Song of the year? (1)

"She Brings the Sunlight", by Richard Hawley.



It may be that you have to live in Sheffield to fully "get" Richard Hawley. But you don't have to have so much as looked for Sheffield on Google Maps to twig to the idea that this song, the first track on Hawley's 2012 album, "Standing at the Sky's Edge", is something special.

It unfurls over seven and a half effortless minutes, drawing on practically every significant strain of British popular music over the previous 45 years (also Hawley's age) to create a song that is so huge, and so compelling, that it is like a giant psychedelic black hole: it sucks you in, and you are powerless to resist.

What is surprising, at least to those of us who have followed Hawley's career arc out of the corner of one eye, allowing it to come into sharp focus only on occasion (eg "Coles Corner"), and heartening to those of us that are way too far on the wrong side of 40, is the unforced and unembarrassing (cf, possibly, although this jury is still out, latter-day Nick Cave) hardness that Hawley has been able to draw on in pursuit of his muse this time around.

Song of the day

"You Are The One", by The Time And Space Machine.

This acid-soaked, sun-struck, brain-fried construction is built around something that sounds very much like a small but crucial piece of Mazzy Star's "Ghost Highway". As Richard Norris, who as far as can be gathered IS The Time And Space Machine, is also one half of Beyond The Wizards Sleeve, we wouldn't be at all surprised. I like where music is going these days. There are people taking bits of songs and turning them into entirely new and fresh songs or pieces of musical, uh, bricolage. And not just getting away with it, but winning.

Song of the day

"Pajarillo", by Aldemaro Romero Y Su Onda Nueva.

If this were a Hollywood pitch, it would go as follows:

"Philip Glass meets The Swingle Singers."

Which is slightly unfair to all three parties, but I promise you that if you have "Einstein On The Beach" in mind when listening to this, you can certainly imagine it as something that may have sneakily insinuated itself into Glass's masterwork.

The Venezuelan New Wave may not have been our New Wave, but it was, in its own way, pretty damn cool.



PS if I can survive the next two weeks I hope to resume slightly more regular transmission shortly thereafter. But at this stage that is a pretty big "if".

A few words about "Moonrise Kingdom", a film directed by Wes Anderson

Perhaps the best way to describe Wes Anderson's new film, "Moonrise Kingdom", is by saying that it is just like any other Wes Anderson picture you have seen, only more so. Accordingly, you will either love it or hate it depending on your predisposition towards the Wes Anderson way of doing things. (I have unequivocally loved and admired everything he is ever done, including his advertising work, but I concede that it is a fine line he is treading, and I predict that, if his style ever manages to attract imitators, their films are likely to be uniformly awful.)

So anyway, all I really wanted to say here is that when Adrienne and I were leaving the cinema, she mentioned to me that the film put her in mind of "Time of Wonder", a children's book by Robert McCloskey (author of one of the all-time classic children's picture books, "Make Way For Ducklings"). As is her way, having sowed the Wes Anderson seed, she then silently deposited the book on my side of the bed. Of course, I then just had to read it immediately, even though it has been in the house for years. (She is very good at this sort of thing. The phrase "Bart would wear that shirt" also has a proven track record.)

It turned out, unsurprisingly, to be a wonderful book, even if it does shine an uncomfortable light on how much better, at least in some respects, the lives if children were fifty years ago. And of course Adrienne is right: the similarities between the book and the film are many. The setting, around the islands of New England, is perhaps the most obvious one. But there is also the theme of children having adventures out of the sight of adults, sailing boats, watching the weather. There is the great storm that is the centrepiece of both the film and the book. Even the houses look curiously similar. The film being by Wes Anderson, there are, of course, inner demons of one sort or another in all of the characters; a dog gets harmed; and everyone is impeccably dressed and/or has a very precise taste in, say, music. None of those things is reflected in Robert McCloskey's book (which was written eight years before the year that Anderson's film is set in). There are no boy scouts in the book, either (unless they are hiding in the shadows).

It would be interesting to know, wouldn't it, and I suppose it would not be surprising in the slightest, if Anderson had read this book as a child and if, consciously or otherwise, it sparked an idea that evolved into "Moonrise Kingdom". Or maybe it is total coincidence. I was expecting to find that Anderson himself grew up in New England, but this appears not to be the case (Texas, it would seem, which is about as far from New England as you can get while still being a part of the United States), which makes the similarity of the worlds depicted in the film and the book even more intriguing.

Anyway. Read the book. See the film. That's all.

Hypothetical mixtape: February 2012

The time is upon us once more to flatten one month's worth of internet trolling into one seamless (not!) sub-80-minute smackdown. Or something.

How far behind the times are we? Way far. Let's party like it's February 2012.

1. "DoYaThing", by Gorillaz. Or, the reappearance of James Murphy. This also exists as a radio-length song, but once you have heard the full thirteen minutes you will wonder why. There's a nice bit of Iggy Pop channelling that goes down from the five-minute mark.

2. "Wolf Girl", by Simian Ghost. Once in a while a song comes along that breaks your heart so completely that all you can do it sit quietly and observe, helpless, as it ever so subtly and unexpectedly draws the tears into your eyes. For now, for me, this is that song. I have no explanation for this.

3. "Faithless", by Scritti Politti. Whereas thirty years ago that song would have been a song not unlike this. I can't profess to ever having heard the 12" version before. At over nine minutes, it demonstrates conclusively that, no, you can't have too much of a good thing.

4. "Saturday Night", by Central Unit. There is a time in your life, if you are "into" music, when you are suddenly old and/or independent enough to start to get out into the world, and perhaps adventurous and/or curious enough to discover some musicians, or some sounds, that are so new that you might be able, for a time, to call them your own. 1982 was my time. These particular floppy-haired wonders would appear to have been Italian, but essentially the same music was being made in Melbourne then, too. Who needed the internet?

5. "Visions (Nite Jewel Seance)", by Stevie Wonder. Speaking of the internet, it has been easy, and particularly rewarding, to have been able to watch the evolution of Nite Jewel. Our little girl is now (musically speaking, anyways) all grown up. It's a brave step to take a song by someone as untouchable as Stevie Wonder and strip it back to practically nothing: two chords teased out, slowly, on an electric piano: music suspended in mid-air with no support. It might be John Martyn's "Small Hours" in miniature.

6. "I Don't Know What I Can Save You From (Royksopp Remix)", by Kings of Convenience. The Kings have a way with melody. Royksopp have a way with sound. That works.

7. "It's A Lovely Day Today", by The Walter Wanderley Trio. Back in the mid-1990s, when we frequented Grumpy Warren's Record Paradise, down the road from the Galleon Cafe in St Kilda, we bought lots of records like this. Just how good is the echo on that Hammond? (Rhetorical. It's good.) Smile for the camera, fellas.

8. "Fallin' In Love", by American Spring. Written by Dennis Wilson. Produced by Brian Wilson. Made in 1973. What more do you need to know?

9. "People Make The World Go Round", by The Stylistics. Evidently there was more to The Stylistics than "You Are Everything" and ritzy suits. Thanks (as always) to Marcello Carlin for writing sufficiently eloquently about this song for me to want to track it down.

10. "All Across The Nation", by All Saved Freak Band. Heavy metal church music. Yes, you read that right.

11. "Heya", by Bosques. Garage rock from Argentina. Garage rock really was the universal language for a while there. Someone is playing the guitar (or is it a mandolin?) in the background in a way that invents Ed Kuepper.

12. "Mary Lou", by Black Mountain. Canada's finest hairy guitar-wranglers come down from the (black) mountain after too long an absence, and we're glad they did. This is them at their most krautrockinest. Is it also perhaps a nod towards early Stereolab? Or maybe they were both merely drinking from the same well.

13. "Chinese Rocks", by Johnny Thunders and The Heartbreakers. This month's Oldies Radio contribution.

14. "You Know You Like It (Raffertie Remix)", by AlunaGeorge. On the other hand, sometimes we feel compelled to give a passing nod to music that could only have been made in the here and now.

15. "The Sometime Girl", by Gerry Pond. This was the b-side to a Reprise single from 1966. Gerry Pond seems to have made no other records. He had clearly been listening to Donovan before he made this one (not a criticism). Fascinating and, in its own way, slightly terrifying.

16. "The Way You Look Tonight", by Dexys Midnight Runners. Let us celebrate the return of Dexys, after a thirty-year absence, with this lesser known off-cut from their previous album, "Don't Stand Me Down", the one the critics loved but nobody bought. (Although it may be that that description, sadly, will also fit the new one.) The last 20 seconds of this version of this well-known song kill me. Kevin Rowland is The Man.

Song of the day

"Privacy Settings", by Ital.

Kids, learn from my mistakes. Do not listen to this, especially on headphones, if, as I have been for most of the last couple of weeks, you are labouring under a nauseous stomach and a woozy head. It's like anti-aspirin.

Internets of the day

I'm not going to beat around the (Kate) Bush here; I'm just going to link directly to this Dangerous Minds post that conveniently collates all the 1982 Kate Bush videotape you could wish to see.

So, um, why are you still here?

They also served

At times, these pages can resemble an obituaries column. It is probably unfair to say so, but sometimes people don't come to the front of your thoughts until something bad happens to them. Two persons of note have, sadly, fallen into that category in the past couple of weeks.

The first, and if I'm honest the one that stopped me in my tracks, was Jon Lord, keyboard player for Deep Purple.

If your life revolves around listening to music, there are certain sounds that leave a particularly strong, deeply profound impression on you. These days, for example, I regularly succumb to the (al)lure of the Hammond B-3 organ and the Fender Rhodes electric piano. As a nine-year-old, listening to tapes on my Sanyo portable cassette recorder (those tapes were frequently bootlegs picked up for next to nothing at Dandenong Market; favourite mistyped song title (actually the only one I can remember, but they were legion): "When the Leave Breaks"), I wasn't in a position to start to pick out individual instruments (well, drums and guitars, obviously). The first unique sound that I recall being able to recognise was a deep, grinding, slightly wheezing sound: a sound I now know to have been Jon Lord, playing a Hammond B-3 through a thing called a Leslie cabinet, a device that one might describe -- probably offensively to aficionados -- as like the effect of talking to somebody from the other side of a rotating fan (cue the scene where Rizzo the Rat sends secret messages to Gonzo in "Muppets From Space").

The Deep Purple record that I was listening to in those impressionable times was "Made in Japan", a double album on one cassette (!) that, as it turns out, is perhaps the best example of (the) Lord's work. (The three classic studio albums tended ever so slightly to overemphasise the guitars at the expense of the organ.) It was the time of the double live album: my collection grew to include entries from Status Quo and Jethro Tull (Led Zeppelin, Peter Frampton, Cheap Trick and Bob Dylan all put out, in the space of a few short years, double live albums of their own (what was this thing called Budokan?), but none of those were on my radar (well, except for Frampton, who was all over everything in the early days of FM radio; ah, the "talk box": another musical Rosebud)).

Anyway. When next you listen to "Smoke on the Water", consider that iconic guitar line, the one that everyone plays the first time they pick up a guitar (or, in the case of someone in our family, the fife), and listen to it closely: aside from the first couple of bars, whatever the guitar is doing, Jon Lord is right in there behind him. In fact, if it wasn't for the almost subliminal tonality / cadence / depth that the organ adds to what the guitar is doing (or maybe it's vice versa), I sometimes wonder if it would have worked at all.

The other fallen soldier this time around was Darryl Cotton.

If you were born in 1964, and absorbing Countdown and 3XY from when you were, say, nine years old into your early teens, you knew certain names and faces of Australian music: Little River Band. The Angels. Darryl Cotton. Brian Cadd. Russell Morris. At that age, you accept everything at face value. You have no idea that any of these people had a past. This only comes to you later on. As it turns out, there was a generation of Australian musicians, of which Cotton was an important part, who opened a door for the likes of Skyhooks (who themselves had a foot in the sixties), Sherbet, Mark Holden and others -- right through to your Kylies and Jasons -- to be considered as musicians first, Australians second. I am not ignoring the significance individuals such as Slim Dusty and Johnny O'Keefe, who forged a path of their own, but the wave of music that came from "home grown" (ignoring nationalities here; many were actually Poms) acts such as The Zoot and The Masters Apprentices, and the songwriting titans Vanda and Young (again, I had no idea, when "Hey St Peter" was one of my first Best Song Evahs, that these two unusual characters were already legends of the scene several times over), even the great Molly Meldrum himself, was, or at least seems from this distance to have been, the first appearance of anything like an Australian music "scene". (Where the Bee Gees fit into this idea I cannot say; they strike me as more like the Barry Humphrieses, Germaine Greers and Clive Jameses of Australian music: going overseas in order to become famous.)

In other words, if I had been born five or ten years earlier my impression would have been very different. For me, Darryl Cotton played a crucial but somewhat secondary role in the Countdown years. For my hypothetical older brother, he was much more than that. (Date of birth, however, has no bearing on the fact -- fact! -- that The Zoot's version of "Eleanor Rigby" is one of the greatest covers of a Beatles song ever. Ever.)

Song of the day

"Sylvia", by Arthur Verocai.

While listening to this song, you can do one of two things.

One, you might contemplate the genius of Stereolab, and how close they were able to go to blatantly appropriating other people's songs while creating music that was entirely their own. The particular reference point here is the three albums they released after "Emperor Tomato Ketchup", which, although each of them is in parts rather unwieldy, might turn out to be the central component of their career.

Two, you can forget all of that angsty, music critic stuff and enjoy this song, basking in the lilting rhythms, silky strings and general sense of spare-no-expense opulence that seems to have gone with every damn record that was made between the early sixties and the early seventies. (See also: Lee Hazlewood.)

Song of the day

"Space", by Magic Wands.

If The Cure had invented surf beat ...

Song of the day

"I'm Going To Spain", by Steve Bent.

What we have here is a one-off single from 1976, released on Bradley's Records, sometime home of The Goodies. Its main claim to fame would appear to be its spot on Kenny Everett's "World's Worst Record Show" compilation (seeing is believing). That is a little unfair. It is a perfectly nice snapshot of 1960s British pop (note the George Martinesque sliding strings near the start) filtered through the Chinnichap prism of 1970s British pop, while also putting me in mind of "Eanie Meany", by Jim Noir, which is a snapshot of 1960s British pop as rendered in the early 21st century.




But wait, there's more.

The Fall, as you know, have always had an ear for the obscure cover version ("Victoria", by the then forgotten Kinks; "Mr Pharmacist"; "There's A Ghost In My House"). It will come as no surprise to you, then, to learn that "I'm Going To Spain" appears on their 1993 album, "The Infotainment Scan". And a pretty nice job they do of it, too: it's a rare opportunity for you to hear Mark E Smith doing something that (loosely) fits the description of "singing".

A few words about "Brave", a film from Pixar

Following on from the seemingly franchise-driven slight misstep "Cars 2" (which, in Pixar's defence, it really had to make; I don't see how you could ignore the fact that toy shops were still full of merchandise several years after the film all those toys were based on last showed in a cinema), Pixar has, much to the relief of those of us who have believed in Pixar for so long and spent nights lying awake worrying if, or more likely when, the Disney takeover would work Disney's particular form of anti-magic, gone back to what it does best: telling stories.

"Brave" is not merely the name of the film. "Brave" is also what Pixar was when it decided to make the film. For "Brave" is an unusual thing: an American mainstream film set in an imagined Scotland and with no concession to American audiences. (It is very Scottish. I kept being reminded of our first night in Glasgow in 1996 with Adrienne's aunt and uncle, when they had invited a number of their friends around to meet us and also to celebrate Adrienne's uncle's birthday: people talking to me in an almost aggressively friendly manner, with me failing to understand more than the occasional word but having a lovely time nonetheless.) Also, both of the main characters are female. (There are, I think, leaving aside the servants, only two female characters, but the entire film is built around those two characters. It is possible that their strength draws in part from their position in what is very much a man's world.) And, to put a complete end to the "Cars 2" complaints, there would appear to be no marketing, spin-off or sequel opportunities with this one. It simply is what it is.

Is "Brave" an act of penance, then? Presumably not, as Pixar's usual working method would suggest that the film would have been well into production before "Cars 2" hit the screen. Or, if it is an act of penance, then it must have been pre-emptive penance, if such a thing is possible. What it might be, though, is John Lasseter's tip of the hat to Hayao Miyazaki. We know that Lasseter was a driving force behind bringing the Studio Ghibli masterpieces to English-speaking audiences. There is much of Miyazaki in this film: the painting-like backgrounds, especially on the long-range landscape shots; the strong young female lead; the mystical elements (the forest sprites in "Brave" echo the dust mites in "Totoro", for example); the physical appearance of the witch, who is very much of a type with some of Miyazaki's elderly grannies and crones. (The witch, and her cottage, I am now thinking, must also be something of an homage to the witches that permeated the classic early Disney movies. Well, "duh".)

If you asked me to come up with a pithy mathematical calculation to sum up this film, then, it would probably be "Studio Ghibli meets 'The Secret of Roan Inish'" (a film, Adrienne and I discovered when comparing notes afterwards, that we had both been put in mind of): predominantly whimsical and mystical (the "Roan Inish" connection), but with just the right amount of mindless violence, suspense, and the customary race against time just before the finish.

Somehow I haven't managed to see any reviews or box office news, so I have no idea how "Brave" is playing out in the wider world. We couldn't convince the boys to see it, on account of word having gone around that it is a "girls' film" (which it most definitely isn't; or at least not only; well, okay, it does contain scenes of a girl riding a horse, but it's clearly not "Saddle Club"). But I am working on them, slowly, in the hope that I might get to see it again on the big screen rather than just on DVD later on. (Did I forget to mention that the animation, even by Pixar's lofty standards, is frequently how-did-they-do-that stunning?)

(Also, and again in keeping with Pixar tradition, we were treated to a lovely stand-alone short film as a curtain raiser for the main event. The only thing missing, which Pixar used to do -- although I can't remember if this was always the case -- was a trailer for whatever next year's Pixar film turns out to be. (It may or may not be a sequel to "Monsters, Inc". Another Pixar sequel? Well, the two wonderful "Toy Story" sequels suggest that there is no cause for alarm. Let's give Pixar the benefit of the doubt for now and work on the assumption that "Cars 2" was just an off year. Oh, and go and see "Brave", even if you can't find any kids to drag along with you. I promise you will like it.))

Song of the day

"Sit Still", by Each Other.

The guitars alternate between post-punk acridity and Postcard jangle. The voices put one in mind, variously, of The Raincoats and Electrelane. The combination is winning. A hit!

YouTube of the day

I don't think I realised how much Gary Numan meant to me until I started watching this video (warning: it's a download quota crusher). I kind of got that feeling, which I haven't had in a long time, of being at the start of a concert and sensing that something very special was about to happen. Except it was happening on a tiny screen. And I was on the bus home. And it actually took place in 1979. Whatever. It goes to prove that being on the autism spectrum doesn't necessarily prevent you from knowing how to put on a good show.



(via Dangerous Minds)

Song of the day

"And I Love You", by The Darling Dears.

The vocals are best described, at least within my limited and possibly misguided musical vocabulary, as silky smooth Philly soul. The frequently over-mic'd backing track, by the wonderfully named Funky Heavy, would, had this record been made in the 1990s rather than in 1972, be called Trip Hop.

And this was "just" a B-side?

Song of the day

"You're My Drug", by The Dukes of Stratosphear.

Only a quarter of a century late, I sink my teeth into XTC alter ego The Dukes of Stratosphear. This slight detour came about after (if not as a result of) working with Todd Rundgren on "Skylarking". It may well be that this 25-year delay has served a useful purpose. Listening to an eighties band going sixties in 1987 might have just sounded either 1987 or 1960s, whereas listening to the same thing in 2012 allows one to hear a little bit of both sides of the equation: the spiky but sophisticated pop of mid-period XTC; and the influence on it of the music of The Beatles, The Kinks, The Beach Boys and, as evidenced on this phased-out gem, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. XTC, in all of their guises, never really put a foot wrong. They sit perfectly comfortably on any continuum that contains the names listed above.

Carl, aged 14, thinks "You're My Drug" is a very strange name for a song. He much prefers "The Mole From The Ministry", perhaps under the influence of the second Johnny English movie: "You mean there's a mole AND a vole?"

Song of the day

"What Did The Hippie Have In His Bag?", by Cornershop.

Not content with having been responsible for the Best! Song! Ever!, Cornershop have reconvened (not strictly true; they never went away) to bring you the Next! Best! Song! Ever!, while at the same time providing the answer to one of the true mysteries of the universe.

Hypothetical mixtape: January 2012

Every month I find, thanks to my many internet friends, an unfeasibly large number of songs that I think might be worth listening to. These songs have, for some time now, been going into an ever-expanding pile, never to be seen again. At the start of this year I decided to conduct an experiment: could I dump the songs I found each month into discrete little piles, and distil each month's offerings into an 80-minute mix tape, just enough to fit onto one (hypothetical) CD? The hell I could. It's now June, and I have struggled to pare January's hopefuls down to 160 minutes of fun. Okay, so that could be labelled a two-disc set, or a "Deluxe Edition" or "Legacy Edition" (?) with bonus disc. That's not the real problem. The real problem is that, at this rate, the songs I am finding now won't get called for consideration until, on a quick calculation, around 2016. At which point if there are any "new" artists floating around in amongst it all, they will have already gone stratospheric, developed bad personal habits, and/or crashed and burned.

All of that is a problem for another day (or year). For now, I give to you the January A-list. (No links provided, or I wouldn't be putting this up for another month. Anything you want to hear, I'm sure you can find.)

"Moon Jocks N Prog Rocks", by Mungolian Jet Set. Just like the old days, this hypothetical mixtape starts off with an epic space disco anthem. It's not by our old pal Lindstrom, but heck, it might as well be. It tells a kind of shaggy dog story, features some tasty Vocoderised vocals, drops in a circa Chariots of the Gods synth solo and generally motors along at a cracking pace for its ten and a half minutes.

"Gypsy Woman", by Kiki Hitomi. I was giving this one two thumbs up before I even knew what it was I was listening to. It's not either of the songs called "Gypsy Woman" that I know. This one was apparently a "club hit" in 1991. Like I would know. Kiki Hitomi sings with King Midas Sound. That's the first thumbs up. The backing music, which I should have recognised but didn't, is a Ricardo Villalobos track. I thought it sounded like Kraftwerk's "Computer World" fed through every kind of filter. That's two thumbs up.

"Whole Sex Lotta Machine (the Drumloop, the Guitar Riff & the Super Bad)", by Fissunix. In other words, a mashup, the content of which should be discernible from the name alone. If you could insert Jimmy Page's classic riff into James Brown's rampant funkisms, you would, wouldn't you? The drum loop? It sounds like it might be the one from "Walk This Way". Although presumably those dudes copped it from somewhere else.

"Pinball (Ashley Beedle Edit)", by Brian Protheroe. The words "lost psychedelic classic" sit with the song, but not really with the year: 1974. And anyway this is an "edit", meaning some boffin has taken the original track and made it "better". I can't comment on that, but in this iteration it is certainly a "trip", uh, "man".

"Underwater Light Reflections", by Gate Way. I listened to a lot of music in 1975 but I don't think I ever heard anything like this. I don't even know what you would classify it as. "Soundtrack music" might fit, if that even meant anything. If you listen closely you can hear things that, many years later, would go to make up the classic Broadcast sound. Research reveals that Gate Way is actually "Laurence Vanay", who is actually the wife of one of the guys from Magma. Which probably makes as much sense as anything I've written today.

"Just The Two Of Us", by Grover Washington Jr. In my mind, Grover Washington Jr is a saxophone-playing Sesame Street character. Featuring the unmistakeable voice of Bill Withers. You would have thought this song was from 1971 rather than 1981. Which perhaps makes it a bit "old fashioned" when viewed from when it came out (but that didn't stop it being a huge hit) but viewed from today it is just a "timeless classic". Which just goes to show, uh, something.

"Isle de Joie", by Mandre. This invariably makes me think of "Quasimodo's Dream" and "Beautiful", my two favourite albums by Dubbo's finest, The Reels. Go figure.

"Aybatti", by Fikret Kizilok and Tehlikeli Madde. Turkish psychedelic Hammond organ freakout. C'mon, guys. C'mon.

"Yokpo Wa Non Kpo Hami", by Assa Cica et L'Orchestre Poly Rythmo de Cotonou. The backing band on this track has been subjected to the archival treatment in the last couple of years. It all sounds wonderful, but there's something singularly remarkable about this song. You are probably not going to believe this, but the horns on this song sound so much like The Laughing Clowns, it's actually uncanny.

"Kelen Ati Len", by Orchestre du Bawobab. Originally released in 1975 in Senegal, and excavated and released as a seven-inch single on Soundway in 2005. And it's great. It crossed my mind that "Orchestre du Bawobab" might be the same as the still-going combo Orchestra Baobab. Turns out it is. There is so much great 1970s African music being unearthed and reissued. I should tell you about it some time.

"Mademoiselle Marie", by Coeur Magique. More archival footage here. French prog rockers circa 1971, rediscovered by the estimable Finders Keepers label. In here for the sound of the guitars, really. As if that ever wasn't enough.

"Eighth Avenue", by Hospitality. And here is proof that absolutely no thought has gone into the sequencing of this mix. Suddenly, like waking up from a prog dream into a pop new morning, we have briskly strummed acoustic guitars and breathy, underplayed female vocals. A certain indefinable "something". As long as people keep making songs that sound like this, I will keep listening. 

"Nice Age", by Hatsune Miku Orchestra. The best thing about this song is that Hatsune Miku doesn't exist. She is a "singing synthesiser application with a female persona". How William Gibson is that? Here "she" is "performing" one of my favourite Yellow Magic Orchestra songs. Ah, what a world we live in.

"Have A Cigar", by John Foxx and The Maths. Foxx's voice here is distorted to within an inch of its life and Benge's synths do a remarkable impression of Foxx-era Ultravox! as they tackle, with gusto, the Pink Floyd song. If there are no second acts, as F Scott Fitgerald is supposed to have said, then nobody told John Foxx. Oh, wait, Fitzgerald limited that rule to American lives, didn't he?

"You'll Improve Me (Caribou Remix)", by Junior Boys. If there's anybody I have been digging in the last few years as much as Junior Boys it's Caribou. Hence at this point my critical faculties switched themselves off.

"Hymn of the Big Wheel (Egyptrixx Remix)", by Massive Attack. It's as if someone said, I wonder what "Hymn of the Big Wheel" would have sounded like if Massive Attack were starting out in 2011. I think this nails it.

"I Close My Eyes", by The Bee Gees. Sadly, The Bee Gees now are like the punchline from the old Dave Allen story about the wide-mouthed frog: "Don't see many of them around these days, do you?" (I say this as a mark of respect, not a cheap joke, but admittedly it could be difficult to tell.) But their songs will live on. It is the disco-era Bee Gees that still command the most column inches, but I believe that their earlier records are the ones that warrant the most latter-day reconsideration. This song is but one case in point. It would be hard to argue that anyone was as good as The Beatles, but crikey, The Bee Gees gave it a shot. My school friend Mark Eddy, who made a lot of unlikely claims, once told me that his uncle had been the drummer for The Bee Gees in their Australian days. A surprising number of Mark's claims turned out to be true, and anyway, why would you make something like that up?

"Tropical", by Nino Nardini and Roger Roger. Groovy. Tropical. The end.

Song of the day

"Cybele's Reverie", by Stereolab.

After 22 years of marriage, at least we can agree on one thing: our favourite Stereolab song.

Happy anniversary, you.

Song of the day

"Sparrow Song", by Acrylics.

If you are about as overburdened with work as it is humanly possible to be while still remaining alive and (barely) upright, it is particularly gratifying when the universe hands you a song that at once sounds like the best song you never heard in 1986 while at the same time being as timeless a slice of dreampop as you are ever likely to hear.

Thank you, universe.

This goes with this (old world vs new world edition)

So anyway, there I was, listening to "Lonely Boy", by The Black Keys, as you do, and I thought to myself: what we have here is good-ol'-boy Southern boogie in the style of the British New Romantics.



Billy Idol could have done this.

And then it dawned on me: he did! But back then it was British New Romantics channelling the Confederate battle cry.



It's a funny old world, isn't it?

Song of the day

"Change", by Tears For Fears.

The place where I have worked for the past 13 years is not actually a family, but it can feel like one. Today I found out that a part of that family, someone who has been a part of the reason I still enjoy my job, against the odds, after all that time -- someone who, in fact, has become an important part of my life over the time that we have worked together -- is about to leave.

This song is for him.

Everybody gets a card when they go. Everybody gets a parting gift. Not everybody gets a blog post.

It's comforting, at times like this, to know that there is a place, amongst the infinite number of parallel universes out there, where it is still the 1980s.

And, because it is the 1980s, it must be the extended version.

This Goes With This (The More You Listen The More You Learn Edition)

1. "It's So Easy Falling", by Manfred Mann.

Listen (from the 2.07 mark) here; or download here.

(The YouTube clip linked to above compiles two Manfred Mann songs, with "It's So Easy Falling" appearing second. They are both worth a listen; if you thought that Manfred Mann's career started and ended with "Blinded By The Light" (and oh how I love that electric piano), you might be pleasantly surprised.)

2. "After Hours", by Caribou.



It is no secret that Caribou's particular skill lies in crafting songs (which are frequently excellent in their own right) using bits of other people's songs. But until I stumbled upon the first few seconds of "It's So Easy Falling", from Manfred Mann's "Mighty Garvey!" album (from 1968), I had never had a clear example of him actually doing it. (It may be that his sources are almost uniformly obscure; or I may be a not particularly good listener.)

And while we are on the subject, I recently had the opportunity, courtesy of our local library (your taxes at work), to finally listen to Isaac Hayes's "Black Moses" album. (He was much more than the voice of Chef.) Therein lay a surprise, even if I am the last to have discovered it. It goes like this.

First, refamiliarise yourself with Portishead's "Glory Box":



Then, listen to "Ike's Rap II":



See how easy this is?

If it is true that all the good songs have already been written, then I suppose you might as well use them as building blocks for your own songs. (But query what is going to happen in a few years' time when the songs that are based on other songs are themselves used as the basis for other songs. My head hurts.)

Song of the day

"Ill Wind", by Ed Kuepper.

The High Quality Audio Reproduction Fairy paid us a visit not long ago, bringing with him/her a Cambridge Audio amplifier and CD player (people still buy CD players?). They must have been a good choice: they even make Ed Kuepper sound good. Not his voice, obviously (I think the expression is "lol"?), but the crispness of his guitar playing really stands out on a song like this. Especially at the kind of volume that can only be employed when the other family members are far away from home.

I have no idea how long it is since I listened to this album ("Character Assassination"), but it really is much better than I remember it. That can't just be the hi-fi talking, can it?

(Obviously, sound quality is a stupid thing to be talking about when linking to a youtube clip, but you can enjoy the pastoral images and imagine the sound of the strings.)

Song of the day

"I Feel Love", by Donna Summer.

Well, obviously.

It's not every day a song comes along that turns on its head the accepted understanding of what popular music can be.

Thank you, Donna Summer.

YouTube(s) of the day

If you have been following Dangerous Minds (and you should have been) then you will have already seen this. If not, now is your chance to enjoy Martin Denny and his pals whooping it up on television some time around the early 1950s. Those were different times.



Bonus beats: John Cleese is the devil.

Mad Man

May, 1945. Fifteen years before "Mad Men". The Second World War (not yet given a capital "S") is drawing to a close. Those outside of Germany, hitherto not prepared to believe the stories that had been dribbling out from that country about the concentration camps, are suddenly forced to believe it, as the evidence, in the form of emaciated, destroyed humans returning to Paris from the camps as they are liberated, is laid out before them. In amongst these stories, of a combination we are unable to comprehend of exhilaration, exhaustion, and foreboding (the horror is not yet over, not that many people at this particular time would have been aware of its magnitude), there is this advertisement, occupying page 9 of the issue of the New Yorker cover-dated 19 May 1945.

(Open it in a new window to get a better view, then click to enlarge. It's worth it.)

One can only imagine the extra weight this ad would have carried in May 1945. Paris, and French perfume, had been lost to the rest of the world since 1940. Nobody knew what state it, or what was left of its residents, would be in until it was liberated. So, there's that. But there's also the drawings themselves, by Saul Steinberg. I always associate Steinberg with Picasso, both because of the extraordinary number of pictures they were able to create, and because of their ability to do magical things with a few lines on a page. (They also both were able to create art out of things the rest of us would never see as the basis of art.) Picasso, though, hangs in museums, while Steinberg is known, if he is known at all, as a New Yorker cartoonist and illustrator of advertisements. (At least there are now Steinberg books that you can buy.)

But take a closer look at this ad. It simply oozes Paris, from the Arc de Triomphe in the centre to the policeman (or is it M. Hulot?) on a bicycle in the bottom right corner. And there, over on the far right, nearer the top: is that Steinberg himself, in his garret, working on his next picture? I would like to think so.

Crash Landing

Continuing a series we started, and then abandoned, many moons ago, we put our hand into the bag and draw out at random another post-1970s Neil Young album, with a view to determining whether you should listen to it.

This week / month / year: "Landing On Water", from 1986.

Which can only be described as a very bad record. 

It is difficult to say what happened to Young, musically, in the '80s: specifically, whether his musical fragmentation was driven by his seemingly uncomfortable fit with Geffen Records, or whether his trouble with Geffen stemmed from his inability to give David Geffen what David Geffen thought David Geffen wanted, or whether the two things were entirely coincidental. Certainly, Young didn't automatically revert to his previous heights when he returned to Reprise (viz, "This Note's For You"), but it didn't take long for him to get back, at least sporadically, to what he did best, with "Freedom". And from that point on his embrace by the flannel-shirted grunge generation seemed to kick-start its own, still continuing, period of productivity.

(Young, like Dylan, Richard Thompson, and Ed Kuepper, seems to view releasing albums as just something that someone in his line of work has to do every couple of years, whether there is any particular inspiration or drive behind it or not. All four of those artists are best viewed through a combination of studio albums, compilations (often with songs that in hindsight inexplicably were left off studio albums) and live recordings. In what is, still, very much an album-driven market, the esteem in which all of them are held, notwithstanding this, is remarkable.)

When you listen to this album, you are inclined to think that Geffen had a point. It sounds like it was produced either by an untrained monkey or by the hearing impaired. Or maybe by a drummer: the drum sound is as close to perfect as a drum sound can be. The problem is that the rest of the musicians, and Young himself, sound like they were squashed together in the back corner and/or given collectively around two percent of the recording budget. Now, Young is no cloth-eared slouch when it comes to sound quality, so we can only assume that one of two things happened: he deliberately gave these recordings, in this state, to Geffen for release, in a rather spectacular "fuck you" gesture; or Geffen, in a fit of pique, messed with the recordings, in a rather spectacular, if self-defeating, "no, fuck you" gesture. (Either is plausible.)

Whichever way you cut it (or whichever way it was cut), the poor old listener is the loser. It is difficult, through the fog of everything except those up-close-and-personal drums, to ascertain the quality of the underlying songs. For myself, I can only give the benefit of the doubt, and then only provisionally, to one song, "Hippie Dream", which at least has the potential to sound like a Neil Young song, and would appear to tackle the kind of subject matter that might have made it seem not out of place on one of his raw, dissolute where-did-the-sixties-go? albums, referred to now as the "ditch trilogy".

(It also, I now discover, is the only "Landing On Water" recording to appear on Young's Geffen-era compilation album, "Lucky Thirteen". So perhaps I am not altogether misguided in hearing something in it.)

Song of the day

"Happy Birthday", by Altered Images.

Well, if I can't have Clare Grogan (circa 1981, of course) jumping out of a giant birthday cake, I guess I'll just have to settle for watching her on Top of the Pops.

*sigh*

Song of the season

"Ding-A-Dong", by Teach In.

Every year, around the time of his birthday, a man's mind turns to Eurovision. And, in particular, to this past winner. According to Wikipedia, the song is "an up-tempo ode to positive thought". If you ask me, it speaks for itself.

Song of the day

"Pulls Me Like A Tide", by The Nearly Brothers.

For some years now, I have been lamenting the absence of recorded material from Mark Snarski. What I didn't know was, back in 2010 he put a band together, recorded an album's worth of songs and then some (more about that below), and released it under the name The Nearly Brothers, to, as far as I can tell, no acclaim whatsoever.

Such is life, I guess. Snarski is blessed with one of the biggest, most soulful singing voices in modern music (you might call him the Australian Mark Lanegan, but you also might not), and has a great ear for a tune, but seems to be destined to fall forever beneath the zeitgeist-radar. The new album, now I have my virtual hands on it (legal, like), shows no drop in quality or intensity from his days in The Jackson Code, all of whose albums are essential listening, if you ask me. His songs of romantic obsession / jealousy / calamity continue to be matched with stellar playing and clever, sympathetic arrangements. They may not win points for artistic originality, but, as (I think) I have said before, quality craftsmanship never goes out of style.

Did I mention the band? Aside from the Irish guitarist, TB Allen, with whom I am not familiar (and nor is Discogs, aside from this album), all of the crew will be in your collection. Martyn P Casey you know from The Triffids, The Bad Seeds, and/or Grinderman. Mick Harvey, on production duties, hasn't yet been elevated to the sainthood notwithstanding my efforts. And on drums we have one Bongo Fury, who may or may not be the same person as Mark Dawson, known to you, if nowhere else, from yesterday's blog post (he has worked with Ed Kuepper on and off for a long time and was also the drummer in The Jackson Code).

This song, a long, slow-burning number that mostly works its way around a couple of chords for five-odd minutes, is the perfect ending to a fine album. Or it would be. Which brings me to the "and then some" referred to above. This album seems to have fallen victim to the not uncommon idea that, because a CD can hold a lot more than a "traditional" album's worth of music, it makes sense to add a few songs at the end and call them "bonus tracks". Which means that we have four songs tacked on after this ostensible "big finish", which, no matter that they are perfectly good Snarski songs and could just as easily have found their way onto the album proper, serve to diminish the impact of the album. It has never seemed to me like a winning move. Tom Waits CDs in this country have tended to have "Australian only bonus tracks" stuck on the end, to no great purpose (and anyway most if not all of those eventually turned up on "Orphans"). Wilco did it right on their most recent album, some copies of which came with a second disc containing four songs, a couple of which were alternate versions of songs on the album and one of which, "I Love My Label", was a very perky cover of a Nick Lowe song. Oldster bands like Swell Maps and Beat Happening occasionally used to throw in a vinyl seven-inch single or flexidisc with their LPs. (To bring us back to somewhere near where we started, Ed Kuepper's other other band The Aints did this with their ultra-lo-fidelity live album "SLSQ". Which may have stood for Special Low Sound Quality.) So it can be done in a way that doesn't attack the integrity of the thing the bonus songs are supposed to be an appendix to. End of sermon.

Here's some YouTube of The Nearly Brothers playing, it would appear, in Sydney a mere couple of weeks ago, with keyboards replacing the strings of the recorded version, and someone looking suspiciously like Mick Harvey himself attacking a bass guitar in the background. Snarski misses a couple of notes, but that only makes him more human, innit?



(Note to uploader: handheld cameras make some of us woozy. Go easy.)

Song of the day

"Master of Two Servants", by Ed Kuepper.

And on the seventh day Ed Kuepper rested.

But it was a strange, restless kind of rest. Five years ago he returned from the wilderness with the angry, energetic "Jean Lee and the Yellow Dog" album, reuniting him with Jeffery Wegener and thus activating the pilot light that eventually ignited into the Laughing Clowns reunion tour.

Since then, Ed has been trawling through his back catalogue, releasing his own Bootleg Series to rival Bob Dylan's, thus adding to the disk space taken up with versions of "Eternally Yours". (I've lost count.) But we have had no new Ed Kuepper music.

So it was with much excitement that the news of a new Ed album was greeted a few weeks ago. What we got, though, was "new" in a very Ed Kuepper sense of "new": eleven old songs given a fresh lick of paint and sent off into the world. The cover, with its nod to his first solo album, back in 1985, "Electrical Storm", should have been a clue. What Ed has done is re-recorded most of "Electrical Storm", added a couple of songs from "Rooms of the Magnificent", and called it "Second Winter".

I should emphasise that (a) this kind of caper from Ed should come as no surprise and (b) nothing I have written here should be taken as criticism. Like Dylan, Ed has spent much of his career looking back over his own songs and reworking, or reinventing, them, treating them, indeed, as "standards" to be interpreted according to the mood of the times, and with all that he has learned since their first creation being at his disposal. It's in many ways an admirable trait, but presumably one that wouldn't lend itself to the all-new-all-the-time rigours of the marketplace.

Ah, yes, the song. I have always loved the original version of this song, propelled to within an inch of its life by what can only be described, using two words that don't often get the opportunity to hang out together, as a mandolin frenzy. (It is also one of the songs that doesn't turn up on any of the demo / alternate take / outtake / live recordings that Ed keeps putting out.) So it is nice to be reminded of the song again, even if its new form eschews the mandolin for some of Ed's typically fine guitar playing. It still moves at a cracking pace. It is a great little song, whichever way you slice it.

This one is the original:



And this is Ed and Mark Dawson doing what is more or less the version from the new album, but in a live setting:

John Zorn 2010 - Fourth and Final Quarterly Report

Finally (feel free to stifle a yawn, or even not to stifle one), my thoughts on the last three John Zorn releases for 2010.

In October, he released "What Thou Wilt", a collection of three chamber pieces written between 1999 and 2007. I have said it before, and I'll say it again, but I just don't "get" this branch of Zorn's ouvre. I will merely observe that the strings in the first piece are so tasty you could eat them. The second, a twenty-two-minute solo piano work, is pretty serious (and again sounds marvellous: one thing about Zorn, he doesn't skimp on sound quality; or artwork quality, for that matter; and he's no slouch at quantity either). If, as the liner notes suggest, the pianist is doing all this from memory, then that's some memory.

For November he gave us "Interzone", the first of a pair of William S Burroughs-referencing works (the second, "Nova Express", appeared in early 2011). This is what Zornophiles would call an all-star line-up: Zorn, Ribot, Wollesen, Baptista, Medeski, Dunn, Mori. Those names, of course, don't tell you what to expect, but if you ran them through your internal processor you would probably imagine yourself to be somewhere between Naked City, The Dreamers, Electric Masada and the more recent series of chamber jazz albums (for want of a better description) which began with "In Search of the Miraculous".

What it is, or what it sounds like, is the 21st century equivalent of Zorn's File Card compositions, whereby certain heads, or instructions, were written on a series of file cards, which he flipped up in some kind of predetermined sequence and which the musicians were asked to follow. The overall length of this album, just shy of an hour, has allowed Zorn to give the individual segments more room to move than on the more turn-on-the-head-of-a-pin Carl-Stalling-with-ADHD adventures of, for example, Naked City's "Torture Garden". The pick-n-mix nature of this method ensures that some bits will appeal more than others, and your own mileage might differ, but I find the middle section of this album frequently a slog, which is a shame given the nature of the players. The upside is that if you don't like something it will be over before too long, and anyway whatever you think of the rest of it the last five or so minutes are a classic John Zorn blast.

What it has to do with William S Burroughs I can't really say, aside from what might be the sound of a gunshot early on, and some fragments that might have come out of a dusty back road in Algiers. But then my Burroughs days are 20-some years behind me, and I have no real intention of ever heading down that rabbit hole again.

And, bringing Zorn's big 2010 to an end (I have my suspicions that it may not have actually appeared until 2011, but let's cut the man a little slack), number 17 in the Book of Angels series, "Caym", this one by Cyro Baptista's own little ensemble, Banquet of the Spirits. Maybe by this point I was suffering from Zorn fatigue, or more specifically from Masada fatigue (although I sincerely hope not), but this seems to have less to offer than many others in the series. I have a theory, admittedly rather dubious, which is: the better the ensemble player, the less striking the ensemble player's own group. (I could give examples. Would that help? I doubt it.) Plus, as I've said here before, I have my own issues with the accordion.

(You should be allowed to make up your own mind. And there's no doubt these cats are all fine players. Here is a clip of them playing live.)

13.11 Cyro Baptista & Banquet of the Spirits live al Teatro Manzoni from aperitivo in concerto on Vimeo.

So, in summary, what can you say about a man who releases a dozen albums in a calendar year? I suppose you could say, "Slow down, man." But there isn't much chance of that happening, I expect. For a guy like John Zorn (i.e., for John Zorn), who has so many different strings to his bow, one couldn't imagine too many people liking all of them. Fifty percent might even be a good strike rate. But if someone whose work you generally admired released even half a dozen great albums in a year, you'd be in some kind of a heaven. And even if this was an exercise in clearing the decks (he went on to put out "only" five albums in 2011!) there's plenty of evidence that he has no intention of resting on his laurels just yet. (Word is that he's also planning something big for his 60th birthday, which comes around in 2013. You have been warned.)

Bonus Beats: you don't have to dig too far into this site for a quantity of audience video from Masada's recent South American shows. And I had no idea that he was going to bring the old gang back together. Enjoy.

Song of the day

"Do It First", by The Crayon Fields.

Ah, Autumn. With the leaves starting to fall from the trees, and the colours changing from green to red and yellow, this is Canberra's time of year. One can be comfortably inwardly focused, and yet not be freezing cold. (Today it is actually a bit warm. A bit warm, I tell you!) There might be footy on the telly and you might not yet be sick of it. (Even if, as supporter of a certain team, you are already looking towards next season.)

This song by The Crayon Fields sums up the best things about this time of year, I reckon, just by sounding the way it does.

(I think their first album is great. It is redolent of the kind of innocent charm that pervades many great first albums by jangly, introspective pop groups. The trick is then to take that quality to the next level. You can't be naive and wide-eyed a second time (unless you are Jonathan Richman and can make a credible career out of it) (okay, Calvin Johnson probably managed it two or three times with Beat Happening, although even then their strongest album, "You Turn Me On", came about because they had by then (relatively speaking) "grown up"), which means you have to be something else. The second Crayon Fields album wasn't quite clear on what that something was, or was going to be. It came out in 2009. There hasn't been another record since, and the singer now has a solo album out, so maybe they never figured it out. Which would be a shame, if only because every second band over the last couple of years has adapted the basic sound of "Do It First", and a few of them have probably made some money out of it, or at least gotten recognition. "Do It First" isn't even on YouTube (a live version can be found there, but the sound quality is so awful it doesn't go close to doing justice to the fragile, autumnal grace of the recorded version).

But all is not lost, for you can download it here.

Song of the day

"Matelot", by The Renegades.

The Renegades were a British beat group from the early sixties. Evidently they had some kind of a following in Finland. (Go figure.) I had never so much as heard of them until yesterday, when we went to see "Le Havre", the new film by Aki Kaurismaki. (If you have any spare time this Easter and it is showing in your town, you should see it. It won't last long.)

This song bookends the film.

Song of the day

"Jimmy Stynes", by My Friend The Chocolate Cake.

There are not many more words that could possibly be written about the late Jim Stynes. He has deserved them all.

He came over from Ireland as part of an experiment to see if Irish kids, whose football was not dissimilar to our own, could play Australian Rules.

He proved that they could.

He was an important cog in what turned out to be the greatest era of the Melbourne Football Club since their glory days of the fifties and early sixties.

He had one fleeting lapse of judgment in the dying seconds of the 1987 Preliminary Final that might well have cost his club a place in their first Grand Final since 1964 (a Grand Final that they could even have won; at least they would have stood a better chance than they did in the two that they later played in, both of which were effectively over by the ten-minute mark of the first quarter). It is plausible that he spent the rest of his life seeking to atone for that one split second. (But Jimmy, we forgave you for that pretty much as soon as the final siren had gone.)

He adopted this country as his home.

He returned to the club to bring it back from the brink of extinction and would appear to have largely succeeded (although on-field success continues to elude us).

He fought on, improbably but heroically, through the worst ravages of the cancer that even he, in the end, couldn't defeat. Bravely, as if that needed to be said, because Jim Stynes was the bravest of them all.

He even had a song named after him.

Song of the day

"Please Be My Third Eye", by La Sera.

It takes about five seconds for me to know that I am going to love this song. Sometimes I don't even have to turn my brain on. Sometimes?

Idiot songs of the day

In which we say "yah boo" to political correctness.

1. "How Sweet To Be An Idiot", a song by Neil Innes. Who is no idiot.




2. "Idiot Friends", by Mr Spongebob Squarepants and his little pink pal, Patrick.




3. "Walk Idiot Walk", by The Hives, as performed live on Mr Letterman's television programme. The Hives are notable for their sharp dress sense and killer guitar lines.




I can't think of any others. Probably because I'm such an idiot ...

Song of the day

"Joseph Cornell", by The Clientele.



Joseph Cornell was an American artist best known for his "boxes", containers that he built himself then filled with, well, stuff. There are a few of them in the collection of the National Gallery in Canberra. You should check them out. I associate him with another American artist, Alexander Calder. They both made things that your uncle might have made. But whereas Calder's work is whimsical and inherently likeable, Cornell you could maybe have arguments with people about, along the lines of is this or is this not art. (Calling something art is like calling something jazz. The dividing line is both invisible and always moving.)

The Clientele are (or were, as might be suggested by their web site) a British pop group with a very distinctive, understated sound. All their songs are either in a minor key or feel like they are. The rain-refracted evening (or early morning) lights on the album cover of "Suburban Light" are about right.

Whatever may be the connection between the artist and this song, it says all that needs to be said, in two minutes and 24 seconds. How do they do that?

Dad joke of the day

Q. Which science fiction writer goes snap, crackle and pop?

A. Edgar Rice Bubbles.

Ahem.

YouTube of the day

I am a (the?) person for whom modern music starts and, perhaps, ends with Television's "Marquee Moon". It first captured my attention as a night-time listener to Sydney's 2JJ, where it was on fairly regular rotation back around 1978-9 but, owing to the vagaries of long-distance AM radio reception, I never once managed to catch the back-announcement (by, let's say, George Wayne or Mac (actual-dad-of-Jarvis) Cocker) and so had no idea what I had been listening to. It wasn't until some years later, after I had forgotten all about it, that I heard it again, on 3RRR, and I was very, very careful then to catch who and what it was.

Fast-forward probably not actually all that far, but well after I had picked up and absorbed the original two Television albums ("Adventure" on stunning red vinyl, fetish fans), and there in Missing Link Records, lost amongst the bottom-feeding punk and hardcore 7" singles, was a copy of Television's debut single, "Little Johnny Jewel", from 1975. This being in my estimation something like the Philosopher's Stone, I assumed it must have been a bootleg, but such was my determination to own a copy of it in any form that I happily forked over the ten-dollar asking price.

We now have the internet, and Discogs in particular, and I can confidently say that what I bought looks exactly like it says here, right down to the "white die-cut paper sleeve", so I am inclined to the view that what I bought is in fact the thing itself, in all its monaural glory. (A spruced-up version now appears on the CD reissue of the "Marquee Moon" album, no longer split into two parts, and it gets closer every day to rivalling "Marquee Moon" itself in its epicness. Note also, as an irrelevant aside, that the version of "Marquee Moon" on the reissue has a much longer fade-back-in section than appeared on the original album. All in all, this one of the most necessary CD reissues in the history of mankind.)

This YouTube clip, again thanks to Dangerous Minds, is of Television in the office of the impresario behind Ork Records, playing something that might be "Little Johnny Jewel"* but the sound is so bad it's kinda hard to tell. Actually, both sound and image are way beyond lo-fi, and it might be deemed "for obsessives only", but, well, what are you waiting for?



* UPDATE: Now that I am somewhere where I can actually hear the thing, it's clear that it's not "Little Johnny Jewel". What it is, I have no idea. It sounds like an amalgam of the Velvets and the Stooges, which, given that the year is 1974, and the place is New York, is probably not that surprising.

Song of the day

"Know Me", by Frankie Rose.

You would think that the first place somebody whose pedigree consists of Crystal Stilts, Dum Dum Girls and Vivian Girls would look for the sound of their solo record would not be classic 4AD. You would, it seems, be wrong.

The combination of that sound and her innate sense of pure pop goodness is, shall we say, irresistible.

YouTube of the day

Here's a clean-cut young man with a bright future ahead of him:



(via Dangerous Minds)

Virtual vinyl artefact of the day

"Shallow" / "Lessons", by Beach Fossils.

Ah, the seven-inch single. A small, flat, circular piece of vinyl, with one song on the A side, another song on the B side. They often come in a nice cardboard sleeve, with a picture on one side and some scant biographical details or product information on the other. You can play one side as many times as you like, as long as you don't mind getting up (or stopping dancing around the room) to put the needle back to the start of the record again. And then, when you get tired of listening to that song, you can turn the record over and -- lo! -- listen to the other song. (Perhaps the analogue, tactile nature of this exercise is a part of the particular sense of attachment one gets with singles. Even album tracks, in the days of vinyl, didn't quite carry the same sense of immediacy.)

Of course, I haven't actually bought one of these things for many a long year. So why this sudden outburst of nostalgia? Because, notwithstanding I acquired these two songs as MP3 files, and can play them one after the other on an endless loop, wirelessly remoted to many devices and/or parts of the house, they seem (to me) to epitomise the very essence of seven-inch-singleness. Both songs are under-three-and-a-half-minute slices of pop brilliance, and both make me want to get up, turn the record over, and play the other one.

Amongst the teeming, bottomless morass of "Brooklyn bands" (many of which probably don't even hail from Brooklyn, except in the sense of Brooklyn as a state of mind) only three have ever really caught my ear: Real Estate, Woods and Beach Fossils. (This might not actually be true: do Emeralds and their countless offshoots count as "Brooklyn"?) These three groups are quite different from each other, but what they have in common is their ability to breath new life into the always potentially moribund form of guitar pop.

When I listen to Beach Fossils, even now that the novelty of their sound has long worn off, I hear strong echoes of the venerable, distinguished, still vibrant Postcard sound (even if it is now showing signs of gray hair around the ears): a singular, effervescent jangle. That they combine this with a flat, affectless, I-might-be-singing-about-love-but-I-don't-really-give-a-damn vocal style doesn't detract from the songs' sparkle. (It might turn out to mark them as part of the class of 2011-12. But we can leave that to the hystorians.)

Now turn to side A:



Now turn to side B:



That's the other thing about the perfect seven-inch single: you can never decide which song you like better.

A few words about "Autoluminescent", a film by Richard Lowenstein

1. Rowland S Howard was fond of cats and worshipped Lee Hazlewood. What's not to like?

2. Listening at close range to Rowland's trademark Birthday Party guitar squall is like mainlining wasabi.

3. If the Pope is listening, can we please have Mick Harvey elevated to the sainthood?

Song of the day

"Off The Wall", by Lee Ranaldo.

The evidence is mounting. First, Thurston Moore releases a solo album that, unlike previous dispatches, isn't experimental wotsit but rather sounds like Sonic Youth Unplugged crossed with, say, Beck's "Sea Change" album. Then, Kim and Thurston announce one of the least expected splits in showbiz history (at least, from this distance). Then, if I recall correctly, Kim says she's working with some other folks (although she's done that before).

Now, we have a Lee Ranaldo solo album, this time not a collection of locked grooves and/or etched vinyl, but what promises to be an actual collection of songs.

If Sonic Youth haven't split, they are pulling off a reasonable approximation.

Maybe Lee's album is not all like this song. But my hopes are high. A lot of my favourite SY songs bear his hallmarks. And you can hear those at the start of this song. The more surprising thing is how, as the song goes along, it morphs into what might be the best song REM weren't able to come up with in the last, say, 25 years of their own distinguished career. Heck, Ranaldo is even sounding like Michael Stipe.

Which is interesting. The two bands must have been in some ways in orbit around each other for much of their careers. I wonder how much either of them might at times have wanted to be the other. (The trajectories of the two bands were quite different, but parallels are certainly there. Both peaked in about 1986. Both lasted a similar time (again, assuming).)

The legacy of the last few SY albums is curious. Any one of them is as listenable as any of their crowning eighties / early nineties albums. And yet, because they came later, they will probably never command the same reverence. Which is not to say Sonic Youth were ever just treading water.

It's weird to be old enough to have lived through the entire cradle-to-grave stories of two long-lived, significant bands. I suppose people older than myself had that sense about The Beatles (who got through it all, don't forget, in less than a decade; imagine that).

Excuse the scattered nature of these thoughts. It's Saturday morning. Just enjoy the song.

Song of the day

"666.66", by Weird Dreams.



The guitar at the start of this song sounds so much like The Durutti Column that it's almost a shame when the song proper starts. "Almost", because if this turned out to be my favourite song of 2012 I wouldn't be at all surprised. It's a welcoming, breezy take on post-C86 pop with a gentle shoegaze-y fringe. At least, that's what I'm hearing. Kids are getting such great sounds out of guitars these days. Not original, necessarily, but great.

Song of the day

"When I See You Again", by Shimmering Stars.

What happened while I was away? The Jesus and Mary Chain revival.

I found this song at a blog called Sounds Better With Reverb. And, you know what? It does!

A Summer Place

Well, that was fun. Four nights at the coast, as a kind of farewell to the school holidays. We did it last year. Then, it was hot and stormy. This time, it was just cool and damp, not at all boogie-boarding weather, and only barely pool weather. Still, we gave it a go. The place we stayed at was in receivership last summer, and we got a really good deal. This year, it turns out, it is under new ownership, and we were somewhat surprised (not pleasantly) by the rates, and by being forced to pay extra for two children and four continental breakfasts, none of which (ie the breakfasts) we really needed. (Four days of mini-croissants and assorted Kellogs (tm) cereals is, I now know, about my limit.) Since we were there last year they have fenced the pool out from the bar area, which just seems wrong (although we would have missed it more if it had been pool weather). They have also forgotten how to make coffee. In fact, all in all I think I preferred the place when it was being run by the receivers. That can't be good.

Still, the setting is magical: cabins that face right onto the beach, bushland behind. Kangaroos wandered onto the deck, looking to stroll right on into our cabin. We took a few walks, with and without geocaching objectives (kindly researched by friends of ours, whom we convinced to come with us). (One of the caches was, apparently, the first ever "earth cache", which took us to various geological formations that we had walked over previously without even noticing, and a fossilised colony of bryozoa, or something, like I would know.) We found a snake curled up in a hole in a rock, not entirely in a location that I would have expected to find a snake. I had walked right past it; it's a wonder I hadn't blindly stuck my hand in the hole for grip. Snap.

Wednesday night we drove into Batemans Bay for fish and chips. As you do. The last week of January is a good time for this, as New South Wales is back at school and the ACT isn't, so you can get a table at the fish and chip shop, and look out at the boats or down at the many fish that are swimming around below you (and a stingray, which, I swear, waved to us).

With the weather being as it was, there was time for other things.

Like watching DVDs. And T20 cricket. And "QI".

Or like playing some of the games we had picked up at CanCon the previous weekend. Unbeknownst to me, Adrienne had bought a game called Monty Python Fluxx, which was fun while also being head-splittingly confusing (the game keeps changing), and which might well lend itself to long, boozy evenings, if such a thing were possible. She had also, while I wasn't looking, bought another game, called Escalation, mainly for the cover image of a granny wielding a machine gun. (If I'm honest, I would have bought it if I had seen it.) It is fun, and simple, and fast. These are not always things you are looking for in a game, but sometimes they are just the ticket. The other game, Elfenland, is neither fast nor simple. It may well be fun, but that is a conclusion that will only be reached with further understanding of how the damn thing works.

Or like fighting through my reader's block (it's like writer's block, I think, except from the other side of the page: I have for some time been unable to pick up and start a novel, presumably in some not small part as a result of having very little time or energy (on account of the nature of my day job) for reading. So to make a start on Ian McEwan's "Solar" was a bit like finding a favourite old jumper in the back of the cupboard. (Actually, an old jumper would have come in very handy, given the weather. Did I mention the weather already?)

Lesson learned: if you are going to take your Bialetti on holidays with you, make sure you take a trivet for balancing it on the stove. There is nothing sadder than coffee that is on the floor instead of in the cup.

The dolphins we had seen last summer seemed to have deserted us this year. But this morning, as we were packing up to leave, I noticed some smaller fish jumping through the surface of the water. This, last year, had seemed to be a signal that the dolphins were about. So I said to Jules, who is useless at packing up (fact!), to go out (in the rain) to look for dolphins. Whereupon he said, within a couple of eye blinks, "There are dolphins." And there they were. Possibly (but probably not) waving us goodbye. We loaded the car, in the rain, walked over to our final continental breakfast, in the rain, brushed the sand off the boogie boards, in the rain, and drove back to Canberra, in the rain. We passed a still-fresh car accident on the way back, which is always a sobering thing to see.

Georgie the cat was pleased to be brought home from her own summer holiday adventure at the local cattery. Two issues of the New Yorker awaited us. The house was cold. There were 28mm in the rain gauge.

And thus normal life returns.