Hypothetical mixtape: September 2014

I'm not entirely happy with this month's selections. The songs are fine, but (a) I have had a bugger of a time fitting them into any kind of playable sequence, and failed; and (b) I have a sneaking suspicion a few of the songs that were jettisoned along the way may have been better than some of the ones that snuck in. C'est la vie.

"Where Were You?", by The Mekons. So, let's start off with a classic example of a pop song, by alleged "punk" combo The Mekons, who later mutated into a lot of different things but somehow always remained true to themselves, and miraculously are still a going concern. The vocal inflections give it away as 1978/9, as do the chord changes, but really this is such a timeless example of good pop songwriting that it could be reworked to fit into any part of pop's rich tapestry. The violin is somewhat unexpected.

"Dancehall Domine", by The New Pornographers. More pop. The New Pornographers tend towards maximalism. This can be a bit overwhelming at album length, but a song at a time they are largely unbeatable. This song is written by A C Newman, who knows a thing or two about pop songs. Don't forget to watch the video.

"Red", by Hyuna. Of course, if we're going to talk about maximalism in pop, you can't get much more maximal than K-pop: nothing exceeds like excess. I am linking to Soundcloud because the song's video is a bit, erm, awkward. You have been warned.

"Let's Have a Party", by Geraldo Pino and The Heart Beats. We can wind things back a little bit here with some Hammond-led funky beats from 1970s Africa. Is Geraldo Pino the African James Brown? Well maybe, but that is a kind of stupid question.

"Blo", by Blo. Come for the bass. Stay for the two guitar solos, the second of which would make Eddie Van Halen sit up and take notice.

"Fanta", by Group Lewlewal. An entirely different strain of African music, which maybe puts paid to the notion that "African music" is even a thing, comprises contemplative guitar and/or kora playing, where not a lot happens, but does so exquisitely. Best heard recorded outside, as is the case here, rather than in a recording studio. If you are familiar with the work of Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate, this is for you.

"Smile", by Ural Thomas. Fragile. Gorgeous. Here you can read about it, and the download link may well still work, too.

(Bonus: album cover of the month.)

"Baby Let Me Take You (In My Arms)", by Detroit Emeralds. Think you've heard that opening guitar lick somewhere else? Maybe you have.

"I'm Not Satisfied", by Betty and Karen. The only way this could be improved is if it was by Betty and Veronica. (Kidding.) We are in sixties girl group heaven here. The Internet told me that it has been covered by The Go Team. My heart momentarily stopped until I realised it wasn't the Calvin Johnson Go Team but the other, more recent Go Team. (Whose first album I quite liked but that's another story.)

"Seven Bridges Road", by Steve Young. It's crying-in-your-beer hour. The best known version of this song was by a group who I like to pretend did not exist.

"Sweet Mountain", by Spring. Well, if this song does nothing else, it makes clear that at least someone was listening to "Pet Sounds" in 1972. Even if it was Brian Wilson's then wife and her sister. Oh, and Brian Wilson (who co-produced the album from which this song is taken, and co-wrote the song). Speaking of "Pet Sounds", we watched the new Wilson biopic, "Love and Mercy", the other day. The reconstructions of the making of "Pet Sounds" and "Good Vibrations", while presumably taking some artistic licence, are nevertheless fascinating insights into how Wilson went about trying to reproduce what he was hearing in his head. With "Pet Sounds", he managed it. With "Smile", maybe, what he was hearing was a step too far. It is a terribly sad story, inevitably, but it is also a celebration of what Wilson has achieved. Which is firmly in "We're not worthy" territory.

"What Game Shall We Play Today", by Chick Corea. Chick Corea played with Miles Davis in some of his more out-there endeavours: "Bitches Brew"; the Fillmore concerts. (He also played on "In A Silent Way": is that the greatest Miles Davis album as well as one of the great jazz albums? For now, let's just say it has aged well.) He then, in the early seventies, as if working with Miles hadn't pushed things far enough, formed a group that included Anthony Braxton. This song, though, is from his first solo album, called "Return to Forever" (released on ECM), which became the name of his next band. Thus was born the hated concept of "jazz fusion". On listening to this song (and yes, it is a song, not a "jam", not a "track") it is difficult to hear what all the fuss was about. Although maybe that's not true: it is certainly the opposite of everything Miles and other future-jazz spelunkers were reaching for. So if "nice" for you, in terms of the state of jazz in 1971, was a dirty word, you were probably going to interpret this as a shot across the bows. You may even have been heard to call out "Judas!", had that not already been done. But time, they say, heals all wounds, and 40-odd years later we can (can't we?) accept "What Game Shall We Play Today" on its own terms, as the quietly sublime pop song it undoubtedly is. 

"The Rose Explodes", by Dream Boat. You could, without too much effort, draw a line from "What Game Shall We Play Today" to this song. As with the latter, this is, on the surface, a light-as-a-feather pop song where, the more you dig beneath that surface, the more complexity you will find. But you can just as easily enjoy it without all that nasty digging. 

"Wordless In Woods", by Tara Jane O'Neil. Everything, as I have said before, sounds better with reverb. Beyond that, I'm not going to say anything at all, because, as the title of the song suggests, words sometimes only get in the way. 

"All The Rays", by Grumbling Fur. I hope they won't take it as other than a compliment if I suggest that this song satisfies that particular itch that we all have from time to time, where what we really want to hear is a Depeche Mode song from that precise point where Depeche Mode shifted from being pure synth-pop teasers to being heavily overcoated electro-goths.

"Girl Drop", by Lee Gamble. I know I shouldn't just say "this sounds like X crossed with Y" but, well, sometimes it does. The ingredients here are the overwhelmingly emotional chord changes you hear in a Burial record, and the beatless, weightless but nevertheless inexplicably propulsive trajectories of The Field. You may need a lie down afterwards.

"Dexter (Two Lone Swordsmen Remix)", by Ricardo Villalobos. Imagine if Villalobos's already outstanding "Dexter" were reimagined as an instrumental track inexplicably left off The Cure's "Seventeen Seconds". Only, you don't have to imagine it: it exists.

"Crying In Your Face", by AFX. September 2014 was around the time Aphex Twin finally came out of hiding, so it's not surprising that I had reams of older Aphex tracks to choose from. This one impressed me the most, largely because it seems to have pre-dated the so-called cold/minimal-wave revival by some five years. The acieeed squiggles over the top are a nice touch, too, but it is the song's foundational garments that do all the heavy lifting.

  

Song of the day

"Nganshe", by Mbongwana Star.

When I was growing up, on the family dairy farm at Fish Creek, hay-carting season was my favourite time of the year. It generally coincided with the lead-up to Christmas, which was an exciting time anyway, and school was over for another year, but there was more to it than that. Hay-carting time was one of the few times when the farm was crawling with people, not just family and share farmers. As an only child, I think I welcomed the invasion, although I suspect I would also not have wanted it to be like that all of the time. (I get people fatigue.)

Hay time was a rolling sequence of activities, from paddock to paddock and from one activity to another, until it was all done. First, tractors went out onto the paddock to cut the grass, using what were basically giant motorised pruning shears. (Before that, identified paddocks were locked up, free from cattle, to allow the grass to grow tall and go to seed.) The cut hay was left to sit for a few days, during which time it was turned once or twice to help it to dry out. It was then raked up into neat rows. Next, a hay baler would appear, gobbling up the rows of hay and spitting it out, via some kind of alchemy, in the form of tied-up rectangular bales. Following close behind the baler was a team of hay carters manning a truck and trailer, stacking up the bales and taking them to the hay sheds, where they were unloaded, tossed onto what we called an elevator, which was a cross between a conveyer belt and an escalator, and stacked up into the highest corners of the hay sheds.

(Note: the above is a random picture from the internet. Our hay sheds were open at the front. But you get the idea.)

So there was a lot of tractor work, which I loved, and there were also long, punishing days of hard physical labour, which left me with a feeling of pure physical exhaustion, which was kind of nice. The nerd inside of me also enjoyed the challenge of trying to build the neatest stack of hay, both on the back of the truck and in the shed.

(It was also a chance to earn some extra pocket money with which to buy records.)

While all this work was going on, dad and my uncles were also constantly looking at the sky, trying to divine the weather for the next couple of days. Often enough in South Gippsland, rain was not far away, so hay season also tended to be a race against time. Wet cut hay was worse than useless: it made bad hay, but you had to bale it up anyway, the problem being that wet baled hay packed tightly into a shed was also a major fire hazard. The hay would sit, in its wet state, causing it to heat up, possibly to such an extent that it might combust, taking the shed with it. (A common sight around farms in the district was a crow bar or other long metal implement stuffed into a narrow gap between bales, with a farmer sliding it out to check the heat every few hours, to see if the entire stack would have to be dismantled.) Thus, if bad weather was on the cards you had to go until you were finished: into the night, if necessary, through thunderstorms, if necessary (there was no O H and S to worry about in those days), and even, not infrequently, all Christmas morning (but work always stopped on Christmas day in time for lunch; that was the line that could not be crossed).

Another thing that I associate with hay season, a thing that was peculiar to our farm, was the Chuck Wagon. Uncle Jack had built a campervan out of an old Bedford refrigerated truck. The uncles used to travel around with this; it had all the comforts of home. (Well, all the comforts of their home, anyway. They were two batchelors; they didn't much go in for fancy things.) You could back up to a river, fling open the back doors, and drop a fishing line straight into the water. During hay season, uncle Jack (who had worked in the family bakery until the War, and was capable of cooking up an absolute storm) would turn the van into a kind of mobile kitchen unit, which would appear every couple of hours or so where the hay carters were working, and providing us all with an extraordinary spread: pies, pies and more pies (all filled with meat that had, until recently, been walking around in our own paddocks), followed by apple pies, snake cakes (aka Swiss rolls), biscuits, and endless cups of tea. I suspect the local bands of kids who made up the local hay-carting teams liked working at our place because the Chuck Wagon was never far away.

So, what is the point of this story? Are these just the deluded ramblings of a crazy old man? Well, quite possibly. But aside from that, I was put in mind of the old hay-carting days by, of all things, a sound on a recording. Specifically, there is a kind of circular, metallic, scraping sound (I don't know how else to describe it) that permeates "Nganshe", the third song on "From Kinshasa", an album by a hot new Congolese beat combo called Mbongwana Star, that, immediately upon my hearing it, sent me hurtling down a wormhole and landed me in front of the hay shed in front of the old house (the house my parents lived in when I was born) at the end of Eastways Road. It is, as near as can be, the sound that was produced by the hay elevator when it was sending hay up into the shed for stacking. Not being in even the tiniest part of my person remotely mechanically minded, I couldn't tell you what was making the sound. The word "flywheel" comes to mind. I would guess it was a belt that didn't quite sit squarely, and, year after year, managed to produce the exact same noise. It was annoying for a while, but eventually faded into the background. Not so far into the background, though, that I wasn't able to instantly pinpoint it 35 years later.

(For what it's worth, "From Kinshasa" is as good an album as I have heard in a while. How to put it? If someone had flown Jah Wobble, John Lydon and Keith Levene down to Kinshasa hot on the heels of "Metal Box", say, and got them together with these guys to make a record, this is what it might have sounded like. I could go for that.)

Song of the day (2)

"A Man And A Woman", by Manuel.

It's 2015. Why in the heck would anybody in their right mind be listening to Manuel and His Music of the Mountains?

And yet. 

And yet.

Mashup of the day

"Hawaii Off Your Shoulder (Jay-Z vs Kitty, Daisy and Lewis)".

Ah, the insanely non-sequiturial mashup. In this case, a rap song that even I know, mashed together with something that wouldn't be out of place on the soundtrack to "Spongebob Squarepants". 

Shit never gets old.

Song of the day

"Until Lately", by The Dream Syndicate.

If you only buy one CD this year, make it an old one. Specifically, make it the new reissue of "The Days of Wine and Roses", by The Dream Syndicate. Not because it's remastered (they already did that in 2001). Not because of the bonus material. Just because it is SUCH a fantastic album.

For example: side two, track two.

Twenty minute psych monster jam of the day

"Funeral Funk 49", by Heron Oblivion.

My eyes! My eyes!

(Featuring, on the drums, Meg Baird. If we can't have new Espers material, this will be just fine.)



(via Doom & Gloom from the Tomb)

Song of the day

"Sweater Day / Shelter", by Zwanie Jonson.

Sitting snugly at the end of Robag Wruhme's masterful Kompakt mix CD "Wuppdeckmischmampflow" (which is probably both the least pronounceable and most replayable mix I have ever heard; I especially love the way he works "Dexter", possibly Ricardo Villalobos' finest invention, into the proceedings at various strategically located places; and whenever "Angel Echoes" comes on, Adrienne says "Who is this?" -- always a good sign) (it also has a lovely cover photo)

is this gently bucolic pop song that could have been made in, let's say, 1971, but is in fact a cunning facsimile of same by a modern-day German musician who goes by the name of Zwanie Jonson. Information is scarce, or maybe I just don't know where to look, but it may well be that it hasn't been released anywhere else. I, for one, am very happy to have made its acquaintance. I hope you will be, too. Enjoy.

Do you remember rock 'n' roll radio?

The Internet, as you already know, has turned much of what would, in previous times, have been lost to history into a kind of permanent now. If you wanted to find newspaper articles about whatever, you used to have to spin through miles and miles of microfiche, trusting to luck that you would land on what you were looking for (if it even existed), until your head spun so fast you fell off your stool. (I have done this.) Now you can type a few words into Google and, hola!, your work is done.

I sometimes wonder if this is a good thing.

However ...

It does have its advantages. Radio, for example. Radio has always been, even more than newspapers, an inherently ephemeral medium. Voices from the past, now gone. Mac Cocker and George Wayne on 2JJ. The Sunday evening reggae show on same. Helen Thomas in the mornings on 3RRR. Steve Cross, regularly surprising you on a Friday afternoon. John Peel, obviously. (There are a few recordings of Peelie floating around the ether, like voices from beyond a well-tended grave.)

Imagine if you could click a button and go back in time to listen, again, or if you missed it the first time around, to someone in a studio talking into the air and playing a few records. I can't think of anything more exciting, but at the same time I also can't think of anything more frightening. Where would I start? Holy cow, I would probably have to live forever in order to get through all I would want to listen to.

And then what happens to now?

My head hurts.

Rather than freeze up pondering the imponderable, let me draw your attention to something out there that is worth your while, and, as long as you promise only to listen to each session once, won't leave you a wizened old pensioner by the time you are done.

Earlier this year, a Pitchfork review, by Philip Sherburne, of a record by Lena Willikens, whom I had never heard of, caught my eye, for reasons I cannot now recall. I finally got around to reading it, and was intrigued by his reference to a series of radio programmes she had done. There was a link. (There is always a link.) I followed it. And I am so glad I did. (Thank you, Philip. Oh, and thank you, Lena.)

This is radio as it used to be. A few songs you know. Many songs you wished you knew. It's better, in its own way, than putting your entire collection on shuffle, because your entire collection is you, and Willikens is not you. But you may well end up wishing you were her.

Complete playlists are available for each show, if you must, but I suggest her oeuvre is best absorbed by pressing play, going on with whatever you are doing, and letting it wash over you. Just like the radio. Remember the radio?

This link should get you to a Mixcloud page from which all shows are available.

To put you in the mood, here are a couple of songs that she has played; one I own on seven-inch but had (embarrassing admission) forgotten about; one I had never heard of.

The one I own: "The Man In The Dark Sedan", by Snakefinger. The single is resplendent in a Mark Beyer cover (like the Zornette (heh) record I wrote about a couple of posts ago).

Snakefinger has worked with The Residents. He has also covered Kraftwerk's "The Model".

Mullet warning:



The one I had never heard of: "Sunset Scenery", by The Dragons. Pink Floydish psychedelic noodling from 1967. The Dragons may be unknown to you, but if you are the wrong side of fifty you probably remember The Captain & Tennille. Believe it or not, The Captain, aka Daryl Dragon, is one of these Dragons. Strange but, evidently, true.

Set the controls for the heart of the sun:

Song of the day

"You Never Show Your Love", by Jessy Lanza.

Jessy Lanza has a new song out. Well, it's not out until next week, but the internet is the internet.

Her 2013 album, "Pull My Hair Back", was one of my favourites of the year and is still going strong. She was last seen (at least, on these pages) singing a couple of songs on the very fine "Our Love" album, by Caribou. She has also been working on some songs with Morgan Geist, so, y'know, I've got my ears pinned back for those, too.

The new song? It's good. Trust me. It's got -- what's that thing again? -- sick beats.

Of Human Feelings

RIP Ornette Coleman.

Back in the far distant past, before John Zorn established his own record label and proceeded down a superhuman path of releasing his own music however and whenever he likes (with the help of a Macarthur grant, thus presumably reducing somewhat his need to generate any kind of sales revenue and allowing him to keep his ideas and their execution the product of his work and his work only (and how often do you get to do that?)), he somehow managed to convince an actual major label to release records like "Spillane", "The Big Gundown" and "Naked City", records that, if nothing else, served to alert people like me to the existence of Zorn and his own peculiar take on this thing called music.

One of those Nonesuch releases, "Spy Vs Spy", comprised two drummers, a bass player, and two alto saxophonists blowing the almighty fuck out of the works of Ornette Coleman. My first exposure to this screaming beast of a record was at the Carlton shared household occupied by two distinguished gentlemen by the names of Dr Jim and Moose. Jim, saying little more than "Listen to this", sat me down in front of his stereo system and pressed play. Any cobwebs in my brain were instantly and violently exfoliated, my nervous system collapsed, and, after two or three songs, I was a sobbing ball of damaged humanity, curled up in a puddle on the floor. Actually, when I recovered from the initial shock my jaw dropped to the floor, my eyes bugged out, an inane grin appeared on my face, and all I could say was "Fuck". (I did a similar thing to our resident 15-year-old alto player this morning; his response was largely the same, but without the expletives. He then left the room.)

(Note also the Mark Beyer cover art. You can't say John Zorn never had his finger on the pulse.)

Needless to say, the first thing I did upon leaving Chez Jim & Moose was buy myself a copy. The element of surprise has never again been quite the same, of course, but I find that getting it out every couple of years or so, when there is nobody else in the vicinity, and playing a few songs at excessive volume is both cathartic and therapeutic.

This is the first thing you hear when you press play:



What Ornette himself made of it all is not something I have ever been able to discover.

"Spy Vs Spy" wasn't my first exposure to Ornette Coleman. I had, coincidentally, recently picked up, on CD, a couple of his "harmolodics" recordings (from which a lot of the pieces on "Spy Vs Spy" were drawn). They were, and continue to be, fascinating documents of a musical idea that is as impossible to fathom as the most ornery post-modern literature, but, like the novels of William Burroughs, if you listen to enough of it in one sitting it starts to make its own kind of sense, especially if you can get your brain into a state where you don't try too hard. These are recordings that manage to be at the same time stunningly lyrical and an abstruse tangle. One thing is for sure: if you resist the (not unreasonable) temptation to throw them away after one listen, they certainly provide long-term value for money. You will keep coming back to them.

(The other Ornette album I have, this one on vinyl, is "Of Human Feelings", which I bought on the recommendation of one David Brown (hi, Dave). (I was lucky enough to find one second-hand; it wasn't readily available then or, I suspect, now (although the Japanese have reissued it a couple of times on CD).) I haven't listened to it for ages, as my turntable has not for some time been in action (note to self: must try harder). My recollection is that it is positioned at the vector of free jazz and disco, but that could be the most ridiculous thing I have ever written. Jazz writing really should be left to the experts.)

Anyway, all of this may be more about me and John Zorn than about Ornette Coleman, but he was an important figure in modern music, if not exactly a household name, and his passing shouldn't go unacknowledged.

Next up: James Last. (Only kidding. But do you have any idea how many records that dude sold? Like, Ornette Coleman by a factor of several zeros.)

Hypothetical mixtape: August 2014

I have to say, I quite like this month's selection. It almost works as a playlist; at least, it does until it goes completely off the rails at the end.

"Herbin'", by Tony Hatch & The Satin Brass.

"Indian Reservation", by Hugo Strasser Und Sein Tanzorchester. What better way to start than with a couple of choice selections of early seventies tracks from the kind of el cheapo selections piling up on the vinyl junkheap as could, once upon a time, be procured in quantity at Grumpy Warren's Record Paradise, in St. Kilda, just up the road from the Galleon.

Bonus: album cover of the month. The suggestion that this feisty German combo could take on both "Paranoid" and "Black Night" is very intriguing. We'll come back to that. Perhaps.

 "En Alabama", by Léonie. You just know that there is going to be a Serge Gainsbourg connection to this beguiling little song. And there it is, in the credits: "Co-written by J. Cl. Vannier." Maybe Léonie is Melody's little sister.

"Gonna Make You My Angel", by Ted. We must be in the Christian-name-only part of the playlist. First we had Léonie. Now it's Ted. Nothing fancy there, just "Ted". The song might remind you (and this may not be an enticing prospect, if you were a boy at a country primary school circa 1974, where all of the girls had been swept up in Rollermania) of the Bay City Rollers. But the significance of this song is twofold: first, it sounds like Eurovision, which is the way a song should sound at this time of year (and didn't Guy do well; I take back every mean thought I have ever had about him); and secondly, it is co-produced by a certain Benny and Bjorn, whom some of us may have had an aversion to for many years, but which we have long since overcome, to everybody's benefit. Sometimes things are popular because they are good. (Sometimes. This song was also recorded, under a different translation, by Mark Holden, with whom I doubt I will be making my peace any time soon. Look away.)

"I See Red", by Frida. And who follows Ted? It can only be Frida. You may know her as the red-headed one from ABBA. You can hear traces of the old ABBA magic here. Produced by Phil Collins. Hence the drum sound.

"Birds of Paradise (Dub Version)", by Peaking Lights. Imagine, if you will, a dub version of Kraftwerk's "The Model", put together by people who have absorbed the lessons of Public Image Ltd, The Slits and The Raincoats. I am entirely comfortable with that.

"Nag Nag Nag", by Cabaret Voltaire. This song, I now discover, was co-produced by Mayo Thompson, of Red Krayola, and Rough Trade's Geoff Travis. The funny thing about that is, it sounds as if it wasn't produced at all. Maybe that's a compliment. I don't know..

"The Soviets Are Coming", by Soul Syndicate. This is not the only time "Take 5" has been done in a reggae stylee. (Sorry. It types itself.) The first 20 seconds are outstanding in the way the song manages to wrong-foot the unwary listener not once but twice. It may not contain the sonic mindfreakery of my favourite reggae, but you can't deny its (or "it's") class. Don't miss the kinda-jazz electric-piano solo.

"Express Yourself", by Charles Wright and The Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band. As heard in, oh, some old hiphop song. The version I am listening to is an outtake, released on a Rhino compilation in 2008, but, y'know, whatever. File with Archie Bell and The Drells' "Tighten Up".

"County Line", by Cass McCombs. I haven't heard all that many Cass McCombs songs, but I also haven't heard one that I didn't like. Maybe there's a lesson in that. You know I'm a sucker for the electric piano. And if the "woah woah woah woah woah" makes you think of "My Love", by Wings, well, where's the harm?

"Jesus Fever", by Kurt Vile. About the only things I know about Kurt Vile are (a) he used to be in The War On Drugs, whom I have latterly fallen for in a rather spectacular fashion, and (b) he has written and recorded quite a lot of songs. They can't all sound as timeless as this. Can they?

"Paper Dolls", by Real Estate. In which my favourite band (as of today, anyway), erm, "rock out". You know, like R.E.M. used to occasionally "rock out"? And it always kind of worked for them because you knew that (a) they really meant it but (b) they knew it wasn't really a style that suited them, which kind of freed them up to just, y'know, have a go. This is like that. And it is also further proof, if further proof were needed, that Real Estate's B-sides are better than most people's A-sides.

"Mahogany Dread", by Hiss Golden Messenger. I wonder what is buried deep within my psyche that causes little tears to emerge from the corners of my eyes whenever I listen to this song. Whatever it is, it's the same damn thing that gets me whenever I listen to that War On Drugs song I wrote about the other month. Do you feel it too? Do I, against my better judgment, really, deeply, miss the eighties?

"It's Good To Touch You In The Sunlight", by Castanets. Imagine, if you will, late-period Bob Dylan fronting Tindersticks. You can't? Well, I think you can. Listening to this might help you.

"Tunan", by Mammane Sani. Hammond sounds (well, "electronic organ") from Africa. It's like the old SBS promo said: "The world is an amazing place."

"I Tcho Tchass", by Akofa Akoussah. Remember when you fell in love with Cesaria Evora all those years ago? Well here's another lost voice in the wilderness for you. I can't even begin to pigeon-hole this stunning song. So I won't try. This blog post does an excellent job. Thanks, pal.

Really, this playlist should end here. There is nowhere to go after a performance as extraordinary as that. 

Especially not here …

"Whatever I Do (Wherever I Go)", by Hazell Dean. Twelve big inches of Stock Aitken and Waterman. (I doubt they were ever better than this.) ("Better", of course, is a relative term.) (Also: in what universe did New Order not get a songwriting credit for this?)

"Sick Beat", by Kero Kero Bonito. And then there's this.

New Yorker advert of the day

Pugs weren't born yesterday, you know. Here is an ad from the New Yorker from June 1965. And look -- they haven't changed a bit!

Song of the day

"Shaker", by Yo La Tengo.

It seems wrong, if not against my religion, to pay for music more than once. Not that I have never done it. (And I've never felt unclean afterwards.) The two Brian Eno box sets, "Instrumental" and "Vocal", contained many songs I already owned on vinyl. I shelled out for the CD editions of "Marquee Moon", "Adventure", "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts", "Fear Of Music" and "Remain In Light" because, well, I had to. Heck, I have even bought "Loveless" on CD twice (the first time cost me one dollar, and the second, the two-disc remaster, only cost me ten).

But "Extra Painful", by Yo La Tengo, is sorely tempting me. A remaster of the original album (a lot of early nineties records could benefit from one of those). A second disc of bonus material. A download code for, like, twice as much bonus material again. You kind of just know, with Yo La Tengo, that any drop-off in quality is going to be barely perceptible to the human ear.

"Painful" was not my first exposure to Yo La Tengo. I bought "New Wave Hot Dogs" when it came out, possibly only because of the name, but in any event I have never had cause to regret it. But "Painful", when (not coincidentally) Ira and Georgia first joined permanent forces with James McNew, was the point where the sum became more than the many (already impressive) parts. "Painful" is close to a perfect album, although it turns out to have been only the first of many.

Plus, "Extra Painful" contains "Shaker", a song that didn't appear on the album and would have done no damage to the album's overall quality if it had. That's how strong they were then. (It's also how strong they are now, for what it's worth.) Any similarity to "I Wanna Be Your Dog" only makes it that much better.

This goes with this: power-pop edition

Big Star look like this:

The Sunnyboys look like this:

Big Star sound like this:



The Sunnyboys sound like this:



Just sayin'.

Hypothetical mixtape: July 2014

Autumn is winding its inevitable way towards winter. The sun is shining, the seemingly interminable strong winds have abated. Let's listen to some tunes.

"Pharaohs", by Tears for Fears. Where better to start than the High Eighties? Soft-focus drum machine, extremely elegant piano, tasteful (naturally!) synth washes, and some very David Sylvian-esque electric guitar shadings, bound together by what sounds like (update: is!) the BBC Shipping Forecast. As The Go-Betweens almost sang but didn't quite, tasteful's not a bad word.

"Coup", by 23 Skidoo. If you thought you had heard this song before, even though you don't know 23 Skidoo from Adam, it may be that you are a fan of The Chemical Brothers.

"Every Morning", by J Mascis. So this is what a Dinosaur Jr song would sound like if you scraped away all of the sludge. You'll believe a man can fly. (I have no idea where that came from.) (Consumer advisory: you can listen to the song below, or you can go here to watch a fine video of the song, starring the one and only Fred Armisen.)

"Here Comes That Sound Again", by Love De-Luxe. Alan Hawkshaw was one of the leading lights of the British "library" music scene, making speculative film and television themes for anyone who might want one. Hence, particularly if you are British, you almost certainly have heard his work, even though you probably don't know it. What I didn't know until now was that he stuck his finger in the disco pie at the end of the seventies and pulled out this remarkable plum: seventeen minutes of spot-on disco propulsion. It starts big, goes HUGE in the chorus, drops back for, what, ten minutes?, and, just when your energy starts to flag and your eyes start to wander out the window, here comes that chorus again. BOOM. 

(Bonus: album cover of the month oh yeah.)

"Rain Code (Fennesz Remix)", by Jensen Sportag. Apologies to the original artist, but for me this is all about the remixer. Fennesz here is playing with our emotions (and with electricity) in a similar manner to last year's stunning "Becs" album.

 "Mental Kombat (Ric & Mso's Sneaky Chic Soup Remix)", by Sneaky Tim. As with the previous track, we are here because of the involvement (as one of two remixers, so we better apologise to M/S/O as well) of Ricardo Villalobos, who has been slightly quiet, at least by his standards, of late. Either you intuit Villalobos or you be bored stoopid. He tweaks the beats, ever so subtly, over inordinate lengths of time. If you said life was too short I wouldn't, in all honesty, have much to come back at you with (well, except "You Are Wrong").

"James Brown", by Nancy Dupree. A school teacher and a bunch of enthusiastic kids tell the story of James Brown – in the style of James Brown! Complete with "Good God!"s.) You need to hear this.

"Mighty Cloud of Joy", by Mighty Clouds of Joy.  We like a big, thumpin' soul tune around here, oh yes we do. Here's one right now. Carl's verdict: that's a great voice.

"Play That Funky Music", by Dan Boadi and the African Internationals. Yes, I know you really want to tack the words "white boy" onto the end of the song title, but don't. Just don't. This track is from 1977. It runs along a parallel path to disco, but you can't really call it disco, it's just classic African grooves, really. (From Ghana, I believe, but details are scarce.) The Hammond solo is something we can all appreciate. The recorder solo? Not so much, maybe.

"What Happened Before They Took The People Away?", by Top Drawer. Is this Southern boogie? Is Kentucky even in the South? Hey, I'm not a geography nerd. As music transitioned from psychedelic pop music circa 1967 in the direction of the hard rock sounds of the early seventies, there was no shortage of bands helping that transition along. Top Drawer was one such band, and one of many such bands largely lost to history until the crate diggers of Century 21 noticed some loose threads and pulled on them to see what would unravel. (Blessed be the crate diggers.) Songs like this are too good to be forever ignored, is what I'm saying.

"Il N’y A Rien Au Monde Que Je Ne Ferais Pas Pour Cette Fille", by Les Sultans. Speaking of psychedelic pop music circa 1967, here we have some psychedelic pop music circa 1966. The French have a reputation for not always "getting" popular music, but between cavern dwellers like this and those ye-ye girls, I think we can say that the mid-sixties were not like that. It's a wonder Wes Anderson hasn't used this song in a movie. Yet. (Literal translation? "There is nothing in the world at what I do wouldst not for this girl." Adrienne, this song is for you.)

"One Way Track", by Bernhoft. If I said this sounded like Renee Geyer singing "Love Will Keep Us Together" as re-rendered by Pharrell Williams, would you hold it against me? Listen to it once or twice, you might hate it. Listen to it a third time, and you will be irretrievably hooked. It's not too late to turn back.

YouTube of the day

Well I'm not sure how long this will be allowed to remain online, so we had better do this while we can. It's the final scene from "20000 Days on Earth", the Nick Cave mockumentary (docudrama?), which I wrote about a few months ago. It contains footage of the Bad Seeds at the Sydney Opera House performing "Jubilee Street", the song which, I think, is the pinnacle of late-period Cave. (Of course, I have been wrong before.)

What makes it so powerful, though, is the way the filmmakers intersperse the concert footage of that show with the fleetingest fragments of Cave shows over the years, from the Birthday Party onwards. It's a bit like watching Nick Cave's life flash before one's eyes, and it is especially moving for those of us who have been with him across that unfeasibly long span.

Here, "Jubilee Street" builds, and builds, like a prowling, monstrous thing, complete with strings, a children's choir, a full complement of Bad Seeds (take note, the less hirsute (by a wide margin) of the two guitarists, the one on the left, is none other than Mr Edmund Kuepper; take note, also, Barry Adamson is tinkling the ivories up the back), and Cave, like an emperor, ruler of the stage, and (you realise) the only one moving, except for Warren Ellis, who is every bit the coiled rock guitarist.



To observe the full experience of the song as performed, you may choose to watch the clip below. (You can also buy it as a song, with way better audio, as the B-side of "Give Us A Kiss", a song that otherwise only exists as part of the film.)

Song of the day

"You Sexy Thing", by Hot Chocolate.

First Gough. Then Malcolm. Now Errol. It's like the seventies are dissolving before our very eyes.

Rest in peace, you sexy thing.



Bonus beats:

Song of the day

"Wordy Rappinghood", by Tom Tom Club.

Ever since pieces by Mary Norris started appearing on the New Yorker web site, I have had the sense of having discovered a kindred spirit. There is much for me to thank her for. She pointed me in the direction of Palomino Blackwing pencils. (They changed my life.) She has frequently validated my choice of career at moments when I have had doubts as to the worth of dedicating oneself to, shall we say, finessing others' use of the English language. She has been, for many years, a part of the invisible team of people (or are they elves?) responsible for nailing down, hectic week after hectic week, the finely wrought prose of the New Yorker magazine itself, one of the few repositories of the written word where I can completely relax in the knowledge that what I am about to read is going to be (a) right, (b) spelled correctly and (c) put together in properly structured sentences. (Although last week, while reading, as you do, a long piece about an 82-year-old nun who broke into a high-security US nuclear-weapons facility, I fell upon a typo (of the missing "little word" variety). Curiously, I immediately felt a sharp pang of empathetic sadness for Mary Norris.)

And now she has written a book, "Between You & Me", which the very kind young people with whom I work gave me as a birthday present yesterday. (Thanks, guys.) Usually, when I am given a book, it takes a while before I feel ready to start in on reading it; or I am halfway through some door-stopper or other which ends up taking a year out of my life. But this time, the planets have aligned, the door-stopper has been put back on the shelf, and I am into it.

Early in the first chapter, I read the following sentence: "I had a traumatic experience with the word ["weird"] in fourth grade."

I am going to like this book.

I, too, had a traumatic experience with a word when I was in primary school. I can't remember which grade, but I remember which classroom I was in, so I think it must have been grade five. (I don't think I got to the end of the spelling book during my previous go-round in that same classroom, in grade two, although I probably could have; I was rubbish at pretty much everything, but I could spell the legs off a table.) At the bottom of the last page of the Victorian Education Department spelling book, on which page lurked, coiled and ready to trap the innocent, the most difficult words Victorian primary school children could possibly imagine, sat one final word, "it's". Just "it's".

The idea was that you would hear a word, write it down, and check the book to see if you had spelled it correctly. How hard could "it's" be?

I knew that the answer to (the phonetically pronounced) "its" was meant to be "it's" because I had already visited the last page of the spelling book; I had no fear of "difficult" words. But (unusually for me at that age, when I was scared to say boo to my own shadow) the word "Why?" formed in my head, and it would not be denied. "How do I know?", I wanted to know. "How do I know if it's an "it's" or an "its"?" My teacher was unable to answer this. For the first time in my life, I had an awareness that the adult world was fallible. The answer I ended up getting was along the lines of "We know that the answer is "it's" because that's what is printed in the book." But that wasn't an answer to the question if the question, as it could only be, was "How do you spell (the phonetically pronounced) "its"?"

Had I been confident and articulate enough to frame a response to this, it would have been along the lines of "But it can be spelled in one of two ways. I can't know if I am spelling it correctly unless I know the sentence in which it appears." But I was neither confident nor articulate, so instead of saying anything I just sat at my desk feeling sad.

I often find myself saying, not entirely seriously but not entirely not seriously, either, "I'm not like other people". Looking back, I would say that that was the moment I became aware of it.

As the song says: "What are words worth?"