Song of the day

"Smoking Her Wings", by The Bats.



Let's take a trip back to 1988, a time when Dunedin bands were capable of unfeasible greatness. (And haven't New Zealand done well in the cricket World Cup? Cue the immortal words of Mike Williamson, in a different sporting context: "I tipped this!")

I fell in love with this song the first time I heard it, to the extent that if I ever get back to the list of 50 most important songs in my life, it will be on there. Featuring Alastair Galbraith on violin, not that you can hear it on this video, which is about as lo-fi as you can get (which is somehow fitting for those faraway, home-made days).

Thanks to whoever taped this from Rage and then had the good sense to throw it up on the 'Tube.

The hot new thing that's got the whole world talking

The only thing better than listening to The Beatles is listening to The Beatles In Mono. (Hint: click on the cover pictures for more of what you fancy.)

Ever since I bought my first complete set of Beatles albums on vinyl, in the early eighties, I have been vaguely troubled by the fake stereo separation evident on, particularly, the early albums. You kind of knew that Ringo wasn't really sitting by himself in the far left corner of the room bashing away on the drums while the others were huddled over to the far right, somehow coming together in the centre for the vocals. (You could always fake a mono set-up by pressing the "mono" button on your amplifier but it isn't quite the same, a bit like watching a black and white movie on a colour TV and getting distracted by the residual colour tints on the screen.) And so "The Beatles In Mono" is the answer to a lot of problems. It is also, if you read the hype, The Beatles as The Beatles originally intended. Which, if true, must surely count for something.

A song like "Please Please Me" -- any of them, in fact -- sounds so incredibly fresh and alive today, nearly fifty years later,  that it's impossible to imagine how revolutionary it must have sounded in 1963. "Beatlemania", kids, wasn't just some cynical marketing ploy.

This goes with that (antipodean edition)

The second album by Grinderman is, to my ears, far more satisfying than the first. The perceived intention behind the first album was to locate the precise nature of the change in direction forced upon the Bad Seeds by the departure of Mick Harvey. The brilliance of that plan was borne out by the success of "Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!!", the resultant Seeds record. Thus, in a sense, Grinderman's purpose had been served. And yet Nick Cave, restless old soul that he is, has opted to pick up his guitar for a second time (cue sound of actual musicians the world over gritting their teeth) and, possibly feeling liberated by the fact the Grinderman was no longer a (side) project with a specific job to do, gathered the hirsute rabble together for another album of late-middle-aged sexual angst and disparate shards of noise. Yeah, I like it. (Some people prefer the Bad Seeds. Some liken Grinderman more to the heady days of the Birthday Party. I don't agree with that, but right now I don't see that a stated preference for one aspect of Cave's persona over another serves any useful purpose. It's a bit like (well, not really, but bear with me) Graham Greene, who wrote serious novels and interspersed them with what he called "entertainments": at the end of the day they're all Graham Greene novels.)

Listening to "Palaces of Montezuma", though, I was struck by one thing in particular: musically it is a dead ringer for, albeit slightly more mellow (you heard that right) than, "Theme From 'Mad Flies, Mad Flies'", by the Laughing Clowns. It is so close, in fact, that you half expect those exhilarating Laughing Clowns horns to burst in on cue and disrupt the proceedings and/or take them to a higher plane.

[Sorry, this appears to be the best available on YT. You might have to listen a little more closely than with the studio original but I hope the point is still made.]

It is as if some of the Ed Kuepper magic rubbed off on Cave during Ed's recent(ish) stint as guitarist-for-hire with the Bad Seeds (and, as you know, there are few internal organs I would not have been prepared to part with in return for the chance to see that set-up in action, but, alas, 'twas not to be), and seeped into this song, perhaps by osmosis (or perhaps by design). So what you get is something like two Australian classics rolled up into one neat-o package.

Three songs

One:

"Calamity Song", by The Decemberists.



This is perhaps the least representative song on their new album, and it doesn't include what, for me, is the record's main drawcard, viz., the backing vocals of Gillian Welch. What it does have is Peter Buck on guitar, and, for all of the band's protestations that they weren't going for an REM sound as much as a "Peter Buck" sound, this song carries REM's DNA right down to its bootstraps. The vocal phrasing has more than a fleeting nod to Michael Stipe. The song itself is straight out of the "Fables of the Reconstruction" playbook. And it carries the listener along with the same sense of sweeping exhilaration that REM, once upon a time, did like nobody else (think "Driver 8").

Two:

"Biking Up The Strand", by Peter Baumann. (Click to play; right click to download.)

If I were ever to do another radio show (I won't), this would be the opening track each week. At least, until I got sick of it. Which isn't likely to happen any time soon. A lost gem of (although not really "of") the post-punk era.

Three:

"Limit To Your Love", by James Blake.



It's difficult to know what to make of the self-titled debut album by James Blake. It has been the centre of such a media shitstorm in the UK, and a lightning rod for so many divergent (and vehement) opinions, that it is probably going to take a while to assess it on its own terms. (It seems from this distance like half of London wants to put him on a pedestal and the other half wants to tear him limb from limb.) And it's true that releasing this song, a cover of the much-loved Feist original (from the thinking person's mother's-day present of 2008), as a teaser for the album was always going to be an accident waiting to happen, whether Blake knew it (unleashing his inner McLaren, perhaps) or not (the latter being more likely, I suspect).

It seems to me that the album is being subjected to much more weight than it was ever intended to carry. When you consider how different the album is from the EPs that preceded it, and how different the EPs were from each other, the picture is that of an exceptionally talented young artist trying on different clothes in an effort to figure out which ones suit him best, and this album is merely the most recent of those changes of clothing.

I deliberately avoided hearing the song until I could listen to it in the context of the album, but, even so, "Limit To Your Love", which sits literally and figuratively at the centre of the record, burns so bright that it sucks all of the air out of everything around it. (When the dub(step) drops, you realise you are witnessing something special.) It will take some time for it to find its place, but time is something that this album has on its side.

Song of the day

"The Great X-1", by The Informatics.

(Click to play. Right click to download.) (Somebody please let me know if this works. I am experimenting with something.)

With synth wave, cold wave, minimal wave or whatever wave being one of the flavours of 2010/11, it is worth remembering that Australia had a very strong synth-band contingent back around the start of the 80s.

Imagine: the small bar at an inner-city pub. The band: a shocking sight. No drums. No guitars. A couple of people on synths and a programmed drum machine. Guys in the band: extremely thin with severely fringed haircuts. Girls: black skirts and stockings, maybe with a horizontally striped t-shirt. Black and red perhaps. Quite possibly somebody up the front wiggling around and bashing a Syndrum (tm) to the second and fourth beats. As Phil Oakey sang, these are the things that dreams are made of.

This song is a good example of what this country was capable of. In fleeting moments it gets a bit proto-Kids In The Kitchen, but those moments soon pass. I think they were from Melbourne but I might be wrong. Biographical information is hard to come by.

You can also listen here, while looking at a typical early-80s post-industrial-type picture:

Song of the day

"Sticky Music", by Sandii & The Sunsetz.



Some things just stick in your mind.

Surprisingly, this was something of a hit in Australia. Surprisingly not because it isn't a very catchy song (it is), but because Japanese acts (I think it's fair to say; no research undertaken) tend not to do well here. Which is our loss, considering that they are at least the equals of anyone else in the world in so many genres of music, from psychedelic freak-outs to reggae to doom metal to noise to the sheer genius that is j-pop. In some ways it is a crying shame that Japan is not a part of Eurovision. Except that it would end up winning every year, thus spoiling everybody else's fun.

Haruomi Hosono (YMO) wrote the music for, and produced, this song. Curiously, there is a strong David Sylvian connection with Sandii & The Sunsetz. I had no idea. I love the internet.

YouTubes of the day

Comic Relief edition.


In which Noel Fielding channels his inner Kate Bush:





and Adrian Edmondson portrays the dying swan (with some help from another familiar face):

Commercial Zone

Get these while they're hot.

Always check the asterisk.

Found in the New Yorker, early 1961.

Click to enlarge.

Ain't no sunshine when she's gone

Yesterday we said goodbye to Ella, the little black St Kilda street cat who has been with us almost forever. She has been an integral part of our family for all of the boys' lives, and well before that, and we will miss her. We were lucky to have her around for so long, I suppose, but just now that's not how we are feeling.

YouTube of the day

"United Provinces of India", by Cornershop.



You may have thought that Cornershop released "Brimful of Asha" back in 1996 and then stopped. You would be wrong. They have released two albums and several singles since then, all of them excellent. They might have raised a middle finger to the music industry, but that's not the same thing. This clip would appear to be a track from their forthcoming album and is as infectious and uplifting as ever.

Deleted Scenes

Longstanding readers will be aware that I have, from time to time, replayed on the pages of this blog mundane and uneventful episodes from what might at a stretch be called my life and times. The following unconnected snippets represent the scenes that presently lie on the cutting-room floor, perhaps one day to be retrieved and turned into their own little short film, perhaps not. I suggest you either take them or leave them.

Playing with my Melbourne cousins at my uncles Jack and Charlie's farm, and going a bit further down the steep, pine-planted embankment above the creek than we had intended. Looking behind us in the direction we had come from, it seemed an impossibly steep climb back up. We convinced ourselves that we were going to die, and one of my cousins kept saying that this must have been what God had planned for us, as if she believed it (or wanted to trick me into saying it). We survived.

Being allowed to go, without adult supervision, with my three older cousins (on my mum's side) to Charlie Brown's Beach (although I have never been quite sure if it is known by that name by anybody other than my immediate family), and my cousins letting me go out with them until the water was over my head. I have never felt any more special in my entire life than I did at that very moment.

Saturday nights at my Melbourne cousins' house, sitting in the central corner of their "modular" lounge suite, watching the VFL footy replay, and a bit later the Tattslotto draw, and observing, slack-jawed, at the way the entire family would compete against each other, at high volume, to guess which numbered ball would roll out next. On rare occasions I would get to stay up to watch some of the Penthouse Club with Mike Williamson and Mary Hardy, which I could never do at home. My mum had a venomous hatred towards Mary Hardy. Venomous hatred was not mum's style. I thought Mary Hardy must have been the most evil person in the world.

Buying my first cassette recorder, at Retravision in Dandenong (at the time, my second-favourite shop in the world, after Tim the Toyman at Chadstone), and discovering that if you recorded something that was in stereo the recording that you made would itself be in stereo. You can believe that this changed my life. It was as if somebody had told me that their mother was the South Gippsland Lego Lady and they could get me any Lego set I wanted. (Actually David Williams did tell me that; and of course I fell for it. Oh the bitter disappointment.)

Having nothing but candle light at home after a storm had (inevitably) put the power out. If the power went out I was in trouble if I tried to read, but playing cards was okay.

Being taken to the beach at Venus Bay by my aunt and uncle, wearing my good school shoes, being warned by my aunt not to get my shoes wet, and then, after a while, finding myself playing in the shallows with my shoes on. My shoes, of course, were sopping wet by then, and my aunt was having a pink fit. Things happen when you are a kid where, no matter how hard you try, the thing you weren't allowed to do, you do. And you get in trouble. And in a way it isn't really fair that you got in trouble, because you didn't do it on purpose, it just kind of happened.

I only have two memories of my time at the old house, where we lived until I was four. The old house had been built by a farmer, during the Depression, with whatever materials were to hand. It had then been moved, twice, before finishing up on top of the hill. It was not in any sense fancy, but as a toddler you don't notice these things. (Well, I might have two other memories, but I can't be sure that they are real memories because, unusually for my family, both of them exist in photographs.) The first of my two actual memories is of having a bad dream, where my stuffed-toy golliwog came to life and started saying bad and threatening things to me. (My rational adult self says this must have been a dream. My small child self would call my rational adult self a liar.) The second is of my Melbourne cousins coming to the house, and the oldest of them getting out a piano accordion, which looked like a fascinating and harmless collection of buttons and other stuff, but which, when she made a sound come out of it, without warning and very loudly, sent me running, crying, to my parents' bedroom. I still have a "thing" about accordions.

Kicking a soccer ball around the yard with my friend Weary. He was Manchester United and I was Leeds United. How the two of us had any idea of who, or what, Manchester United and Leeds United were, I will never know.

Being at my uncles' farm, with a different set of Melbourne cousins, all boys this time, and being the victim of a cruel but harmless prank. They took me for a walk after dark over towards the hayshed out past the old dairy, the hayshed where we often built forts and conducted full-scale wars, oblivious to any risk of the fragile edifice of piled-up bales of hay collapsing in on top of us. They distracted me briefly, and suggested I might like to walk in a particular direction. Like the fool I always was, I did what they asked me, and walked straight into an electrified fence. The humiliating thing was not walking into the fence, and subsequently jumping back in shock, to the tune of their teenage laughter. The humiliating thing was that I knew like the back of my hand the layout of the paddocks and fencing over there, but with the darkness, and the excitement of being asked outside, after dark (and being allowed to go!), with my cousins, I forgot everything I knew.

This next one was related to me many years later by my mother, who didn't usually tell me very much about things that had happened, but must have been carrying this around with her for so long that she couldn't bear to keep the truth from me any longer. What she told me was that the white kitten we brought back from Bateman's Bay when I was five years old didn't just "go away for a long walk", as she had said to me at the time; in fact, being deaf, as many white kittens are, it had been run over by our sharefarmer. I was kind of glad she eventually told me the truth. For what seemed like years after it had happened, I would often find myself gazing forlornly at the hills in the distance, wondering when that little kitten would come back home.

This goes with that (sleight return)

"Hark, The Herald Angels Sing", a Peel Session recording by The Fall, and "Pretend We're Dead", by L7. Strange bedfellows indeed, but there it is.

YouTube of the day

Hugh Laurie captures something here. I'm not sure entirely what. But I do remember enjoying this immensely when I saw it, presumably on "A Bit of Fry and Laurie" although the YouTube uploader suggests otherwise. Maybe he performed it twice.

YouTubes of the day

A couple of White Stripes clips in order to wave them farewell.





The White Stripes had an almost classical trajectory for a rock band. They appeared as if from out of nowhere with a string of releases bursting with unconstrained excitement and potential, followed those with an album where it all came together brilliantly, followed that with a certified Classic Rock Album ("Elephant"), followed that with one that was not quite so good but that was good enough that it allowed contrarians to argue that it was actually better than said Classic Rock Album, followed that, after a long pause, with an album that, for a while, you were able to convince yourself was not a drop-off in quality but which you knew, deep down, really was. Then a long silence. Then the announcement. If you put it on a graph it would be a kind of Quality Bell Curve.

Thanks guys.

And, just to finish off, a song where, in our family, we like to imagine Animal from the Muppets wandering into the studio every so often. You will hear what we mean.

Song of the day

"Map Ref. 41ºN 93ºW", by Wire.





I always assumed those coordinates would put me somewhere in the UK. In fact, it is a road south-east of Des Moines, Iowa. Which suggests that they may have just made it up. But that is Wire in a nutshell: confounding our expectations since 1977.


Oh, and did I mention that this is one of my favourite songs ever?

Song of the day

"I Heard You Say", by Vivian Girls.



What I said earlier about twenty-odd-year-old records by Look Blue Go Purple never sounding as of-the-moment as they do now? Case in point number 2,851.

YouTube of the day

It's nice to see Ian Curtis with a smile on his face, yeah?

Song(s) of the day

First, we have the song that samples the other song: "Lord Knows Best", by Dirty Beaches.



Then we have the song that is being sampled: "Voila", by Francoise Hardy.


Francoise Hardy - Voila from Know Phase on Vimeo.


Which do you prefer? I have heard the Dirty Beaches track criticised on the basis that the person doing the criticising would rather be listening to Francoise Hardy. And while that's a sentiment I can generally endorse, there is something genuinely haunting and unsettling about "Lord Knows Best" which one doesn't come across much these days, that voice is in the rich tradition of Lee Hazlewood, Johnny Cash and Stephin Merritt, and the piano sample is put to good use.

I think I prefer them both, actually.

Song of the day

"What A Pleasure", by Beach Fossils.

Despite having a name that would appear to have been created by the ACME 2010 Brooklyn Band Name Generator (TM), Beach Fossils have consistently stood out from their lo-fi brethren, mostly on account of a crispness of tone, a nimbleness of playing and a classiness of melody.

"What A Pleasure" is the title track from a forthcoming eight-song "EP" (eight songs, 23 minutes; that's how we like it). It also, it seems to us, happens to be far and away the best song on it. You can listen to it here (and download the next-best song on the EP while you're at it).

Not YouTube of the day

"Rosary", by Marissa Nadler.


Marissa Nadler "Rosary" from Patrick Fraser on Vimeo.


Something about this video makes me think of Sofia Coppola. Maybe it's just the way that not much is happening, but it happens (or doesn't happen) very elegantly.