Monday, April 28, 2003
I'm going back.
Come this time on Saturday I shall be on a train to Paddington, from whence I shall traverse London to Euston, and then head northwards alongside the M1 and A1 to that godforsaken place where I spent three years. It will be the first time I've set foot there in two years. Am I scared? Apprehensive? Excited? All and none. I feel as if I'm getting back to being myself now, as if I was put to one side for a while, while I was there, in order to look for something, something I needed in order to further who I am. And though I was never explicitly shown the thing I needed, I was pointed in it's genetral direction. And now I'm on the road.
There isn't a finishing line. I know this very, very well, and yet my laziness is partly down to wanting to have reached it; so I can stop and sit and, not even contemplate, just not. Just stop.
And so, because I'm going back, I've made a minidisc to accompany me on the train journey. I've tried to make this particular disc several times before. It is, of course, the songs I relate to the university experience, to those three years in Northampton... Why have I tried so many times to make this disc? Why have I only just got round to doing it? Is it suddenly satisfactory after all those years of disappointing? Of course not. At least; I think not. I stopped trying to make it profound and miserable; I accepted that yes, I had some shit times at university, but yes, I also had some amazing times. Some fucking crazy times.
And so it starts, of course, with The Rock by Delakota; the tune of 98 that I've enjoyed most. This time, for the first time since it's parent album was released, I used the 4-minute single edit rather than the 6-minute album version (which says, on the back cover of the album, ludicrously, Album Version, as if we couldn't tell on our own). Ostensibly I used the edit in order to be able to fit more songs on the 80-minute disc (I managed to cram 20 in), but really I love that absent intro and that delicious, blissful fade-out, the slowly setting tropical sun and the gently lapping evening tide; I love it so much that I felt I had to cut it out from the disc. After all, this is for Northampton; even the best of times were so frantic and vague that it was almost impossible to sit and contemplate and soak it in. So, no intro. No outro. Just those vague words about aliens and deserts and sitting on a rock with a speaker; that and, of course, the guitar sound... that circular trill, gold and red and warm and breezy, sand and salt water licks at your feet given aural truth and presence. It's a swoon, a palm tree waving, a breath of wind...
That's how it starts...
What else is there? You Just Have To Be Who You Are by Idlewild. I dissolved to that song; headphones, noise, complete destruction and noise and catharsis. Just walking across campus. At night. Broke down. Went and sat on some steps up to a temporary room. Who's the captain? No one can believe I'm a voyeur... It made sense. Now, of course, they're working in the area of pleasant, smart tunes, no longer this ferocious energy and intelligence and something denied; now they do want to be REM. But those six minutes when they were young and reckless and convinced they had the truth, for what the truth is worth, if only they could speak the language, and they could, when Roddy just screamed and Rod hit his guitar because playing it wasn't enough.
Once In A Lifetime by Talking Heads. Played in a lecture; something about postmodernism. How can something 'postmodern' have such feeling, was, I think, the point. Awesome. This rising, surging feeling; I'm drowning, say the lyrics, in a roundabout way, I'm drowning but I'm rising; I've lost my self. I've lost my purpose. I am free. This is not my beautiful house; this is not my beautiful wife... Where did that highway go to? Jerky and awkward and somehow precise; it's funky, in a crazy way. David Byrne's voice is so oddly mannered; this smart guy who is so not a rock star, who yelps and twists and can't carry a tune and yet lifts it up so high...
There is Aphex Twin. Twice. Two consectutive tracks from the Come To Daddy EP, placed far apart on this compilation. Further in mood. The first; another video played in a lecture. To poke fun at Adorno - first, some rag-time jazz, cheesy and safe and very much played for the audience. Adorno's point; that 'high' culture must necesarily be more difficult and progressive than 'low' or 'popular' culture. The lecturer's point; that it isn't. He played Come To Daddy, of course. Most of the lecture theatre sat there bemused and confused. A few looked worried. One or two looked physically sick (this was, after all, a fullscreen projector with surround sound - Richard D James' face filling an entire lecture theatre wall and screaming your mind out). This goes early on in the compilation; much later we get the ambient calm and childlike blip of Flim, possibly my favourite single AFX track (Richard D James Album and Selected Ambient Works 85-92 surpass it as complete pieces, but Flim is my favourite three minutes).
What else? More later...
4/28/2003 04:57:00 pm
I've put my Playstation away.
The problem with me is that I like being bored. And when you like behind bored you find yourself actively seeking out things to not do. For all my existential philosophy and refutation of the soul; for all my talk of life being about finding your own purpose; my own purpose is un-purpose, not-purpose. The bits of life I enjoy most are the bits that are not there in any memorable, recountable way.
I'm not even sure this is about sublimation of the self, about the immersement of yourself in something greater than you, the state of being-at-one-with-the-task which, say, Lyra in Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials triology posits herself in when reading the alethiometer. It's not about losing yourself in a crowd at a gig or a a nightclub. It's about being able to turn off one's brain, maybe...
There's the line in On The Road about how the only people worth bothering with are the ones "who burn like roman candles", the ones "who never say a commonplace thing..." and sometimes I agree with that and sometimes I don't, but it's less and less lately... Hell, more than a few years ago a friend bought me the first volume of Hunter S Thompson's letters for a birthday present, saying that I was like him, that I burnt and was angry and passionate and that the stuff I wrote was unmeasured, that it spilt onto the page (screen, these days) like bile, like I would open up my chest and chuck-up all my insides for your perusal and amusement and catharsis...
These days I don't burn so much, do I? I'm more measured... I need to unite the two. I've learnt so much and now I know that I know so little; I've seen a small section of how much knowledge and wisdom and art and passion and stuff there is out there and realised that even what I've seen is only the tiniest fragment, unrepresentative and unreal...
4/28/2003 09:10:00 am
Wednesday, April 23, 2003
What on earth am I doing here? In this little office, in this little provincial city, in that little seaside town straddled by valleys and red cliffs, beseiged each summer by Black Country and West Yorkshire folk looking for their time in the sun? I've never been abroad! I live in a place where everybody else comes to for a holiday; why would I? I have no wonderlust. Or do I? I ought to be in London taking this shit in as it's happening, being involved with it, instead of having it filter down to me in Devon. Who comes here? Who ever shaped a scene from Exeter? Who ever documented the shaping of a scene from Exeter? Graham McBeath thought that 100 people decided history and culture for the entire country to recall in our collective memories, and that those 100 people were all centered in London. How can I have control over my own self if the history and culture in which I exist, which I love so much, is being decided by people out of reach, by people who neither know nor care who I am? Unless I am their potential purchasing demographic? Which I am, but not to a great enough extent. So I feel like I should be in London making a concerted effort to be involved, to contribute, to stand on a street corner and chat aimlessly to someone who's just made a record that's gonna change people's lives, to have a beer in a pub with a dozen people who are all full of ideas and all doing things and and and and and and...
The thing about escape is that you have to understand it's function; not the function of 'escape' in general, but the function of your escape. To something or from something? BIG difference. Very important difference. From something implies that you can't cope, that you need to flee, that you are refusing to deal with something, with whatever you are fleeing from. Escaping to something... That's much healthier. That suggests you're heading towards a destination, a goal, rather than away from an obstacle or problem. So many of my friends live in London and can talk about nothing other than how much they want to get out. Why then would I want to get in? I don't, not really, or I'd have done it. I am in the place that other people wish to escape to. I am nearly in the place that I would wish to escape to (but not quite; the actual place would have less work and more money, and I already do little work; I just want more time).
So what's the point of all this music that I listen to and write about then? I'm a child of a postmodern age, incredulous to meta-narratives, existing without God, fleeing definitions and pidgeon-holes. I live in a place that is not the UK; the UK is London and Surrey and Kent and maybe Birmingham and Manchester and Bristol; the UK is the places with postcodes you recognise from television and magazines. Down here we're literally on a limb, isolated and ignored. When was the last time national news took place in Exeter? It doesn't. When was the last time people from down here decided the direction the country is heading in?
(Aha, I cry, you are wrong, Coldplay and Blue are from the Devon area and they have an input and a say and they are involved and so on and yet I refute this and I reply but they had to flee from here to do so, they had to flee to London, flee! And they don't even matter anyway! Blue? Pah! All Rise was a good tune... Coldplay? My thoughts are well-documented. Flee! You may be from here but you can't do it from here, you have to go elsewhere, fuckers, there is no locality anymore, no local character and scene, not in an identifiable national youth cultural sense, the magazines they want to homogenise us! Even BBC digital refuse to broadcast local news for anywhere but London; if ITV can manage it the BBC can! But they don't want to because surely, the only people with digital television live in London anyway? You are WRONG BBC you are WRONG!)
Yes, if you're from here you have to leave to have a say. I don't want to leave. I like it too much and it likes me. I like the water, the countryside, I like the sun and the slow pace of life. I like the fact that I am not one with this country because I am on it's outskirts.
And so, seeking to avoid definition, I find music as a source of identity because down here you are so cut off it cannot be anything else, it cannot be a hobby or a passtime or a distraction because if you really love it you have to seek it out and struggle and get things after everybody else; but this is fine (the internet is stopping that anyway, or at least making it less so). So if you find yourself loving music here it is in a very odd way, hermetically sealed from the rest of the country, isolated. No one gigs here, no one I wanted to see as a kid, so music for me was CDs in my bedroom, not real people performing live in a hall or club or wherever. Music for me is not a communal thing; it is a private thing, a private world. And as I seek to not define myself, to stretch myself, I must seek to stretch my tastes, because if I am defined by being into music because there is not much else there to define me (bad at football, likes a drink, likes walking beaches/rivers, has a girlfriend, works in a library, watches films, reads magazines, writes stuff; where is me in all this?), then I must escape that definition by having to truly answer the question "what kind of music do you like?" with the response "all sorts", just the good stuff, mind, but how to find it? How to find it when down here? That's the struggle! I am not avoiding definition; I have my definition. I am Nick Southall. Make of it what you will.
But of course, I don't believe in God, in soul, in spirit, in self; I believe only in existence; but that doesn't make my refutation of definition or my quest for identity invalid; far from it. The purpose of existence is to make your existence worthwhile, to find your "history book thing" as I said once of Sartre's semi-autobiographical anti-hero in Nausea. And so the quest for identity in the face of non-definition, the challenge to unify the two and to do it with music and writing and walking along the beach and watching films and holding conversations (God, how I love talking to people about interesting things!) and stuff, that's just my own way of making my existence worthwhile, and hotfuckingdamn if it's not working, I tell you! Slowly and surely and with moments of blue and red amongst the yellow and green, but yeah, yeehaw, that's it that's it.
A word on Gameboy Advance SP; you should buy it with three games; Metroid Fusion, Mario Kart Super Circuit, and Zelda, A Link To The Past. Balls to the rest of them!
Yes yes yes.
4/23/2003 02:09:00 pm
Monday, April 21, 2003
The Streets (and also Cornelius [but not Susumu Yokota])…
Definitive list of 2002’s favourites? Bollocks! How did I forget The Streets? God knows, but you can now consider it included, not at the expense of any of those other albums listed somewhere below but as an addition (it wouldn’t be fair to delete one of the others simply because my memory is shocking).
I wrote the end-of-year poll blurb for Original Pirate Material on Stylus, and claimed it was “like looking in a mirror” if you were a 20-something British male. Obviously, considering it’s cult status on the other side of the pond, the British thing isn’t strictly necessary. I guess garage originated in the US, and that’s where Skinner finds himself posited most often, though to be honest he’s more like your typical bedroom laptop kid from anytown, anycountry than some blinging garage producer or MC. He’s got a pleasingly DIY ethos and a greater degree of sensitive (and self-indulgent) insight than your MJ Coles and Craig Dayayayayayayavids. He’s a bedsit auteur. I see much more of his lineage in The Specials than anything else; Let’s Push Things Forward begins with a brass hook disarmingly similar to Ghost Town for one thing, plus his position as an outsider/observer riddled with distaste/fascination for the culture he’s nominally involved in put him close to the “I wouldn’t dance in a club like this / the girls are all slags / and the beer tastes just like piss” lyrical chops of the young Terry Hall. Isn’t Mr Skinner a midlander too? Albeit one who’s fled to Londinium.
Geezers Need Excitement shows off the positive side of his insight, a thought-provoking (but not that profound) document of lad culture that neither condones nor condemns the participants, but rather seeks to understand just how young men can get dragged into the booze-and-fights lifestyle that’s so prevalent in provincial Britain. The Irony Of It All is the rather condescending flipside of his charm though, loaded with the conceited ennui of the heavy toker, further supporting the erroneous weed=natural=good=holier-than-booze meme that is part of the reason I find serious dopeheads so irritating (that and their deathly dull obsessions with cod-philosophical insights and useless kitsch nobrow cultural inconsequentialities [Playstations, kung-fu movies, MTV, the eternal stoner’s desire to be ‘deep’ via received Chinese-whispered wisdom that might once have had something to do with Einstein of Jung], both of which he also mentions). Skinner is sharp and strangely beguiling, his almost dissonant anti-song voice cringe worthy and off-putting but so natural and honest (despite its clear affectation) and different that it becomes hard to resist. “Get fucked-up with the boys” is a depressingly eager cry during Too Much Brandy, a shopping list of easily-available ways to get off one’s face, a litany of aimless self-abuse, Hunter S Thompson lost the passion and fire that gave purpose to his ludicrous excess, a little boy lost slightly scared and ashamed of what he’s done but also possessed of the prideful braggadocio that impels him to show off. He’s in thrall to his mates and afraid to follow his own ambitions for fear of leaving the cocoon he’s built for himself (Don’t Mug Yourself). It’s Too Late further waxes his perception of himself as helpless social retard, unable to sustain a real relationship because he’s caught up in the insouciant anti-success trap, too disenfranchised to get off the sofa for anything other than scoring, too emotionally stunted and immature to commit. Is this first person Skinner himself or just a character, putting women on a pedestal without asking and then ignoring them when they fail to match his expectations? My guess is the latter, but that the character is Skinner himself in a younger and more misguided incarnation.
And then there are the chap’s beats and tunes, which is really what drags you in. He locked himself away for three years, inspired by Hendrix’s self-imposed exile to learn guitar, intending to become “the best at tunes” and it God-damn nearly worked. Who Got The Funk? is “just a groove” and that’s fine, a nice phat bass and some squidgy wah-wah jerking for a couple of minutes with no purpose other than to exist. Elsewhere big pulpit organs and gentle cuts of piano rub up with snatches of strings, all the while over this pulse that’s not really garage (not that I know what that is) and not really house and not really hip hop but that seemingly has the last decade and a half of UK club culture scratched into it like slogans of laconic rebellion on school tables. Has It Come To This? has a definite dancefloor throb, accentuated by the snippets of “oh-oh-oh” vocals over the top, and his words betray a youth spent trying to desperately lose oneself in sweaty clubs and find oneself in dodgy pubs. He’s in love with the romance of dance culture, name checking Rampling and Tenaglia, but too young to have lived it properly in it’s first flush of rush and pump, fooling himself into believing the mythology, unable and unwilling to see the old-school of DJs who made their names in 88 grasping desperately to the past and preventing the genre being moved on, or the superclubs homogenising the country’s disparate dialects of dance music into one big, ugly, amorphous trance behemoth intent on consuming your local lager-carpeted shitpit and sending everyone to Ibiza. Skinner comes at club culture almost from the opposite direction to Simon Reynolds, an organic, naïve yearning to be a part of something exciting that he’s grown up watching from afar but not been allowed to participate in, the eternal young boy’s desire to impress older brothers/friends. Both seek to understand it, but Skinner is unconcerned with hermeneutics and paradigm shifts and theories; he wants to know why it’s not as great as he’d been led to believe, whether it’s always been a false Holy Grail or whether it’s recently hit the rough, his ability to synthesise the evidence and form a conclusion hindered by spliffs and Smirnoff Ice.
Since before the release of Original Pirate Material the UK club industry has been in decline, but over the last 12 months it’s collapsed into startling freefall. I doubt that Skinner consciously predicted this, but maybe, in his darkest moments, he could detect the beginnings of its death. In some ways he’s like Big Star, desperately trying to recapture the British Invasion when it was long dead; like Chilton and Bell we love Skinner because he’s a romantic idealist, no matter how disillusioned he becomes, not content to document the death of the thing he loves because he thinks he can save it. Weak Become Heroes sounds strangely like an elegy for Britain’s dance culture, somehow juxtaposing the everybody-welcome utopia of house as it was first conceived all those years ago with an intangible and profound sadness, that looped organ stab filled with poignancy. “The world stands still as my mind sloshes round…/ my life’s stood still since I walked from that crowd…/ we all smile / we all sing…”, the last six words full of positivism but delivered with the same despondency and dejection as those that precede. Because when the party’s over you’ve always got to try and clear up and keep up. Stay Positive gives us the unfortunate reality that many people get lost trying.
But its not all misery, it really isn’t. The main reason I love Original Pirate Material so much is cos it’s fun; Skinner’s beats and rhymes are exciting and amusing and enjoyable, and OPM signals the emergence of a promising and singular talent. My only qualm is that I suspect many trendy London types only big it up because it mentions place names they’ll recognise from the tube ride home…
As well as The Streets I also happened to chance upon Point by Cornelius, sniffer-dog head firmly in place after the name cropped up a couple of times on I Love Music in positive comparison with my much beloved Up In Flames by Manitoba. Point can also consider itself included in 2002’s list of a dozen (as it has become) favourites. Less drum-crazy and chaotic than UIF, it’s still invigoratingly eclectic and in love with music, with sonics, with enjoying itself. Flits of acoustic and electric guitar dance across the speakers like hummingbirds, the few words that appear from time to time are in Japanese, the drums live or programmed are delicious and jerky. Neither dance, nor ambient, nor rock, Cornelius is trading in solipsistic Odd Pop, where strangulated guitar noise can sit comfortably with harps and electronic washes and vocal harmonies, and a melody is never far away. Not as spectacularly great as Up In Flames, Point is nonetheless a terrific ride for 45 minutes.
However, Susumu Yokoto’s beautiful and brittle The Boy & The Tree narrowly misses out on a place in last year’s list because of it’s overly mannered aesthetic. Like the meticulous rituals that the Japanese observe in the preparation of tea, Yokoto’s ambient dance music is strange and delicate and beguiling, but also alien and distant. And, most importantly, it distracts you from being able to enjoy the thing in hand, whether it be a cup of tea or a piece of music. As strictly defined and elaborate as Cornelius’ work is too, he has managed to produce something more lightweight and enjoyable than Yokota. Cornelius, like Manitoba, wants you to enjoy his music; Yokota, like Boards Of Canada, wants you to be impressed. Ultimately I’m not so keen on that.
4/21/2003 06:52:00 pm
Monday, April 07, 2003
Lowedges
Richard Hawley
Setanta
2003
Solo artists are an odd breed, mixed bags of arrogance and insecurity; "I am great enough to do everything myself and trade purely on my own name" facing off with "no one wants to play with me". Just look at Prince or Har Mar Superstar for the evidence; anyone that desperate for attention and acclaim is bound to have some serious life issues buried somewhere. The parade of volatile pop and soul divas, Mariah, Xtina, J-Lo, et al, with their list of remarkable demands and tantrums, merely adds to the assumption that you have to be pretty fucked-up to go it alone in the music world.
But what happens if you start out in a band and end up on your tod when things go west some time later? Richard Ashcroft's constant musical proclamations of his own genius and vast sensitivity would seem to affirm the fact that he too is an egocentric twat with a mammoth inferiority complex leading to him over-compensating. Sting-style mediocrity and tantric sex marathons await you, Sir Ashcroft. John Squire on the other hand is such a retiring chap that it took him five years of failed attempts to put new bands together before he finally realised it wasn't going to work and he had to carry his songs all on his own. Dave Grohl had solo-status thrust upon him, became reluctant frontman for three albums and then realised that really all he wanted to do was sit behind the kit and bang skins, leading him to join QOTSA for a sabbatical.
An added trauma of ‘indie’ stars going solo is the perpetual quest to maintain their aura of authenticity and cool coupled with the constant struggle to disprove the perpetual “greater than the sum of their parts” tag which most ‘alternative’ bands get lumbered with. Ian Brown, Steve Malkmus, Frank Black, Joe Strummer, Johnny Marr; all have taken up the gauntlet, struggled, and come in second, whether they were frontmen or taciturn guitar-strokers in their heyday. What makes them think it’s gonna be easy outside the safe, nurturing confines of their original gang? If George Michael and Robbie Williams struggle outside of the supposedly suffocating and contrived confines of a boyband, why do artists who lived and breathed their own bands from being teenagers imagine they’ll immediately be able to transfer that unique, organic chemistry into artistic solo success? (Cocaine, that’s why! Dur…)
And if luminaries from indie’s higher echelons fall flat, what makes Richard Hawley, ex-Longpigs string-smith, think he can make a go of it?
Ignore the past. Forget the Longpigs thing. Lowedges (as well as being named after the Sheffield housing estate where my Gran lives) is a wonderful, romantic and human record. It really is. It’s very good. I like it a lot.
Hawley’s managed to make the whole going-solo thing work by forgetting his own past, which is the right thing to do because it doesn’t matter. As the odious Tom Cruise says in Magnolia, the past is the thing which best prevents us moving into the future, or something. And so Richard Hawley doesn’t attempt to react to his old band’s bombastic emotional gothic Britpop in any way, nor does he make a big thing about his time as a jobbing session guitarist for the likes of Pulp, Robbie Williams or All Saints. It’s just a job after all, and better than most if you think about it.
All he’s done is written some songs and then recorded them with some people he knows who can play instruments. It’s a fine idea, and more people should take heed of it. The result is a personal record that’s not cloying and which lacks the influence of ego. Hawley’s deep, characterful burr is reminiscent of Scott Walker, Kurt Wagner or Nick Cave minus the none-more-blackness, deep and rich and mature and fascinatingly untrendy (is there really still such high demand for affected and anonymous falsetto’s emanating from spuriously sensitive young men at the moment? Or for the distorted yelps of proto-punks in skinny trousers?). The musicianship supporting his voice and songs is equally cut from velvet and fine corduroy, 12-string, 6-string, slide and electric guitar, bass, drums, strings, piano and more all deployed with subtle care and a level of attention to detail which enhances the songs rather than distracts from them.
And the songs are great. Simple, heartfelt Jimmy Webb-esque late-night ballads, full of warmth and honesty and generosity, where the subject of the song and the act of singing it becomes more important than the singer. Maybe this sense is derived from Hawley’s passion for motorbikes, where the machine and the journey are the key factors, much more so outside of the hermetically sealed safety-bubble of a car; on a motorbike you become a part of the journey’s landscape, rather than being cut-off from it. The ego can’t sustain itself in the face of this. Oh My Love and the almost-epic The Only Road are built on understatedly repeated themes which build steadily to a climax, The Only Road’s repeated call of “keep me in your heart” heady and strongly emotive. Your thoughts turn to your own loved ones. The trick of balancing character and song between singer and listener is a difficult one but it’s pulled off here on several occasions. It couldn’t be anyone else singing and writing these songs, making these touching observations, but equally it doesn’t matter who Hawley is because his honesty and humility put the audience square in the emotional heart of the music rather than merely aggrandising the singer-as-idol as so many other contemporary (male/alternative) balladeers do. Think of I Say A Little Prayer or Wichita Lineman; it’s the same thing. Travis get close to it but are so blandly MOR and lacking in personality that they can’t really involve the listener’s emotions, and end up as just something to mindlessly hum along with and tap the steering wheel to.
Lowedges reminds me of the lost 90s classic The Magical World Of The Strands by Michael Head & The Strands (Michael & John Head from Shack moonlighting with a flute player and string four-piece), as well as being redolent of Lambchop’s last two albums and the prettier moments of Sparklehorse. It’s a delicate and warm record that’s out of time and out of place, not quite country and not quite folk and not quite soul, rooted perhaps in America more than the UK. The only time it stops in Sheffield is during the beautifully winsome and hopeful I’m On Nights. Even then it’s only lyrically and not musically, as Hawley weaves a simple tale of a man working all hours to keep himself and his sweetheart, even if it means passing her on the stairs as their shift patterns clash. The everything’s-gonna-be-just-fine poignancy of the line “I’m on days / and off tomorrow” as the song slowly culminates is extraordinary and uplifting.
Hawley’s definitely possessed of the realist romance of the long-distance biker. These aren’t songs about an intangible and unattainable romantic ideal; they realise the blood, sweat and tears that love really entails, the comfortable resignation that is loyalty and fidelity, and they celebrate it wholeheartedly. You Don’t Miss Your Water (Till Your River Runs Dry) takes part of its title from Otis Redding but the sentiment is less dramatically selfish and more mature. Otis bemoans his dry well which has presumably run dry ‘cos he’s drunk it that way, and demands his thirst be quenched like a spoilt adolescent. Hawley, on the other hand, is dealing with the motion and flow of a river rather than the artifice and stagnancy of a well; the object of his affections is untethered and natural and has run dry for bigger reasons than simple over-use, and Hawley’s reaction is one of resignation and regret. It’s a subtle difference but a profound one, and reveals a world of difference between Hawley’s attitude to women and Otis’.
Is this indie music then? I don’t really listen to indie anymore, I can’t be doing with it. I can be doing with this. Unashamedly retro, defiantly emotive. This is rich and mature, a good red wine, it satisfies rather than titillates, it’s got no idea what’s cool and it doesn’t care. Yes, I like this.
4/07/2003 04:09:00 pm
Sunday, April 06, 2003
Up In Flames
Manitoba
Leaf
2003
Start Breaking My Heart, Dan Snaith’s first album as Manitoba, was a pleasant example of ambient found-sound laptronica, all fizzpop clicks, gentle piano and mechanical percussion. Ultimately, despite its accomplishment and humanity, and some occasional sublime touches of elegiac brass or beguiling keys, it was an unremarkable exercise though, especially when compared to the work of Snaith’s friend and contemporary Kieron Hebdon under the guise of Four Tet. Mammals Vs. Reptiles may have had gentle moments redolent of Miles Davis or Laughing Stock era Talk Talk, but too many tracks walked the line of People Eating Fruit, a tune every bit as aimless as its title, or Lemon Yoghourt, the sound of a listless radiator slowly breaking down. But Up In Flames… Well, this is something else entirely…
A Canadian based in London with a background in classical piano and advanced mathematics, Snaith has taken the rulebook and put a match to it. The result is glorious; a seething, enticing mess of drums, guitars, keys, electronics, brass, anything and everything you care to imagine. I imagine if Snaith had had a kitchen sink to hand during recording, he would’ve played that too. In fact he probably did. Put simply, Up In Flames is a record in love with music made by a music lover, futurepsychenoisebeatpop that reaffirms how much fun music can and ought to be.
Snaith has taken his influences (and they are a broad array), cut them up into tiny delicious snippets, and stuck them back together in vibrant new patterns. The result is neither rock, dance, nor electronica, but rather something else entirely. Up In Flames appropriates the languages of disparate musical genres and reforms them within its own idiosyncratic semiotic scheme, defying the restrictive grammar of any one individual system. And so we have the dreamscape aesthetic of prime My Bloody Valentine tied to the raucous percussive chaos of The Chemical Brothers, the shuffling campfire acoustics of the formative Beta Band, and the intricate headphone balm of ambient electronica purveyed by Susumu Yokota. Laconic vocal harmonies in thrall to The Beach Boys breathe through washes of illusory noise. Opening track I’ve Lived By A Dirt Road All My Life is a clattering, woozy beginning, a mess of glorious twirling sonic frippery, upbeat and indecipherable; Skunks is a fusion of euphoric organ melodies and delightful percussion book ended with the bemused ribbit of a misplaced frog, climaxing with joltingly smashed drums and jazzy skronking.
There are more ideas within this extraordinary thirty-nine minute album then there are strictly room for as Snaith struggles to let loose his entire imagination in the space of just ten tracks. The juxtapositions thus presented can be dizzying; intense collisions of drums in exhilarating celebration of the beat give way to delicate string-laden passages; electric guitars make love to glockenspiels; electronic blips decorate honking clarinets; handclaps underpin collages of abstract sound. On first listen I was jerking, laughing and dancing with joy; many, many spins down the line and I’m no less caught up in childish reverie while this record oozes and jumps and rattles and oscillates from the speakers, enormous drums and beautiful noise combined. Snaith is happy to take risks and embark on sonic adventures, always making them accessible via irresistible percussion and melodies, upbeat and kinetic. Up In Flames is possessed of more oomph and verve than most other electronica, intricate enough to be a sublime headphone experience but visceral and propulsive enough to demand attention when channelled through cabinets at volume.
There’s so much here that it’s hard to think of Dan Snaith as anything but a childishly wilful dilettante, grabbing shiny sounds and interesting noises from wherever he sees them and putting them back together with such consummate skill and undeniable joi de vivre that he appears to know what he’s doing. But is being a dilettante so bad? Where Loveless was meticulously, painstakingly orchestrated, or Susumu Yokota is a master of mannered, controlled abstraction, Up In Flames is intuitive and spontaneous in its use of noise and sound, a level of accomplished, deliberate precision sacrificed in favour of a much more instinctual approach that reaps major benefits by embracing chaos rather than attempting to take charge of it. The purpose of this music is not to achieve a specific, pre-planned aesthetic goal but rather to capture a feel and an effect that reveals its own aesthetic goal on completion. Looking at it this way, Kevin Shields perhaps has more in common with a composer of classical music while Dan Snaith works in a realm closer to jazz. Of course, I may be wrong about this; but I don’t think I am. Up In Flames is far too carefree and expressionistic in its colours and lines for me to think otherwise, it has the life and energy of Kandinski or Picasso, not the delicate and affected control of Dali or Mondrian.
But beyond all this conjecture about intention and aesthetics there is the music and it is resolutely and consistently fantastic. Hendrix With KO melds breezy bah-bah-bahs with shuffling drums, piano and a miasma of whistles and swirls in a woozy moment of dreamy pop. DJ Shadow would be proud of the percussive mastery demonstrated on the eastern-tinged Kid You’ll Move Mountains, laced with flute and modest tectonic ambitions. Crayons is the only track to exist in recognisable laptop territory, a dose of appealing electronic summer melodicism featuring laughing children and wayward canines. The final track, Every Time She Turns Round It’s Her Birthday, is as wonderful as its title, the long-hoped for (by me at any rate) sound of The Chemical Brothers remixing MBV via The Flaming Lips and Spiritualized, overwhelmingly gathering momentum as it gallops towards the sunset, flutes & sax & organs & voices & drones gathered up in a surging rush of drums celebrating the very joy of its own sound, pausing for breath every so often before launching into another glorious wave of endorphin-blasting movement.
This record is so near to perfect that I could almost believe it’s been created just for me. Thirty-nine minutes of constant surprise and delight.
4/06/2003 11:12:00 pm
Friday, April 04, 2003
Top 10 albums of 2002
I love and hate end-of-year best-of lists in almost equal measure, both consuming them and constructing them. Finding hidden gems in obscure lists by people you don’t know, being reminded of pre-spring LPs you’d loved briefly but forgotten once the sun emerged, being able to look at a year’s cumulative releases juxtaposed and ruminated upon rather than considered quickly and in isolation; these bonuses easily outweigh the negative exasperation of being confronted with identikit lists from a host of predictable outlets and publications, the trauma of seeing easy, lightweight albums being lauded by people who should know better (hello, NME), or the anachronistic, ostentatious-hipster choices proffered by arenas concerned with indie-kudos and alt.rock-cred over actual musical appreciation.
Construction of these damn things is a different matter, though. It’s an ego-war, making lists, a naked statement of self; you assert your opinion in the face of all others as superior, affirm your level of musical consumption as wider and deeper than anyone else’s. To make a list is to say “I have listened to more music than you and what’s more I have understood and assessed it better than you could and now I’m going to judge it and rank it and my opinion is absolute and final and rooted in truth and certainty…” And really these rankings are just arbitrary, political constructs, value judgements given textual authority, compromised overviews and half-assed summaries, as if you can understand a record, an artist, something as intangible as a year, just by making a list of it. Foolery.
Of course, being an arrogant and vain individual, and also a contributor to Stylus, I composed a list in late November, fretted and fussed over it’s content and context, revised and reviewed it and submitted it to be both displayed on the site and amalgamated with the lists of other writers into One Big List, one final musical authority for the year 2002. And, of course, being fallible and lazy, I neglected to actually hear many of the most wonderful records of the year 2002 until well after the list had been submitted, and even well after the new year had rolled into and then back out of sight one more time. And so, as usual, the real list of the best albums of 2002, my favourite albums from that year, doesn’t get composed properly until we’re into the next year’s spring. So here it is, finally, eventually, as accurately and honestly as I can muster; the 10 records from the 12 months between January and December of last year that I enjoyed most. Some of them are reviewed elsewhere on this blog at length, some of them aren’t; for the sake of democracy and fairness, I’ll blurt out a cursory sentence or so about each one here whether they’re looked at elsewhere or not.
And so, on April 4th, 2003, in no particular order, here are my absolute, positive favourite records from last year (at least until I listen to the as-yet-unheard copy of Susumu Yokota’s The Boy & The Tree which is newly arrived this morning from Amazon). There are plenty more records I liked, but these are the ones I really loved…
Wilco
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
I’ll admit that I’d never heard Wilco before this record, and that they’ve now found themselves a place in my heart that doesn’t look likely to shift or shrink for a fair old while. Supposedly this is their greatest record because of it’s mildly experimental leanings; I say balls to that. It’s Wilco’s finest record because Tweedy’s voice of drunken sadness and honesty here finds itself wrapped around songs and arrangements that are better than anything they’d done before. I Am Trying To Break Your Heart sent elegiac shivers down my spine the first time I heard it and it still does now.
Akufen
My Way
Micro-house wasn’t something I’d heard of before I came across internet whispers about this record, and it’s still not something I’m gonna claim to understand. All I know is that since I was 18 I’ve had the idea that it’d be great to cut-up sound into tiny bits of noise and then reassemble it over rhythm so that it becomes artificial melody, and that Canada’s Akufen does just that. The fact that he also pastes the most glorious, ass-wibbling house beats and bass-lines underneath his snippets of piano, guitar, static and voices makes this record all the more fabulous.
The Bees
Sunshine Hit Me
I love eclectic, upbeat oddpop with a definite reggae lilt. Not surprising then that I love Sunshine Hit Me. Anything that gets close to recapturing the feeling I got back in 98 when I first heard The Rock by Delakota, that warm-sand and cool-sunshine swoon, is a good thing, and The Bees were the only group in 2002 who managed it. They managed it very well indeed.
Radio 4
Gotham!
You can take The Strokes and shove them up your arse; this is the sound of underground New York that I want to hear, a sound rooted in disco and post-punk rather than style magazines and dates with Drew Barrymore. Dub bass rubs up with edgy guitar and a sense of righteous fury at not knowing your hometown anymore when you’ve never even left it. A kinetic masterpiece in thrall to Gang Of Four and PiL.
Interpol
Turn On The Bright Lights
Did I say post-punk? Did I say New York? Yes, I love the Interpol record too, and I’ve never even listened to Joy Division. Sad and powerful at the same time; hard to believe it was just a debut.
El-P
Fantastic Damage
I don’t think what El-P and Cannibal Ox are doing is that important. I don’t think they’re really changing perceptions or forging new ground. Hell, I don’t even really like The Cold Vein that much, and I’m not prepared to give it a level of grudging respect just because of it’s ferocious accomplishment. Fantastic Damage is a different matter though, because although El-P can’t rap for shit, he sure can fucking produce, and he’s not afraid here to show that he knows his way around a beat either. A positively overwhelming journey through underground hip-hop; not necessarily a pleasure, but always worthwhile. (Three in a row from NYC…)
Lambchop
Is A Woman
The songs are all 7 minutes long and about his dog, but Kurt Wagner’s gloriously fucked-up downbeat alt.country-soul collective turned in possibly their best record with Is A Woman, a wonderfully understated and subdued swoon of elegant piano and intricately arranged ambience. We wondered how they’d follow-up the magnificently lush Nixon, a modern soul masterpiece from the most unexpected quarter; we didn’t expect this graceful foray into beguiling, redemptive depression, but we were glad we got it.
N*E*R*D
In Search Of…
Re-recorded with live guitars and percussion to give it the potential for D’Angelo-style crossover success (“what the fuck?” – “no, really, that’s what the label said…”), N*E*R*D actually managed to create the only album to ever do the rap-rock thing properly, combining the kinetic/sonic slam of rock with the intricate and dynamic aesthetic of mainstream hip-hop. Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo would’ve been everywhere even if they hadn’t released their own record, given the amount of production work they keep so splendidly churning out, but In Search Of… was their biggest achievement. Quite possibly, this is the sound of the future of pop music.
Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man
Out Of Season
It arrived late in the year but it bled such quiet, intense quality that people knew it had to stand high in the myriad lists it made it into, even though really it’s a grower of an album rather than an immediate hit. My own review for Stylus was basically an excuse to rant about why Mariah Carey is and always will be inferior to Beth Gibbons, partly because I think that, but mostly because this odd, gossamer record does it’s best to defy description. Even now I can’t pick out individual moments, and it still doesn’t get played often, but when it does it’s undeniable. An autumnal hybrid of Talk Talk and Portishead; how could I not love it?
The Delgados
Hate
I almost feel guilty choosing this because I generally really don’t get anything out of indie anymore, but the quality of these bittersweet Scottish pop songs is undeniable. Syrupy and orchestrated to death, certainly, and produced by a David Friddman seemingly on autopilot ever since The Soft Bulletin, but The Delgados stomped all over The Polyphonic Spree and The Flaming Lips, who both tried to make the same record. Emma Pollock’s voice remains a lovely thing, especially in the album’s softer moments. To all intents and purposes this was The Great Eastern Part 2, but it’s a quiet triumph nonetheless.
4/04/2003 11:46:00 pm
The Vines
Highly Evolved
Heavenly
2002
Welcome to the twenty-first century alt. rock review.
The Vines, as you know, are from Australia, and, as you also know, are the greatest band the world has ever seen. We know this because NME has told us. Craig Nichols appears to have ascended to the status of ‘star’ merely because of his unerring ability to a; pull faces, b; grow a lopsided fringe and c; be very, very stoned in interviews. Six months on from the release of their debut album and it is wonderfully reassuring to see that The Vines have spectacularly failed to do an Oasis, Nirvana or Blur, and are languishing somewhere outside of the Zeitgeist.
What are the problems with Highly Evolved? The problems with Highly Evolved are many. Firstly, it’s produced to a ridiculously anal degree. The sound is clean, sharp, polished, professional and mechanical like a Ford just rolled off the production line, and is just as characterless. Craig has said many times that he much prefers being in the studio to playing live, and listening to this album you can hear that in every note. For a supposedly vibrant and dangerous rock n roll band, The Vines are desperately short on sonic dirt, edge, and noise. Listening to the album you’d be hard pushed to believe that any of The Vines (and who the fuck are the other 3? 4? 5? What are their names? What do they look like?) had ever played a bum note in their lives, such is the precision of the musicianship. And yet, for all his professing that he loves studio work, Craig seems loathe to use the studio as an instrument itself a la Brian Eno et al, for as well as clean the sound is also safe and unimaginative.
But if the sound is unimaginative, the songwriting is positively fraudulent. The three ‘punky’ tracks each fall in thrall to the Nirvana/Pixies axis/template of quiet bit, loud bit, scream-your-lungs-out, while almost everything else seems to rip-off Britpop in excelsis. A modulated hooky Elastica synth-noise here, the bridge from a Blur song there, some harmonies every-fucking-where (harmonies, to NME journalists, automatically = Beach Boys + Beatles fucking in heaven). From time to time they manage to throw in the influence of an American band other than Nirvana. Homesick sees the hook from Blur’s The Universal tied to November Rain by Guns N Roses (no really, it does!), plus a really slow guitar solo reminiscent of Oasis circa ’94 (only minus the dirty production that gave early Oasis 80% of their character), and finally rolls out on a rolling bass coda pinched from Jane’s Addiction. Fed up of Britpop and shiny modern grunge? Try The Factory’s Clash-aping skank on for size! The Vines are truly the band for all seasons!
And if Craig’s songs are somewhat suspect in their origins, his lyrics absolutely reek of Freudian fucked-up-ness, for the poor boy is obsessed with being, and getting, ‘in’ things. “In the jungle,” “in the factory,” “in a country yard,” “ride into the sun,” “there ain’t no room for me in the city.” In the final track (which is, of course, ‘epic’), Craig expresses a desire to be in 1969 (which is, of course, the coolest year in history). What Jung or Freud would have to say about this, I’m not sure, but it would probably be along the lines of “boy, you are obsessed with returning to the womb, grow up and stop wanting to fuck your mother.”
ARGH! The Vines. Balls to them. Forgettable pastiche merchants.
PS. Seven Reasons Why Craig Nichols Is The Perfect RockStar™.
1; Young.
2; Good skin (= good looking 'cos all music journos are spotty cunts).
3; Messy hair (= good looking, 'cos if your hair is messy than presumably someone [maybe a gUrL] has been running their hands through it, ergo you might have been doing some shagging [music journos are asexual {not through choice}]).
4; Acts a bit 'mad' (see Jim Morisson through Johnny Rotten to Richard Ashcroft [always good for entertainment value {plus 'mad'ness is 'sexy' 'cos if you're 'mad' you might do weird things like shagging with the woman on top and so on}]).
5; Smokes dope (drugs are sexy 'cos they can KILL YOU and danger is always sexy unless it's actual real, potential-pain-and-nastiness danger happening to YOU rather than SOMEONE ELSE).
6; Because he acts a bit 'mad' and smokes dope he might DIE possibly of SUICIDE (one's records become approx 50x better if one dies under the age of about 40, esp. if one tops oneself [accidentaly or on porpoise]; see Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis, Curtis Stigers, etcetera {nb. Curtis Stigers has not died young, and so his records are still not good}).
7; He's Australian, and might be able to set you up with Kylie Minogue.
4/04/2003 10:12:00 am
This blog has been kicking around cyberspace unlinked-to and unviewed since January, which suits me, because it's mine and I am lazy. I've been intending to post stuff here for months and haven't. So what.
However, from last night onwards I've started posting record reviews here; so far, with two exceptions, it's just a selection from the back catalogue of stuff I've had published on Stylus over the last 9 months (some of these old Stylus reviews have been altered minutely, but not many). The two exceptions are a review of Mr Lif's I Phantom album, released last year on New York's premier underground hip hop label, Definitive Jux, and a bulk review article of six different albums, featuring a recent Cocteau Twins reissue (the wonderful Treasure), the Junior Senior album, and other assorted recent stuff (including the godawful Antenna by Cave In). It's entirely possible that this set of six-reviews-in-one might end up on Stylus in one way, shape, or form in the summer months when the site undergoes and overhaul (note the clever and quick juxtaposition of opposite prepositions there, almost dizzying, eh?). Until then, though, it gets burried here.
[A quick word on the use of spacing after commas and full-stops - I have a habit of putting two spaces after full-stops and one space after commas to accentuate, even if only on a subliminal level, the definite end that a full-stop signifies, ie; a gap for you to breathe, should you be reading this out, or stop momentarily to consume the content of the sentance; whereas commas merely signify a pause in a sentance, a change in direction, and should not be so definite. I've been doing this since I learnt to use computers at senior school, aged 11, I think because the IT teacher told us to, but I may be wrong, this whole two-spaces-after-full-stops thing might be a figment of my strange imagination. However, no one else I know at all does it, including Todd Burns, the editor of Stylus. Hence, anything that originally appeared on Stylus will only have one space, and not two, because I can't be bothered to trawl through 30,000 odd words of old record reviews with a finger poised on the spacebar. Not that you've noticed this slight discrepancy anyway, because you're not mentalist. And now I look like an anal fool for mentioning it. Just as well I did it in tiny font then, eh?]
Although, obviously, writing about music is a great love of mine, having always enjoyed listening to it and thinking about it to such an extent that I'd never want to fuck it up by playing it, and the content so far is all on the subject of music, this blog isn't necessarily for the exclusive purpose of me writing about music. No, I might write about films occasionally too. Or cats. Or genomics. Or beer. Or... You get the picture.
Anyway, here's another record review...
A.R. Kane
“i”
Rough Trade
1989
If you look closely, the grid of monochromatic hieroglyphics behind the eye on the cover reveal themselves to be letters. If you look closer still and piece them together, you will find that together they spell “supercallafragilisticexpealladosius”, a word that means simultaneously nothing and everything; a word that makes you smile just to say it.
A.R. Kane are both the most undervalued and the most prophetically influential band of the late 80s, their first two albums laying down an atlas of future directions for British alternative music to pursue over the following decade. Sitting and listening to ”i” in particular now is a strange experience, akin to opening a long-buried time capsule and discovering it to contain a recent invention. Several recent inventions even.
Formed in London in 1986 by Rudi Tambala and Alex Ayuli, A.R. Kane’s early singles found very modest success in the independent charts, but first came to real prominence when they and Colourbox (4AD label mates at the time) collaborated as M/A/R/R/S on the enormous smash single “Pump Up The Volume”, one of the first records to successfully fuse the rhythms and beats of classic dancefloor soul with emergent sampling technology. Their own material mined a different ground though, the Rough Trade debut album 69 a bizarre work of nascent dream pop that melded jazz rhythms to eerie neo-shoegazer-noise atmospherics and bewildered, drifting song structures. Barely a year after 69’s release in 1988, A.R. Kane had completed ”i”, a phenomenal accomplishment given the records astonishing and colossal musical scope.
Roughly divided into four suites of four songs each (the sleeve even assigns each suite a house of cards – spades first, then diamonds, hearts and finally clubs), plus an additional ten interludes of found sounds, ambient noise and disconcerting samples which are sometimes wonderful, mostly banal, and once or twice irritating, ”i” starts off as a record of straight-ahead pop music, becoming progressively odder and more consuming with each successive song and each consecutive suite. After someone beckons us “hello” from a distant and mysterious sonic plain, “A Love From Outer Space” kicks irresistibly to life. The song rolls along as shimmering electronic dance pop about extraterrestrial love built on house-y pianos and classic sha-la-la’s, before a low tide of bongos ushers in the dub pop of “Crack Up”. The quality of A.R. Kane’s songwriting is far from spectacular, and the scope of ”i” means that there are several lapses in quality, at times exacerbated by the dated 80s pop sheen of the production, especially in the first suite. The cheesy pun-pop of “Snow Joke” is nothing special anyway, but the presence of a truly cringe-worthy synthesizer-brass hook propels it almost into agonising territory despite the interesting use of an eerie 20001; A Space Odyssey sample. “What’s All This Then”’s clumsy lyrics and structure are almost redeemed by its sly dub patois and gliding guitar vibes, but it is let down again by the flat drum machine beat.
The second suite begins the album’s move into tentatively bizarre territory, laden with foresight and innovation. “And I Say” could have been lifted from Bjork’s fantastic Debut, not released until four years afterwards, its percussive electro bass and determinedly idiosyncratic vocals almost spookily close to the Icelandic genius’ breakthrough material. “Conundrum” is a slow drawl, a demanding, unfamiliar sexual obsession jam built on drone and repetition, the near-refrain “when you touch me… when you fuck me…” almost painful in its desperation. The phased vocals and gorgeous pop weirdness of “Honeysuckleswallow” heighten the sexual tone of the suite, before a moment of perfect guitar ambience (“Long Body”) segues into the heady, baffling “In A Circle”, built on layered strings and delirious voices and concluded with a delicious, soothing coda.
”i”’s third suite is heralded by “Miles Apart”, a near perfect pop song, an amalgam of meaningless lyrical profundities (“and it really doesn’t matter if you break my heart…”) and lysergic guitars that threatens to escape the confines of the otherwise galactic boundaries of the album. If dolphins bothered to make pop music it would sound like “Spook”, spectral guitar chimes putting The Edge to shame and ignominy. Midway through “Pop” the vocals, always otherwise distant, suddenly slip into disarming intimacy, spinning your head around yet again as wraith guitars rise and fade like mayflies in the midday sun.
“Down” ushers the final suite into being, threatening to usurp The Verve’s entire career in five minutes with its simply perfect space-drone-rock sublimation, metronomic percussion and hypnotic bass impulsion washed with waves of hallucinogenic guitar chimes and streams, Rudi’s vocals all implorations, “oh / stay down, / just / stay down, / please / stay down”, and euphoric sighs concerning church bells and “skinny trees”, incantations of “little fingers / push me over…” The best moment of the album? Oh, but there are so, so many others… The murder-pop drone of “Supervixens” follows “Down”, before it is superseded by “Insect Love”, effortlessly capturing the electro garage lurch that Primal Scream have been so eagerly pursuing for the last half-decade. Finally, “Catch My Drift” soars gently in the lower stratosphere for six minutes, a perfect dub trip, Rudi’s damaged voice finding its perfect fit, scatting and jiving ideally over rolling reggae bass and beautifully syncopated drum patterns and lilting guitar up-strokes, rim-shots precise and sharp and foggy sampled ambience oozing from channel to channel, A.R. Kane finally lost in smoky ecstasy The eternal, transcendent moment lifts and fades, before a female voice, distant and post-bliss, intones “I just challenge anyone to listen to them and not cry…” Pretentious, yes. Off the mark as well, probably. But you can’t fault the sentiment or ambition.
”i” is a kaleidoscope of future sounds. It’s a ragged listen, certainly; the breadth of ground and ideas it covers and encompasses means it couldn’t be any other way. Moments of it are exasperating, passages where the idea is so good but the execution so poor, the first solution sought hurriedly to enable progression to the next brainwave, the next territory; but for every second of infuriatingly missed targets there are three of brilliance. Screamadelica, Blue Lines and Loveless are often taken as the three touch stones of nineties alternative music, a triumvirate of masterpieces from 1991 that would foreshadow the musical development of the rest of the decade; but ”i” precedes and predicts them all in one way or another. Why A.R. Kane have never quite received great critical acclaim or popular success is a mystery; possibly the UK is still too stuck in its ways to accept black musicians operating in spheres outside of their allotted territory – early press coverage described them as “the black Jesus & Mary Chain”, a remark only a few thousand miles off the mark. White musicians have been happily encouraged to appropriate black musical ideas and territory since pop music was born, aping blues, jazz, hip hop, reggae et al left, right and centre; but for black musicians to step the other way is still frowned upon and seen as quizzical and unusually eccentric. It’s unfortunate, then, that they’ve been so nearly forgotten, because ”i” is a flawed and crazy work of brilliance.
4/04/2003 09:59:00 am
The Boo Radleys
Giant Steps
Creation
1993
Proving that not all bands from Liverpool have influences that stop at The Beatles, The Boo Radleys’ third album is their undeniable classic, a wistful, exciting and perfectly-formed journey through a colourful musical universe. Formed in 1988 by school-friends Martin Carr and Sice as a vehicle for Carr’s songwriting and Sice’s angelic choirboy voice, the Boos meandered through Ichabod & I and Everything’s Alright Forever, two competent but uninspiring albums of My Bloody Valentine-derived guitar pop, before creating Giant Steps, their genre-bending and stellar zenith.
Stealing its name from John Coltrane and its melodies from the purest pop heaven can muster, Giant Steps saw The Boo Radleys taking hold of everything they loved about music, throwing it in a big box, shaking it around and then letting it back out again in weird and wonderful new forms that only they could have come up with. Weighing in at a bloated seventeen tracks and 64 minutes, the album ought to be a chore but isn’t, simply because there’s so much going on, so many ideas, so many hooks.
Essentially Giant Steps is an album of simple, well-crafted pop songs, but they are embellished and fleshed out in such marvellous, creative ways, and twist and turn in such weird and wonderful directions that they are transformed into something rather more absorbing and special. The Boo Radleys seem to throw almost everything at Martin Carr’s songs to see what sticks, from Beach Boys hooks to Loveless scree and back again via reggae, jazz and Dinosaur Jr., each song designed to be “a room with many doors”, or full of other, little songs. The epochal “Lazarus” both achieves and encompasses the band’s ambitions in spectacular style, phasing in on a gorgeous dub skank, drifting through acoustic reveries and exploding in a wordless chorus of technicolour guitar noise and heavenly brass, the sound of a life dumbstruck by glorious God-baiting noise.
The synergy between trumpet and guitar is a major key to the success of Giant Steps, both instruments veering between polar extremes. Steve Kitchen’s trumpet emits Motown-esque melodies at some points, and honks like Miles Davis’ most freeform jazz at others, while Martin Carr divides his guitar between simple pop riffs and exhilarating cacophonous squall. The two sides of Martin’s guitar are probably best illustrated by the sweet pop of “Wish I Was Skinny” with its simple melody and swirling fairground keyboards, and the post-MBV feedback of “Leaves And Sand”. The former is innocuous bubblegum pop, beguiling and sweet, while the latter lulls you with faint acoustic strumming before pummelling you senseless with gorgeous layered noise.
How many wonderful things are there about Giant Steps? Too many to mention. Hidden in the cover artwork are a couple of giraffes. Faye Dunaway is harmoniously mentioned in one song, and no one seems to know why. There are songs about love, about God and his tendency to not exist, about childhood dreams coming true. There are songs with handclaps. There are songs about the victims of infamous racial attacks, which are dedicated to dead comedians. There are songs about being afraid of flying. There are songs about being full of beer and songs about being full of drugs. There are songs with clarinets and songs with cellos and there are songs with guitars that sound like clouds. There are songs about listening to The Beatles. There are songs about so many things and not one of them is dull.
Few albums manage to be so expansive, so personal, so excitingly imaginative and so joyously pop all at the same time, but The Boo Radleys managed it here. This is a record about being a young man in a strange, sad and sometimes wonderful world, tired of injustice and fed-up of platitudes, a record about racing for the prize, catching dreams and smashing prejudices. This is a record about realising that what you were told was “normal” is actually abnormal and unnatural, a record about stepping outside and grabbing the world. “If you want it, take it all / there’s nothing cool about / having to go without…”
If you’re lucky, this is one of the most wonderful records you will ever hear.
4/04/2003 09:39:00 am
Dismemberment Plan
Change
Desoto
2001
The Dismemberment Plan’s fourth album sees them moving further and further away from their origins as a straight-ahead hardcore quartet back in the mid 90’s. While Emergency & I, their last album, saw them more fully integrate the funk / hip-hop / pop influences that had always bubbled under their formative work, stretching their musical palette to extraordinarily diverse lengths, Change sees them begin to look thoughtfully inwards rather than rambunctiously outwards. The result is a record that, while still always engaging, is now more effectively moving, and still finds time to be as exhilarating as hell from time to time.
Travis Morrison’s peculiar, quavering voice is put to use delivering vignettes of his daily life, the musings of a man standing at a slight angle to the world, telling things in the first person, as straight as he can see them and with little pretension. Sometimes wistful, sometimes angry, often confused, his lyrics stand out in much the same way as the band’s music does, by doing familiar things in unfamiliar and creative ways. There is little new about the subject matter in his tales of love and loss, but his humility, attention to detail and perspective make them seem refreshing. ‘The Face Of The Earth’ would be a standard rumination on past love, were it not for his down-to-earth and bemused manner – “it’s been a couple of years / and I guess I’m fine about it / it’s not like we were married / it was three or four months”. Elsewhere, ‘Ellen & Ben’ recounts the tale of a pair of friends lost to the world in a consuming love affair, as seen from outside – “every time I tried to ask them something / they started making out all again / I thought it was rude”. At the other end of the spectrum ‘Time Bomb’ lays down Travis’ anger and bitterness in gloriously explicit fashion, as he claims “I am a faultline / and I’m pulling apart the ground / that lays beneath your newest life”. There’s something endearing about the way Travis often eschews conventional rhyme, meter and other contrived lyrical tools in favour of fitting his words around the melody of song however he can.
Musically The Dismemberment Plan are as tight and as telepathically fluid as it is possible to be. Only Fugazi and Lambchop can compare for musical insight and interaction between band members. While the too-fast wig-outs of previous albums have almost disappeared, their legacy remains in the band’s ability to shift the dynamic of a song from one extreme to another. Morrison and Jason Caddell’s guitar lines alternately twist, snarl and chime depending on what a song calls for (often covering all bases in the space of a single track), while Eric Axelson underpines everything with throbbing, melodious, dub-inflected bass, tight and deep. As for Joe Easley, he is quite simply one of the best drummers on the face of the planet, as comfortable with 4/4 power-pop as he is fucking around with live drum and bass on ‘The Other Side’, loose and funky one moment, solar-plexus-shakingly powerful the next. On top of this, the band’s democratic and free-thanking approach to keyboard duties give the record an even broader eclecticism and unpredictability - ‘Following Through’ is nearly straight alt.pop, ‘Secret Curse’ is muted-but-still-frenzied hardcore, and ‘Ellen & Ben’ is 22nd century post-punk funk.
Emergency & I was a furious and sometimes unfocused statement of the band’s ability and intent, covering many bases and winning serious acclaim. With Change, however, The Dismemberment Plan feel little need to show off with self-conscious musical ostentation and excess, instead choosing to focus themselves on making a fantastic, understated and involving record. They’ve mellowed certainly, but they’re far from being boring and staid. What comes next is anyone’s guess, but it ought to be good.
4/04/2003 09:36:00 am
DJ Shadow
The Private Press
Mo’ Wax
2002
In 1996 Josh Davis released …Endtroducing, an expansive, intricate and morose tapestry of samples that wove brass, pianos, filtersweeps and hip hop beats together, creating something new from many things old. Quick to garner critical acclaim, public acceptance slowly but surely followed, making …Endtroducing one of those rare things; a cult record that found mainstream success, attracting serious hip hop chin-strokers and casual music fans alike. Predictably, DJ Shadow became a cool name to drop on the back of very little material.
It’s taken six years for The Private Press to arrive, but DJ Shadow hasn’t quite done a Stone Roses on us. In the meantime he’s worked on the ill-advised Unkle project with James Lavelle, the cool but forgettable Quannum album, and the fantastic but insanely hard to find Brainfreeze mix LP. None of these side projects have come anywhere near the majesty of …Endtroducing though, largely because the nature of collaborative work means it requires compromise. Searching through musty old records for funky beats and interesting sounds is by its nature a very lonely and introspective pastime, making the way Davis makes music not conducive to partnership and teamwork. His records are by far his most beneficial collaborators.
While …Endtroducing seemed to most people to arrive unannounced from the hip-hop ether, The Private Press bares a serious weight of expectation on its shoulders. Davis pieced portions of the album from one-off pressings of records that were never intended for commercial release, individual vinyl postcards and doodles from long ago (hence the title). His source material for the actual music, however, mines a wider array of music than …Endtroducing, due to Shadow's increasingly varied listening in the time between records.
Criticisms of The Private Press have centred around the idea that DJ Shadow has done all of this before, that he’s retreading previously innovative ground that he himself first years ago. Maybe this is true to an extent, but to criticise DJ Shadow for sounding like DJ Shadow is churlish, especially when you consider that his cinematic found-sound collages are still a cut above those of his many imitators. No, the problem with The Private Press is simply that it’s not consistent enough. "Fixed Income", "Giving Up The Ghost", and "You Can’t Go Home Again" are all at least the equal of anything off …Endtroducing, and readily show up the Unkle album as the hollow self-pastiche it really is. But then we have to deal with the awkwardly irritating "Six Days" and it’s pseudo-profound vocals, and the histrionic "Mashin’ On The Motorway", which is a weak attempt at the kind of psychotic street funk which David Holmes was producing back in 1997 on Let’s Get Killed. Even the much talked about "Monosylabik" is more tedious than terrific, the indulgent hip hop equivalent of a 6-minute Joe Satriani wank-wank guitar solo.
One of the joys of …Endtroducing was that it wasn’t an album you could get to grips with immediately – it took many listens over a period of time to fully reveal its quality and depth, and because of this the listener’s relationship with it became more involved and fulfilling. After a few weeks I already feel like I’ve gone as far with The Private Press as I can. There are too many tracks I want to skip past in order to get to the next one I like, and bizarrely, for an instrumental hip hop artist, there’s too much singing as well. On at least two occasions ("Blood On The Motorway" and "Six Days") DJ Shadow lifts whole vocal tracks from records and simply gives them new arrangements. OK, so we’ve never heard these particular songs that he’s lifted from before, but that doesn’t make these tracks anything more than glorified remixes of other people’s work. DJ Shadow’s previous work shows that he is way above this kind of laziness. The two "Letter From Home" tracks which partially bookend the LP also add nothing to The Private Press except a vague sense of kitsch irritation. Thank heaven he tacked the original version of "Giving Up The Ghost" on the end so the LP could finish on a high note.
There’s no doubt that DJ Shadow had a massive impact not just on hip hop or dance but music in general six years ago, that he is technically way ahead of most of his contemporaries, and that he has a knack of digging up gold from boxes of dusty records. But The Private Press, sadly, is merely a good album, when we were all expecting another great one. I doubt that people will be eulogising this record as an earth-shattering masterpiece in half a decade’s time, and that’s a shame.
4/04/2003 09:35:00 am
Four Tet
Pause
Domino
2001
Now where did I put those pens? Click. Click click. Clickety-click. Clickety-click click click-click.
On a bike, cycling along a canal towpath on a hot summer afternoon, arms glistening with perspiration. You see some swans sculling gently past you. Rushes touch your legs as you flow past them, leaning slightly, first one pedal down to a glide, then the other as you seek to avoid brushing nettles. The quiet knowledge tucked away in the back of your head that you have absolutely nothing to do for the rest of the day other than cycle up this canal as far as you want to go. Maybe a butterfly finds itself entwined with your motion for a few yards, maybe you turn a corner and find yourself enveloped in a cloud of butterflies for a fleeting moment, maybe one of them nearly finds itself in your mouth and you gasp at the idea. Sun-dappled tow paths, lazy canals, meandering games of cricket on village greens…
Pause is the sound of Keiron Hebdon relaxing for a while and enjoying the summer, piecing together the rattling of pens, the rustling of paper and the buzzing of insects, constructing music from found-sound building blocks. Much less angular and mathematical in feel than the work of post-rockers Fridge, Hebdon’s day-job, Four Tet is his indulgence, a solo side-project producing the kind of ruralistic, childhood electronica that has seen Boards Of Canada so lauded for the last three years. But while BoC are guilty of often descending into long-winded and tuneless atmospherics, Four Tet is considerably more focused and concise, Pause coming in at 11 tracks and under 45 minutes long (45 minutes being, as anyone with any sense knows, the perfect length for an album).
Hebdon’s fondness for real instruments gives Pause a more authentically organic aura than his more purist electronic contemporaries are capable of achieving, much as they may strive for it. Amongst the clicking stationary samples and glitchy effects are to be found sweet pianos and winsome brass, as well as occasional (gasp) guitars and what sound suspiciously like real drums. ‘Everything Is Alright’ drifts along for two and a half minutes in this tunefully natural way, all skittish beats, swirling keys and the kind of stop-start guitar motifs that Akufen is being so highly praised for cutting up at the moment.
This is an album that seems to effortlessly evoke the kind of lazy summer days that everyone claims only ever happened when they were kids. ‘No More Mosquitoes’ picks up on BoC’s trick of sampling children’s voices, but rather than burying them uncomfortably in the mix and trying to unnerve the listener it is beatific and naively triumphant, the sound of kettles of boiling water being poured on ants nests. ‘You Could Ruin My Day’, on the other hand, builds up an almost hypnotic sense of rhythmic determination during its seven minutes, almost making you want to (gasp) dance.
You can practically see people paddling up canals and dozing in shaded park corners on August afternoons as you listen to this album. Or even perhaps staring wistfully from bedroom windows at passing clouds. Just look at the couple on the sleeve, dressed for a balmy autumn day and smiling for all they’re worth. Magic.
Fugazi
The Argument
Dischord
2001
Shut up. Shut up and sit down. Get off your fucking hardcore high-horse and shut the fuck up. Take your ethics and your polemic and your do-it-yourself attitude and your straight-edge and shove them right up your fucking ass. You people piss me off with your ennui and your guitars and your anti-consumerism stances and your black-rimmed glasses and your little fucking ironic backpacks. You nasty little intense little fuckers.
This is Fugazi’s best album and I don’t care what you think. You can take Repeater and fuck off with it. I don’t care about your hardcore historiography. I don’t care about Minor Threat or Nation Of Ulysses. I’m not a hardcore fan and I never was nor ever will be. As a genre I think its arrogance, ennui, and piety make for thoroughly distasteful baggage, never mind the actual po-faced, anti-fun, serious-as-cancer music, afraid of hooks, embarrassed by choruses, as enjoyable as a whack in the face from a policeman during an anti-capitalism riot, and even less productive in terms of accomplishing goals. Insular, exclusionary and proud of it, I have no truck with this attitude. Is this descended from punk? No one ever changed the world by cordoning themselves off from it. These hardcore kids who sit around musing over concepts like “record industry self-sufficiency” and “selling out” have forgotten the musical eclecticism and joyous acceptance that made The Clash so great, the wilful experimentalism that PiL and Wire used to make them stand out from the crowd of so-so post-punk groups, the fact that The Sex Pistols were gloriously ugly pop situationists above and beyond being sincerely and pointlessly ‘punk’. Husker Du were a noisy gay pop band, Make-Up much more interested in righteous soul and gospel than conservative white-boy guitar scraping. Gang Of Four were a fucking funk band!
But these hardcore kids today are running scared of anything that doesn’t fit in the milieu of stern, Caucasian post-modern guitar angst, deadly serious and deadly dull, of backpacks and fanzines and all-ages gigs, of ugly, sexless, charmless music made by ugly, sexless and charmless people. Preaching and righteousness and ethics and half-baked politics. Misdirected guilt energy stemming from the greed and inhumanity that is your birthright. Anyone can cheer when George Bush gets pilloried. Listening to Fugazi isn’t going to buy your place in heaven, you dumb little fucks. It’s time to ignore reputation and misheard folklore.
There are handclaps and harmonies on this record, and handclaps + harmonies = pop music. I know how much that scares you, but it really is time that you got used to it and even embraced it. Their last three albums have seen a concerted attempt to broaden their scope musically, and still the talk that surrounds their fans is of ethics and lifestyle and nonsense. And who cares about that, really? “Cashout” is about something or other and I’m sure it’s very liberal and profound, but damn it if I’m not just into this for the sheer visceral hell of those guitars, those guitars that sound like steel being wrought in white-hot forges, those drums that smack you in the solar plexus and wind you and leave you curled up on the floor. There’s some screaming and some nonsense (“one banana one banana one banana more”, possibly) and some frantic build up at the start of “Full Disclosure” and then there’s this massive chorus and it sounds like The Sex Pistols, which is to say that it’s spitting bile like you expect but it’s got a melody underneath too and it picks you up rather than just slamming you back. And those harmonies you’re so scared of are in here as well. And again, those drums.
Those drums. There are two sets of sticks thwacking two sets of skins on Ex-Spectator and on Epic Problem, which is just that, HUGE and AWKWARD and FUCKING BRILLIANT, and with a hush in the centre and then a dynamic swing that sets fire to your chair and sticks it’s fingers in your holes and bowls you down the alley into the pins and CLANG, if it isn’t a strike. And fuck me if their voices aren’t awful when they holler and spit and puke on your shoes, but when they actually sing, which they do on this record, they do it better than they ought to be allowed to do it. And there are acoustic guitars (“Nightshop”) and subtle, hushed arrangements incorporating the aforementioned handclaps (“Life & Limb”), long sad songs with strings (“Strangelight”), and it’s no longer unsophisticated, brutish hardcore that these guys peddle, but rather accomplished, heavy guitar pop. Or something. Shove your genres up your ass as well. The title track to this album is the best thing Fugazi have ever done. I don’t know what it is.
4/04/2003 09:34:00 am
Jane's Addiction
Ritual de lo Habitual
Warner
1990
Here they come, fucking shit up, sucking shit up, taking your daughters on stage and making… them… do… things… Look away, moral guardians. Look away, those of a nervous disposition. Jane’s Addiction are not for the faint-hearted, this music is not for conservatives, republicans, librarians, doctors, lawyers, teachers, parents. This music is not for you. You don’t understand it. Look away. This music will steal your VCR, your soiled underwear, your medicine cabinet, your daughter’s virginity, your dignity. Your soul itself is not safe. Look away. Look away.
A Spanish girl says something sensual and seductive, and then a glorious, hedonistic racket starts up and the party you once heard about from a guy with some bad drugs who you met the morning-after a damaged night-before starts up and grabs your arms, your face, licks your face, pushes its hand down your pants, tells you it wants to fuck you dry and then drops you, spent, cursing, confused, on the floor. And then picks you up and fucks you harder and faster and rougher than you’ve ever been fucked before. And then drops you.
Look away, moral guardians. This is not the place for you. This music is not for you. It is for the garbage, the fuck-ups, the weirdos, the freaks you fix your eyes beyond and walk past late at night, drug-stained and degenerate, the people who don’t vote, don’t pay taxes, don’t pay heed to your world anymore than you pay heed to theirs. Look away. This is thrashy, nasty, bastard music, it stole its eyes from Jesus, it stole its pumping heart from Africa, it stole its mind from heroin, it stole its face from the streets you won’t walk down even in the fucking daylight. Look away. You might not like what you see if you don’t.
Decadent, nihilistic, talented and confrontational, Jane’s Addiction were born in early ‘80’s LA, Perry Farrell allegedly trawling the city’s subterranean music holes for talent, trying to steal a band together. He found Dave Navarro, Stephen Perkins, Eric Avery, and Jane’s Addiction began, a heady, deadly concoction of drugs, violence, metal, funk, prog, jazz, folk, art-house posturing, sex, voodoo, and insanity. A live LP, a deal with Warner Brothers and the studio debut Nothing’s Shocking followed, a flurry of whores, madness, lysergic instability, oceanic rock, narcotic ballads and excess captured at high velocity on wax.
1990. Jane’s Addiction unleashes Ritual De Lo Habitual, a libidinous psyche-rock masterpiece, strung-out, fucked-up, disorienting and inspirational. Split in two halves, the first assaults you, a relentless, dynamic five-song set that embraces punk, funk, metal and rock, the sounds of the LA underground, each tune wired and frenetic. Navarro’s guitar lines spill like electricity from the speakers, live shards, trashy and sharp, the bass is deep and funked and breaks bones in the company of the drums, huge, cavernous things that make you shake and sweat. And on top of all this is Perry Farrell’s voice, high and mad, straight through hysteria and into the other side, beyond loss of control and into Nietzschean territory, pure existential empowerment, total control, subservience of the body to the mind’s will, “bumped my head, I'm a battering ram / goddamn took the pain / cut myself, said 'so what?' / motherfuckin' took the pain…” wisdom and madness intertwined, naked on each other’s bodies, “fools don’t fit in the boots that I tread in”, Farrell a prophet, a seer, a hedonist, nihilist, antagonist, lunatic… What the fuck is this music about? “Farm people / book wavers / soul savers / love preachers!” Everything, everything, everything. Indecipherable, everything! Racial harmony and sensory overload, theft, rape, human nature… The first side is a smash-and-grab, a hit-and-run, unreported, unseen, deadly, fast, spiralling fast and sharp and out of in under lose control, explosive, violent...
The second side is… Predators, consumers, animals, lust, art, a tryst? “Three lovers in three ways…” Four songs, the first two alone pass twenty minutes together, stretched beyond breaking point, stretched into something approaching… what? Knowledge? Pain? Love? Disgust? All of these things are the same. “Without game / men prey on each other… / we choose no kin / but adopted strangers”, our bestial nature, our savagery, our baseness, glorious, understood, not disgusted by it but… enlightened? Yes, yes! “All of us with wings!” This is us… Hypnosis, mysticism, “a sea of candles”, unfulfilled, disconcerting, disturbing, strung… way… out… and then, somehow, from somewhere, a balm, an ocean like glass, to sink in, tranquil, a woman, a girl, an affair to save you. “Goodnight…”
This music. This music will consume you. It will take hold of your head and turn you round to face in new directions. Hold it in your hands, drink it in, look at it, it is voodoo, it is a lover, an abuser, a teacher, if you let it. Don’t be scared, shocked, disgusted, don’t hold your mind closed. Listen! Know…
4/04/2003 09:33:00 am
Massive Attack
100th Window
Wild Bunch/Virgin
2003
It’s all about expectations, really. Yes, this is essentially a solo album by Robert Del Naja (a.k.a. 3D). Yes, Massive Attack hovered behind the nineties like a spectral whiff of sensimilia, rarely placing themselves at the forefront of our collective consciousness, but always there, always present. Their influence and greatness is undeniable; with a hat-trick of albums and a dub remix record Massive Attack have changed the face of British music for ever, the founding fathers of the early 90’s Bristol scene which has led to the genesis of trip hop, drum n bass, garage, trance, and which has bled like smoke in candlelight into everything else around it, sometimes unseen but always in attendance. But they are not to be looked to for constant reinvention and innovation. It is not their job to forge ahead into new ground any more than it is their job to continue retreading old sonic territories. Because despite what you may have been told this record does neither of those things, and yet it also does both.
The blend of contemporary urban soul, dub ambience, hip-hop turntablism and underground dance aesthetic presented on Blue Lines over a decade ago still sounds fresh and wondrous today. The miraculous, one-shot video for the Shara Nelson-sung “Unfinished Sympathy” bleeds perfection almost as much as the song itself, the jolting stabs of sub-bass swathed in street ambience that begin the track, Shara’s unequalled, bitterness-drenched-in-honey charms, the plaintive lamentation of the strings and the gently kinetic rhythm. By contrast Screamadelica, groundbreaking at the time, is beginning to date and fade into the territory of rose-tinted recollection. Revolution, it seems, is ephemeral; class is permanent.
That Massive Attack were to have difficulty following Blue Lines was taken as read by so many that the quality of Protection often finds itself forgotten, the jarring, muddy live cover of “Light My Fire” that incredulously and inexplicably finishes the album remembered more often than the delicate and lovelorn vocals of Tracey Thorn or the subtle elemental powers of Nicolette. It took Mad Professor’s dub overhaul of the record to cement it in the same collective quality consciousness as its predecessor. And then, by 1998 and Mezzanine, everybody had come to recognize that Massive Attack were one of the finest and most important bands working in the world. The gravitas afforded to the severe solipsistic paranoia of that record, with its hungry, foreboding basslines and overwhelming, metallic guitars, finally cracking the fragile binding lines within the group.
Mushroom left the group shortly after Mezzanine was released, unhappy with the dynamic, unhappy with the record. Massive had never been a good time band, but they had equally never been so dark, so harsh and unforgiving. Mushroom’s reputation had been as the group’s turntablist and sample wizard; the move away from cinematic hip hop and sweetly melancholic urban soul towards this new, subtly ferocious, guitar-led anxiety and insularity, with its irresistible, militaristic, dictatorial march towards darkness, was never going to please him. Never prolific when they were three, Massive as two would take things even slower. When Daddy G sunk into child-rearing sabbatical, Massive as one would barely move at all.
The naysayers do not understand. Their expectations hamstring them. 100th Window is a record of organic, ambient dub. It is closer in spirit to The Orb and Bark Psychosis than Soul II Soul or Groove Armada. The metallic buzz of guitars is gone but the paranoia is resolutely in place. Once again a new chanteuse is found. Shara Nelson, Tracey Thorn, and Liz Fraser are succeeded by Sinead O’Connor’s dulcet Irish tones, occasionally eerily close in tone to the detached, oblique sexuality of Tricky’s old chanteuse of choice, Martina. Daddy G’s deeply rhythmic ragga growl is missing, but the mysterious, childlike wash of Horace Andy’s delicious reggae lilt remains on a brace of tracks, albeit buried and confused almost to the point of being unrecognisable. Even Del Naja’s own voice is twisted and altered, the laconic raps of yesteryear subdued and suspicious and verging on indecipherable, less lines of melody and tune than supplementary wafts of sound interpolated into the fascinating, precise and evocative mix along with everything else. Certainly, lyrics are not the albums strong point; O'Conner, as you might have guessed, errs too close to the sanctimonious preacher within her. Del Naja is no Keats or Blake. But 100th Window is not about words or vocals; it is about sound.
This is not a trip hop record. This is not a document of hip-hop and dance inflected modern soul. Nor is it a powerfully irresistible album of guitar-led industrial dub paranoia. To expect those things would be wrong. Massive Attack have not set out to make an epochal, world-changing record. They did not set out to make an epochal, world-changing record in 1991 either. They just did.
100th Window is fluid, black ice and oil beneath your tyres. It flows and meanders; darkly cavernous basslines joined with intricate, head-spinning production effects that imply both motion and stasis. Listened to on headphones it is seductive and irresistible, sublime movement of tones and rhythms and collaged sounds which suck awareness from you, a black hole for your conscious, “that tickle in your head – that tingle in your ear” which Sinead incants and summons in “What Your Soul Sings”. Future Proof is subdued and suspicious, Del Naja talking of lepers, ghosts and “warm pipes”, mistaken soul and absent friends. It is agonising, patient and hypnotic, its suppressed climax painted with inky guitars that slip from channel to channel in a hazy cloud of dub, disorienting and out of reach. This is not a collection of songs. It is an evocation of mood. It begs for dark rooms.
It is the clarity of production, present on all of Massive Attack’s albums, which has caused some to claim that 100th Window is mere repetition of old ground, a rehash of Mezzanine. It is not. There is no “Teardrop” or “Angel” here, no obvious single (even “Special Cases”, the nominal release, would only really fit on nocturnal, somnambulant radio), nothing with the kinesis of “Inertia Creeps”. But equally 100th Window is not a clear departure; it is recognizably Massive Attack, an evolution rather than a new direction; a slow curve in the road rather than a junction. Five of the nine tracks sail slowly past the seven-minute mark, contemplative and narcoleptic, never to be hurried or compromised. Like the glass sculptures featured in the artwork it is precise, transparent, dangerously fragile, and ominously lit. 100th Window is a masterpiece of its kind.
4/04/2003 09:32:00 am
Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man
Out Of Season
Go! Beat
2002
A much wiser man than me once said that “singing isn’t about hitting notes; it’s about pulling strings.” On both sides of the Atlantic right now we seem beset with ‘vocalists’ rather than singers, practitioners of a precise science, physicists of the larynx, where the held note and the octave-range are Holy Grails and where personality and character are shied. Mariah Carey, high priestess of vocalists, finally demonstrates a degree of personality by coming dangerously close to an emotional breakdown, and her career freefalls, an album flops, and her malaise deepens. As soon as she sheds the vestiges of real, panicked, terrifying emotion and re-embraces the precision-engineering of her particular brand of commercial nu-soul dance-pop balladry, she is accepted into the welcoming bosom once again, where the hyper real falsification and spectacle of emotion is craved, but the dirty, unpredictable business of reality is shunned.
In the UK, we have this year been force-fed a continual diet of televisual-gauntlet-running vocalists who are forced to sing for their survival in front of an audience baying for success and the Xeroxed semblance of safe emotion, muppets who can hold a note and occasionally span an octave but whose real range extends fully from fake to false. Entertainers. Real emotion, actual feeling, is a scary, frightening prospect, because it might summon in us great feelings, terrific sensations and overwhelming passions that demand of us responsibility, maturity, intelligence, control, astuteness and commitment – things that most of us are both unwilling and unable to supply.
But enough about emotion and hyper reality, I’m here to talk about singers. Gareth Gates ran through an Elvis medley at the British Royal Variety Performance last week, trying his hardest, bless him, throwing shapes and trying to carry songs that, in actual fact, carried him and his weak, insipid larynx so obviously that the fear was apparent in his eyes to anyone looking closely enough. Chris Martin, fat lad from Starsailor, Fran Healy, through to Robbie Williams, Will Young, Charlotte Church, a peculiarly British list of vocalists but you could add any number of Americans, Australians, products of any Western capitalist culture industry system, all are vocalists before being singers and entertainers before being performers, all work resolutely and comfortably within the realm of modern expectations and allowances. They are not allowed to sing and to perform and be successful on the meta-scale of 21st century achievement at the same time. The real purpose and essence of performance is emotion, to convey emotion, whether through open expression of actual subjective inner feelings or through method immersion, artistic and stylist remove. Often the two are closely linked (always, should we view the world as non-dualistic, which I’m favouring more and more) and difficult to distinguish. Cobain’s animalistic holler or Buckley’s looping vocal arc, Tricky’s asthmatic growl or Morrissey’s mannered anguish, would I state the former in each duality as subjective catharsis and the latter as stylised method? Possibly, but the end result is the same; the conveyance of emotion through performance. It is the antithesis of the production of the semblance of emotion through entertainment, which is where the line is drawn between those who are vocalists who entertain and those who are singers who perform, those possessed of character and artistic awareness be it studied or innate, from Louis Armstrong to Nina Simone to Tim Buckley to Kate Bush to Mark Hollis to Bjork. Singers who use their voices as instruments, who realise the potential scope and range of the voice, who imbue it with character whether by necessity or by choice, from the wild to the mannered.
Beth Gibbons is a singer and performer. Out Of Season is a collaboration with Paul Webb of Talk Talk and it showcases her remarkable, expressive, stylised voice over a backing of Webb’s near sublime arrangements. The joint compositions presented are mature, elegant and sophisticated, achieving a level of accomplished and timeless beauty of which other more ambitious and less subtle artists would be proud. Freed from the technological (post)modernism of Portishead, Gibbons is able to ally her understated-yet-dramatic torch songs with a warmer and more organic instrumentation which favours her sometimes uncomfortable and intentionally abrasive vocal swoops in a way we have not heard before. Because Beth’s voice is an instrument and it is used to express in a way that goes beyond the usual, its timbres and nuances explored and exploited in the way that Davis explored the trumpet or Hendrix explored the guitar. From a delicate, gossamer whisper to a wounded, age-old cackle, each studied twist is purposeful and measured, designed to evoke and emote in a way that the likes of Mariah Carey and Fran Healy could never comprehend let alone accomplish. Out Of Season is both a remarkable record of beautiful music, and an outstanding, awe-inspiring performance inducing near-irresistible feelings and sensations. This album is a sublime example of the art of the singer, and of the art of music.
4/04/2003 09:28:00 am
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