"Open Soul", by Tomorrow's People.
Floating Points is probably the most significant musical discovery I have made over the past 18 months. I don't know precisely what it is, but everything he turns out sounds to me like some sort of perfection. But not satisfied with making his own particular musical magic, Mr Points has seen fit to reissue what would appear to be a pretty obscure 1976 soul-disco album from some otherwise-unknown Chicago band of (literally) brothers.
I can't speak for side one of said album, but this song, which comprises the entirety of side two, is twenty minutes of the best kind of seventies insanity. Nothing stays in the one place for long except the rhythm, which is relentless. Give that bass player a medal. And the drummer. And the rhythm guitarist. Oh, and let's not forget whoever provided the vamping electric piano, which is all over everything. And everything, as Radiohead once sung, is in its right place. I don't know if Floating Points established his own label solely to be able to release this monster jam, but I couldn't blame him if that turned out to be the case.
It's a four-day weekend, so you have time to listen to this.
"Sunspots", by Julian Cope.
In those long lost days of 1984, following the dissolution of his band The Teardrop Explodes, but before he became something of a latter-day druid, world expert on all things Krautrock and Japrock, creator of heavily psychotropic- and/or magick(sic)-influenced multi-disc concept records, published author, archaeologist, and possibly much else besides, Julian Cope released two brilliant and still, I think, criminally overlooked albums of finely crafted, inventive yet earworm-heavy psychedelia-tinged pop songs, "World Shut Your Mouth" and "Fried". Cope, I think, had the idea that he wanted to be a star, and after these two albums failed he took a bit of time off, returned with a larger budget and with songs containing bigger (and louder) hooks, but stardom yet eluded him. In the traditional narrative of the damaged rock musician, that would be the point at which he fell off the edge of the world as most people know it, but looking at the series of photos adorning "Fried", with a seemingly naked Cope looking fairly comfortable and relaxed under a tortoise shell, one suspects that by 1984 he was, just possibly, already occupying a space slightly out of phase with that occupied by the rest of us. Looking at the vastness of his body of work, it doesn't seem to have held him back. And "Sunspots", which popped, unbidden, into my head this morning, and which I am, as a human being, ashamed to say climbed no higher than number 76 on the UK singles chart, is about as good as it gets.
"Two Arrows", by Real Estate.
This song starts off like some kind of Paisley Underground throwback (not a criticism). It breathes a lot more than a Real Estate song usually does. (It is also in the direction of twice the length of a typical Real Estate song.) Around four minutes in, something locks into place. You know those songs that go round in a seemingly endless circle, looping back on themselves so often that, no matter how often you have heard the song, you have no idea when it is going to end? "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", from "Abbey Road", might be the ur-text for this type of song. It can be an almost stressful listen, in its own way, as you know the song is going to abruptly cut out but you can never be quite sure when. "Two Arrows" does exactly the same thing. (One assumes this isn't coincidental.)
(You kind of wish The Velvets' "What Goes On" did the same thing, instead of fading out; although there is an argument that fading the song out, rather than cutting it out abruptly, leaves a stronger suggestion that the song does, in fact, go on forever. (It's nice to think that somewhere "What Goes On" is continuing to motor its way ever onwards.))
Bonus beats: here they are performing the same song live in the middle of last year, when it was a "new song", and where it heads off in a slightly different, but also very satisfying, direction.
And then disaster struck. Well, not actual
disaster. Nobody died. The computer on which all the random
music I have internet-trawled resided (note the past tense), neatly parcelled
into monthly playlists awaiting my delayed attention, had to be rebuilt, the
result of which is that I haven't lost any music, but everything has been
lumped together into an undifferentiated, congealed mass. Here, then, endeth
the monthly hypothetical mixtape (which was never really monthly, or
hypothetical; or a mixtape). I will try to find a way to keep doing these, in
some form, as it has been an enjoyable exercise and a way of discovering the
occasional wtf musical moment, and those, of course, are what it is all about. In the
meantime, there is this.
"She's In The Wall", by Hope
Sandoval & The Warm Inventions. Let's start off by what seems to have
become the monthly Hope Sandoval song. This time it's her own band, and a song
that, because she has been on a total creative roll of late, she seemingly couldn't fit onto her latest album. If you were a musician that would probably make you cry.
"She Wants To Disappear", by
Plates Of Cake. If you ever imagined what The Clientele might have sounded like
if they were a part of the Postcard Records roster (I know I have), this song is for you.
"Golden Vanity", by The Hanging
Stars. Because everything sounds better when it sounds like it was written and
recorded in 1967.
"Dejenla En Paz", by Tonchos
Pilatos. Remember, if you build a wall between Mexico and the United States you
will also be keeping out good people like Tonchos Pilatos. Which would be just wrong.
Next up: a mini-mix of three stray
Stereolab-related tracks; either I was bored, or listening to
Cavern Of Anti-Matter sent me into a dangerous spiral of nostalgia. Who can say?
"One Wild Moment (Stereolab
Remix)", by The Pastels. There is probably a Pastels song buried in here
somewhere, but all I can hear is what I regard as Mouse On Mars-era Stereolab
(you know, the "Dots And Loops" sound), which was not a thing for
anywhere near long enough if you ask me.
"Explosante Fixe", by Stereolab.
The "A" side of a "Chemical Chords"-era tour single. This
is part of what at the time I regarded as Stereolab's "long tail",
although in retrospect this era still has its charms, albeit they may be taking
a bit longer to reveal themselves.
"Calimero", by Stereolab &
Brigitte Fontaine. Released in the same year as the above Pastels remix, this struck
me instinctively as sounding more like something from what I would call the Jim
O'Rourke ("Cobra And Phases Group") era of Stereolab, although in
trying (without success) to find the precise analogue to the backing track, I have
been forced to conclude that (a) it might also be related to
"Sound-Dust" and (b) this might well be the most mind-bending
three-album run by any group in the history of popular music.
"Rashomon", by Takeshi Terauchi
& The Blue Jeans. My discovery of this track, right here, is why I do this
blog. Whatever the first two and a half minutes (a remarkable piece of music in
its own right) leads you to expect you are being set up for, I can almost
guarantee that you will be wrong. Try it and see.
(Bonus: album cover of the month.)
"Underground In Blue", by The
Underground Set. As interpolations of "Love Is Blue" go, nothing can
quite reach the might and majesty of Paul Mauriat's own disco version, but this unstable pile of Italian nutso gives
it a fair shake.
"Nucleo Antirapina", by Bixio,
Frizzi & Tempera. This seems to have
been originally rediscovered (if that's not a tautology) by the estimable
nineties label Crippled Dick Hot Wax. So incredibly well recorded that
listening to it could actually kill you. (But don't let that stop you.)
"Zota Yinne", by Alogte Oho
Jonas. So, this is some classic African-tinged roots reggae. It sounds so
amazing (I almost had an accident when the horns first kicked in) that it could
only have been made in ... Germany. In 2013. In fact, the only thing that might
connect it to the 21st century is the copyright information: otherwise it is so
authentically seventies that you have to suspect a set-up.
"Ono No Imoko", by Siuyoubi No
Campanella. Because Japanese pop music.
"El Groove De Tu Corazon (Matias
Aguayo Version)", by Ana Helder. Matias Aguayo has a reputation for doing
things that don't sound quite like other things. I don't entirely know what to make of
this song, if it is even a song, but it certainly fits that description. Uh, "enjoy".
"Threatened", by Lives Of Angels.
Purely electronic sounds from, I would say, the earlier end of the 1980s. Well,
mostly electronic: note the (at the time) subversive use of Young Marble Giants-style electric guitar for "tonal colour".
"The Linear Way", by Linear
Movement. This is not the first time I have heard Linear Movement. In another
universe, they might have been the band that I went to see at The Tote with
almost religious devotion. (They are also very stylish.) Notwithstanding the previous track, you certainly did not need guitars in order
to make an impact. It would all be lost to history now, if we didn't have the
internet. (On the other hand, if we didn't have the internet Donald Trump most
likely wouldn't be president. Gosh, that's awkward.)
"Crossing", by Midori Takada. You
would be ignoring the elephant in the room if you didn't at least mouth the
words "Steve Reich" when listening to this. Which is not in any way
to diminish what is a sufficiently compelling, and mesmerising, piece of music on its own
terms. By an extraordinary coincidence, the album this comes from,
"Through The Looking Glass", is being reissued this very week on
WRWTFWW Records, which is a very satisfying acronym.
"French Press", by Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever.
It is gratifying, from a distance of 19 years and 660 kilometres, to still be able to recognise a Melbourne band when you hear one. You know that this scene has continued to bubble under in the old town, because you have been keeping an eye on bands such as Twerps, Beaches and The Crayon Fields. But only from a distance. And nothing that you have heard has quite knocked you off your feet as this song does.
It is also gratifying to know that, as your body starts its inevitable descent into senescence, and your mind starts taking a little longer than it used to to recall concrete nouns (don't worry; we're not quite there yet), you are still able to feel the same adrenaline rush that you used to get in those long-lost days of, say, the late 1980s, and that you are still able to fulfil every parent's role of embarrassing your offspring by spinning around the room with your hands above your head, and/or going the full air guitar. (Hint: don't try both at the same time. You are not as young as you used to be.)
There is a moment about three and a half minutes in, where you would normally expect a song of this type to abruptly end, leaving you needing to immediately play it again, when instead it suggests, momentarily, that it might be about to take off into "Daydream Nation" territory, before it returns, by way of a 90-second guitar-driven coda that leaves the song, and you, with nothing left to give. And then you have a lie down.
"The Highest Flood", by Forest Swords.
Well, I wouldn't want you not to know that there is a new Forest Swords song out there. Hard to believe it's been three and a half years since "Engravings". It's still on high rotation in these parts. I'm trying to keep my expectations within reasonable limits regarding what might come next, but honestly, this is very good. I think I hear a tiny bit of This Mortal Coil in there, but that might just be me.
"Valve (Revisited)", by Visible Cloaks & dip in the pool.
Visible Cloaks work with the kind of hyper-digital soundscapes that can be found on the James Ferraro record "Far Side Virtual", which The Wire magazine named album of the year a couple of years back, or which would (at least in one's dreams) work perfectly on the soundtrack for the upgraded "Bladerunner" movie that is, I'm told, on its way.
It is -- or for me it is, anyway -- music that can be difficult to really "feel" (although maybe that is the/a point; I think I described the Ferraro album somewhere, or maybe I just imagined it, as the audio equivalent of a Jeff Koons painting). There is a barrier that one needs to break through in terms of, well, finding the human in the music. (Or even, I hear you say, finding the music in the music.) Yet I find myself drawn back to "Reassemblage", the new Visible Cloaks album, and their first for Rvng Intl, perhaps feeling the pull of its very faint but unmistakeable allusions to the sounds Japanese artists in the orbit of Yellow Magic Orchestra were making around the early 1980s (which, you will remember, is when MIDI first appeared).
The second song on the album is called "Valve". It's hardly right to describe it as a "song" at all. Above, I used the word "soundscape". Whatever that might mean, I think it fits here. Woodblocks and sounds from nature intermingle with some very digital sounds that could never exist in nature. Occasionally, something that the casual listener might recognise as "music" drifts by. (Also: is that a rubber duck?) A disembodied and disassembled Japanese voice helps you on your way, but then you are on your own.
Anyway, it turns out that "Valve" reappears on the CD and, ahem, digital versions of the album as a "bonus track", "Valve (Revisited)", where it is utterly transformed into a pop song of real human emotional warmth; the voice reveals itself to be that of Miyako Koda, one half of dip in the pool, a Japanese duo who have, it turns out, been making music since (surprise!) the early 1980s. Further digging reveals that dip in the pool actually released an album on Rough Trade in 1986. (There, that got you interested.) (Smiths and Woodentops aside, my gaze had largely been averted from Rough Trade by then, so dip in the pool passed me by at that time (and at all times since, up to approximately yesterday, to be honest). I am about to embark upon the work of making up for lost time.)
To the extent that "Reassemblage" reveals its secrets very, very gradually, the sudden appearance of "Valve (Revisited)" is a revelation. As its own song, it certainly cries out to be listened to, but it is also a useful exercise to do so on the back of everything that has gone before it on the album. If you can't do that, the following clip takes the first minute of "Valve" itself and then segues into "Valve (Revisited)". It approximates the effect of coming out of the album into the latter, but reduced to a three-and-a-half-minute exercise, which in today's time-strapped world is an admirable public service.
This time around, let's skip sublime and go straight to
ridiculous.
"Louie, Louie", by The
Sandpipers. From a 1960s that time forgot, here is a version of rock'n'roll
bedrock made to sound like "Guantanamera". It has been drained of all
life. Its reason for existing is no longer evident. It is like a slow-motion
car accident from which you cannot look away. And so you stare, spellbound, at
something that's like a thing you recognise but also, like, not.
"Fran Andra Hand Till Stranderna I
Nice", by Gryningen. This seems to have been cut from the same cloth: you
know, the kind of gem you might find hidden on some Phase 4 Stereo lp you found
at a garage sale. But -- surprise, surprise -- it's some Swedish dude from the 2010s. Go figure.
"Da Klagar Mina Grannar", by
Charlie & Esdor. If you ever thought you needed to hear more damaged-psych
clatter from Swedish hippies, embellished by excessive quantities of free-form
sitar, (a) boy have you got problems; and (b) this is for you.
"Ganglat Fran Valhallavagen", by
Kvartetten Som Sprangde. Yet more psychedelic Swedes, this time from the early
seventies and therefore with something of a prog-rock bleedthrough. I'll be
honest with you, I could probably listen to this all day. In fact, I think I
might. (No wonder this column is so far behind.)
"Gonul Dagi", by Baris Manco
& Kurtalan Ekspres. At the self-same time, weird musical excursions were
also, uh, "happening" in Turkey. If this song hasn't been sampled,
the samplers haven't been doing their job properly.
(Bonus gratuitous lookalike gag: Hey, look,
it's the Turkish Lemmy.)
"Ad Gloriam", by Le Orme. You may
also know this from the soundtrack to "Ocean's Eleven", where it was
rejigged by David Holmes. "I didn't know that, Wayne."
"The Visit (She Was Here)", by The
Cyrkle. The other things hippies couldn't do was spell. Byrds. Beatles. Cyrkle?
On the other hand, seven-inch B-sides were their bread and butter. Viz:
"Move With The Season (Beyond The
Wizards Sleeve Reanimation)", by Temples. My guess is that Temples would
be one of the seemingly countless number of bands that appeared in the wake of
Tame Impala, with inevitably diminishing returns. This sort of post-psychedelic Britpop is easy on the ear but it can struggle to generate much excitement (at
least at our house) if it doesn't have the X factor that someone like Kevin
Parker can bring to it. Enter Beyond The Wizards Sleeve, the living embodiment of
21st-century UK psychedelia. It appears this is one component of an entire
album's-worth of Temples "reanimations". Curiously, Temples' second
album was released, like, literally yesterday. Spooky.
"Alphaville (Todd Terje Remix)",
by Bryan Ferry. So this is where the idea for Ferry's star turn on TT's
"It's Album Time" album came from. Even when you know it's him, it's
still kinda hard to fathom. Mr Terje, on the other hand, he's all over this, in
the best possible way. A couple of minutes before the end it morphs into an
discourse on "Music For 18 Musicians". Or maybe that's only in my
dreams.
"Don't You Wish You Had (What You Had
When You Had It?)", by Ruth Copeland. Co-written by The Clinton That Did
Inhale. Guitar, I would appear, by Eddie Hazel. And such the voice. I am a
better person for having learned of this record's existence. Also: some of the
best use of parentheses in a song title.
"What's A Girl To Do", by Fatima
Yamaha. Thoroughly beguiling piece of electronic pop music from 2004 which,
seemingly, refuses to die. You will, of course, swoon when the voice of
Scarlett Johansson, from "Lost in Translation", appears out of
nowhere.
"Planet Sizes", by Steve Mason.
In which the erstwhile Beta Band member reminds listeners of how that band was able
to make even the trickiest of pop songs sound oh so easy. I'm not sure he
hasn't done himself a bit of a disservice here, though: combining an utterly
gorgeous song with an utterly gorgeous video, at our present stage of human
evolution, is probably more than we mere mortals can absorb in one go. I know:
watch the video with the sound off, then listen to it with your eyes closed.
That might be the best of two very fine worlds.
"I Don't Mind", by Psychic Ills.
You already know how I feel about Hope Sandoval (*sigh*). Combining her voice
with psych-haze stoners Psychic Ills is a thing I can get behind. They dial it
right back, she fits right in. It's like an earlier pairing, of Mark Lanegan
and Isobel Campbell, only -- well, I was going to say "only better",
but that would be unfair. It's all good.
"Herd of Creeps", by Sunwatchers.
You won't believe your ears. And yet here we are. Warning: may induce headaches
in the unsuspecting.
"Stereoscope (Steve Hauschildt
Remix)", by Christina Vantzou. To bring us back down to earth at the end
of a long and surprising (to me, anyway) playlist, why not some Steve Hauschildt magic. I
haven't given him anywhere near as much oxygen on these pages as he deserves (to wit, precisely none). He has been doing
some excellent work out there on the ambient/experimental/electronic fringe, nowhere
better than on his 2016 album, "Strands". This track is a presumably
roughly contemporaneous remix. Whereas the originalis all ladies and gentlemen we are floating
in space, the remix is all ladies and gentlemen we are floating in a warm bath
of amniotic fluid.
Until I saw this, I had no idea precisely how good a guitarist Paul Weller is. My estimation of him has just gone up maybe tenfold.
I saw The Style Council in Melbourne many years (decades) ago, but I must admit I spent the entire concert focussed on Mick Talbot's electric piano and wondering whether it would actually topple over, given the pounding he was giving it. (Plus, as this actual footage reveals (I love the internet), Weller wasn't playing guitar; he had too many moves to bust.)
Also: note the similarity between the letter "P" on Weller's guitar and the Portishead logo. Coincidence, surely.
"Postcard #17", by Jens Lekman.
Jens Lekman is rock'n'roll's premier empiricist poet. He observes, he takes notes, he constructs: not theses, but vignettes. Or maybe we could call him an investigative journalist of the heart.
Like all poets [full disclosure: I know no poets; but you know what they say], he has in recent years, I suspect, had his share of introspection and its consequences (he spent 2015 writing and recording a song a week to see if he could even still write songs; of course he could, but it's easy for an outside observer to say that); so it's nice to see on his new album, "Life Will See You Now", a return of his earlier confidence (see for example our old favourite, "You Are The Light"). The production on some songs might be slightly more professional-sounding (thanks, maybe, to co-producer Ewan Pearson), and I am having early adjustment issues in relation to the rock-band-style sound of the rhythm section on some songs (I'm sure that will pass), but it's just really, really nice to be have this album in my life right now.
"Postcard #17" began life as one of those 2015 songs; the version on the album is virtually identical, but for the slightly buffed-up sound. I wonder if some of his time living in Melbourne might have rubbed off on this song. Every time I listen to it, I have an almost overwhelming sense of: a single-fronted weatherboard house in, say, Northcote or North Fitzroy; the late-afternoon light slowly fading through the trees; a fireplace; a cup of tea; a kitten. That piano line is, as the song says, "fucking ridiculous". It's that kind of song.
"No Trace", by The Bats.
It is, of course, entirely coincidental that the very same week in which the United States inaugurated an Administration that is demonstrably bat-shit crazy, The Bats (you see what I did there) released a new album into the wild. The comfort provided by the latter has acted as a necessary counterbalance to the anguish dredged up by the former. It should be required listening.
"No Trace", as far as I can gather, was the second song to appear before the album was released (we used to call this "the second single", back when times were simpler and the position of President of the United States carried with it prestige, decorum, and even a modicum of civic responsibility; heck, how long until us old-timers start to feel nostalgic for George W Bush?). It is, simply put, another in a long line of classic Bats songs. It sounds simple enough, but the closer you listen, the more layers of guitars you can pick out. It is an impressive sleight-of-hand that nowhere do they collapse on top of each other; nowhere does it sound like Too Much Guitars.
It's been six years since their previous album. Here's hoping the planet hasn't been destroyed by madmen before they get a chance to make another one.
"Circumspect Penelope", by Look Blue Go Purple.
Number one son and a friend of his do a weekly radio show on the local community FM station, 2XX. Each week they have a different musical "theme". Last Sunday it was "Cats". My uninvited contribution was, had to be, "Cactus Cat", by Dunedin scenesters Look Blue Go Purple. Neither of them had ever heard of either band or song, but it proved to be a popular choice and was played on the show.
Coincidentally, late last week The Guardian, in honour of the imminent appearance of a new album by DN legends The Bats, came up with a list of 10 of the best Flying Nun songs. I am generally sceptical of these kinds of thing, but in truth it is a pretty fair selection; over half of the songs might well have made a similar list of my own had I ever been bothered to put in the effort. (Maybe one day I should.) Okay, so I have never seen what others evidently do in Straightjacket Fits, and I confess to not yet having figured out exactly what The 3Ds were up to. But the important thing for our purposes here is that (bet you didn't see this coming) "Cactus Cat" was on the list.
And whilst I can't argue with that, I can, I think, argue, that, good and all as it is, it would be ever so slightly edged out of any such list of my own by an earlier LBGP song, "Circumspect Penelope", an exemplar of the melancholy charm of the minor chord. Watch the clip. It never gets old. I wonder if that organ is the same one as appears on practically every Flying Nun record of the era. If so, somebody should put it in a museum: it would generate the same chills (no pun) as did the EMS that was on display at the "Bowie Is" exhibition.
Having successfully gotten through the first couple of weeks of January unscathed, I foolishly thought to myself something like, well, at least it's not like last year. And now, as if on cue, we have lost in quick succession Maggie Roche, one of three sisters who recorded as The Roches, and Jaki Liebezeit, best known as drummer for the German collective Can. (They say bad news travels in threes. I'm a bit alarmed as to who might be next.)
First, condolences, obviously, go out to friends and family members. I don't ever feel entirely comfortable putting these kinds of posts out in the public sphere, and yet I also feel that, in the case of people whose work has had a profound effect on me, it would be nice to say a public thank you.
I imagine that most of you think of Can when you hear the name Jaki Liebezeit. Okay, I do, too. But his tentacles stretch much further than that. I think I would be right in saying that my first exposure to the man would have been on the "Snake Charmer" EP, from 1983, a kind of evil twin to Robert Palmer's "The Power Station" from a year or so later. It wasn't until I belatedly tumbled down the Can rabbit hole, many years later, that I made the connection. Curiously, it turns out that "Snake Charmer" was also the point at which, again unknowingly, I made my acquaintance with Arthur Russell, who wrote the lyrics for "Hold On To Your Dreams" (which, I know now, is a *very* Arthur Russell song title). It may not be the strongest advertisement for the drumming talents of Jaki Liebezeit (for that, I would probably send you to "Halleluwah"), but it's a pretty dank piece of music, and Jaki is right there with you.
Maggie Roche, on the other hand, holds a place in my heart on account of one song. Many have been the days when "The Hammond Song", by The Roches, has been the only song that could help me navigate my way through this strange and confusing world. It was produced by Robert Fripp, whose otherworldly guitar anchors it, but really the song is all about the voices. I hope you enjoy it. (I suspect I may be drawing from the well of this song quite a bit over the next four years.)
"Of what went on there, we only have this excerpt."
"I Miei Ricordi", by Marco di
Marco. Fender Rhodes. Upright bass. Drumming as light as a feather. What more
could you want as the mercury creeps into the high thirties? (Yes, that would be Celsius.)
"See Saw (Club Version)", by
Jamie xx + Four Tet. And so, in January 2017, enigmatic pop music trio The xx
re-emerge with their third long player. It's a tricky balancing exercise for a
band to be able to move away from what made them distinctive in the first place
without becoming merely ordinary. Early indications, to these ears, anyway, is that
they might just have gotten away with it. The new album kind of triangulates
the first The xx album with Jamie xx's "In Colour", which is a fair place to have landed. In the meantime, here's a "Club
Version", whatever that might be, of a track from "In Colour",
with assistance from Four Tet. That got you interested.
"Razrushitelniy Krug", by Kedr
Livanskiy. Swoon.
"ESC (Prins Thomas Remix)", by
Lauer. Evidently this gets played in "DJ sets". You got me.
"Sisters (Boards of Canada
Remix)", by Odd Nosdam. This month's obligatory Boards of Canada remix. To
be honest, after the first couple of seconds this doesn't carry too many overt
traces of the Boards themselves, but it's got an enticing hint of mystery about
it.
"Retox", by Essaie Pas. Yes, this
has "DFA" written all over it. Also "coldwave",
"minimal wave", "synth wave". So many waves. I know, we've
heard it all before. But when has that ever stopped me?
"Can't Hold Back (Your Lovin')",
by Kano. If you ask me (as if you would), this hits some kind of sweet spot
between peak Chic and early-eighties funk/electro. Boom.
"Let's Groove", by Earth, Wind
and Fire. Because it was there.
(Bonus: album cover of the month.)
"If You've Got It, You'll Get
It", by The Headhunters. And then this happened ...
"I Am The Black Gold Of The Sun",
by Nuyorican Soul. We don't often step into the mid-nineties Latin Jazz
revival. No, I can't explain it either. Anyway, welcome. From here, you can
either go forwardsto the 4Hero remix, which throws some (it
says here) tasty drum'n'bass into the blender, or backwards to the 1971 original, by Rotary Connection,
featuring Minnie Riperton on vocals. Either way is fine.
"Sunshine Lady", by Chris
Smither. Hard to fathom how the album from which this song sprang forth could
have languished in unreleased-record limbo for 30 years. The songs are fine.
The musicians who played on it amount to a who's who of who's who circa 1973.
Chris Smither is, like, the man. In short, they don't make records like this any more.
"Elinor", by Bob Lind. This song
variously appears as "Elinor", "Elanor" and
"Eleanor". There may be others. 1966 never sounded better than
this.
"I Ride The Wind", by
Lightdreams. Some kinda drugged-out post-hippie avant skeez -- heck, I don't
even know. From Canada, would you believe.
"Sexspurt (Ricardo Villalobos &
Max Loderbauer Remix)", by Kerrier District. Kerrier District is aka Luke
Vibert. The others you know. Extreme down-the-rabbit-hole remix weirdness over
12 minutes. You have been warned.
"Let Me Get There", by Hope Sandoval and The Warm Inventions.
As they say in the classics, Hope Sandoval could sing the telephone book and I would most likely be curled up in a ball on the floor, sobbing uncontrollably. Kurt Vile? I suspect that if he started working his way through the White Pages I would be exiting the room around the time he got to "Ab". (No disrespect; he is a very gifted tunesmith (n.b. not faint praise) and knows just how to land his voice in the right (if sometimes unorthodox) place.) So I am as surprised as you are that these two voices could mesh together as seamlessly as they do on this smouldering seven-and-a-half-minute number. It's like they are trying to out-chill each other. (And succeeding!)
And yet the real hero of this song is the guitar. Two guitarists are listed in the credits, so I don't know who to give the plaudits to. But you know who you are. Thanks, pal.
One of the key moments of my life, pathetic as it may seem (and may in fact be), was buying a copy of "The African Man's Tomato", the first album by The Cannanes, from Au Go Go records, in Melbourne. As was the way, back in those primitive times, word travelled slowly. I heard about The Cannanes via months-old copies of the NME. I was intrigued by this group from Sydney, who, so far as I knew, had no exposure on Melbourne radio or in the Australian music press, and yet were forging an international reputation. The album turned out to be a fine thing. I don't know, in fact, where my life would be without it. It inspired a small number of us, living and working in South Gippsland, to publish a fanzine. We heard from The Cannanes. We met them. We felt way cooler than we (at least some of us) probably were. As far as we could tell, we had captured the zeitgeist. And we wouldn't even have known what that was. (I still don't.)
Well, almost 30 years later, The Cannanes are still with us. But the band that is captured on that first album is not entirely representative of what they would later sound like: a large part of the feel of that album came from Randall Lee, who would soon wander off into his own world of self-released cassettes under the names The Nice and Ashtray Boy. (He is still going strong, too.) So by the time of their second album, "A Love Affair With Nature", The Cannanes, to me, weren't quite what they had been. They were a little bit less multi-dimensional. Mercifully, though, what they still had was enough, and the core of Fran and Stephen (often augmented by the rough drumming and, arguably, even rougher songwriting talents of David Nichols) has burned steadily ever since.
So it comes to pass, as the wheel of history turns once, twice, turns again, and so on, that "A Love Affair With Nature" has been given a slightly unlikely deluxe reissue treatment. Perhaps befitting a record (and a band) that have never entirely sounded "of their time", it sounds perfectly suited to the early hours of 2017. I'm not aware that The Cannanes ever sold many copies of their records, but, perhaps as is (I suspect somewhat apocryphally) said of the first Velvet Underground LP and the first Sex Pistols concert, everybody who heard it/was there was inspired to go off and make music of their own, and so it is that their influence, it can now be seen, is surprisingly strong. (Either that or they, and everybody else, was listening to the same things, and drawing the same things from what they were all listening too. Sorry, that sentence was a bit of a mess, wasn't it?)
Brief pause while I look up the word "interstitial".
While it is, of course, nice to see "A Love Affair With Nature" back in general circulation (and a relief not to have to sit on the porch with a shotgun while guarding my own copy of the original pressing), the real treat, for me, with this reissue is that it includes the two seven-inch singles that the band released in 1988, between those first two albums. I had always thought they neatly summed up what the band was all about, in both the Randall years and the post-Randall era. Listening to them again now, I still think that. (It's nice to be right for a change.) In fact, if you only had room in your life for four songs by The Cannanes, it might as well be these four. As a service to the community, I have collected them all for you, and, lo, here they are.
