Here.
Trust me. You won't regret it.
(via Aquarium Drunkard)
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Cows
[Note: This piece should have been a fantasia of whimsical observations, poetic imagery and the like. But, you know, once a farmer, always a farmer. "A pint of plain is your only man": Flann O'Brien. (Mind you, it does get a bit "Great Gatsby" towards the end ...)]
As I have said, I grew up on a working dairy farm. It was home for the first seventeen years of my life, and intermittently thereafter for the next eight years, and when it wasn't home it was a frequent respite from the tumultuous life of a university student and, when those halcyon days ended, the slightly less turbulent but somewhat more affordable life of a young "professional".
When I wasn't spending my time hanging around the house, playing with Lego or, later, listening to records and reading music magazines that were fresh off the boat from England and "only" three months old (tell that to the young people of today and they won't believe you), I was more likely than not getting involved in one way or another with the focal point of the farm, which was the cow shed.
The cow shed was (I use the past tense because I have it on good authority that it is no longer there) a long, corrugated-iron structure, with two elevated concrete platforms separated by a walkway at ground level. The platforms were where the cows stood while they were being milked. The elevation of them was such that a person standing down in the walkway was about eye level with the cows' udders. There were two other rooms, one containing the engine that drove the milking machines and the other containing the milk vat and a big trough for washing up. These rooms were separated from the milking area by a breezeway. Attached to the shed was a somewhat elaborate series of yards and gateways, enabling cows to be brought in from one part of the farm, milked, and then sent out to a new paddock, where the grass had not been chewed for a few days. The shed sat on a flat area halfway down a hill. You got from the house to the cow shed by way of a gravel road which ran down from the top of the hill, where the house sat, past the old pigsty (on your right), which in my time was used for housing the young calves when they were first removed from their mothers (yes, farming is a cruel business), and also for storage of junk, such as old bicycles, prams, and other things that had outlived their usefulness but that couldn't quite be gotten rid of. The road then turned to the left and ran past some very tall and old cypress trees until it reached the shed, where it widened to allow a milk tanker to turn around.
The cows were milked twice a day. I liked being involved. This is something that made no sense to me then and it makes no sense to me now, given that I am inherently lazy and introspective. I think I liked the routine, and the feeling it gave me of being a part of the farm, along with a sense of achievement, of having contributed in a real way to what my father did with his life.
For most of my childhood we had sharefarmers, who did the milking for us, but at various times, and sometimes for extended stretches, it was mum, dad and me, or dad, Uncle Charlie and me. I also sometimes helped out when a sharefarmer was on his own (see "Dennis, Part 1" and "Dennis, Part 2" passim). In fact, one of the times dad and I did the milking was during the first part of my HCS year, and so I somehow had to fit school and homework in with farm work. (That seemed to turn out okay, somehow. On school days mum would come down to the shed and take over from me so that I could have breakfast and get ready for school. I owe a debt of gratitude to Helen Thomas, breakfast presenter at the time on 3RRR, whom I credit in large part for getting me through that busy time, and really for getting me through HSC, and whose brother Greg, curiously, I would get to know the following year when I moved to Melbourne University.)
The morning milking involved getting up very early, while it was still dark. I would take my dog, Woof, for a long walk, sometimes to the further reaches of the farm, to bring the cows up to the yard. Depending on the time of year, the cows would either be waiting keenly at the gate to be let through, or they would be hanging back at the furthest corner, trying as hard to hide from us as their tiny brains would allow them to. Woof had no training, and she turned into a raving lunatic whenever there was a tractor around, but when it was just the two of us, on foot (or paws in her case), she demonstrated a good instinct for knowing where to go and how to get the cows moving. (She had no sense of how to get them moving in the right direction, but the cows knew where they were supposed to go and all Woof needed to do was get them up and about, which she did by running up to them and barking a lot.) My role was to encourage the dog in her endeavours, and to do a rudimentary head count of the cows as they left the paddock and headed along the track towards the shed. Then it was just a matter of pushing them up into the yard and closing the gate behind them. By the time I had brought the cows into the yard dad would have arrived at the shed with a cup of tea for me. (And, to borrow a line from Maurice Sendak's "Where The Wild Things Are", it was still hot.) He would also have set up all the hoses, turned the hot water on and started the motor. After that, the milking process was fast and incessant.
In case you're interested, this is how it worked.
The first row of nine cows would be herded up the steps and onto one of the platforms. There they would be washed, and the milking machines put on them. Milk was pulled out of the cows by a pulsating suction operation, kind of like a vacuum cleaner with the hiccups, and sent along a stainless steel pipe into the stainless steel milk vat, which was refrigerated to a temperature of four degrees Celsius to keep the milk in pristine condition until the milk tanker arrived, later that day, to collect the milk and take it to the Murray Goulburn factory.
The farmer, whose head, as I said, was more or less at the height of the cows' udders, was vulnerable on two fronts. For a start, the cows, and especially the younger ones, didn't always particularly enjoy the intimate human contact they were being subjected to, and could be inclined to lash out with their back legs. Cows, being much stronger than people, have been known to break bones, but they were facing away from you, and cows kick out to the side rather than straight back, so a person who was concentrating and exercising caution should have been able to keep himself safe. For particularly ornery critters, a kick clamp was applied to prevent their legs from lashing out too far. (The kick clamp restrained the cow but didn't appear to cause it any pain or discomfort. It never seemed to me to be at all cruel, and I tend to be sensitive about that sort of thing.)
The second area of vulnerability arose out of the fact that the cows, while they were in the shed, were a little bit on edge and therefore prone to outpourings of one type or another from their rear ends, which outpourings, remembering again that the farmer was at eye level with the cows' udders, could land upon the head of the unsuspecting and/or unprepared. From personal experience, this didn't happen anywhere near as often as you might have expected it to; I think after a while some kind of sixth sense kicked in that would let you know when there were rumblings afoot. (One or two of my university friends, not being as skilled in the ways of cows as us natives, were not so lucky.)
Once that first row was quietly milking away, the next bunch of nine cows would be run up the steps and onto the other platform. They would have the mud washed from the area concerned, and the machines would then be taken off the first row of cows, swung across towards the other platform and placed on the newcomers. The first row would then get a bit of a rinse, in the interests of personal hygiene, and be sent on their way, out through the "exit" doors and off to whatever paddock the gates had been set up to send them to. They usually headed off without any need for encouragement, because after each milking they went into a new paddock, which meant fresh grass for them.
One thing that soon became clear, if you were a student of cow psychology, was that there was a clear pecking order amongst the cows in the yard. Certain cows would insist on standing in the same place each milking, waiting for their turn to be brought into the shed. Some cows would insist on being first in. Others would want to be anywhere but first. Still others would hang right back, like reluctant schoolboys, until they had no choice but to be next into the shed. A feeble but effective electric fence pushed the cows up the yard as their numbers decreased, just to make it easier to chase the laggards into the shed. (A two-foot long lump of polythene pipe applied to the rump of a cow also came in handy, but shhh, don't tell anybody. (And anyway they didn't need to be whacked very hard to get them moving; it was more of a friendly reminder.))
And so it continued, row after row and cow after cow, until before you knew it the only thing left in the yard was a patchwork quilt of cowpats. Dad then washed and sterilised all of the milking equipment and I got to do my other favourite job, which was cranking up a high-pressure hose and washing all of the manure out of the shed and the yard, from where it cascaded down into a pit a short distance downhill from the shed, and thence via a very long hose out into the paddocks nearby. (Occasionally we would let it bake in the sun for a little while, shovel it onto a trailer and take it home, where it was added to the compost heap for eventual use in mum's veggie garden.)
Once all of that was done, one of us would go into the engine room and flick the master switch to "off". The engine would slowly wind down until the cow shed was shrouded in a peculiarly enveloping silence. The noise of the milking machines, when they were running, was everywhere, making it difficult to have a conversation (which you didn't have time to do anyway), but after the first few minutes you didn't even notice it, which made the silence when they were turned off even more striking.
One of us would then wander down to where the cows were supposed to have gone, chasing any stragglers along in front of us, and lock them all in their allotted paddock, where they would stay until next milking.
As you all know, cows need to be milked twice a day, and so off we would go, again, after our four o'clock cup of tea, following the same routine. There was something special, though, about evening milkings. In winter we didn't finish until well after dark. There is nothing quite like the feeling you got walking homewards with your father, the only sound that of the gravel road crunching underfoot, with nothing but the stars and perhaps a bit of moonlight to guide you, the lights of the dairy having been extinguished, the lights of home not yet visible, with the ghostly presence of the cypress trees beside you, and yet feeling perfectly safe and knowing exactly where you were going. Perhaps you walked in silence, or perhaps you were talking about whatever it is you talk about when it is just you and your father, and you are at the end of another long day. And then you round the bend in the road and start to walk uphill, the lights of home appearing out of the darkness, and you know there will be a hot shower and a home-cooked meal waiting for you, a meal put together, with love and home-grown ingredients, by your mother, the largely unseen and unsung hero of the piece, the person who kept the home front ticking over with such efficiency and independence that it was easy to take her for granted (which, of course, you did) even though, should you have chosen to think about it (which, of course, you didn't), you would have known damn well that you couldn't have managed without her.
As I have said, I grew up on a working dairy farm. It was home for the first seventeen years of my life, and intermittently thereafter for the next eight years, and when it wasn't home it was a frequent respite from the tumultuous life of a university student and, when those halcyon days ended, the slightly less turbulent but somewhat more affordable life of a young "professional".
When I wasn't spending my time hanging around the house, playing with Lego or, later, listening to records and reading music magazines that were fresh off the boat from England and "only" three months old (tell that to the young people of today and they won't believe you), I was more likely than not getting involved in one way or another with the focal point of the farm, which was the cow shed.
The cow shed was (I use the past tense because I have it on good authority that it is no longer there) a long, corrugated-iron structure, with two elevated concrete platforms separated by a walkway at ground level. The platforms were where the cows stood while they were being milked. The elevation of them was such that a person standing down in the walkway was about eye level with the cows' udders. There were two other rooms, one containing the engine that drove the milking machines and the other containing the milk vat and a big trough for washing up. These rooms were separated from the milking area by a breezeway. Attached to the shed was a somewhat elaborate series of yards and gateways, enabling cows to be brought in from one part of the farm, milked, and then sent out to a new paddock, where the grass had not been chewed for a few days. The shed sat on a flat area halfway down a hill. You got from the house to the cow shed by way of a gravel road which ran down from the top of the hill, where the house sat, past the old pigsty (on your right), which in my time was used for housing the young calves when they were first removed from their mothers (yes, farming is a cruel business), and also for storage of junk, such as old bicycles, prams, and other things that had outlived their usefulness but that couldn't quite be gotten rid of. The road then turned to the left and ran past some very tall and old cypress trees until it reached the shed, where it widened to allow a milk tanker to turn around.
The cows were milked twice a day. I liked being involved. This is something that made no sense to me then and it makes no sense to me now, given that I am inherently lazy and introspective. I think I liked the routine, and the feeling it gave me of being a part of the farm, along with a sense of achievement, of having contributed in a real way to what my father did with his life.
For most of my childhood we had sharefarmers, who did the milking for us, but at various times, and sometimes for extended stretches, it was mum, dad and me, or dad, Uncle Charlie and me. I also sometimes helped out when a sharefarmer was on his own (see "Dennis, Part 1" and "Dennis, Part 2" passim). In fact, one of the times dad and I did the milking was during the first part of my HCS year, and so I somehow had to fit school and homework in with farm work. (That seemed to turn out okay, somehow. On school days mum would come down to the shed and take over from me so that I could have breakfast and get ready for school. I owe a debt of gratitude to Helen Thomas, breakfast presenter at the time on 3RRR, whom I credit in large part for getting me through that busy time, and really for getting me through HSC, and whose brother Greg, curiously, I would get to know the following year when I moved to Melbourne University.)
The morning milking involved getting up very early, while it was still dark. I would take my dog, Woof, for a long walk, sometimes to the further reaches of the farm, to bring the cows up to the yard. Depending on the time of year, the cows would either be waiting keenly at the gate to be let through, or they would be hanging back at the furthest corner, trying as hard to hide from us as their tiny brains would allow them to. Woof had no training, and she turned into a raving lunatic whenever there was a tractor around, but when it was just the two of us, on foot (or paws in her case), she demonstrated a good instinct for knowing where to go and how to get the cows moving. (She had no sense of how to get them moving in the right direction, but the cows knew where they were supposed to go and all Woof needed to do was get them up and about, which she did by running up to them and barking a lot.) My role was to encourage the dog in her endeavours, and to do a rudimentary head count of the cows as they left the paddock and headed along the track towards the shed. Then it was just a matter of pushing them up into the yard and closing the gate behind them. By the time I had brought the cows into the yard dad would have arrived at the shed with a cup of tea for me. (And, to borrow a line from Maurice Sendak's "Where The Wild Things Are", it was still hot.) He would also have set up all the hoses, turned the hot water on and started the motor. After that, the milking process was fast and incessant.
In case you're interested, this is how it worked.
The first row of nine cows would be herded up the steps and onto one of the platforms. There they would be washed, and the milking machines put on them. Milk was pulled out of the cows by a pulsating suction operation, kind of like a vacuum cleaner with the hiccups, and sent along a stainless steel pipe into the stainless steel milk vat, which was refrigerated to a temperature of four degrees Celsius to keep the milk in pristine condition until the milk tanker arrived, later that day, to collect the milk and take it to the Murray Goulburn factory.
The farmer, whose head, as I said, was more or less at the height of the cows' udders, was vulnerable on two fronts. For a start, the cows, and especially the younger ones, didn't always particularly enjoy the intimate human contact they were being subjected to, and could be inclined to lash out with their back legs. Cows, being much stronger than people, have been known to break bones, but they were facing away from you, and cows kick out to the side rather than straight back, so a person who was concentrating and exercising caution should have been able to keep himself safe. For particularly ornery critters, a kick clamp was applied to prevent their legs from lashing out too far. (The kick clamp restrained the cow but didn't appear to cause it any pain or discomfort. It never seemed to me to be at all cruel, and I tend to be sensitive about that sort of thing.)
The second area of vulnerability arose out of the fact that the cows, while they were in the shed, were a little bit on edge and therefore prone to outpourings of one type or another from their rear ends, which outpourings, remembering again that the farmer was at eye level with the cows' udders, could land upon the head of the unsuspecting and/or unprepared. From personal experience, this didn't happen anywhere near as often as you might have expected it to; I think after a while some kind of sixth sense kicked in that would let you know when there were rumblings afoot. (One or two of my university friends, not being as skilled in the ways of cows as us natives, were not so lucky.)
Once that first row was quietly milking away, the next bunch of nine cows would be run up the steps and onto the other platform. They would have the mud washed from the area concerned, and the machines would then be taken off the first row of cows, swung across towards the other platform and placed on the newcomers. The first row would then get a bit of a rinse, in the interests of personal hygiene, and be sent on their way, out through the "exit" doors and off to whatever paddock the gates had been set up to send them to. They usually headed off without any need for encouragement, because after each milking they went into a new paddock, which meant fresh grass for them.
One thing that soon became clear, if you were a student of cow psychology, was that there was a clear pecking order amongst the cows in the yard. Certain cows would insist on standing in the same place each milking, waiting for their turn to be brought into the shed. Some cows would insist on being first in. Others would want to be anywhere but first. Still others would hang right back, like reluctant schoolboys, until they had no choice but to be next into the shed. A feeble but effective electric fence pushed the cows up the yard as their numbers decreased, just to make it easier to chase the laggards into the shed. (A two-foot long lump of polythene pipe applied to the rump of a cow also came in handy, but shhh, don't tell anybody. (And anyway they didn't need to be whacked very hard to get them moving; it was more of a friendly reminder.))
And so it continued, row after row and cow after cow, until before you knew it the only thing left in the yard was a patchwork quilt of cowpats. Dad then washed and sterilised all of the milking equipment and I got to do my other favourite job, which was cranking up a high-pressure hose and washing all of the manure out of the shed and the yard, from where it cascaded down into a pit a short distance downhill from the shed, and thence via a very long hose out into the paddocks nearby. (Occasionally we would let it bake in the sun for a little while, shovel it onto a trailer and take it home, where it was added to the compost heap for eventual use in mum's veggie garden.)
Once all of that was done, one of us would go into the engine room and flick the master switch to "off". The engine would slowly wind down until the cow shed was shrouded in a peculiarly enveloping silence. The noise of the milking machines, when they were running, was everywhere, making it difficult to have a conversation (which you didn't have time to do anyway), but after the first few minutes you didn't even notice it, which made the silence when they were turned off even more striking.
One of us would then wander down to where the cows were supposed to have gone, chasing any stragglers along in front of us, and lock them all in their allotted paddock, where they would stay until next milking.
As you all know, cows need to be milked twice a day, and so off we would go, again, after our four o'clock cup of tea, following the same routine. There was something special, though, about evening milkings. In winter we didn't finish until well after dark. There is nothing quite like the feeling you got walking homewards with your father, the only sound that of the gravel road crunching underfoot, with nothing but the stars and perhaps a bit of moonlight to guide you, the lights of the dairy having been extinguished, the lights of home not yet visible, with the ghostly presence of the cypress trees beside you, and yet feeling perfectly safe and knowing exactly where you were going. Perhaps you walked in silence, or perhaps you were talking about whatever it is you talk about when it is just you and your father, and you are at the end of another long day. And then you round the bend in the road and start to walk uphill, the lights of home appearing out of the darkness, and you know there will be a hot shower and a home-cooked meal waiting for you, a meal put together, with love and home-grown ingredients, by your mother, the largely unseen and unsung hero of the piece, the person who kept the home front ticking over with such efficiency and independence that it was easy to take her for granted (which, of course, you did) even though, should you have chosen to think about it (which, of course, you didn't), you would have known damn well that you couldn't have managed without her.
Song of the day
"Dandelion", by Charlotte Gainsbourg. Let's face it, there is a small part of every last one of us that wants to be Marc Bolan. Beck is not an exception. On this song he takes the loping gait of the title track of his last album, "Modern Guilt", and ramps it up by way of some very T Rexian rhythm guitar, as a cushion atop which Charlotte Gainsbourg quietly lays down her very, very English singing voice. Mournful, but beautifully captured, string and horn sections stop things from getting too glam.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Song of the day
"Who Makes Your Money", by Spoon. I would trade anything -- either or both children, eye teeth, kidneys or other vital organs, memories of growing up on the farm (no, not those) -- for the part of this "song" (a word which, when it comes to Spoon, is used loosely) from 1:40 to two minutes, where they break everything down and then build it all up again to the point where it rejoins the song itself. It may not be quite as stunning as the moment in "I Feel Love" where that song takes off into the stratosphere, but it's pretty impressive. Man, Spoon are a quality unit.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Song of the day
"Snow Days", by Real Estate. To my ears, which may not be entirely honest or faithful, this song represents a kind of unexpected mid-point between David Kilgour and Fleet Foxes. The guitar has the same kind of crispness that you (or, at least, I) get when listening to Kilgour (think "BBC World") while the harmonies, while not being as exhilarating as those conjured by Fleet Foxes, are at the very least growing from the same root. The fact that the drums have been recorded from two rooms away using the crappiest microphones known to man, well, we remain to be convinced that this is due to financial necessity as opposed to affectation, but it doesn't in any way detract from the song.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Song of the day
"Keeper of the Flame", by Nina Simone. Did somebody say "Antony"? I always favoured the Bryan Ferry comparisons, myself, but this song is clearly, and indisputably, where the Antony-does-Nina story derives from. I'm not convinced anybody could tell the difference on a blind test. Having said that, this song is so emotionally raw that it almost hurts to listen; the instinct is to turn away, which is also something I get when listening to Antony's solo work (guilty secret: my favourite Antony is Disco Diva Antony, see for example "Blind", by Hercules & Love Affair). But how did he get in here, anyway? This is Nina Simone's song ...
Friday, February 19, 2010
Song of the day
"David Watts", by The Kinks. I am sorry to say that I have come rather late to the Kinks' late-sixties albums. And yet it seems like they have always been with me. Let me count the ways. "Days", by Elvis Costello. "Victoria", by The Fall. Ed Kuepper's take on "Last of the Steam Powered Trains". (Sorry about this one) "You Really Got Me", by Van Halen. And, it transpires, "David Watts", by The Jam. There was nothing about this song, as I have known and loved it for thirty years, that gave any indication it was anything other than a Paul Weller original. In its lyrics' theme and tone, and musically, it blended perfectly with what The Jam were all about. (Which, in many ways, was also what Ray Davies had been about -- a certain type of Englishness, which, being Australian, I am not qualified to dig into any more deeply.) The Jam were never really "punk" as much as they were, what, "British Invasion?", ten or a dozen years after the fact.
Hearing the originals of all of these songs after (in some cases long after) becoming attached to the versions listed above requires a bit of reverse engineering. But it is surely a testament to the quality of Ray Davies as a songwriter that each of them, with very little tweaking or manipulation, sounds just as comfortable in their old skins as in their new I'll shut up now ok thx bye.
Hearing the originals of all of these songs after (in some cases long after) becoming attached to the versions listed above requires a bit of reverse engineering. But it is surely a testament to the quality of Ray Davies as a songwriter that each of them, with very little tweaking or manipulation, sounds just as comfortable in their old skins as in their new I'll shut up now ok thx bye.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Song of the day
"For Ex-Lovers Only", by Black Tambourine. Sure, in 2010 this sounds like it has been cut from a template. But didn't Black Tambourine invent the template? Oh, and since when can the word "twee" have anything to do with a sonic onslaught such as this?
(Watch it here.)
(Watch it here.)
Saturday, February 06, 2010
We Were Wrong (a continuing series)
Nine years later, I have no recollection of what it was about The Strokes that rubbed me up the wrong way [not intended to be a reference to the front cover of "Is This It" - ed]. But rub they did. Perhaps it was something along the lines of what seems to piss countless people off about Vampire Weekend: a sense of calculated, studied "cool", of advantage being, well, taken advantage of. What they did was, they made it all look too damn easy.
I now turn slowly towards the camera, cap in hand, and announce that "Is This It" is, and always was, a remarkably tight little nugget of a rock album: concise, full of impeccable tunage, everything (another line I have used before) in its right place. Each song produces, even in the most jaded listener, a little adrenaline rush. Nobody should be entitled to ask for more than that.
What is hard to own up to is that the criticisms I aimed at "Is This It" all those years ago, particularly the line (which I also, and I am now seeing the error of my ways there too, used in relation to The xx's "xx") about if I wanted to listen to The Ramones / Television / sundry other rock bands from the golden age of downtown NYC I would listen to the originals rather than these young upstarts, well, those very criticisms were thrown back at me, if I cared to recognise and/or admit it, by my falling head over heels, barely two years later, for LCD Soundsystem, a band that, lets face it, were for the first part of their existence nothing more than the sum of James Murphy's record collection. It's not as if The Strokes' tastes were any worse, from my perspective, than Murphy's. It's not even as if Murphy's songs were particularly better (although a couple of the early 12s would wipe the pants off anything, anywhere, anytime).
The really funny thing, though, is that at least two of the songs on "Is This It" now reveal themselves as being templates for, or predictors of, or precursors to, LCD Soundsystem's song for the ages, "All My Friends" (something I probably wouldn't have noticed if not for my peremptory dismissal of The Strokes, which at least has allowed me to listen to "Is This It" with a fresh pair of (cloth) ears). And so we see, as we so often do, a wheel turning full circle, and proceeding to run over a blogger whose opinions, like those on The Daily Show, are "not fully thought through".
I now turn slowly towards the camera, cap in hand, and announce that "Is This It" is, and always was, a remarkably tight little nugget of a rock album: concise, full of impeccable tunage, everything (another line I have used before) in its right place. Each song produces, even in the most jaded listener, a little adrenaline rush. Nobody should be entitled to ask for more than that.
What is hard to own up to is that the criticisms I aimed at "Is This It" all those years ago, particularly the line (which I also, and I am now seeing the error of my ways there too, used in relation to The xx's "xx") about if I wanted to listen to The Ramones / Television / sundry other rock bands from the golden age of downtown NYC I would listen to the originals rather than these young upstarts, well, those very criticisms were thrown back at me, if I cared to recognise and/or admit it, by my falling head over heels, barely two years later, for LCD Soundsystem, a band that, lets face it, were for the first part of their existence nothing more than the sum of James Murphy's record collection. It's not as if The Strokes' tastes were any worse, from my perspective, than Murphy's. It's not even as if Murphy's songs were particularly better (although a couple of the early 12s would wipe the pants off anything, anywhere, anytime).
The really funny thing, though, is that at least two of the songs on "Is This It" now reveal themselves as being templates for, or predictors of, or precursors to, LCD Soundsystem's song for the ages, "All My Friends" (something I probably wouldn't have noticed if not for my peremptory dismissal of The Strokes, which at least has allowed me to listen to "Is This It" with a fresh pair of (cloth) ears). And so we see, as we so often do, a wheel turning full circle, and proceeding to run over a blogger whose opinions, like those on The Daily Show, are "not fully thought through".
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
Earworm of the day
"A Little Bit More", by Jamie Lidell. Honestly, listen to this three times in a row and I challenge you to chase the little bugger out of your head. You won't be able to. It's just like that tiny creature in "Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn".
How can you extract so much melody from just drums (probably electronic) and the human voice?
How can you extract so much melody from just drums (probably electronic) and the human voice?
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Will there be a silver lining?
And if there is, will it really be silver?
A lot of questions present themselves. The most obvious one, and the one that largely determines the answers to all others, or at least the direction the answers will take, is: what exactly had J D Salinger been doing since he turned his back on the world in the 1950s, and in particular since the publication in the New Yorker, in 1965, of his last known story?
Rumours have been circulating, of every possible stripe, and mostly contradictory, for a long, long time. (Drinking his own urine? I don't think so. Although Brian Eno writes, in "A Year With Swollen Appendices", of doing just that: what is it with these creative types?) He seems to have confirmed at one point that he had indeed been "writing". The fact that he struggled to describe exactly what it was that he was writing is, of course, entirely consistent with him having done what we all (don't we?) hope that he has been doing: working on the continuing adventures of the Glass family. Of course, it is also entirely consistent with whatever might turn out to have been the case: even if it is that he hadn't been writing anything at all.
And if he had been writing: what are his instructions to his executors? Is it all to be destroyed? And, if so, will they honour that? Should they? Now, there's a good one, isn't it? If he had been writing away, year after year, for much of the last 40 years, say, that amounts to a volume of work. It could, of course, be the ravings of a madman. (And who would decide that?) And if it isn't the ravings of a madman, what right would the executors have to follow Salinger's wishes (to destroy it) in the face, or more particularly to the detriment, of, let's call it, the broader heritage of American letters?
I think I wouldn't want to be in their shoes.
(Here is an interesting tangential question: how do, or should, the wishes of the public intersect with a person's last will and testament? Imagine if Frank Lloyd Wright had owned Fallingwater, and that he had stated that on his death it was to be destroyed? Would that be okay? Imagine if only one person in the whole world knew the secret formula for making Coca Cola, and he stated that on his death the secret formula was to be destroyed? Imagine if a famous but reclusive scientist had developed a cure for an incurable disease, and stated that on his death the secret formula was to be destroyed? Would that be okay? I'm not saying yes. I'm not saying no. I'm just puttin' it out there. (Isn't this fun?))
The fact that Salinger's literary representative, agent, spokesperson or whatever has apparently declined to comment about future publications suggests, well, what does it suggest? That there aren't any? That there are? That nobody knows? Oh, this is so exciting.
Another question. The recent Raymond Carver brouhaha has brought into sharp focus the relationship between writer and editor. Assuming there are stories. Assuming Salinger has kept them entirely to himself, and under lock and key, unread by any living soul. Are they to be published (if at all) verbatim, as it were? I would suggest (and here I put on my editor's hat) that that would not necessarily be a good thing. I am not aware of the level of editing that his Glass stories underwent before publishing in the New Yorker. Assuming (as is almost certainly the case) that it was considerably less than Carver's stories seem to have been subjected to, they are nevertheless highly unlikely to have gotten through unscathed. Nothing ever does, not really. (Which is why blogging and talk radio are such problematic media.) So some lucky person may well be given the job of taking the Red Pen of Death to unpublished J D Salinger stories, without the vital luxury of a two-way dialogue with the author. It has been done before, of course. But it is hard to imagine it having been done with such a singular literary stylist, in the face of such expectation, and in what will surely be a pressure-cooker environment, with the eyes of the whole wide Internet upon them.
I don't think I envy the person who gets that job, either.
I have only recently embarked upon the Glass stories. (From the pages of the New Yorker, where they originally appeared, of course, with surrounding advertisements and all that, because that's the kind of pathetic geek I am.) They are extraordinary, they haven't dated a bit, Salinger is a great writer of dialogue (he knows exactly which syllable to emphasise), yes, but not only that, the entire concept, of a series of independent stories involving the same fascinating and complex cast of characters, clearly lends itself to more, and more, and more stories. The Glass family is like a canvas (not a blank canvas, more a kind of multicoloured, geometrically complex canvas) upon which almost anything a fertile mind could think of (and Salinger clearly had one of those) could be written.
The world is full of "if only's". We are about to find out if the mystery of the reclusive writer is another one. If only.
A lot of questions present themselves. The most obvious one, and the one that largely determines the answers to all others, or at least the direction the answers will take, is: what exactly had J D Salinger been doing since he turned his back on the world in the 1950s, and in particular since the publication in the New Yorker, in 1965, of his last known story?
Rumours have been circulating, of every possible stripe, and mostly contradictory, for a long, long time. (Drinking his own urine? I don't think so. Although Brian Eno writes, in "A Year With Swollen Appendices", of doing just that: what is it with these creative types?) He seems to have confirmed at one point that he had indeed been "writing". The fact that he struggled to describe exactly what it was that he was writing is, of course, entirely consistent with him having done what we all (don't we?) hope that he has been doing: working on the continuing adventures of the Glass family. Of course, it is also entirely consistent with whatever might turn out to have been the case: even if it is that he hadn't been writing anything at all.
And if he had been writing: what are his instructions to his executors? Is it all to be destroyed? And, if so, will they honour that? Should they? Now, there's a good one, isn't it? If he had been writing away, year after year, for much of the last 40 years, say, that amounts to a volume of work. It could, of course, be the ravings of a madman. (And who would decide that?) And if it isn't the ravings of a madman, what right would the executors have to follow Salinger's wishes (to destroy it) in the face, or more particularly to the detriment, of, let's call it, the broader heritage of American letters?
I think I wouldn't want to be in their shoes.
(Here is an interesting tangential question: how do, or should, the wishes of the public intersect with a person's last will and testament? Imagine if Frank Lloyd Wright had owned Fallingwater, and that he had stated that on his death it was to be destroyed? Would that be okay? Imagine if only one person in the whole world knew the secret formula for making Coca Cola, and he stated that on his death the secret formula was to be destroyed? Imagine if a famous but reclusive scientist had developed a cure for an incurable disease, and stated that on his death the secret formula was to be destroyed? Would that be okay? I'm not saying yes. I'm not saying no. I'm just puttin' it out there. (Isn't this fun?))
The fact that Salinger's literary representative, agent, spokesperson or whatever has apparently declined to comment about future publications suggests, well, what does it suggest? That there aren't any? That there are? That nobody knows? Oh, this is so exciting.
Another question. The recent Raymond Carver brouhaha has brought into sharp focus the relationship between writer and editor. Assuming there are stories. Assuming Salinger has kept them entirely to himself, and under lock and key, unread by any living soul. Are they to be published (if at all) verbatim, as it were? I would suggest (and here I put on my editor's hat) that that would not necessarily be a good thing. I am not aware of the level of editing that his Glass stories underwent before publishing in the New Yorker. Assuming (as is almost certainly the case) that it was considerably less than Carver's stories seem to have been subjected to, they are nevertheless highly unlikely to have gotten through unscathed. Nothing ever does, not really. (Which is why blogging and talk radio are such problematic media.) So some lucky person may well be given the job of taking the Red Pen of Death to unpublished J D Salinger stories, without the vital luxury of a two-way dialogue with the author. It has been done before, of course. But it is hard to imagine it having been done with such a singular literary stylist, in the face of such expectation, and in what will surely be a pressure-cooker environment, with the eyes of the whole wide Internet upon them.
I don't think I envy the person who gets that job, either.
I have only recently embarked upon the Glass stories. (From the pages of the New Yorker, where they originally appeared, of course, with surrounding advertisements and all that, because that's the kind of pathetic geek I am.) They are extraordinary, they haven't dated a bit, Salinger is a great writer of dialogue (he knows exactly which syllable to emphasise), yes, but not only that, the entire concept, of a series of independent stories involving the same fascinating and complex cast of characters, clearly lends itself to more, and more, and more stories. The Glass family is like a canvas (not a blank canvas, more a kind of multicoloured, geometrically complex canvas) upon which almost anything a fertile mind could think of (and Salinger clearly had one of those) could be written.
The world is full of "if only's". We are about to find out if the mystery of the reclusive writer is another one. If only.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Song of the day
"Psykick Dancehall", by The Fall. Ah, there is nothing quite like the feeling you get when listening to prime Fall: the thrashing guitars, pummelling rhythms and Mark E Smith's mouth, all working together in perfect, uh, harmony. I was thinking of calling this blog "Medium Discord" but I couldn't settle on the preferred spelling of "disc(h)ord".
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Song of the day
"The Mystery Zone", by Spoon. Depending on who you read, the first three "major" releases for 2010 are "Transference", by Spoon, "Realism", by The Magnetic Fields, and "IRM", by Charlotte Gainsbourg. The first to reach these four walls (and, unless I was looking in the wrong places, the one that hasn't leaked) is "Transference". Spoon, without doubt, are major. They are so good at what they do, so confident, so comfortable in their own skins, that sometimes all you can do is smile. (Imagine if REM had maintained their sense of playful experimentalism, combined with swagger, beyond the first two albums (but remembering that REM managed still to release another four - at least - classic albums after that).)
The new album, on first listen, is a more abrasive, somewhat less user-friendly affair than "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga". It sounds like the members of Spoon have been giving their old post-punk records a spin or two (there is more than a touch of Martin Hannett in some of the production gewgaws). But they know what they are doing, and they do it well. "The Mystery Zone" stands out, perhaps because it is the song that most recalls "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga". Whatever. It has a very classy piano vamp, and strings that could kill. And, as usual with Spoon, the elements of a perfect pop song are stripped back to the absolute basics before various bits are added back - and those are not necessarily the bits you were expecting.
The liner notes for the album finish with the following statement: "Buying records from record shops is cool." How did they know?
The new album, on first listen, is a more abrasive, somewhat less user-friendly affair than "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga". It sounds like the members of Spoon have been giving their old post-punk records a spin or two (there is more than a touch of Martin Hannett in some of the production gewgaws). But they know what they are doing, and they do it well. "The Mystery Zone" stands out, perhaps because it is the song that most recalls "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga". Whatever. It has a very classy piano vamp, and strings that could kill. And, as usual with Spoon, the elements of a perfect pop song are stripped back to the absolute basics before various bits are added back - and those are not necessarily the bits you were expecting.
The liner notes for the album finish with the following statement: "Buying records from record shops is cool." How did they know?
Monday, January 25, 2010
Nigeria Special
There is still, five (or whatever) years after the most recent change in fiction editor, a recognisable type of New Yorker short story. Of course, any magazine that publishes new fiction on a weekly basis is to be cherished, but for the most part you have some idea at least of what you are going to be getting. Occasionally, though, something comes along that surprises and stays in the mind. That goes back to the 1940s, actually, with the publication of "The Lottery", by Shirley Jackson. (Salinger's Glass family stories, come to think of it, don't really look like anything else, either.) The surprises in my own reading lifetime include a remarkable horror story by Nicholson Baker about (not a typo) Mister Potato Head; the first piece I ever read by Roberto Bolano (whose "The Savage Detectives" I have just finished reading, after toughing it out for almost a year; it was the opposite of a page turner until the last fifty pages or so; but I finished it with the sense that I had just read something extraordinary, and also that I had completely missed what was actually going on for most of the book - I don't know if that is a recommendation or not, read it at your own risk!); "Super Goat Man", by Jonathan Lethem; and a story about a clown set in South America somewhere, name and author forgotten, sorry.
The most recent story to break the mould is "Baptizing the Gun", by Uwem Akpan, from the issue of 4 January 2010 - that's "twenty-ten". You can read it here. It tells the story of a night in hell as experienced by a country priest who is driving his brother's clapped-out VW Beetle when it breaks down somewhere in the badlands of Lagos, a city that, based on what I have read about it, might be a fascinating social experiment if there weren't millions of actual human lives involuntarily caught up in it. The story is a bit like "Slumdog Millionaire" but stripped of the bright colours, stunning cinematography and, y'know, "hope". Nevertheless I can, and do, recommend that you read it.
The most recent story to break the mould is "Baptizing the Gun", by Uwem Akpan, from the issue of 4 January 2010 - that's "twenty-ten". You can read it here. It tells the story of a night in hell as experienced by a country priest who is driving his brother's clapped-out VW Beetle when it breaks down somewhere in the badlands of Lagos, a city that, based on what I have read about it, might be a fascinating social experiment if there weren't millions of actual human lives involuntarily caught up in it. The story is a bit like "Slumdog Millionaire" but stripped of the bright colours, stunning cinematography and, y'know, "hope". Nevertheless I can, and do, recommend that you read it.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Song of the day
"Rockit", by Herbie Hancock. My friend and work colleague Denis asked me today if I had any songs by Icicle Works. I checked this evening, and I do have one song of theirs, from the 1983 UK top 40. Having listened to it, I put that year on a random rotation and, after several songs ranging from forgettable to slightly above average (1983 pales in comparison to the year that preceded it, but shines in comparison to the particularly fallow years that came after), "Rockit" came on to blow all cobwebs away, just as it did in 1983. The thought of seeing Herbie Hancock on Countdown (were those disturbing robotic contraptions actually designed by SRL, or by some mainstream usurpation thereof?) still amazes. The song itself still amazes. It seems at least 10 years ahead of everything around it (strangely, what comes closest is a throwback to an earlier era [unlike Herbie Hancock? - ed], updated by the father figure of New Pop - I speak, of course, of "Owner Of A Lonely Heart", by Yes).
The other thing I noticed about 1983 is that, if you ignore their vastly different accents, the singing voices of Eddy Grant and Men At Work's Colin Hay are practically indistinguishable.
The other thing I noticed about 1983 is that, if you ignore their vastly different accents, the singing voices of Eddy Grant and Men At Work's Colin Hay are practically indistinguishable.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Home Taping Is Killing Music
Once upon a time, in a galaxy that seemed to be a long, long way away but was actually only a few miles down the road, there was no Internet. Exposure to music was different then. You could read in the pages of the NME about what kids were getting up to in the UK, but you couldn't hear much if any of it. If you were lucky enough to have access to, say, Three Triple R in Melbourne or (what was then) Sydney's 2JJ, you could hear what was bubbling up from underground, but even so, to get played there a band had to have recorded an album in an actual studio, with an actual producer, using other people's actual money.
Aside from personally knowing a young band and/or being able to get out to pub gigs, your ability to hear music made on the absolute ground floor was very limited. (And, correspondingly, the ability of neophytes to get heard was very limited.) But there was one way out: a combination of cassette tape and the postal service. We came in around the mid-1980s, but presumably this sort of thing had been going on before then. Enterprising people like Wayne Davidson in Melbourne and Calvin Johnson in Olympia, WA were somehow able to put together compilation cassettes of what we would now call "unsigned artists" and if you sent them a dollar or two, or a tape of your own, or a fanzine, or a badge, or pretty much just begged them, they would sent you their latest compilation tape. Many of these were of fleeting interest, but others have lasted to this day. I'm thinking of the "Let's Together", "Let's Sea" etc series of K Records tapes, and especially of Toytown's epoch-defining (at least for a small group of youngsters in a small town in South Gippsland) "Display Ideas For Supermarkets".
Some of the bands on these tapes didn't really exist. Others disappeared without trace. But you also had your first exposure to future household names like The Melvins, The Magnetic Fields, The Cannanes, Beat Happening and Mecca Normal. And there was a special feeling you got when what you received was a cassette tape that had been put into a case into which a hand-photocopied and hand-folded cover (and sometimes even hand-drawn, such as one I received from XPressway in Dunedin) had been inserted by a real live person just like you, and it fell out of an envelope that had been hand-addressed by somebody just like you. What you got was a sense of belonging to a community.
Now, of course, you can wander around the Internet and download hundreds of new songs by people you have never heard of, without even looking too hard. But I can tell you from dismal personal experience that you will then delete after one listen at least nine of every ten of them. These are, then, the best of times, but also the worst of times. Who is there to help you? Underwater Peoples, that's who. You can wander across to their site (or the site of someone they know) and download the Underwater Peoples Winter Review. What you get is the C21 equivalent of one of those tapes. You don't get quite the same sense of personal involvement, but if you close your eyes and listen you can almost imagine it.
Obviously on a venture such as this nobody is going to like everything they hear, but there is much to enjoy, and come back to, on what they have put together. The loss leaders on this particular venture are tracks by Real Estate and Ducktails, both of whom aren't exactly household names but have at least poked their heads up above the grass roots. But everyone involved does a great job of evoking the sheer joy of making music for its own sake, in that special but narrow period between when an individual voice is discovered and when commercial considerations, however subtle or benign, necessarily intervene. Sound quality is rudimentary at best, but since when has that been relevant? (If you dubbed it onto a C-60 using a shitty tape recorder you would barely notice the difference, and you would also end up listening to it in the medium it was really designed for.)
You want influences? I hear variously Galaxie 500, T Rex, Jonathan Richman, Sebadoh, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and what might be described as the Pacific North-West branch of the C86 Diaspora.
And if you do download it, and like what you hear, do the right thing and send a handwritten note (or virtual equivalent) to its compilers. It's what the old timers would have done.
Aside from personally knowing a young band and/or being able to get out to pub gigs, your ability to hear music made on the absolute ground floor was very limited. (And, correspondingly, the ability of neophytes to get heard was very limited.) But there was one way out: a combination of cassette tape and the postal service. We came in around the mid-1980s, but presumably this sort of thing had been going on before then. Enterprising people like Wayne Davidson in Melbourne and Calvin Johnson in Olympia, WA were somehow able to put together compilation cassettes of what we would now call "unsigned artists" and if you sent them a dollar or two, or a tape of your own, or a fanzine, or a badge, or pretty much just begged them, they would sent you their latest compilation tape. Many of these were of fleeting interest, but others have lasted to this day. I'm thinking of the "Let's Together", "Let's Sea" etc series of K Records tapes, and especially of Toytown's epoch-defining (at least for a small group of youngsters in a small town in South Gippsland) "Display Ideas For Supermarkets".
Some of the bands on these tapes didn't really exist. Others disappeared without trace. But you also had your first exposure to future household names like The Melvins, The Magnetic Fields, The Cannanes, Beat Happening and Mecca Normal. And there was a special feeling you got when what you received was a cassette tape that had been put into a case into which a hand-photocopied and hand-folded cover (and sometimes even hand-drawn, such as one I received from XPressway in Dunedin) had been inserted by a real live person just like you, and it fell out of an envelope that had been hand-addressed by somebody just like you. What you got was a sense of belonging to a community.
Now, of course, you can wander around the Internet and download hundreds of new songs by people you have never heard of, without even looking too hard. But I can tell you from dismal personal experience that you will then delete after one listen at least nine of every ten of them. These are, then, the best of times, but also the worst of times. Who is there to help you? Underwater Peoples, that's who. You can wander across to their site (or the site of someone they know) and download the Underwater Peoples Winter Review. What you get is the C21 equivalent of one of those tapes. You don't get quite the same sense of personal involvement, but if you close your eyes and listen you can almost imagine it.
Obviously on a venture such as this nobody is going to like everything they hear, but there is much to enjoy, and come back to, on what they have put together. The loss leaders on this particular venture are tracks by Real Estate and Ducktails, both of whom aren't exactly household names but have at least poked their heads up above the grass roots. But everyone involved does a great job of evoking the sheer joy of making music for its own sake, in that special but narrow period between when an individual voice is discovered and when commercial considerations, however subtle or benign, necessarily intervene. Sound quality is rudimentary at best, but since when has that been relevant? (If you dubbed it onto a C-60 using a shitty tape recorder you would barely notice the difference, and you would also end up listening to it in the medium it was really designed for.)
You want influences? I hear variously Galaxie 500, T Rex, Jonathan Richman, Sebadoh, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and what might be described as the Pacific North-West branch of the C86 Diaspora.
And if you do download it, and like what you hear, do the right thing and send a handwritten note (or virtual equivalent) to its compilers. It's what the old timers would have done.
Lost
RIP Kate McGarrigle. I don't think it was possible to hear the twinned voices of Kate and Anna McGarrigle and not be moved. Even the hairs on the back of a bald man's neck would be standing on their ends.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Song of the day
"Caroline", by Espers.
I felt it was my civic duty to listen to the three albums that sat somewhere near the top of most 2009 critics' polls: "Merriweather Post Pavilion", by Animal Collective; "Bitte Orca", by The Dirty Projectors; and "Veckatimest", by Grizzly Bear. Having done so, I can announce that my considered response to all three of them is a resounding "Whatevah". They all, to my ears at least, have about them an earnestness, a sense of scale, of reaching towards the status of "important", of making some kind of boad, majestic sweep, of, what, bigness?, maximalism?, that makes them easy to admire but, for me (I am clearly in a pretty small minority here), not easy to actually like. No, I have never been particularly keen on U2 or Radiohead either, other purveyors of the serious and/or grandiose, and I also failed to click with Arcade Fire. So either I am old and grumpy (yes), or I am lapsing into a kind of reverse snobbery that I thought was dormant and/or that a one-two combination of Adrienne and Darren had long ago talked me out of (viz, everybody else likes this so there must be something wrong with it), or the pop zeitgeist is somewhere that I don't particularly want to go (as happened with the rise of grunge at the end of the 1980s) and, pop music being the caravan that continually moves on, something more amenable will surely be about to appear.
Of course, I might just be lazy; all of these albums clearly require more work than I have put in. (Or is that no different from "Eat your greens, they taste like filth but they're good for you"?) Outright ejection may well turn out to have been my loss. (I also didn't warm to Fleet Foxes at first, and it in fact took the spark of Adrienne's interest in one of their songs, which was being heavily rotated on the local ABC radio, to get me to give them a second listen, whereupon in no time their album became the most played record at Stan's house ("Whose house??"), and it remains so. This just goes to show, as if any proof whatsoever were required, that I am capable of being very, very wrong.)
If you forced me to speculate, my guess would be that, of all three of these records, I would be most likely to develop warmer feelings for "Veckatimest". There is a song on it called "While You Wait For The Others" that has some nice guitar. That would be my way in, if I were looking for one.
All of which brings me to the third Espers album, "III", which appeared with no or slightly negative fanfare towards the end of last year, and which takes a very different tack from their previous album of extended arboreal psych jams in favour of an appealingly loose but concise take on English folk (there is at least one song on here that could slip unnoticed onto, say, Fairport Convention's "Unhalfbricking"). "Caroline" is lovely. It will have you checking that it isn't a reissue of something that might have originally been released on Island in 1969. It is also one of the few examples I can think of where electrified violin (if that's what it is) actually enhances a song.
I felt it was my civic duty to listen to the three albums that sat somewhere near the top of most 2009 critics' polls: "Merriweather Post Pavilion", by Animal Collective; "Bitte Orca", by The Dirty Projectors; and "Veckatimest", by Grizzly Bear. Having done so, I can announce that my considered response to all three of them is a resounding "Whatevah". They all, to my ears at least, have about them an earnestness, a sense of scale, of reaching towards the status of "important", of making some kind of boad, majestic sweep, of, what, bigness?, maximalism?, that makes them easy to admire but, for me (I am clearly in a pretty small minority here), not easy to actually like. No, I have never been particularly keen on U2 or Radiohead either, other purveyors of the serious and/or grandiose, and I also failed to click with Arcade Fire. So either I am old and grumpy (yes), or I am lapsing into a kind of reverse snobbery that I thought was dormant and/or that a one-two combination of Adrienne and Darren had long ago talked me out of (viz, everybody else likes this so there must be something wrong with it), or the pop zeitgeist is somewhere that I don't particularly want to go (as happened with the rise of grunge at the end of the 1980s) and, pop music being the caravan that continually moves on, something more amenable will surely be about to appear.
Of course, I might just be lazy; all of these albums clearly require more work than I have put in. (Or is that no different from "Eat your greens, they taste like filth but they're good for you"?) Outright ejection may well turn out to have been my loss. (I also didn't warm to Fleet Foxes at first, and it in fact took the spark of Adrienne's interest in one of their songs, which was being heavily rotated on the local ABC radio, to get me to give them a second listen, whereupon in no time their album became the most played record at Stan's house ("Whose house??"), and it remains so. This just goes to show, as if any proof whatsoever were required, that I am capable of being very, very wrong.)
If you forced me to speculate, my guess would be that, of all three of these records, I would be most likely to develop warmer feelings for "Veckatimest". There is a song on it called "While You Wait For The Others" that has some nice guitar. That would be my way in, if I were looking for one.
All of which brings me to the third Espers album, "III", which appeared with no or slightly negative fanfare towards the end of last year, and which takes a very different tack from their previous album of extended arboreal psych jams in favour of an appealingly loose but concise take on English folk (there is at least one song on here that could slip unnoticed onto, say, Fairport Convention's "Unhalfbricking"). "Caroline" is lovely. It will have you checking that it isn't a reissue of something that might have originally been released on Island in 1969. It is also one of the few examples I can think of where electrified violin (if that's what it is) actually enhances a song.
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