I have, and this was only remarkable for being the first time it happened, this thing where something will trigger a sudden withdrawal from whatever is going on around me, and I fall into a dark place of frustration, confusion, anger: if you called it Extreme Sulking you might not be far off. It can happen at any time, and be caused by anyone or anything (or maybe even nothing), and there is nothing to do but wait it out and try not to burn any bridges in the process.

So, there we all were, walking along in this beautiful landscape. Weary was mixing and having fun with the others, in a way that I couldn't. Before long it seemed to me that I was alone in the world. I knew that I didn't need to be, that I was among friends, but I felt trapped, and helpless to do anything about it. I got really, really angry, muttered terrible things to myself in response to what the others, particularly Weary, were saying, and physically withdrew from the group. Swimming in the river shook me out of it, but the feeling resonated, and confused me, for some time. I had discovered something about myself that I hadn't known before, and that I would rather not have found out. And I knew, too, that this longstanding friendship had suffered a unilateral, debilitating blow from which it would stagger along for some time but never really recover.

The camp went on. The last couple of nights we stayed at a church hall in Omeo. There was a swimming hole at a bend in the creek in the centre of town, where we spent a long afternoon and where I managed to lose my glasses. I had gotten used to swimming around without them on, and I simply failed to realise that I wasn't wearing them. They fell out of the towel and onto the ground. The next morning, we went exploring a warren of caves on the side of a hill. I could barely see a thing without my glasses, which made scaling the hill difficult, and it didn't really help with my fear of heights, as I had no real idea of where I was in relation to the ground except for the fact that it was some indeterminate distance below where I was. Later on that day, we went back to the swimming hole, where my glasses were waiting for me, intact but in bad need of a clean.

We went for a midnight walk to the local cemetery, where we scared the bejesus out of ourselves, mucking about with torches, making scary noises, and telling ghost stories and other tales of mystery (such as the one where the girl is sitting in the car on a deserted road while the fellow goes out to investigate some movement over in the trees at the side of the road, and then, hearing a banging noise on the roof of the car, she gets out to investigate, only to discover that the banging is, well, I don't think I should go any further actually, there may be children watching).

We also listened, many times, to a Rolling Stones cassette that was in someone's possession. "Sympathy for the Devil", in hindsight, seems a bit out of place in a church hall.

The camp ended. So, eventually, did my friendship with Weary, although not for a little while longer, and even then perhaps not forever. I never heard from any of the other participants again, nor have I ever met another person called Robert Luff. Two is probably enough for one lifetime.

This Goes With This (junior edition)

Carl has pointed out that the Little Jimmy Osmond of "Long Haired Lover From Liverpool" sounds more or less exactly like the Brenda Lee who sang "I'm Gonna Lasso Santa Claus". I wonder if they were ever seen in the same place at the same time.

Song(s) of the day

First there's

"Wings", by The Fall. "Wings" has long been one of my favourite Fall songs. Its lack of availability is a puzzle. For a long time it existed only as the b-side to the first disc of the "Kicker Conspiracy" double-seven-inch, and on "Palace of Swords Reversed", one of a number of otherwise superfluous and/or dubious compilations that sprang up, and continue to do so, in the cracks of The Fall's peripatetic label-hopping existence. It appears on the Rough Trade "Totally Wired" set, but not on "50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong", which is otherwise probably the best jumping-off point for youngsters.

But its relative obscurity cannot hide the fact that it is a great song (and, unlike a lot of Mark E Smith's seemingly free-associated, top-of-the-head ranting, it has some kind of structural and even - gasp - poetic lyrical integrity). It immediately hits upon a grinding riff and refuses (or forgets?) to let go. There is also a fine video clip that exists on a VHS tape called, and I could be wrong here, "Perverted By Language BIS", wherein MES intones the words while sitting stony-faced in a pub somewhere in (presumably) northern England, the wallpaper of which clashes spectacularly with the knitted pattern on his jumper. At least that's how I remember it.

And then there's

"Tighten Up", by Yellow Magic Orchestra. I cannot believe I had no idea that this remarkable cover version existed. But a little research set me straight. It is no wonder, actually, that its existence has been buried (or at least kept hidden from me). The original, Japanese version of "X∞Multiplies" is a funny sort of record, a few songs interspersed with lengthy extracts from something called "Snakeman Show", some in Japanese and some in English but all making no sense whatsoever to your average Westerner. Thus, unbeknownst to me, the Australian version of "Multiplies", which is the one I knew back in those golden days, was actually made up of a large part of "Solid State Survivor", together with three of the actual songs from the Japanese "Multiplies". But not, strangely, "Tighten Up". (Possibly the fact that it is divided into two parts (three, arguably, given that Part One itself fades out and comes back in again), much as was the Archie Bell & The Drells original, didn't help the decision makers know what to do with it.) Discogs says it exists independently as a single, but I can't imagine this would have dodged my radar if copies had reached Australia, given that I was [possible understatement alert] a bit of a fan.

Anyway, it is a gloriously faithful ("ersatz"?) and fearsomely infectious rendition of the original, right down to the "Hi everybody, we are YMO" introduction, but they have the good sense to throw in some Vocoder just when you start to get too comfortable.

You read it here first

But now you can read it here, in the New Yorker, with facts and figures, greater detail, and an elegance with language that I can only dream of. Oh, and a more negative prognosis than my own: I am naive enough to believe (actually it is more "hope") that the economic collapse that is now upon us can be turned to advantage by investing in infrastructure that will actually further reduce the world's carbon emissions when the economy hots up again. More fool me.

Song of the day

"Ain't No Sunshine", by Michael Jackson.

There are some storming versions of "Ain't No Sunshine" out there. I had no idea that Michael Jackson had turned his hand to it. And yet there it is, his fourth single, a minor UK hit in 1972, which means he must have been only 13 or 14 when it was recorded. (And the song itself would only have been a year old.)

It starts of with a nearly whispered spoken word intro, which is underpinned by some snaking, "Maggot Brain"-style lead guitar. The song proper is an exquisitely arranged combination of Motown rhythm section, funky drumming,strings and vocal harmonies. It oozes confidence and maturity. And then there's Michael's voice. Professional coaching alone, even if coupled with a tyrannical father leaning over one's shoulder, could not conjure a vocal performance of this level. Michael -- and remember, he is only a boy -- owns this song. He sings it from the inside out, even though he is singing about emotions and concepts he can only have been starting to become aware of.

It is moments like this that force me to re-think my own attitude to the sorry tale of Michael Jackson. We have been very hard on him. Here is one of the most exceptionally gifted singers, and performers, that we have ever seen or heard. He was on the stage at 11, and was never allowed to have a childhood of his own. His life has never been his own to live. No wonder he is so fucked up. Is it so wrong to suggest that we should be grateful for all that he has given us, rather than gaze, slack-jawed and full of tut-tutting disapproval, as his slow unravelling is paraded across the front page?

Our own 11-year-old has been a big Michael Jackson fan for some years. He either doesn't know, or doesn't comprehend, the story of Michael's latter years of tragic fall and public laughing stock. He is lucky enough to be able to appreciate the entirety of "Thriller", and assorted hit singles, at their magnificent face value. I played him "Ain't No Sunshine" this morning, and he instantly took to it.

We are, truly, not worthy.

Song of the day

"Kidney Bingos", by Wire. If Wire were ever going to have a tilt at megastardom, this gorgeous song was it. (Clearly, they failed. I suspect its name may not have helped.) Sure, it suffers today from an unwanted eighties sheen (especially that (un)classic mid-80s bass sound, what do you call that anyway, "flanged"? "phased"? just plain old "overproduced"?), but in the actual mid-80s that would only have helped their cause. If you close your eyes, you might be listening to a good U2 song [ahem - ed], well, if you were able to imagine U2 without the stadium-targeted bombast, and if you were able to scale down the size of Bono's ego to something like the size of a normal person's (and lose those stoopid glasses).

A couple of interviews with Mr Alan Moore

Here

and

here.

It's always fun to immerse yourself in a few Alan Moore interviews. It is something of an Energizer Bunny experience: switch him on and watch him go. (I once heard him interviewing Brian Eno for a BBC radio series. He may have allowed Eno to get a word in edgeways.) The Wired interview, in particular, is a good example of Moore in full flight, because of its length as well as its breadth and depth.

The thing I like about hearing (well, reading) Alan Moore go off is that he is, for someone who operates so far outside of the mainstream of society that his closest contemporary might be the Unabomber, remarkably rational and sensible in the way he sees the world and in the things he says. Why not reject Hollywood's overtures, if to do so is a principled objection and not a publicity stunt? Also, he seems to be simultaneously aware of his own stature (and justifiably proud of his work) while acknowledging that the medium he works in is predominantly (historically and in a post-"Watchmen" world) entertainment for (male) juveniles and misfits.

I saw the short for the "Watchmen" movie. (It ran before "Slumdog Millionaire". I reckon Danny Boyle has read a comic book or two in his time.) I have no intention of seeing it. But I did want to get a feel for how the film makers would make the world of the Watchmen look, and I can't say I was disappointed on that score. Still, I would much rather read the series for the, what, fourth time than watch a movie of it. And I didn't need to read Alan Moore's views to reach that conclusion.

The Motorcade Sped On

Next on the Darren Hit Parade is "Happy Together", by The Turtles. There are a bunch of sixties beat groups that I have never been able to tell apart. Okay, I can separate The Beatles from The Stones, and I have a reasonable handle on The Kinks and The Zombies, but when it comes to the likes of The Turtles, The Troggs, The Small Faces, Herman's Hermits, and a swathe of others, I can't actually put a name, or a face, to any of them. Which is not the same as not liking the music they made. Take "Happy Together": it is simply too joyful, too welcoming, too, um, brilliant, not to strike a chord. And the chorus makes me want to pick flowers and ride bicycles - specifically, an old bicycle, with a basket, and slightly rusted tin mud guards. Maybe yellow, but an old, faded yellow. The sun will, of course, be shining.

"Happy Together" is followed, incongruously, by ZZ Top's "Legs", one of the most ridiculous hit singles. Ever. It starts off like Motorhead, but only for the first few seconds, until the disco backbeat kicks in and you instantly sense that what you are listening to is a money-making exercise. In truth, without the silly beards and souped-up hot rods they would be not much different from, and no more likeable than, Foreigner, except maybe for "rocking" a bit "harder". I always liked the fact that the one without the beard was called Beard, but that's probably just me. Actually, I thought I liked this song more than I do.

And one more, to put a bit more distance between where we are now and the start of this very long list. It's Phil Spector but with a few bricks removed from the wall of sound. It's "Sugar Baby Love", by The Rubettes (a name which I assumed signified that they were a girl group, how wrong I was), a song I never thought I would want to hear again, whereas in fact I would rather listen to this than "Legs" any day. There is something endearing in the earnestness of this song. It is, in its own way, a time capsule, but it is dealing with, and in, feelings that have been felt by teenagers of any place and time. Whatever next? Am I going to discover a long-suppressed love for The Bay City Rollers?

Oh, what the heck, let's also throw in "It's A Heartache", by the female Tom Waits, Bonnie Tyler, a song that was so unavoidable during its heyday that it is hard to listen to it with open ears now. So I won't.

New Morning

A few conflicting emotions tossed themselves around when I heard the one-two news punch that (a) Mick Harvey had left the Bad Seeds and (b) one Edmund Kuepper had been recruited as replacement, at least for a forthcoming tour of Europe.

First, I had to take stock of my own response. If this had been the mid-80s, and those twin pillars of Oz Rock Royalty Nick Cave and Ed Kuepper had been thrust together onto the same stage at the same time, I would have been wetting my pants with excitement, and running up to total strangers on the street to tell them about it. So I have found it curious to observe my sardonic eye-rolling reaction in 2009. It's not as if my affections for either of them have cooled in the ensuing 25 years. In fact, if anything the opposite has happened: of all the old guard, Cave and Kuepper have been the ones to have continued to work hard, develop their craft, and surprise. I suppose my thoughts, if I can pin them down, go like this:

(a) when am I ever going to Europe? Hence, the Cave-Kuepper thing is of theoretical interest only;

and, (b) to borrow from well-known music critic John Wayne, could any stage be big enough for the two of them? Unless my memory has failed me, Kuepper hasn't played second fiddle to anyone since The Saints, and look how that turned out. Cave? Well, I can't think of any name that more conjures the expression "front man". So what, or who, is going to give? Which makes it an interesting proposition, but not, I expect, a lasting one. One can only assume they shared one too many beers up on Mount Buller.

You also have to spare a thought for Mick Harvey, unsung hero of Australian music. I suppose his departure from the Bad Seeds was written on the wall with, in particular, the Grinderman project and, in general, the growing dominance within the Bad Seeds of that fiddlin' bushranger, Warren Ellis. But it is a sad thing, nevertheless, to contemplate the bald fact that "it's over".

It is easy, I suppose, to romanticise, in a tortured-artist sense, the life lived (if that is the right word) by Nick Cave in Berlin in the early 1980s. But I have always believed that if it wasn't for Mick Harvey Cave wouldn't have survived those days. Surely he cut it pretty fine as it was. Even hip cats only have nine lives. But Mick Harvey, at least on my reading of it, was the fulcrum around which Cave wildly spun: solid, dependable, able to withstand all the pressures that swirled around them. (Of course I could be wrong, but I've seen nothing in Harvey's subsequent appearance of unshakeable calm to make me doubt it.)

Also, Harvey was in large part responsible for the sound of the Bad Seeds, and the way that band developed. Or, in a sense, didn't. The Bad Seeds have always given new meaning to the word "ramshackle", and yet to see them play, in any of their many permutations, or to listen to "Live Seeds", is to understand that they are, when all is said and done, one of the great rock bands. They evolved over the space of the first four Bad Seeds albums, and Harvey's hands can be found all over each of them. In fact, for me the Bad Seeds, as a band, were never better than on "The Firstborn Is Dead", in which they comprised just (but not, he hastens to add, "merely") Barry Adamson on bass, Blixa Bargeld doing whatever it is that Blixa Bargeld does, and Harvey.

And yet Harvey has never sought the spotlight. Whether that is the result of his close-quarter observations of what that spotlight did, and what it might have done, to Cave is a question that even Harvey himself probably couldn't answer. But it's not for want of talent. "Intoxicated Man", his first solo record, was many people's (and my own hand is up) first introduction to Serge Gainsbourg, and it is a fine album, understated like Harvey himself, typically perfectly played and arranged, and (if I remember right) he even did the translations himself. His subsequent "pop" records (I haven't heard his soundtrack work) may not quite reach that gold standard, but any of them would serve, and frequently do, as perfect Sunday-afternoon listening.

In short, Mick Harvey has long been one of our honest-to-goodness heroes. We wish him well.

Boing boing

Another dead cat bounced off the Wall Street pavement overnight. Quite a large one this time (five per cent), but one can only assume that gravity will take effect, if not tonight then one night in the near future.

Meanwhile, the page count in the New Yorker continues to shrink, as the biggest economic contraction since the last one proceeds apace. The magazine survived the [First] Great Depression and we can only hope it has the reserves, and stamina, to survive whatever this one winds up being called. Of special interest in the recent "Anniversary" issue is George Packer's report from the real-estate wastelands of Florida, in which he gives both an insight into the human face of the collapse, and how Florida seems to have been its Ground Zero. (I still have trouble fathoming how a fall in real estate prices in one State of the Union could have such far-reaching international effects, but what do I know?)

What I do know, or at least what it looks like, is that the United States economy is so fucked they are going to have to find a new word for "fucked".

Song of the day

"Born on a Train", by The Magnetic Fields. Even if this was the only song Stephin Merritt ever wrote, he would have earned his place. It is our extraordinary good fortune that it is, in fact, only one of many (including sixty-nine on one (triple) album, a fact which continues to leave me staggered each time I think of it).

Emergency of the day

Here.

Magazine advertisement of the day

Look at this ad, from the New Yorker magazine circa February 1959. (If you click on it, you can see it at full size. How good is that?)

Looking at this photo today, it is easy to overlook the fact that it was taken fifty years ago. The Seagram Building hasn't changed a bit, in either appearance or stature, since it was completed, not long before the photo was taken. The building site across the road is, presumably, long gone, but there is little difference between the building site of today and that of mid-century. The furniture being carried into the building, well, our vantage point is a bit too far away to be certain, but it looks from this distance to be a little bit 2009 itself.

In fact, it is maybe just the cars in the bottom left-hand corner that provide unequivocal period detail. Those, and the font used at the very bottom of the ad to list all the places that Dunbar Furniture Corporation calls home.

Mind The Gap

Darren's long list of hand-picked songs has arrived at:

"Zombie", by The Cranberries.

A song from, as he well knows, my "lost decade", the 1990s, the decade in which I gave up in frustration as the good (Beat Happening) were ignored and the lesser (Nirvana) hit the big time. Also, the decade in which I found myself assuming that I was, or should have been, "growing out of" young people's music as I left my twenties behind, and that I should do the respectable thing and move to classical music and, you know, "Kind of Blue" (not to in any way diss "Kind of Blue", of course). As has since become obvious, I mis-read myself: I seem to be one of the sad minority for whom pop music runs through their veins well beyond the normal use-by date. It often seems like the only musicians I followed through the 1990s were Tom Waits and Nick Cave.

By the time I broke the back of my thirties, and started this blogging caper, I figured that there was no point in fighting against myself, and I came back to pop music. Maybe the break did me good. My listening has moved forward, into European techno, new traditionalists (M Ward, Iron & Wine) and the second wave of New Pop (Rachel Stevens, Sally Shapiro, Kathy Diamond, Robyn, etc), and backward, to the music of the seventies that I had previously summarily dismissed, cloaked as I was in my post-punk straight jacket. And there sit the nineties, unexplored and without any place in my heart. Maybe I didn't miss anything. And yet entire fields of music, much of it held up, talisman-like, by today's respected music commentators, draws a blank. Pavement. The Pixies. Throwing Muses. The Beastie Boys. Britpop of every hue. This is where Darren can perform his most important service. He knows which stones to leave unturned and which to throw through my window.

"Zombie", then, it seems to me, sits somewhere between, say, U2 in its Irishness and its anthemicness, and Nirvana in its opening guitar sludge/buzz and its quite/loud dichotomy. I don't know that I could ever grow to love a song like this, but I imagine that every day radio stations all around the world play songs many times worse.

[Editor's Note: the above narrative is not entirely free of artistic licence. In fact, by the second half of the 1990s I was alive to the possibilities of, at the very least, Tortoise, Stereolab, and Belle and Sebastian. And if it took good people like Bart to steer me on that course, I nevertheless was prepared to grab those balls and run with them.]

Song of the day

"I've Got A Plan", by My Friend The Chocolate Cake. "My Friend The Chocolate Cake" is not a good name for a band. It tells you nothing about what to expect. Maybe that was its purpose. MFTCC evolved out of Not Drowning, Waving. "Not Drowning, Waving", aside from the difficulty of having a comma in it, is a good name for a band. Easter, another (brief) NDW spin-off, I'm not so sure either way as a band name, although there was a perfectly good band (now mostly forgotten) called Christmas, and a Melbourne electronic musician called Ash Wednesday, and neither of them was crucified (sorry) for adopting the names of religious festivals in the provision of secular entertainment. MFTCC took David Bridie's vision in a different direction, from the electric, ambient washes and Australian outback evocations of NDW and the semi-prog digressive stylings of Easter, to a more grounded, domestic, earthy place, where jaunty Irish jigs and Hungarian wedding songs could rub up against quiet suburban melodramas, all centred upon Bridie's more than useful piano playing, and the strings of the very glamorous Helen Mountford and Hope Csutoros. Giving such a venture a signifying, or meaningful, or even ironically distancing name might have been asking for trouble. So, for better or worse, we were left having to say, when friends enquired who was responsible for the lovely music they were hearing, "My Friend The Chocolate Cake", and trying to suppress an involuntary cringe.

I put them on in the car this afternoon because, well, because they have fallen somewhat out of our lives in recent years, and more specifically because I have just been reading Martin Flanagan's piece in yesterday's Age about people who support the Melbourne Football Club (of whom I am one). David Bridie and Andrew Carswell, both members of MFTCC, featured in the article. I knew Bridie was a Demon supporter. It was nice to read of the two of them breaking out the footy while on tour for some kick-to-kick. It turns out that Bridie's daughter also supports the Demons, which struck me as perhaps inevitable but also a little unfair (oh, the burden of having to justify supporting not only a frequently losing team, but also one that has the vestigial reputation of being the silvertails' team of choice - when they are not off skiing or down on The Peninsula).

Martin Flanagan is one of the great sports writers, because, like other great sports writers (A J Liebling, Roger Angell, Garrie Hutchinson, Brent Crosswell, Gideon Haigh, John Harms), he sees the larger-than-life narratives, and the poetry, that permeate sport without losing sight of the fact that it is, after all, just a game, and thus his sights are frequently aimed beyond the boundary fence. That he will be following Melbourne this season, as he did the Western Bulldogs a couple of years ago, is one of the few bits of good news to have fallen from the pages of a newspaper in recent months.

Anyway, back to "I've Got A Plan": I should be more careful, in my fragile middle-aged emotional state, listening to music that has deep personal resonance, especially something I haven't listened to for some years, while in charge of an automobile. That's all I’m going to say.

John Zorn's Filmworks - The Overload?

I have, as you know, been chronologically cycling through the possibly endless series of John Zorn "Filmworks" releases. I should say that, just as there are many John Zorn recordings that I will gladly listen to a hundred times or more, there are also quite a few that, having listened to them once, I never want to see, or hear, again. (My list will differ from yours.) "Filmworks XVI: Workingman's Death" falls squarely in the latter category. If ever a soundtrack recording needed the visuals that go with it, this is it.

Next!

Darren's list: "Smoke on the Water", by Deep Purple

Is there anybody alive who doesn't know this song? Is there anybody whose body doesn't respond to its opening (and only) guitar riff with a wave of primal air-guitar action? Nobody in our house, anyway. Jules learnt the fife at school last year, and once he had figured out how to extract sound from that infernal instrument, you can guess what the first song he taught himself was. (It doesn't have quite the same grunt on the fife as it does when Deep Purple play it, but all the same it gets my (hypothetical) long hair flying.) (He moved on to "School's Out" and "Funky Town". Well, you would, wouldn't you.)

Catch of the day

I thought I had seen the catch of the season a couple of nights earlier, with Mike Hussey's stunning one-armed grab in between showers at the Gabba. But that was before Adam Voges's extraordinary performance last night. Degree of difficulty? Off the scale. Presence of mind? Don't even think about it. Watch the clip before Nine has it removed.

Pause

As once and future Victorians, we share the shock and disbelief of many about the terrible bushfires that devastated much of that State on Saturday. We can't yet be certain that we don't know anybody who has been directly affected by the fires (although at this stage we are quietly hopeful that we don't) but it is highly likely that many of our friends and relatives will either know, or know of, somebody who was, and our thoughts are with you all.

Things I Learnt Today

Catching up (slowly) on Tom Ewing's admirable Popular, and in particular the fascinating comments threads that append each entry. (If you want an example of the Internet hive-mind operating at its fullest potential, this is surely it.)

Tom has motored along to 1981, but I am still reading my way through 1975. And, in particular, the entry relating to 10CC's "I'm Not In Love". There I discovered two things relating to 70s popsters Fox:

1. Noosha Fox, the band's singer and focal point, had a previous life as an Australian folk singer, real name Susan Traynor.

2. The backing band was basically the same band that later, as Yellow Dog, had a big hit, in Australia at least, called "Just One More Night".

This latter is the type of factoid that gets me all hot and bothered (erm, any mention of Noosha Fox does that, actually). I was, and still am, in love with Fox's big single, "S-s-s-single Bed" (although as a naive youngster I had no idea what the song was really about). I was also, as a 13- or 14-year-old, hugely in love with "Just One More Night" (subtext, or text really, again, totally beyond me). I thought the spoken-word bits, especially right at the end where the singer phones in yet more pleading and whining, were the funniest thing ever committed to record. Listening to the song again today (thanks, Darren) I can see how wrong I was. But you can see how humour can work across generations: Jules was listening in, and also found much to laugh at.

(And as a further aside, in 1974 Ray Stevens had a big hit with "The Streak", which, similarly, my friend Weary and I were frequently in stitches while listening to, or singing, in the school ground. It, too, has been exposed by the passage of time as a terrible, terrible song, and yet since its recent discovery by our boys it has been on unpleasantly high rotation. "I said, 'Don't look, Ethel', but it was too late." Oh ho ho.)

(Actually, the first time I went to a day of Test cricket was with Weary and his mum, at the time when the streaking thing was first happening. We were less interested in watching the cricket than in trying to be the closest to the binoculars in case some drunken naked reprobate made a dash for the central playing area. It didn't happen.)

"Ah ca-a-ant ha-ardly sta-and it"

R.I.P Lux Interior.

More Maira

Here you will find a lovely downward-scrolling report, by Maira Kalman, of the Inauguration. We love Maira Kalman at our house, from the "Max" series of children's books to "The Principle of Uncertainty", which I gave Adrienne for her birthday last year. She draws beautiful pictures, which she combines with a gently askance (or do I just mean side-on?) view of the world and everything in it.

A few (too many) words about "Adventure", by Television

There is a lot of talk (I have done some of it myself) about the idea of the "difficult" third album. You throw everything you have into your first album; everything else goes into the second. By then you become identified, most likely, as having a definable "sound". You have run out of songs. You might feel trapped in your perceived "identity". What do you do? You might do more of the same, and get canned. (The Ramones, you might say, did this ad infinitum.) You might crash through the walls of the box in which you have found yourself, successfully ("London Calling", "The Correct Use of Soap") or not (Franz Ferdinand, or not, depending on who you are reading, and I haven't heard either of their second or third albums and don't really care either way).

But what about the difficult second album? The story here is that you have five years in which to make your first album and six months to make your second. (This is no longer true; the modern dynamic, if anything, is more like you have six months to make your first album and a couple of years to make your second.) How your second album lasts, in the long term, really depends on where your career goes from there. To use the first two examples above, "London Calling" followed the disappointment of "Give 'Em Enough Rope", which remains more or less lost between the twin towers of the self-titled first album and "London Calling". Contrast with Gang of Four, whose first album was an inspiration, for me at least, whereas I don't know anyone who would cross the room to listen to "Solid Gold", largely, I suspect, because their career then went nowhere, or nowhere interesting, so there isn't much of a gap to fill.

In the case of Magazine, and I would throw in with them also Echo & The Bunnymen, their first albums were such a blast that for each of them the follow-up had to be a disappointment. And, for me, both were. But they sit so centrally inside a solid body of work (the former, for me, more so than the latter) that they remain intriguing, and I keep coming back to them from time to time, looking for the secret key with which to unlock their mysteries.

Which brings me, longwindedly and largely irrelevantly, to "Adventure", the second, and final (for so many years, anyway, that the much later self-titled third album forms its own continuum), album by Television. It, too, suffered under the oppressive weight of what came before. Television's first album, "Marquee Moon", is regarded, by me and by many other people, including many Actual Serious Music Critics, as one of the finest rock records ever made. Its title track is simply untouchable. Television had been around a long time, were roughly contemporaneous with, but were singularly not, punk. They looked cool. They hung with Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. They had to release a second album, and it fell flat. It is difficult to know what happened. All the ingredients are there. Maybe if it had been released by anybody else it would have been hailed. But it was by Television, and as such it had to be compared with its predecessor. And in every respect it fell short, and I have recently established that such is still the case 31 years later. The red colour scheme isn't quite as good as the black (although the red vinyl out of which my copy is made is rather sharp). The Mapplethorpe photo is not quite as talismanic as the one on "Marquee Moon". The songs, in favouring simplicity over the former's complexity, come across as not quite as good. The intertwined guitars of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, likewise, are not quite as good. Heck, even its "Marquee Moon" ("Ain't That Nothin'") is no "Marquee Moon".

Thus, it is a record that will always live in the shadow of its big brother. Nevertheless, I am happy to have found a used copy of the CD reissue, because "Marquee Moon" and "Adventure" deserve to sit together on any self-respecting record shelf, as they have done for many years at our house, down where the vinyl goes. It just won't get pulled out as often.

Solid Air

RIP John Martyn.

I'm speechless.

"Heroes"

If you go here you can, for "One Week Only", watch the video footage that goes with Kraftwerk's "Minimum-Maximum" live double-CD. Swoon as people who look like elderly public servants or middle managers perform some of the most beautiful and cutting-edge music ever made. Be amazed that "Autobahn" sounds even better now than it did in 1974. Weep for lost opportunities, i.e. not having taken the opportunity to see them play in Melbourne when they toured in what must have been 1982 or 1983. Give thanks and praise to the Internet.

Portrait of the artist as a figure on a record cover

Except that I don't own an Underwood.

(Aside: the first song on the album, "Linoleum", was co-written by, and features the impeccable vocals of, David Sylvian. I don't know anything about the record other than that.)

The Coast

Me, having fun doing things I would not normally be doing:

1. Eating oysters.

2. Taking on nature, specifically the incessant might of the surf, armed with just board shorts, sunscreen and the occasional use of a borrowed boogie board. (I now can only hear out of one ear, which is very disconcerting, but a small price to pay.)

Song of the day

"Baila Sin Petit", by Ricardo Villalobos. It might be, at five minutes, the shortest Villalobos track known to man, but I can't get it out of my head. The vocal snippet belongs on David Byrne's collection of new-old French music, "Cuisine Non-Stop"; the music is pure Villalobos. I would not hesitate to describe it as "very cute".

Silver lining?

If the global economic collapse turns out to be as severe, and as long-lasting, as it is giving every sign of being, in ten years time we will all be slouching around, with our arses hanging out of our trousers, and feasting on boiled cardboard. But there might be some unexpected good news, too: as the wheels of industry grind to a halt, so too will emissions of fossil fuels. Perhaps not to zero, but by a fairly significant amount. Maybe even enough to stem the seemingly unstemmable tide of global warming.

The only way out of such an economic trough is by way of government spending, in particular spending on large infrastructure projects. And, as I have said here before (and as has been taken up by Thomas L Friedman, amongst others, but remember You Saw It Here First), it's not rocket science to figure out that the best use that such funds could be put to is re-engineering the world's economies so that when the upswing comes (as it always does) it can take place in environmentally sustainable ways. Roll out the solar panels. Dig those geothermal pipes. Hoist those wind turbines. Et cetera.

You know, it just might work.

50 most important songs, revisited

The list up to now:

The Chills, "Pink Frost".
The Go-Betweens, "Cattle and Cain".
Television, "Marquee Moon".
Propaganda, "Dr Mabuse". (Ah, but which version?)
Donna Summer, "I Feel Love" (12 inch).
The Passions, "I'm In Love With A German Film Star".
Brian Eno, "1/1".

The recent additions:

Gerry Rafferty, "Baker Street".
D.A.F., "Der Mussolini".
Buzzcocks, "Ever Fallen In Love".
Kate Bush, "Wuthering Heights".
10cc, "I'm Not In Love".

No surprises there, I'm sore. I mean "sure".

A few words about "Alight Of Night", by Crystal Stilts

Way back in 2008, I found myself getting all hot and sweaty over a band called Crystal Stilts, on the strength of a six-song EP that was only available by download from the inexplicably successful (or so I assume) business model that calls itself eMusic. What I liked about these songs was that they embraced the idea of "lo-fi", not as a defined genre or commercial strategy, but in the sense of "we recorded these songs as quickly as we could and on whatever shitty equipment we could find because we knew no other way and we hope you like them anyway". Which, if this was 20 years ago, I would have happily stood in some sweaty Brunswick Street hotel watching them night after night, and fanzining them to death. Also, there was something almost tangible connecting them to the two competing strands of the kind of Flying Nun records I liked from those times, at one end populated by the Jefferies brothers, and at the other by the melodic likes of The Clean, The Bats and The Chills.

But it is now 2009, and Crystal Stilts have released an Actual Record, on an Actual Label, made with Actual Money, and most of the magic has been lost in the process. In trying to stay the same, they seem to have lost what made them special (like, or so I'm told, what happened to Hong Kong after the handover). What was affecting now sounds like affectation. They often make me think of The Clean with a hangover, which is not something I would necessarily want to listen to.

There is one song, the final one on the record ("The City In The Sea"), which suggests one possibly fruitful direction for them to go in. It drifts along on languid guitars that do what they did on the third Velvet Underground album, which is to say, it sounds more Galaxie 500 than Flying Nun. But even if they do decide to catch that train, I suspect that I won't be riding it with them, if only because I can go back to those Galaxie 500 and Flying Nun records any time I want, and that's good enough for me.

What It Is

Douglas Wolk writes, blogs, runs a record label, and has an abiding interest in comics. We seem to share an enthusiasm for the work of Kevin Huizenga. Here Wolk publishes a wonderful four-panel strip by Kevin that conveys, without words, the essence of live rock music. Most of us have experienced this more than once in our gig-going lives. It may or may not have been at the Apollo. That's just the title of the strip. Or not "just".

My plan has always been to write at greater length about why I love Kevin Huizenga. That is still my plan.

Free music!

Head on over to Aquarium Drunkard, and specifically to this post, to download a CD-R's worth of outtakes from the sessions that produced David Crosby's solo LP "If I Could Only Remember My Name", released in 1971.

An impenetrable fug of marijuana haze sits atop these performances, evocatively transporting you to the valleys and canyons of California at the start of the Seventies. The sound quality is excellent, as is the music. Crosby, of course, is responsible for "Triad", which demonstrates that he is both (a) prodigiously talented musically, and (b) psychologically suspect.

Railway station of the day

Willison.

T-shirt of the day

Vibrant gold on a black background. "Peng"-era Stereolab image, sitting above "Mars Audiac Quintet"-era lettering saying, simply, "Stereolab". I have envy.