Song of the day

"Tobacco Road", by The Nashville Teens. I heard this song today, as part of a very entertaining mix that can be had at Aquarium Drunkard, and it brought back some hazy memories of days long past. Specifically, Melbourne circa 1982 to 1989. Was it a staple of somebody's radio programme on 3RRR? Or was it covered by one of the local bands I followed back then, let's say the Huxton Creepers or the Sacred Cowboys? I suspect I will never know. Still, it's nice to welcome such a fine song back into my life.

It looks like everybody had a go at it. A version by the Blues Magoos appears on "Nuggets". Jefferson Airplane and Eric Burdon and The Animals can be found doing it on YouTube. Wikipedia tells me that Jimmy Page plays on the recorded version, but you can't always trust Wikipedia.

"The British group with the American name."

Song of the day

"Golden Age", by Beach Fossils. This song has something that the rest of the blog-huggin', zeitgeist-surfin', rainbow-chasin' class of 2010 don't have: Postcard guitars! Ah, God love ya.

Coincidence of the day: SFJ has some tasty Orange Juice YouTube goodness over on his Tumblr.

Song of the day

"The Plague", by Scott Walker. Is it just me, or are there times during this song when, if you closed your eyes, you would swear that the singer was Iggy Pop?

Song of the day (2)

"Dad", by Thug.

Not safe for work.

Or home.

Song of the day

"Get Back", by Woods. The knife-slash electric guitar that coruscates this song (I'm not sure if you can use "coruscate" in that way; I don't have time to check) entirely wrecks the mood of this otherwise gently gorgeous song. On the other hand, it also makes the song complete.

I don't entirely understand Woods. I can't figure out whether they just get so excited about their songs that they want to just slap them down and get on with the next one, or whether they actually work at making themselves sound so ramshackle. Either is good. Sometimes they make me think of a slightly feral Mercury Rev. Which is also good.

8.45pm update

Hi.

It's all good here.

I just can't seem to find the words.

Let's assume that normal programming will resume shortly. It usually does.

Song of the day

"Happy", by Best Coast. In theory there is no reason why I would have any interest in Best Coast. They do nothing I haven't heard before and nothing, again in theory, that I am not by now entirely jaded by.

But enough of the theory. A song like this comes on and it's like somebody has opened a window and in has come a blast of pure, fresh and clean 1989 air. All 1 minute 45 seconds of it. No time for beard stroking when that happens.

Featuring, as too few songs do, the word "cranky".

Song of the day

"Babelonia", by School of Seven Bells. The thing about School of Seven Bells is that, while they may have all the right looks, and all the right moves, and all the right influences (and two magnificent voices), what they don't have, at least yet, is the ability to write songs that are strong enough for them to stand out as themselves, rather than for their good "taste" or whatever. For now, they seem content to generate echoes, admittedly very tasty echoes, of, amongst others, My Bloody Valentine, Cocteau Twins, and This Mortal Coil.

Take "Babelonia". If you ignore the drum programming, which sounds like it has come from another decade entirely, the song is pure Stereolab. (Stereolab, of course, famously made a career out of sounding like their influences, but they had so many things to draw on that the sum of the parts amounted to a very large number.) Which, in the absence of any new Stereolab product, well, this song will just have to do. And it does. Quite nicely.

Song of the day

"Calypso Frelimo", by Miles Davis. In which Miles grabs time in his long, thin fingers and stretches it further than you could imagine it being stretched. And then stretches it some more. But, being Miles Davis, he gets away with it.

Fans of Super Mario Brothers (or residents of houses where one member of the household is, not to put too fine a point on it, obsessed with the little plumber) will be surprised to recognise within its grooves a particular recurring three-note bass motif. Just one of the many ways in which Miles Davis predicted the future, and continues to do so.

Song of the year?

"Voi Parlate, Io Gioco", by jj.

Maybe, maybe not. But from where I am sitting, right here, right now, on the shag pile (not exactly), there is nothing I would rather be listening to.

Listening Wind

Today's soundtrack was brought to you -- well, me -- by Sasha Frere-Jones.

First we have "On The Corner", by Miles Davis. This is an album I cannot listen to without thinking that  Brian Eno and David Byrne must have been listening to it, either separately or together, while planning the strategies that became "Remain In Light".

Then it's "Cupid & Psyche '85", by Scritti Politti, an album I don't, in any sense, "need" to hear. But it can't hurt to do the actual listening thing every once in a while.

And "You Are In My System", by The System. A Robert Palmer-free zone.

And "The Golden Age Of Wireless", by Thomas Dolby. Here is another record that I have no recollection of ever having owned in any form, and yet upon hearing it for the first time in what must be decades every note, every shimmering sonic inflection, comes flooding back. I probably acquired a tape of it from Roger and thrashed it for a while until it got stuck in the machine and snapped. Cassettes were like that. Roger was a big Thomas Dolby fan. (He was also a big Martha and the Muffins fan, which I could less understand, but to each his own.) There are so many perfect songs on this album that it seems ridiculous that I could have lived my life without its presence, however fleeting, for so long. The song I find most affecting in 2010 is "Airwaves". Even though Trevor Horn had nothing to do with this record he is, in a very real sense, all over it.

Finishing off with "I Am Not Willing", by Moby Grape, which I have clung onto, in a kind of gentle desperation, ever since I first heard it, courtesy Art Decade, a couple of years or so ago. Not, of course, to be confused with its opposite, "Willin'", by Little Feat. Although they do make the perfect couple.

Song of the day

"The End Of The World Is Bigger Than Love", by Jens Lekman. I can't imagine what kind of day it would be when a new Jens Lekman song wouldn't be the song of the day. Extra-specially when it's yours for an email address.

YouTube of the day

Galaxie 500 live. Something I never had the chance to see. The perfect soundtrack to Mike McGonigal's oral history of the band that appeared a while back; what a happy, sad, sweeping narrative trajectory that was. A bit like their music.

Song of the day

"Come With Me", by ceo. As promised (see yesterday's entry), another improbable vocal sample threads its way through this song: "I need the griddle"? I suppose it could be from a campfire scene from some old-timey cowboy movie. (The song is also a fine example of present-day Swedish pop maximalism, complete with a gentle nod to "Brazil" (a song best known in its Django Reinhardt incarnation, but most memorably covered, if almost unrecognisably so, by the very wonderful Tav Falco's Panther Burns).)

ceo appears to be one half of The Tough Alliance, who seem to have some kind of mentoring role in relation to jj, who have a song on the Internet called "ceo Birthday". I don't know. You figure it out.

Song of the day

"No Sell Out", by Malcolm X. There is a passage early on in this song (a song which, I often wonder if it would exist but for the trail blazed by "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts", and in which I should not be, but am, surprised to notice a similarity with "Buffalo Gals") where, to this day, I swear the vocal sample has Malcolm X saying "brown windsor soup ... windsor soup ... windsor soup". Of course, I could be wrong. I'm not sure how that would fit into a speech about stamping out skulduggery and flim flam, and not compromising.

(Also, am I the last person to pick up on the irony, if irony it be, that "Keith LeBlanc" translates from the French as "Keith the White"?)

Coming tomorrow, weather conditions permitting: further misheard vocal samples.

Song of the day

"Stumbling 22nd St", by Moon Duo. Or, "We've got a scuzzball and we're not afraid to use it."

The Department of Forgotten Songs

One of life's mysteries has been solved.

Approximately 28 years ago a small fragment of song got stuck in my head. It has run around up there, appearing from time to time, ever since. I have made many attempts to hunt it down, all fruitless. All I had was the vocal line "press the button, hear the sound, elevator up and down", and a sense that the song was in the style, loosely, of Plastic Bertrand.

A few months ago I visited a work colleague's house for lunch. Music was playing. It was another song I hadn't heard in years: "I Like 'Lectric Motors" (you can -- and should -- watch it here), by someone called Patrick D Martin. Last night, while on the trail of Shanghai Au Go Go and other Melbourne early-eighties synth nostalgia, I stumbled upon this page, which was offering to share with me a mini-album by Patrick D Martin (thanks, pal). What the heck, I thought to myself. It's probably all rubbish apart from "'Lectric Motors", but you never know. (It's the thrill of the chase, don't you know.)

So today I listened to it. I got to a song called "Police Paranoia" and thought, that's funny, I could swear I have heard this before. I got to the next song, "Press The Button", and I realised, almost instantly, that this was the song that has eluded me for all these years: "press the button, hear the sound, elevator up and down".

And you know how you wait so long for something, building up expectations in your head that are inevitably dashed on finally getting it? Not this time. It is exactly how I remembered it.

What's weird though (aside from the back cover photo, which in its own way is kinda beyond weird) is that if you had asked me at any time before this year who Patrick D Martin was, I would have said I had absolutely no idea, and yet three of the seven songs on this record -- a record I had no knowledge of until last night -- I have had sitting in my head for almost 30 years. I assume that what happened was that these three songs were, at one stage, on high rotation on 2JJ, in those halcyon days when I spent as many of my waking hours as I could tuning in to the tenuous radio signals that made the journey all the way from Sydney to Fish Creek (weather conditions permitting), fading in and out such that more often than not you weren't able to catch the announcer telling you what he had been playing (or, if it was Mac Cocker, which it often was, you probably couldn't understand what he was saying even if the signal was clear enough to hear it). Which would explain why I may never until 2010 have heard the words "Patrick D Martin", even though his music has played a disproportionately large part in my life.

Today has been a good day.

Song of the day

"I Cried All Winter", by Shanghai Au Go Go. Melbourne band from the early 1980s. I saw them play at the Tote in Collingwood, fairly early on. They comprised one intimidatingly cool guy and two intimidatingly gorgeous (to my naive country-boy eyes) girls. They used a drum machine and what would now be called "vintage synths" but then were just synths. In the Melbourne of 1983 they were very much on the cutting edge. Listening to this song now, what is surprising is how close it sounds to 2010. If you played this, and followed it with, say, "Love or Music", by Soft Metals, you could be forgiven for thinking that music had gone nowhere since 1983. (Not that there would have been anything wrong with that.)

YouTube of the day

It's always time for some vintage Talking Heads.

(via Aquarium Drunkard)

Song of the day

"My Love", by The Bird And The Bee. It's a pleasure to wake up with this song going through your head. From "Ray Guns Are Not Just The Future", yet another in the increasingly long list of Albums That Pitchfork Completely Missed The Point Of.

Travels in the third person

So.

He had been putting it off for so long he had managed to convince everybody, himself included, that it was never going to happen. But a felicitous and timely invitation, together with fortuitously available accommodation in the vicinity of the place, drew him out of whatever shell he had erected around himself, and he knew that it was time.

His researches uncovered the important information that the farm had been split up and sold off, to three different owners, identities unknown, since he parted with it, ten years ago. He found this knowledge distressing at first, almost as if somebody that he once knew had died unexpectedly. But, once assimilated, it actually made his decision to go back there easier. There was no more unfinished business, no half-severed ties. He could be a comfortable stranger.

Nevertheless, he had no idea what he might find there, and less idea how he would psychically handle whatever he did find.

They travelled due south, a direction they had never been before. An hour or so out of Canberra, the temperature briefly dropped below zero. At Bombala, the drinking fountain in the park, even though it was in direct sunshine, was covered with ice. They stopped for lunch in Cann River, which he had first visited in 1972, on Grand Final day, an unusually high-scoring affair between Carlton and Richmond, and which he last passed through in the May school holidays of 1979.

The mind does funny things. When they turned into the main street of Bairnsdale he remembered that this was where he had bought the cassette of Meat Loaf's "Bat Out Of Hell", many years ago. When they turned onto the road from Morwell to Mirboo North he thought of the lengths to which his father went to find a cure for his bad back. He remembered that they included acupuncture, and that nothing that he did really worked. When they went through Mirboo North he recalled going to Sue Williams's 21st birthday party at a restaurant there, and he wondered where she might be now. When they got into the hills around Leongatha, with their green paddocks dotted with Friesian and Jersey cows, he was home, in a way that Canberra will never be home, and yet at the same time his elation was tinged with the certain knowledge that this will never be his home again.

He spent time around Leongatha. He was surprised to discover that he had forgotten his way around its back streets. 84 McCartin Street has new front steps, and has lost its tree ferns, but otherwise looks just like the house he left for Melbourne 20 years ago.

He took the boys to visit their grandparents in their permanent home at the Meeniyan Cemetery. One of the boys discovered other Emmersons: it appears that persons unknown (but suspected) have had the graves of his father's parents (who died before he was born), and two or three other relatives, just names to him (although one of them he might vaguely recall being mentioned by his father in relation to a fatal boating mishap), relocated to a central part of the cemetery. He was aware that they had been buried outside the modern boundary of the cemetery but he had never been able to find their graves. He took the time to stand before the graves of his uncles Jack and Charlie, who had been such a presence in his childhood. He felt less emotional than he anticipated. He felt peaceful. Among friends.

Fish Creek. The town has undergone a renaissance as an artistic and latter-day hippie centre. It looks good. This made him happy. The board listing deceased members of the bowling club contains a number of names he didn't expect to see: a reminder of the time that has passed since he was a part of the life of the town.

He drove down the one and a half miles of potholed dirt road to the farm. He drove to the top of the hill, got out of the car, and listened. He listened to the silence. The silence, there, is a very big silence, and he had forgotten it. He had a curious sensation of travelling back in time, but of having travelled back to a universe that was not the one he left. It was undoubtedly the same place, but some things were not how he expected them to be. (If you have read the second book in Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy, you might think of Will taking Lyra to his Oxford (which is similar to, but different from, hers), and Lyra's surprise and confusion upon looking around: yes, I recognise this place, but where is this, and this, and this.) The house has been done up and hidden from the road by generous tree plantings. The dairy, which his father built with his own hands, and which carried sounds and smells of its own, is gone. A new wetland has been created. All the big, spooky old cypress trees have been cut down. They walked down the road that used to go to the dairy, and up the other side (via a straight stretch of road that wasn't there before) as far as he felt comfortable going. It is a public road now, but still he felt a little bit like a stalker. He pointed things out to the boys as they went; told them stories. He expected them to say "Yes, dad, can we get back in the car now?", but they were actually very attentive, very good. He took in the view. Like the silence, the view is very big. The sky goes on almost forever. It is a view he can see with his eyes closed, but it was nice to be able to see it with eyes open. Two wedge-tailed eagles circled the air currents far overhead. They, too, were a part of his childhood: eagles lived in a dead tree on a remote part of the property for many years, but they had been gone for a long time. He thought he heard them whispering, "Yes, you have come back. We have come back, too."

He realised that he had forgotten the sound your boots make as you walk over waterlogged ground. South Gippsland is a very wet place, and this is a very wet year. Canberra is a very dry place and has been in drought most of the time he has been living there. You do not hear water underfoot in Canberra. It is a lovely sound. He had been missing it, without even realising that he had been.

He knocked on some doors. He said hello to people he has not seen for a very long time. He was relieved to see that the years have been good to them. For some of them it is the first time they have met the boys (who were so patient, and so friendly, he was very proud of them. He was in their position once, when his father took him on something of a pilgrimage back to Malmsbury, his father's own childhood home, meeting "old" people and having no idea of who they were or what he was even doing there.)

He got to catch up, and this was the reason for his going back, with numerous relatives on his mother's side. They are entirely the nicest people you could ever wish to know, and on all of the available evidence this has rubbed off on the next generation.

And then it was over. The question of whether he will go back there again seems much smaller now. To have gone back after ten years, and seen that the farm, his dad's farm, is in good shape and in good hands, was something he needed to do. Now it has been done. It was okay. He was okay. (Although he wonders whether the appearance of silent but real tears numerous times while watching "Toy Story 3", a couple of days later, was some kind of emotional aftershock.)

Later, back home in Canberra, which somehow does now feel like home in a way that it didn't before he embarked on this journey, he sits down and smiles. He closes his eyes and sees the green, rolling Gippsland hills of the mind, hears the shucking sound of rain-sodden ground underfoot, the cows tearing grass from the ground, the sound of baby calves calling for their mothers, of milk tankers driving along the main road late at night. It is true what they say: you can never go home again. But you can go to some pretty nice places that just happen to feel like some kind of home, that may even have been home once, a long time ago. And you can be happy in the knowledge that they will always be there, and that enough of what you remember so fondly will always remain, so that, if you do go back there later on, sparks of memory will catch fire and rise up into a bright and warming flame.

Song of the day

"ILU", by School of Seven Bells. Not necessarily in the sense of being the best song of the day (although not necessarily not in that sense, either) but certainly in the sense of being the most unexpected. This sounds as if it has sprung, fully formed, from the distant and (mostly justly) maligned land of the post-new-pop mid-eighties. It's all Fairlights, "In The Air Tonight" drums, echo on everything, and generally carrying an AM radio sheen that makes it more hyperreal than real (although it sounds at times like Kevin Shields must have wandered into the studio occasionally and mucked around with the settings). Whichever of the twins is doing the singing makes it work as a "real" song, too.

Chair of the day

Ad found in the New Yorker, August 1960.

(Click to enlarge.)

Song of the day

"Pure Affection", by Eternal Summers. What we have here is a good old-fashioned K Records feel bolted onto something that sounds like the quieter moments (yes, they do exist) of Sonic Youth. A little bit special.

Song of the day

"Everlovin' Man", by The Loved Ones. Another fine, albeit slightly unhinged vocal performance from the acid-tinged late sixties. And it's from Australia. We heart local content.

We're going to take a short break now

But we'll be back after a while.

Two weeks, actually. We're off to a cabin in the woods, to revisit some old, old haunts, and to prove that, as they say, "You can never go home any more".

We will likely miss two or three entire music trends while we are away. Woe is us.

Song(s) of the day

"It's Gonna Rain (Pt 1)" and "It's Gonna Rain (Pt 2)", by Steve Reich. This is one of those accidental discoveries that changed the future of music. The surprising thing about it, though, is how damn danceable it is, considering that there isn't a doof doof to be found. Listening to it this afternoon I couldn't sit still. Of course, it's just possible that that might have been in some small part due to the day's serial caffienation.

Song of the day

"Old Fangs", by Black Mountain.

Watch the video. Cars. Beards. Aviator Glasses. Mystical, uh, "chicks". Lights radiating out from people's heads. What more do you want?

Mashup of the day

"How Soon Is Independence?", by Go Home Productions.

For generations, young men (and not so young men) have strived to find a song that can be successfully mashed together with The Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?".

Now, after countless hours of human suffering and personal sacrifice, and most likely many cups of coffee, one man has found the solution. That man is Mark Vidler, a.k.a. Go Home Productions. He has climbed Bootleg Everest. Humanity is in his debt.

I might have known that Beyonce would be involved.

You can listen to it over here. You can even watch it.

GOAL!!!

Being precisely one-eighth Swiss (my mum's mum's parents were both from Switzerland, although they met in Gippsland), I was pleased to wake up yesterday morning to the news that my fractional ancestral home had defeated Spain, an Actual Soccer Playing Nation, at the World Cup.


Imagine if Switzerland hosted the World Cup. They could replace those wooden trumpet things, which make it sound as if the whole of South Africa is permanently under attack from swarms of killer bees, with alpenhorns.


Is the World Cup draw truly random? Wouldn't it have been interesting if North and South Korea had been in the same group. Or if, say, in the 1942 World Cup America had played Japan, or England had played Germany. Was there even a World Cup in 1942? There kind of was, but it ran for six years, and the playing field was larger than usual.

Vernacular

I spend a bit of time hanging out at the local skate park, chaperoning the ten-year-old through an emaciated and oily forest of "youth". (I actually don't mind doing this. It gives me a chance to observe. Today's active child is tomorrow's "youth", after all, and it allows me to do some research unobserved: unobserved because I am of such an advanced age that I do not actually appear to them in visible form.) Language is an issue here, and the ten-year-old understands that just because the bigger guys use it doesn't mean that he can, so don't even think about it. He's cool with that (for now). But sometimes a gem slips out that demands to be catalogued.

One such: "Hey, don't do that. I almost shat out my own heart."

YouTube of the day

Here.

Don't believe what they say. Nostalgia is what it used to be.

When is the cravat revival?

Song of the day

"Bouree", by Jethro Tull. By God, it must be over thirty years since I have listened to the music of Jethro Tull. But in those intervening years this song has intermittently snuck its way back into my head, by processes unknown. Listening, now, to its parent album, "Stand Up", with those thirty extra years of growing up (well, a bit) and accumulating musical knowledge (I hope), it strikes me that Tull weren't as sui generis as I have long assumed: like some Appalachian yokels transplanted into Middle-Ages England. What I hear now is a band that, flute solos aside, is something of a mid-point between The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Led Zeppelin and the English folk revival. I had a bad feeling I would cringe on going back to this. I was wrong. (How many times have I written those words?)

My take on the career of Jethro Tull (still going!) is that an analogy can be drawn between them, The Bee Gees and Status Quo. All three had a kind of heyday in the late sixties / early seventies, until they either lost their way or the world moved away from them. But whereas Ver Quo and Ver Bee Gees reinvented themselves in the later seventies as boogie-heads and disco-pants respectively, with huge degrees of success, Ver Tull's (or, more accurately, Ian Anderson's) strategy in those dark days was to play a long game: basically, to keep on doing what they were doing, maintaining integrity and a loyal fan base, until that fan base had become wealthy merchant bankers and what have you, able to spend large amounts of money on concert tickets every year or so, buy extravagant Tull merchandise, live recordings and reissues, and basically keep the cash flow positive over the long term. (You would probably say Quo have done something similar, and maybe add in Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span as well, although in the latter case there isn't, correct me if I'm wrong, such an identity between those bands and one individual.)

I'm rambling.

My best memory of those years of being South Gippsland's Number One Jethro Tull Fan Under The Age Of Fifteen? Going into Clark's Sound Centre, in McCartin Street, Leongatha, and asking its esteemed proprietor, Mr Clark, for the cassette of their (then) new double-live album, "Bursting Out", which he happened to have in stock. "Ah, yes", said Mr Clark (in an effort to be seen to be hip to what was goin' down, although in truth he would have been much more comfortable discussing Dixieland jazz with old-timers), "that's one of his best albums". "His". At that moment I lost my faith in the adult world. I was going to have to do this thing on my own.

Song of the day

"Falling Down a Mountain", by Tindersticks. In a world where Internet hype knows no bounds, bands are famous not so much for 15 minutes as for 15 mouse clicks, and their mothers still have to hang around to change their nappies before they go on stage; in a world where blockbuster releases take up all the remaining space; in that world, one band continues to sail just under the radar, year after year, making music just as good as they made back when you were taking notice. I'm talking about Tindersticks. "Falling Down a Mountain" is their second album in their new, stripped-down line-up. The previous album, "The Hungry Saw", had them testing the waters. This new album is a triumph. The sound is subtly different from the old days (mostly due to the smaller number of players involved, and the loss of their string and brass arranger, Dickon Hinchliffe). They have now discovered that less can, indeed, be more. And still, Stuart Staples rides atop it all, his voice, if anything, getting better with a little bit of wear and tear.

The album opens with the title track, six and a half minutes of slow drift, carrying with it clearly intentional echoes of "Walk on Gilded Splinters". That is a brave thing to attempt: like going for a triple somersault with double reverse pike while blindfolded. Naturally, they pull it off with aplomb.

(And did I ever mention that "Tiny Tears" is most likely the greatest song of the last 20 years? Well, there's no harm in saying it again.)

Zorn of the Month Club

As if he hasn't flooded the market enough with new recordings over the last couple of years or so (gotta spend that Macarthur Fellowship money somehow, I suppose), John Zorn announced at the start of this year that he would bring out a new CD on the fourth Tuesday of each month of 2010. Is it even possible to do that? Will there be any cheating involved? Will the best-laid plans of mice and men do whatever it is that they do?

Time will reveal all. But, in the meantime, we have had five fourth Tuesdays and five new Zorn records. (Six actually -- or maybe even seven -- but we'll get to that.) First out of the box was "Mycale", the thirteenth installment of the ongoing Book of Angels series, otherwise known as the Masada songbook, book two. The Book of Angels is starting to build into something substantial, in terms of quality as well as quantity. I found it difficult to get a handle on what he was up to early on -- the fact that each release was by a different artist, with little or no overlap of individual songs between them, made it hard for the music to develop an identity of its own, particularly when the shadow in which it sat was the extraordinary body of work known as Masada, with its large number of very memorable and excellent individual songs, all of which were first sent off into the world by Zorn's very own Masada quartet, which allowed them to develop a strong and recognisable template before Zorn introduced the many and varied reworkings, and live recordings, that followed.

The original quartet seems to have been put to bed (although a variant of it came together for volume 12), so book two inevitably comes across more as variation than as theme. But repeated listening, and in particular shuffling between them at length, reveals, perhaps unsurprisingly, a uniformly high standard amongst the releases. If Zorn knows one thing, it's what he is doing. "Mycale" is a quartet of female voices, putting words, or things that sound like words, to Zorn's music. It is necessarily of shorter duration than most of the other releases. It would be too intense, too draining, if it went much beyond the allotted 33 minutes. It might not be the one I come back to the most often, but there is a lot going on here and it does repay concentration.

The fourth Tuesday in February brought with it "In Search of the Miraculous". This appears to be part of a new series of works by Zorn called "Odes for the New Millennium". It is lyrical chamber music, perhaps you might call it chamber jazz if you had to bang a nail into it from which to hang a particular shorthand description. The opening theme sets the tone: melodic piano and vibraphone, with restrained drumming lurking in the background. You could put this on in a fancy restaurant and it wouldn't raise too many eyebrows.  Which, y'know, when you're talking about John Zorn is actually a remarkable thing. He seems to have been working with melody and restraint rather a lot lately: the difference being that he no longer seems to feel the need to break the mood with passages of noisy skronk (which, obviously, has its place, but it does mean you don't get to introduce most of his music to the squares, even though they would like much of it).

March: Zorn's Dreamers ensemble, what I have come to think of as his "such fun" outlet, came along with their own take on Book of Angels, "Ipos". It perhaps doesn't need to be said, but this is a delight from beginning to end. The music is constantly changing, but almost invariably the changes raise a smile. (If Dreamers sound like any other Zorn combo, it would be Naked City as they were on parts of the debut album and, most directly, on "Radio".) Anything with Marc Ribot on board is bound to be quality.

The Tzadik site lists not one but two Zorn releases for April. Which one is the Zorn of the Month Club entry? The first is Zorn and Fred Frith improvising in the studio. There is a side of John Zorn's work that I have to allow others to make sense of. In the absence of anything to grab onto I find this type of unstructured improv impossible to enjoy, and hence impossible to listen to. I know that's my bad.

The other April release is another Book of Angels volume: number fifteen, "Baal". It is by two-thirds of the Jamie Saft Trio (responsible for the essential Book of Angels volume one, "Astaroth") with a different drummer, Kenny Wollesen -- another Zorn regular -- plus Ben Goldberg on clarinet. It promises to be very klezmer. I haven't heard it yet.

May has promised us one of Zorn's modern-composition pieces, from which I will probably keep my usual distance. I doubt that it's reached our shores yet.

Have we reached saturation point? Well, I haven't, anyway. (And nor has this been all: in February he also snuck out a reissue of "Chimeras", "a child's adventures in the realms of the unreal" (but which would more likely induce nightmares), with some reworkings and additions.) There is enough of a something-for-everyone feeling about what has come out so far (or has been announced -- a second Masada String Trio recording of Book of Angels material!; a sequel to In Search of the Miraculous) that he might just be able to pull this crazy stunt off, and without scraping the bottoms of any barrels, either. Stay tuned. (And then he will probably somehow top it in 2011: a disc a week, perhaps? I'd better resurrect my own survey of the "Filmworks" project, before it's too late.)

Song of the day

"You", by Ellen Allien. Ms Allien has long been our hot German DJ babe of choice. (Mind you, we have creepy middle-aged-man kinda feelings towards Ada, too.) Ellen's new album, "Dust", is a much more direct and straightforward affair than the relatively diffuse tones of "Sool". But I don't think anybody was expecting "You", a sub-three-minute slice of dream-pop comprising bass guitar, actual drums, and clean guitar lines straight out of the Robert Smith playbook. It is as striking as it is out of place. (Although it's only out of place if you approach your musician of choice with preconceived ideas of what they will sound like. As we do.) As we have now said three times running, "girls just wanna have fun".

Song of the day

"Dancehall Queen", by Robyn.

I figured that I wouldn't hear a fresher pop song this year than Germany's winning Eurovision entry. [Aside: for the last week we have had a ten-year-old going around the house singing "Balkan Balkan Balkan" and doing a very special little dance. Some days you hope they never grow up.]

But I had forgotten that Robyn had an album coming out. This song, which had previously appeared under the name "No Hassle" in various corners of the Internet, looks more backwards than forwards, but what Robyn manages to do, as few Europeans before her have managed, is to tackle serious reggae grooves and not come across sounding totally, um, "white". The Clash got it right after a couple of false steps. Rhythm and Sound, obviously. Well, The Police [he grudgingly acknowledges], whom Robyn might in fact be shouting out to in the brief "eeyo-yo-yo" passage. Anybody else? As for Robyn, she's a natural. This song will dislodge whatever is stuck in your head, and it will stay there until, well, until you play any other of the first six songs on the album. [Aside two: is it an album? Eight songs? Twenty-seven minutes? I think I have bought "albums" by KC & The Sunshine Band that have been that short, and a lot of early long players weren't all that long. What else are you gonna call it? It's too long to be  a "mini-album". It's definitely not an EP.] (The last two songs are quieter affairs, and take the record in a quite different, but not in any way lesser, direction.)

As we said yesterday, girls just wanna have fun.

Song of the day

"Sois Pop", by Antena.

Girls just wanna have fun.

Song of the day

"A Little To The Left", by The Renderers. Her voice, somewhere between speaking and singing, narrates a fragmented tale of, well, it's a bit hard to tell, really, but it doesn't sound promising, and is probably not going to end well. (Who is Jeff Rose?) She hovers, fragile, above a spartan backdrop of acoustic guitar, (what I assume to be) mandolin, brushed drums, and the sound of (again what I assume to be) New Zealand birdsong. It takes six minutes, six minutes in which the listener, particularly late at night, is transfixed like a rabbit trapped in the headlights. Like the best short stories, it takes hold of you from the start and never releases its grip. It is perhaps an anomalous curiosity that at the point when it threatens to burst open into something bigger, it bears similarities to The Scientists' "Swampland". (It bears no resemblance to The Birthday Party's "Swampland".)

The album it comes from, "Monsters And Miasmas", I cannot recommend highly enough. (Yes, I am talking to you.) 

It is an interesting thing that one can be acutely attuned to the emergence of any news of further musical activity by, say, David Kilgour, The Clean, The Bats and The Chills (in the case of The Chills, maintaining something of a forlorn vigil, year after year, in the increasingly unlikely hope that we will get new material before Martin Phillipps dies of old age), while equally worthy groups like The Renderers, The Terminals, The Verlaines, The Cakekitchen and any of the seemingly hundreds of bands Hamish Kilgour may be involved with at any one time, can continue to plough their own fertile fields, ignored since the tail end of the 1980s. Heck, I had no idea until recently that either The Renderers or The Terminals were still going.

One the one hand, I feel somewhat guilty for not keeping the flame burning for any of those latter groups (it's not as if I don't like what they do). On the other hand, it is kind of comforting, in a selfish way, to know that the music is out there, waiting for me, waiting for the moment when I need to turn to it. 

Television Personalities

We bought a new TV.

You haven't seen Graham Norton until you've seen him in HD.

Song of the day

"It Happened Before Our Time", by Jeremy Jay. It's always nice to hear a new song by Jeremy Jay. He has the ability to clear away all the bad air, so that everything, for a little while, is all shiny and clean (plus, nobody says "yeah" quite like he does -- although he doesn't do it on this song). This time around, he has moved a little away from his trademark skinny-tie power-pop, more into a seventies zone. The guitars are a bit fatter, the sound a bit fuller. But really, it's all good. And you can download it at rcrdlbl.com. For free! Oh it's a good time to be alive.

Song of the day

"Ding-A-Dong", by Teach-In. We're warming up here for Eurovision. Obviously.

Song of the day

"Tired of Toein' the Line", by Rocky Burnette.

Nah, just kidding. (Though that video is pretty freakin' awesome.)

Actually, it's:

"Come on Home to Me", by Tracey Thorn.

Tracey Thorn. Jens Lekman. Lee Hazlewood. It's a marriage made in heaven. (Sadly, in Lee's case, literally so.) In fact, I assumed it would be too good to be true. And yet it turns out that the song, which is way different from what I expected it to be, is much, much better than it would have been if it had been what I expected it to be. There. That makes complete sense, doesn't it?

Song of the day

"OFYC Showcase", by The Fall.

Midlife crises. Some blokes go out and buy red sports cars. Some quit their established, successful careers, sell everything, and move to the country somewhere so they can do what they "really want to do", which inevitably will end in bitter failure. Me, I seem to be compelled, not exactly against my will but without thought, to listen to copious quantities of music by The Fall. And not only the music of their own Golden Years (and mine), but the new stuff, too. I am totally, unexpectedly, into the new album, "Our Future, Your Clutter". There is no sense of a band going through the motions. Everything is urgent, everything is the most important thing they could be doing right now. Whatever was missing in The Fall over most of the last 20 years is back.

This, the first song on the record, has the kind of incessantly rolling groove that they were capable of pounding out, as if it grew on trees, around the time of "Cruiser's Creek". It doesn't let up for nigh on six minutes. Nor do you want it to.

Curiously, around the four minute mark Smith begins to sound just like former Australian Rules champion Alex Jesaulenko singing about drinking Canberra Milk. See for yourself.

Song of the day

"You Are Waking", by Jamie Lidell. Roughly half way through Jamie Lidell's new album, "Compass", just as one is starting to think about how much further he can go with this Smoother Than Stevie schtick before it starts to get just a little bit, erm, well, boring, along comes this song, which, after a deceptively calm thirty seconds or so, morphs into a genuine get-yr-balls-out-and-swing-'em-around big rock'n'roll number, featuring pretty much every type of big guitar action known to man. God bless him, it even has a bridge lifted straight from the power ballad playbook. And look at that drummer go.

My knee hurts.

Song of the day

"(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang", by Heaven 17. Not because Britain has moved from Labour to Conservative (well, semi-Conservative) rule for the first time since the election of Thatcher herself, but because at my work we have all been given something called "proximity readers" (they unlock doors and probably give you cancer) and I have discovered that if I hold it at one end and shake it from side to side I can make a close approximation of the rattling sound that introduces, and drives, this song.

Where have they been?

Following the last entry, you probably figured that I have taken a couple of weeks to engage in quiet contemplation and reflection on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of Ian Curtis's death. You would be partially right: it has been on my mind, more so than it has been for a long, long time. I don't quite understand why that is. Maybe it's because I am now almost twice as old as Ian Curtis ever was.

But mostly, I have been staring, mesmerised, at the Flensted mobile I got for my birthday. (It's funny how language has changed. Every time I said to somebody "a mobile" in answer to the question "What did you get for your birthday?", a few moments of confusion ensued as I had to explain that, no, it's not a telephone, and that, no, hanging a telephone from the ceiling would serve no useful purpose.)

Unknown Pleasures

I don't know why I recently found myself looking at the "Goings On About Town" section of the issue of the New Yorker dated 26 May 1980, but there I was, failing to recognise the names of more than one or two of the bands playing at CBGB, and contemplating why the magazine, at that stage in its history, set the names of jazz musicians in bold type but not those of "pop" musicians or punk rockers, when something stopped me in my tracks: a listing, at a club called Hurrah (where DJs, the magazine said, spin "sides" by The Clash, The Specials and The Pop Group -- sounds like my kind of place), for Joy Division to play for three nights, Wednesday to Friday the 21st to the 23rd.

Upon reading this, a moment or two of cognitive dissonance ensued. Things slowly came back into focus, and it dawned on me: that never happened. 

The New Yorker, I thought to myself, at least these days, is cover dated a week ahead, which suggests the presses would have been running in the evening of 18 May. The first day for that issue's listings section was 19 May. In the early morning of 19 May 1980 Ian Curtis committed suicide. I was looking at a strange and morbid kind of historical artefact: if the magazine had come out a couple of days later, or if Curtis had taken his own life a couple of days earlier, the venue would presumably have rescheduled those nights' gigs in time for the listings to have been changed, with Joy Division's name removed. 

One always hears that Curtis's suicide occurred "on the eve of their American tour", but what this discovery brought home to me was how literally that was the case.

Here is the page. (Click to enlarge.) I find it kind of creepy to look at. It is like sneaking a glimpse at a future that never was.

(For what it's worth, there would still have been plenty of music to catch that week: what must have been a very early gig by Mission of Burma (also at Hurrah), Defunkt at Max's Kansas City (and also, with Nona Hendryx, at something called the Squat Theatre -- that's where I would have been, man), John Cale, also at the Squat Theatre, the "Velvet Fog", Mel Torme, at Marty's, Kinky Friedman or Bo Diddley at the Lone Star Cafe. Meanwhile, Sun Ra was flying in from Saturn to entertain us, and Jonathan Richman and James Brown, in their respective 1980 incarnations, both had gigs at Irving Plaza. (It might also have been nice to squeeze in Mongo Santamaria, at the Village Gate, although I have no idea where his head was at in 1980.))

Things I Learnt Today

Though my vinyl copy of Swell Maps' "A Trip To Marineville" (with bonus "Loin of the Surf" seven-inch) has long been one of my prized possessions, I had no idea, because, at least to my knowledge, we never got to see Gerry Anderson's "Stingray" in this country, that Marineville is the Headquarters of the World Aquanaut Security Patrol (WASP). 

Chris Ware's rejected cover for Fortune magazine

One question: why would you commission this in the first place, but then why would you, at the last minute apparently, cancel it? (Okay, it's pretty obvious, really, why somebody got cold feet.)

It is a towering piece of art (literally), and perhaps the most scathing commentary on the American way of capitalism I have ever seen.

You need to be able to view it close up. I suggest saving it to your own computer and opening it in a viewer that allows you to zoom in, in order to see as many of the little details as possible.

Song of the day

"Go Go Pongs", by A La Ping Pong. From 1981. Is this the well from which all of dubstep has sprung? Okay, probably not, but I venture to suggest that if you spun it at your local dubstep night it wouldn't at all sound out of place, at least for the first couple of minutes, and by then you are hooked anyway.

Song of the day

"When I'm With You", by Best Coast. It just is.

YouTube of the day

"Shack Up", by A Certain Ratio. Memories are made of this.

This Goes With This (civil litigation edition)

If you accept, which, I should add, I strongly do not (for reasons that are much more intelligently put by Graeme Downes, musicologist and driving force behind New Zealand's Verlaines, in a long blog entry that I commend to you), that Men At Work's "Down Under" is a "substantial reproduction" of the old Australian song "Kookaburra Sits In The Old Gum Tree", then Portishead's lawyers might be well advised to spend some time with the title track from Charlotte Gainsbourg's new album, "IRM", and run some comparisons with "Silence", the opening song on Portishead's "Third". There may not be any note-for-note copying going on, but the overall sound and atmosphere of the two are, at the very least, sympathetic. The way the drums, recorded to the edge of distortion and then a little bit further, punish the listener. The way both songs don't so much end as just stop, as if someone has simply pulled the plug. (There are, actually, elements of a couple of other songs from "Third" that can also be picked out in "IRM", I'm thinking in particular of "We Carry On" and "Nylon Smile". Then again, there are also close echoes of T Rex, as I have mentioned before, in one of the other songs on the album, "Dandelion", not to mention all the ways in which it reminds of Beck's own "Sea Change" album.)

The point I want to make, though, is that none of this is intended in any way as a criticism. Aside from imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, and all that, there are any number of songs that I like that sound like other songs that I like. This is not just coincidence. Once a piece of music is out there in the public arena, there is a good chance it will catch someone's attention, and if that someone is a musician, well, it is always possible that some small part of it, a few notes, a chord sequence, a sound, a mood, even an indescribable essence, might turn up in one of that musician's songs.

Which leads to my problem with the Men At Work decision. Judges talk, in various contexts, about things having a "chilling" effect. (They don't mean that crawling feeling you get when sitting around a campfire telling horror stories. They mean that activity in a particular field will be dampened down, or frozen.) All songs are, in some way, influenced by other songs. If the Men At Work decision is correct (and, unless it is successfully appealed, it is by definition correct, in the sense that The Law Has Spoken, unless Parliament sees fit to legislate against it) the logical corollary is that the only people who will be able to write songs, free from the risk that they will be seen in the eyes of the law as plagiarising someone else's work, are people who have never listened to another piece of music in their lives. There is, I would have thought, a difference between being original and being ignorant.

Yes, there is, when you know to listen for it, a clear but fleeting similarity between one line of "Down Under" and the opening melody of "Kookaburra". (The ways in which they are not similar is explained by Downes.) I have listened to a lot of songs, and, as I have perhaps established on this blog over the years, I am able to hear (rightly or wrongly) bits of songs in other songs all the time. And yet I (and, presumably, most other people, until it was pointed out during an episode of the popular Australian music-quiz television programme "Spicks and Specks") had never made the connection. To say that the two songs, as songs, are "substantially similar" is, in my own opinion, nonsense. To say that a fleeting reference, which, even if it was conscious, can't really be said to rise above the level of homage, nod, wink, or "shout-out", is worth forty percent of the Men At Work song's royalties, well, no. Just, no. You might as well say that anybody using the words "I love you" in a song is breaching the copyright of whichever of the tens of thousands of songs using those words happened to be written first.

Larrikin's decision to bring this case in the first place can only have been a decision made by opportunists with dollar signs in their eyes, or by bean counters, in any case people with no regard for its implications for the future of songwriting. In winning it, Larrikin's "Kookaburra" has not only managed to do a big crap in its own nest, it has also taken a large bite out of the hand that feeds it. It is yet another example of being careful of what you wish for, just in case you actually get it. The company would be well advised to contemplate the consequences of its "victory" for the future of the industry it is a part of, and thus for its own future cash flows. I don't know if this has ever happened before, but Larrikin might even think about making an odd kind of legal history by appealing against its own successful court action.

Song of the day

"Infinity", by The xx. I go into this song hearing the song itself, but I come out singing "Wicked Game". It seems clear that the similarity is intended. Because of my confused relationship with the Chris Isaak song, I can't yet decide whether that is a good thing. But I am optimistic that things will turn out alright.

Song of the day

"It's Gonna Be Alright (Dirk Leyers Remix)", by Justus Kohncke. If you saw a behatted gentleman standing at a bus stop in the Canberra parliamentary triangle around 5.45 this afternoon, dancing with himself, well, okay, that was me, but (a) it kept me warm and (b) I challenge you to stand still with this song booming around your ears. Dickensian employers take note: playing this song in your Victorian-era factory would enhance the productivity of even the most jaded and tired of child labourers.

House of Tomorrow

(Click on image to enlarge.)

Song(s) of the day

1. "Clampdown", by The Clash. Because I look down and see that my shirt is blue and brown. I never understood that: if you wore blue and brown were you one of the good guys or one of the bad guys?

2. "I Am A Cider Drinker", by The Wurzels. Well, you just have to love it, don't you. Don't you?

3. "Alright, Alright, Alright", by Mungo Jerry. As featured in a current Australian TV advertisement for a fizzy drink that is self-promoting its long-running support for AFL football. For some weeks the identity of this song has eluded me. The internet can answer pretty much any question that you can throw at it. You just have to know how to frame the question. Thank you, internet.

"All over the world, High School girls ..."

... are presumably not mourning the passing of Malcolm McLaren -- unlike the way they would have been mourning, say, the death of Ian Curtis in 1980, or Curt Cobain in 1994, or Jeff Buckley in 1997. But if those High School girls had been doing their homework, instead of spending half the night Facebooking, texting, and hanging on the telephone, they might have discovered that McLaren is in no small part responsible for the pop cultural landscape they inhabit.

It is ironic, no, not ironic, funny, well, no, not funny at all, actually, just a horrible coincidence, that what took him was mesothelioma, a disease that is mostly known for attacking people who have been exposed to high levels of asbestos, a fire retardant: ironic/not ironic, funny/not funny, horribly coincidental because McLaren spent large parts of his adult life deflecting the many powerful blowtorches that were periodically fired at him.

For those of us a million miles away from The King's Road in the early 1970s, our first awareness of Malcolm was as the face -- or perhaps more accurately the mouth -- behind The Sex Pistols. But there is no evidence that his life before then -- if he was 64 when he died then he must have been around 30 the year punk broke -- was that of a shrinking violet. A person who didn't want to draw attention to himself would not, in 1975, in Mary Whitehouse's Britain, have renamed his clothes shop "Sex".

Here I rehash my take on the Sex Pistols. Musically, they were no big deal. They released two exhilarating and still remarkable singles, which captured the anger of the UK at a particular moment, but they very quickly became cartoon characters of themselves, and not in a good way, and of course the whole thing ended in farce followed by tragedy (or possibly the other way around). But for McLaren the Sex Pistols was never about the music so much as it was a kind of social experiment concocted to see how far he could push "things". He may not even have had a direction in mind, other than just to get something happening, and hang (or, in fact, overdose) the consequences.

In his adventure with the Pistols, McLaren was an early exponent of the use of the media as a tool. Was he an anarchist, a philosopher, or a shrewd businessman? You cannot ignore his tendency to use people and then spit them out. That must weigh against all that he did achieve, but surely doesn't negate it. His enthusiasm for the new, his love of music, his drive to shake things up: these are the things he should be remembered for.

But musically, for at least some part of him was in "the music business", he should be remembered for "Duck Rock". Presumably chastened by the death of Sid Vicious, and maybe a little bit frightened by what the Sex Pistols wrought (you might imagine him looking down from a high balcony at a scene of utter devastation and carnage, and then looking at his hands, and thinking, "Did these do all of that?"), but still perhaps running on adrenaline, he shortly unleashed Bow Wow Wow onto an unsuspecting but, for the most part, uninterested world, and then he seems to have gone on some kind of world tour of musical discovery, which he distilled, with the help of Trevor Horn and a long list of other accomplices, into "Duck Rock". I love this album, although I wasn't sure what to make of it at the time. In fact, it felt like it had dropped from some passing spaceship, en route from another planet entirely.

It appeared, as if out of necessity, at a time when the New Pop was in the process of congealing into a horrible parody of itself, where what you looked like in the mirror was more important than the sounds you made. There are days when I honestly believe that "Double Dutch" is the greatest single ever. There are other days when I think more deeply about the album, and about the snail trail it has left through almost every corner of the pop landscape since. Its interest in the township music of Soweto can be heard today, in the music of Vampire Weekend and jj. More immediately, it paved the way for releases like "Indestructible Beat of Soweto", on Shanachie, and more broadly the emergence and growth into maturity of that thing we reluctantly call "World Music". Its early embrace of what was then known as "break dancing" culture, graffiti, Keith Haring paintings, Velcro'd sneakers and ghetto blasters, well, it's impossible now to imagine a world without those things, but at the time you would almost have had to have been physically located in certain pockets of New York to be aware of them. The way the album is structured, with songs drifting in and out of radio chatter, and the songs themselves seemingly constructed from almost random bits and pieces, introduced the world to sampling culture, and ultimately paved the way for the mash-up. It must have had some influence on later records like "As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt 2" and the Girl Talk albums. Even the piano motif on "World's Famous" predicts acid jazz and, if you want to stretch things ever so slightly further, numerous subgenres of house music, old and new.

Those High School girls, though, I have often thought, was the one Malcolm McLaren controversy that the world wasn't yet ready for. Imagine, in this fallen, post-Gary Glitter world, a middle-aged man (at least by "industry" standards) getting away with a song like "Double Dutch" today, and its attendant visual imagery of girls in short pants jumping rope. It is the sort of stunt only a Malcolm McLaren would dare to pull. And yet at the time (or so I remember) it was seen as good clean fun, and taken entirely at face value, or maybe it was just trampled over in the rush to pillory him for his use (by theft or otherwise) of music from black South Africa in the darkest days of Apartheid.

It is an album that may not have been well understood at the time of its release, but it is surely one of very few records that can prove, in hindsight, to have been a road map for so much of the next thirty years of pop music.

"Duck, duck, duck."

Fairports, Fairports everywhere

Ah, Autumn in the nation's capital. The days are a couple of degrees cooler. The leaves are starting to fall from the trees. The wind is springing up. (I don't like that much.) The light is fading as I wait for the evening bus home from work. A new bunch of songs on the iPod. Fitting, then, that so much of the recent music that has come to my attention draws from the ancient well of those three essential Fairport Convention albums, "What We Did On Our Holiday", "Unhalfbricking", and "Liege And Leaf".

Three bands in particular: Tunng, Espers and Midlake. Each coming from their own unique corner of the musical world and, curiously and (presumably) independently, landing in more or less the same place: Tunng from a place called, and for once fairly accurately, "folktronica" (and calling out the haters for leaving that place); Espers from a place where the rivers are busting their banks with extended psychedelic jams (and the haters are hating on them for leaving that place, too); and Midlake, well, not so long ago they were the unexpectedly fertile second coming of Fleetwood Mac. The haters are on them, too, I guess for not coming up with another "Roscoe" this time around. This, of course, is completely unfair: perhaps one in a hundred million bands would ever in their career come up with a song as special as "Roscoe". To expect Midlake to do it twice, well, it's asking a bit much really. The new album, despite what the blogging heads might think, has a lot going for it, it's just that what is going for it is different from what was going for "The Trials Of Van Occupanther". Sometimes it seems like in this world you are either damned for standing still or damned for moving on.

As for the prevalence at this point in time of Fairport love, it's a bit of a double-edged broadsword. On the one hand, these three bands (at least) are doing it for all the right reasons. On the other hand, in this hyper-accelerated Internet-driven world of wave upon wave of seemingly week-long trends it is never too long until somebody, or a hundred thousand somebodies, miss the point entirely and the entire mo(ve)ment jumps the shark. (Example: it seems like only yesterday that Underwater Peoples were captivating us with their blend of nostalgic cassettes-in-the-mail lo-fidelity doohickey; and suddenly everybody is doing it, with the usual diminishing returns.) As with other trends, the trick for the listener is not to throw out the bath water with the baby. These three are the babies you would be wise to grab hold of as they start to fly out the window.

[Written in some haste and not checked over. Heck, everybody else does that, don't they?]

Song of the day

"Can't Seem To Make You Mine", by Yo La Tengo. From the "Camp Yo La Tengo" EP. A song in which a little reverb goes a long way.

Here is a list of incorrect things

The Fall can make grown men do foolish things. Read this essay at The Quietus and you will see what I mean. Such effort, and in pursuit of what exactly nobody will ever really know. Fall lyrics are beyond normal understanding, but that only deepens the challenge.

As a bonus, it contains the clip of "Wings" I mentioned once before. The clip is brilliant. Smith's nonchalance is brilliant. The song is brilliant. The wallpaper is brilliant. Funny, I had completely written out of my memory of it the presence, at Smith's left hand, of Brix. At the time I hated Brix. I thought she had softened him. I was wrong. Mark E Smith cannot be softened.

Are You Are Missing Winn-ah?

I had occasion recently to listen to what purports to be the imminent new album by The Fall, "Our Future Your Clutter". (Although, as Winnie-the-Pooh once said, You never can tell with Fall albums.)

Scratch a few Fall fans, or at least journalists/bloggers, and you are sure to find somebody who is prepared to fight to the death to defend at least one of the many albums they have released since the Glory Days of Yore. There are few that haven't been championed somewhere as "return to form", or "the best Fall album since [insert pre-'90s album of choice here]". Heck, somebody at The Quietus the other day was boosting up "The Light User Syndrome".

For a long time there were few bigger Fall fanatics than myself. And yet I have struggled to get excited by anything other than the occasional stray album track since "Bend Sinister". And yet there has always just been enough on display to indicate that the pilot light in Mark E Smith's brain has continued to burn. Recently it has seemed to be sparking into actual flame: the Von Sudenfed album; a couple of key tracks on "Fall Heads Roll"; and I ask you, how fucking mighty is "Fifty Year Old Man"? (I plan to make it my anthem in 2014.)

And here comes "Our Future Your Clutter". (That title is probably not a little nod to Nick Cave, but you never know.) Those who threw superlatives at any of the band's last, let's say, fifteen (a wild guess; I lost count years ago) studio albums might be struggling to find the words for this one. This is not a review, just a heads up: the rhythm section hits so hard you will be stunned; the guitars are as good as any Fall guitars ever (whoops, looks like I've succumbed to the hyperbole bug); and at least three of the songs are the kind of adrenaline rushes that will have you flailing your arms as you bounce around the living room. (Kids -- or, more to the point, middle-aged parents -- don't try this at home.)

On the strength of this, it must be about time that Smith once more sacked the band and started from scratch again.

Take Care

Oh, by the way, RIP Alex Chilton, described rather well by Aquarium Drunkard as "the indelible link between the world of the Beatles and of R.E.M." The broad range of Chilton's activities is such that almost everybody will have a different story of how they were first exposed to him. For some, it would be the chart success of The Box Tops. For others, it would be, obviously, Big Star, either at the time or, more likely, during their long period of critical reappraisal. For myself, it was at something of a tangent, via his involvement with "Behind The Magnolia Curtain" by southern psychobilly freakos Tav Falco's Panther Burns. (Why does nobody ever mention them these days?) Man, that's a record to melt even the sturdiest of turntables. I once saw them live @ The Old Greek Theatre in Richmond, and they put on a fantastic live show, too (I assume that Chilton was off their boat by then, but my memory isn't so good these days; my hair is greyer, too, and I sometimes forget what the hell it is that I'm supposed to be doing -- that's right, getting ready for work; oops).

This Goes With This

Sometimes the computer knows more than we do. This morning it offered up "Yellow Moon", by the Neville Brothers, a track that I have long been quite fond of (the rest of its parent album I can mostly take or leave), immediately followed by the Prins Thomas remix of "The Long Way Home", by Lindstrøm. At some point I realised that I was humming the former while listening to the latter. They fit together remarkably well. Mash-up artists: don't thank me. Take this suggestion and run with it. It's yours.

NSFW

The acronym "NSFW" is an Internet shortening of the expression "New South F#%$&# Wales". As in, "If you want to play cricket for Australia you had better move to NSFW". It is frequently used to warn people not to watch certain videos at their place of employment. This is because many of those videos are made in New South F#%$*&% Wales and therefore are likely to corrupt the morals of our youth. (Unlike those good, wholesome, morally rigid Victorian videos.)

Next week: "BFF".

Fart joke of the week

Seen on "The Daily Show" one night last week: Joe Biden, at a ceremony in Israel, with flames appearing somewhere behind him, leans forward, at the same time that the flames increase in height. All it took was one well-placed sound effect. You can take in as much clever, intelligent political satire as you like, but really there's no humour like bum humour.

(And it's a surprise and a privilege to have Jon Stewart on our screens less than 24 hours after he airs in America - and with no ads! - on Your ABC. They used to say that the ABC costs us five cents a day. Allowing for inflation that's probably up to twenty or so today, but nevertheless it's money well spent when they give you this level of service.)

Song of the day

"Love Cry", by Four Tet. In which Mr Hebden takes a bunch of old records, and by a process of chopping, splicing, looping, flipping, whatevering, manages to create ... a Kruder and Dorfmeister track?

Don't get me wrong; I love me a bit of the old K&D. But in 2010? On the one hand, why would you bother? And yet, on the other, preferred, hand, when the results are this striking, why the hell not?

And be sure to stay for the gorgeous thirty-second coda, where the percussion drops away entirely, leaving just a shimmer of guitar fragments and assorted bleeps.

Song of the day

"Woman Of The Ghetto", by Marlena Shaw. Such power. Such grace. Such the deep, rolling funk groove. When I listen to this song I am conscious of the fact that this is not "my" music (but then The Clash was not "my" music either) and that there are elements of it that I am not equipped to understand. But mostly when I listen to it I know instinctively that I Am Not Worthy.

Song of the day

"The All At Once Club", by Belbury Poly. Imagine if Krafwerk, around the time of "Computer World", recorded a cover of The Beatles' "Get Back", using only the equipment with which they made "Autobahn" some years earlier, and inviting Jean-Jacques Perrey in to help them. Then listen to this song.

YouTube of the day

Here.

Trust me. You won't regret it.

(via Aquarium Drunkard)

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.

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.

Song of the day

"I'm A Man", by 101 Strings.

Insane. Completely insane.

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.

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.

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 ...

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.

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.)

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".

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?