Tuesday, June 29, 2004
Do it yourself
A bit that wont end up in the Stylus interview...
Graham [laughing - in fact we're both basically pissing ourselves throughout]; So you’re a PC man, yeah? Wicked, cos I fucking hate Macs so much.
Nick; How come?
Graham; Overpriced, underpowered, total style over substance isn’t it. It’s like I built my own studio and built my own computer to record stuff onto, it’s all hand done - I just love the PC thing…
Nick; Macs look nice, the iPod’s a useful gizmo but that’s it – a mate of mine said, and caught the Apple ethos in a nutshell, “they’d rather give stuff away free than sell it at a reasonable price”.
Graham; Yeah!
Nick; Plus anyone I know who can actually fix a computer deals with PCs…
Graham; Totally! Like, my girlfriend lives next door and there’s her and loads of graphic designers round here with their Macs, and as soon as anything goes wrong they’re total panic; the idea of a new hard drive or upgrading your motherboard scares them!
Nick; “No, no! Buy a whole new one!!”
Graham; Haha, yeah!
NJS
6/29/2004 08:57:00 pm
Sunday, June 27, 2004
Sonic cathedrals
Sick Mouthy says:
i'm surprised you've not interjected yet
karim says:
i can't be arsed
karim says:
you've already said what i would've wanted to
Sick Mouthy says:
fair enough
karim says:
you fucking mindstealer
karim says:
:o)
Sick Mouthy says:
haha
karim says:
see
karim says:
right
Sick Mouthy says:
??
karim says:
the way you listen to music is very similar to i
Sick Mouthy says:
is it?
karim says:
in that we both systemise
karim says:
and empathise
Sick Mouthy says:
??
karim says:
in psychology speak.
Sick Mouthy says:
we do?
karim says:
let me explain
Sick Mouthy says:
ok
karim says:
it's like
karim says:
looking at a rainbow
Sick Mouthy says:
yes
karim says:
and seeing the different colours (production, style, space) etc
Sick Mouthy says:
"isn't refracted light beautiful, how can i refract more?"
karim says:
yes
karim says:
realising the science behind the sound
Sick Mouthy says:
yes
karim says:
but also appreciating how it makes you feel
Sick Mouthy says:
aye
Sick Mouthy says:
and that;s why we want to udnerstand, so we can do it more
karim says:
you perhaps are a little more astute in this sense
Sick Mouthy says:
this is being blogged, mate
Sick Mouthy says:
i am?
karim says:
but i draw on music theory and such to extrapolate more
karim says:
yes
Sick Mouthy says:
aye. i have no music theory as such
Sick Mouthy says:
it's all feel and thought
karim says:
because you have a richer....ability to receive
Sick Mouthy says:
i do?
karim says:
(i know what i'm trying to say, but can't quite quantify it )
karim says:
yeah
Sick Mouthy says:
i phase-out more than you?
karim says:
and this is the main strength in your writing
karim says:
perhaps, yes
karim says:
your links are more abstract
karim says:
i get fleeting ideas which encapsulate how something sounds or is
karim says:
but you take it and run
karim says:
so you both systemise (break down) and empathise with (open up to) the music
Sick Mouthy says:
aye
karim says:
and a lot of people don't
karim says:
i guess it's the most refined way of receiving it
karim says:
this is why we can go
karim says:
i like girls aloud
karim says:
i like dr. dre
karim says:
i like weird indie shit
karim says:
:o)
Sick Mouthy says:
ehehehee
karim says:
and they're like
karim says:
BUT THEY DON'T SOUND LIKE EMBRACE
karim says:
THIS IS AN EMBRACE MESSAGEBOARD
Sick Mouthy says:
HAHAHAHA
Sick Mouthy says:
yes, totally
Sick Mouthy says:
say m ore clever shit, bitch
karim says:
er
karim says:
i'm dry, kid
karim says:
for now
Sick Mouthy says:
BAD PUN
karim says:
ehehe
karim says:
touch me
Sick Mouthy says:
rappers have been shot for less
Sick Mouthy says:
*touch*
NJS
6/27/2004 10:52:00 pm
Friday, June 25, 2004
Graham Sutton
A very nice man.
NJS
6/25/2004 04:06:00 pm
Thursday, June 24, 2004
BALLS
The really sad thing is that, on balance of play, we didn't deserve to win. I've said it before. You can't win by defending for 80 minutes.
Oh well...
NJS
6/24/2004 10:52:00 pm
Drawing luck from petrol pumps, again
So I've been given another Sainsburys Official Euro 2004 England Squad Medal by the English husband of a woman from Gijon.
And today's talismanic potential England hero is...
Phil Neville?!
His dad's called Neville Neville for fuck's sake!
NJS
6/24/2004 08:26:00 am
Wednesday, June 23, 2004
Goodbye, chaps
Orbital
Blue Album
The end is nigh. This summer, after 15 years, Orbital will cease to be, at least in the form that we have known and loved them. It seems wrong to say they’ve ‘split up’, because the Hartnolls are not only brothers but also an amiable pair, so there’s been no animosity, no ‘falling-out’ or ‘musical differences’; the Orbital name will simply produce no more music after this, the Blue Album.
Given that their last album proper, the messy and inconsistent but far from bad The Altogether, was widely perceived as being their worst record, and failed to make as much commercial impact as earlier efforts, Blue Album could easily have been a step too far for a band past their artistic peak. What the Hartnolls have wisely done, however, is take a step backwards. While Blue Album doesn’t break any moulds, match their best records from the mid 90s, or (quite) end their career on a triumphant high, it will almost certainly find favour with old fans because it is an undeniably good record, certainly their best since The Middle Of Nowhere and possibly even since In Sides. What makes Blue Album good is that it is a very Orbital record; it seems at points to refract every phase of their career thus far, pulling together each creative strand and echoing their past impeccably.
Album opener “Transient” doesn’t start proceedings in this manner though. Almost entirely beatless and surfing a proggy time signature, it grows from nearly arrhythmic bass pulses into an abstract lament, slowly becoming laden with elegiac yet dramatic strings. So unlike Orbital’s previous work, one can’t help but feel that “Transient” is a eulogy for their career, a mechanical mournfulness that veers into Phillip Glass territory via a repeating harpsichord momentum. But this exploration of new sonic territory is the exception that proves the rule; and so the following “Pants” is a close but less sophisticated cousin of “Adnan’s” and “Dwr Budr” from In Sides, darkly melodic and with a gentle yet determined impetus, but lacking that frisson of purpose that its antecedents had, the knowledge that “Dwr Budr” was Welsh for ‘dirty water’ and driven by ecological anger, that Adnan was a real person, a young man at that, caught up in the Baltic conflict. Likewise “Tunnel Vision” harnesses the kind of paranoid velocity perfected on “P.E.T.R.O.L” and “Technologicque Park” without being quite as strong as either.
Blue Album manages over the course of its nine tracks to push all the buttons that Orbital fans have already had pushed so deliriously well over the last decade and a half by (generally) superior albums and songs. It is dark but not oppressive (the “Kein Trink Wasser”-esque “Bath Time”, and the lounge-muzak chimes of “Easy Serv” lighten proceedings tangibly), sophisticated, atmospheric, loaded with melody and gorgeous synths, unafraid of both the dancefloor and the headphones, and touched with mania on the Sparks-starring “Acid Pants”. It even has, in “One Perfect Sunrise”, the kid of epic, pseudo-spiritual 4am rave climax that you thought they’d finished with on “Belfast” and “Halcyon” all those years ago. It may sound recycled and contrived to hell and back (as most of the album does, in truth), but this doesn’t prevent it stimulating an incredible surge of euphoria within you. It may have been done before, it may be a cliché, it may be Pavlovian, but you can’t deny that it feels good.
There are two secret trump cards on Blue Album, and they run back-to-back at the centre of the record. “Lost” is five minutes of subtle cyber-melancholy, oddly reminiscent (to me at least) of Aaliyah’s “Try Again” in its spooky, desiccated melody, and drifting through time and space with little thought for where it finally resides. “You Lot” is a different kettle of fish, and probably the best song on the album. Coming on like a beefy hybrid of “Science Friction” and “Philosophy By Numbers”, it melts away after a couple of minutes into Aphex-like ambience, before a sampled rant about man’s relationship with God (“If you want the position of God then take the responsibility”) causes it to kick in again, the key lines of the rant subverted through cybernetic filters to delirious effect. It’s one of the most glorious and effective things the Hartnolls have produced in years.
And so Blue Album is a fond farewell, a photograph album encapsulating past experiences and emotions but never quite managing to be as good as actually being there first time around. Neither their best nor their worst, it is simply the Hartnoll brothers doing what they have always done exceptionally well, which is make music. Orbital, we’ll miss you. But we’re ever so glad to have known you.
NJS
6/23/2004 10:32:00 am
Wherefore art though, Antonio?
Just for a second last night Antonio Cassano was the most romantic hero since… well, not Romeo, because Cassano really did think he’d got the girl and Romeo knew he would never be allowed. Not for Cassano the doomed conceit of the tragic death; he was fighting until the last, he would not bow down and sip of wormwood or mercury or strychnine. Don Quixote then? Quixote who thought windmills were giants, a barber’s basin for his helmet, fighting a doomed fight because of his delirium, unaware that there was no fight at all beyond the one in his imagination, in which he was the honourable, romantic champion, victorious and glorious. Let us not forget that this is Antonio Cassano we’re talking about, who was born on the day Italy lifted the World Cup in 1982, who is destined to lift it himself, who has fallen out with Fabio Capello because Capello refused to agree that Cassano was “greater than Maradona”. Cassano is given to flights of fancy. And yet… and yet…
Trapattoni has been Italy’s coach for four years, has had the best school of players from which to draw his team since 1982, and at no time has known his best XI. Sven may have his detractors, may make use of stupid substitutions during friendly games, but he knows the value of establishing a strong central unit of players, who know each other and are confident of their roles. (OK so he should have taken Defoe and Barry, but you can’t have everything…) Trapattoni promised two years ago that Italy would begin to play attractive, free-flowing, adventurous football. Apart from the opening 60 minutes against Sweden last week, they have failed to do so during this tournament, and that has been their undoing.
Time and again teams have been punished for erring on the side of conservatism after taking the lead. The Dutch, the Spanish, the Italians against Sweden, us against the French, the Germans against the Dutch. As demonstrated in the England / Croatia match, the way to win games is to finish teams off, to not let go of momentum, to keep on attacking until you have hammered them back and demoralised them. The Italians are in possession of so much attacking verve and flair and yet they refuse to play to it. Had they kept attacking against the Swedes instead of reverting to type, they would have won. The best way to defend a lead is to keep increasing it.
Unaware of the equalising goal fifty miles away, Cassano last night experienced, in the space of seven seconds, the most joyous and then the most dreadful moments of his short career. He had rattled the bar and seen the rebound turned in. He had demonstrated exquisite touch and guile to win a penalty only to see it denied by a myopic official. He had, tired mentally and physically beyond measure, been unable to do more than pass the ball into the keeper’s hands when, had he not had the weight of a nation’s expectation (and it is not ‘hope’ with Italy, it is ‘expect’), he might have mustered more strength and stung the back of the net on two, three, more occasions. Where Vieri failed, Totti flustered, Corradi vanished, Di Vaio pitter-pattered and Del Piero flattered but did not deceive, Cassano stood up like a man and took responsibility. Sadly, only Buffon, Zambrotta, Cannavaro and Gattuso from the rest of the squad looked capable of doing the same, and the latter two were missing yesterday evening due to standing up too firmly and taking responsibility too eagerly.
Four minutes of injury, sorry, added time, and it was justified because the Bulgarians kicked the Italians at every opportunity. Each time the Italians attempted to mount a quick counter-attack a Bulgarian would collapse as if shot by an elephant-gun, writhe in agony and wave like a drowning man until the ball was kicked to touch and the game halted for medical attention which was never necessary. A defender came off and an attacker came on. Adventure? From the Italians? Why so late?
Four minutes of added time. And it was necessary. 90+4. 2-1?
The joy on Cassano’s face as he exquisitely swept home the later-than-late, low cross, was beautiful. Beautiful because it was pure, and beautiful because it was deluded and hence short-lived. He ran to the touch line, arms wide, smile wider, to be greeted and cheered by the coach whose job he had just saved. But he was not greeted and he was not cheered and Trapattoni will not be saved. Cassano only needed to be told two words for his world to collapse, and each word was the same, and each word was a number less than three and more than one.
Foul play has been cried by the Italians. It was cried before the match, but the Swedes and the Danes don’t do match fixing and gerrymandering. It’s not in their make-up. Perhaps the only reason the Italians suspect it is because they would not be beyond it themselves, and indeed in the past have not been beyond it. As suspicious as the mutually beneficial scoreline between the Danes & Swedes might be, you cannot plan a goal like Jon Dahl Tomasson’s first, the most spectacular strike of the tournament so far. And even if the penalty was dubious and the late equaliser only flapped at by the keeper, there can be no other conclusion than that the Italians were hoist by their own petard.
NJS
6/23/2004 09:22:00 am
Monday, June 21, 2004
Monday Monday, not good to me
For reasons that will become apparent I spent the weekend listening to early Embrace singles and EPs, which was infuriating because there were two simultaneous Timbaland thread revivals on ILM, one about the new L Cool J album (heard two tracks so far, reasonably ‘good’ but no more) and the other about whether Tim Mosley is the ‘greatest producer ever’. So all I wanted to do was download Tim tracks but I had to write godamnit, and for money too (I’m going to have to declare it! I had to write an invoice! omgwtf?!). Top track, as mentioned the other day, = Petey Pablo’s “Get On Dis Motorcycle”, which is one part Disco Inferno (specifically “Starbound…”), one part Qawwali, one part retard, plus two parts regular Tim and all parts fucking fantastic.
Some great stuff on Stylus today; firstly Akiva tackles A Ghost Is Born and gives it a 10. I don’t agree. Wilco are a great little band and I love the way Tweedy phrases things, bends melodies and actually does sound as if he’s drunk all the time, but for fuck’s sake!
· a; obsessing about ‘the great American record’ is not good (I shall dig out my meta-talk from last year on ILM sometime – Scorsese die, Frantzen die, Mendes die, Flaming Lips die, etcetera etcetera)
· b; Yanks be crazy over Wilco (it’s always either “best thing ever” or “Satan’s nasty little helpers” when they are neither, just a great little band!), and
· c; Akiva asked me what was “the last 10” I’d heard – I immediately presumed he meant “last 10 records” but no, he meant “last record I would have given 10/10 to”; I had to say “nothing, ever”, because that’s what a 10 is for = unattainable perfection. Akiva countered with “you give a lot of 9s”, and I jabbed back with “I give way more 7s, and I’d give more 1s, 2s, 3s and 4s if I was being paid and could do it full time meaning I could actually listen to all the shite out there too”. I don’t have a ‘favourite album ever’ anymore. Also
· d; Jim DeRogatis likes Wilco, and Jim DeRogatis is a cunt.
But then again so is Paul Morley. I can only assume that, like Paul McCartney, the ‘real’ Paul Morley died years ago and was replaced by some patsy who looked a little bit like him, because there is simply NO WAY ON EARTH that all the fucking sad sad gay fuck muso journo wank wank hyperbole hero worship SHITE dolled out to Morley across ILM and the blogosphere is justified from what I’ve read by this fucking sad old tool lately. His assertion in Words & Music that he ‘created’ [us], i.e. people who write music blogs, is fucking ludicrous. I know Marcello loves him but I’m fucked if I even knew who he was two years ago (or Marcello either). Morley, you’re twice my age and I’ve seen a picture of you wearing multi-coloured trainers and a polo shirt with a suit, and if that doesn’t mark you out as a bona fide out-of-touch sad old man then I don’t know what the fuck does. This entire, canon-building Best 100 British Albums Ever shite is just the same as all the rest, a fucking ugly, arrogant, rockist (haha! – sorry people…), wretched, nasty little list. Observer Music Monthly is the most-read music publication in the country, apparently, and its vested interest is encouraging people to be scared of dancing, scared of women, scared of the future (scared of the fucking present, never mind the future!), scared of pop and scared of being different (also scared of being ‘the same’). If you are going to do a list, OMM, at least do it with the necessary level of irreverence.
Anyway… the other great stuff on Stylus includes Ben Welsh taking apart the new Wilco, and Dom’s contribution to Summer Dubbin’, the Stylus mixtape series. Expect my titular mix at some stage during the week.
Oh yeah, there’s also William Bloody Swygart’s UK chart rundown, which you ought to be reading religiously anyway.
Hero or villain; Wayne Rooney? Goadable or God? Tonight we shall see.
NJS
6/21/2004 09:00:00 am
Saturday, June 19, 2004
A very very nice man
As you may be aware, Google/Blogger/the military industrial complex/Echelon/Al-Qaeda (according to the FBI 'most wanted' profile Osama is "6'4" - 6'6" tall! Fucking hell!) are beta testing Gmail, their sexy new, free email service which gives you a gig of space. Anyway, as an active Blogger user I have been invited to test it (and now have accounts at auspiciousfish@NOSPAMgmail.com and njsouthall@NOSPAMgmail.com should you wish to email me, which you might), and I also have invites for other people to join the beta test by having a Gmail account too.
So what I'm saying, bitches, is 'do you want a Gmail account?' If you do, email me at the auspiciousfish@NOSPAMgmail.com address and I shall invite you. I have four invites left at the moment, but might possibly get more once these have gone. Ask nicely, kids.
Also, get on slsk and search for "Get On Dis Motorcycle" by Petey Pablo, cos it fucking rules.
NJS
6/19/2004 10:19:00 am
Friday, June 18, 2004
Not actually 'grime' at all then
At university Channel 4 provided the only regular free football on television; Football Italia on Sunday afternoons with James Richardson. Since I’d been interested in football I’d always been intrigued by Serie A, the fact that the kits seemed darker, the mud was a different colour, players in the teams were drawn from all around the world, people talked about the “technique” being greater than in the English leagues, and I’d always watched Football Italia on a Sunday whenever I had the chance (i.e. whenever nobody else wanted to watch anything). But at university, especially in the third year, Football Italia and The Sunday Times became a ritual; we’d read about the Olsen Twins and watch Juve dispatch Perugia 2-1 and it was great. The most exciting team to watch was Roma; their emphasis seemed to be much more on attack than other teams, and they had this one guy, about 22, who was captain already and looked like being something really special in a few years.
Francesco Totti is a bizarre man. I anticipate watching him play like no other player, except maybe Thierry Henry this last two seasons, and yet almost every time I do get to see him play, be it for Roma or Italy, he seems to take the opportunity to disappoint one way or another. I have seen him sent off probably half a dozen times (on one occasion for shoving a referee) and fail to make the impact he is capable of probably twice as often as that (and consider that, in the UK, opportunities to see Totti play are not that forthcoming). He’s a mercurial and infuriating mix of the skill of Roberto Baggio and the temperament of Roy Keane; harnessed this makes him the greatest player in the world, unharnessed it makes him, in Ron Atkinson’s words, “a little twat”. His interplay with Antonio Cassano for Roma this year has been inspired, they have created fantastic goals for each other and approached the game with a guile and intuition and justified arrogance that has been wonderful to behold. Francesco Totti has also published a book of jokes, which largely make fun of himself, and donated the profits to charity. The best joke in the book goes – Francesco Totti walks into a sex shop and asks to buy “the pink vibrator, the blue vibrator, and the red vibrator”, the shop assistant replies “sir, you may buy the pink vibrator and the blue vibrator, but the fire extinguisher is not for sale.” I mean wtf?!
Totti has been banned for three Euro 204 matches for spitting at Danish midfielder Christian Poulsen. I love him, but the guy is a nobhead. Hopefully this means that tonight’s clash between Italy & Sweden will see a; Cassano start (also Gattuso and Pirlo, please), b; Italy out to prove something, and c; lots of great football. Hopefully.
Oh yeah, England won and Gerrard scored. Also, how the fuck is Wayne Rooney so pale? He’s been in Portugal for a month playing football and his knees are the same colour as his socks, how is that?
NJS
6/18/2004 08:59:00 am
Thursday, June 17, 2004
Not a care in the world, and the world doesn't care...
A few things early this morning…
1; I neglected to properly mention Technicolour in the Disco Inferno piece from a few days ago. This is because a; the piece was specifically dealing with the five EPs, b; even though I did mention D.I. Go Pop, this is because it came out during the run of those EPs, whereas Technicolour didn’t finally emerge until 1996, and c; I didn’t really rate it compared to the rest of their catalogue. It seemed neither as beautiful as some of the material (generally the lead tracks) from the EPs nor as bizarre as D.I. Go Pop and the other material from the EPs, and as such I was never really sure how to deal with it. However, I spotted something in an old DI thread on ILM by Tom Ewing (I was going through old threads as ‘research’ for the below piece) wherein he stated that it was his favourite DI album, because it “actually is Disco Inferno going ‘pop’”, and, partly because of this and partly because of my hunt for ‘real’ copies of those EPs / engagement with them recently to write the piece, I’ve been hammering Technicolour for the last few days. And good lord, if it isn’t fucking great. The spiralling, Durutti Column guitars are gone, there’s not the sense of bizarre, beatific ambience as found on “Love Stepping Out”, it’s nowhere near as plain weird as the fractured, refracted D.I. Go Pop, and the lyrics aren’t as conspiratorial / desperational / conversational. (I thought the lyrics to “Sleight Of Hand” were crap until it struck me [duh, obvious] that it’s probably an extended metaphor about the kind of fakery and lies and disinterest inherent in the music industry [on behalf of both industry people, journalists and fans] that caused DI to split.) I still don’t think they’re great, but…
But Technicolour itself is remarkable. It may not be as revolutionary on a pure sonics level as the other stuff they did (I gather they’d had their equipment nicked prior to recording it), but their use of samples in these 9 tunes seems much more organised and complimentary to the actual songs; the fireworks in the chorus to “I’m Still In Love”, the horn parps in “Sleight Of Hand”, the ghost strings in “Can’t See Through It”, all of “When The Story Breaks” – they’d made an almost perfect synthesis of found-sound noise and pop, a complete interpolation of the ideas they’d always had into their aesthetic. It completely blurs the barriers between what is music and what is just sound, and it’s pretty sublime.
We're getting old...
On Ebay you can buy Stone Roses fridge magnets, drinks coasters, and keyrings. If this isn’t indicative of the fact that the Madchester kids have grown up, had kids, bought fridges, and started to worry about leaving marks on their coffee tables then I don’t know what is. It’s fifteen years since their debut album. It’s five years since the tenth-anniversary reissue, for fuck’s sake. (And still Silvertone haven’t bitten the bullet and remastered everything, singles, album and all – why not?- you always loved fleecing money off us before, now we can afford it we actually want remasters…)
In other news, behemoth… I’m sorry, “b-side” ahoy. Where would we be without wishful thinking?
I sat next to a guy with a walkman on the train this morning, so as not to disturb anyone else with my headphones. He was listening to Thin Lizzy. He was probably my age. Wearing a suit. Today, to work, I am wearing Merrell sandals (yes, I bought some), blue/grey Carhartt shorts and a short-sleeved white-with-brown-check-like-lines shirt (also by America’s Favourite Work Wear Outfitters). Success mans never having to wear a suit to work, especially when it’s hot.
Leaving at 4pm today (some time in lieu + skipping some lunch hour) to be home in time for kick-off. I have no magical Euro 2004 Petrol Coin Of Divinmation to rely on, so I shall just say for fuck’s sake Steven Gerrard please have the game of your life.
kthxbye
NJS
6/17/2004 08:59:00 am
Monday, June 14, 2004
Gravity
And so Embrace announce their comeback single. I’m reliably informed that news broke a day early because of some cuntwit at 6music. “Gravity” will be out on August 30th with an album two weeks later, making it just over three years since If You’ve Never Been. Yes I know what the album is called, no I’m not telling, no I haven’t heard it, no I don’t know the tracklisting, yes I do suspect it might be very good, in that BIG, ANTHEMIC, MINOR-TO-MAJOR CHORD way. Yes, I am excited.
Here’s the suckerpunch. “Gravity” is written by Chris Martin.
Now I’m the last person to bitch about people writing their own songs, but this is odd. Not sure what to think. I obviously think Coldplay are weak and boring and so on and so forth, with ABYSMAL lyrics, but Chris Martin clearly has a way with a populist, hummable melody. I’m sure Embrace would make any arrangement much more muscular and exciting than Coldplay would. And I’m sure that the publicity this will garner will factor in Embrace’s favour; I would love to see them go massive and sell five million records. Ten million records. Twenty million records. Cos maybe then I could write a book and buy a house.
But at the same time, I know they can do stuff better than Coldplay could ever do. Much better. So we’ll see.
NJS
6/14/2004 10:11:00 pm
Sunday, June 13, 2004
"And just for a second I truly believed / Though I don't know what in..."
Walking through the city, open-back headphones bleed the sound of life around you into the music; bleed the sound of music into the life around you. The muttering of a mad old tramp, vehicles reversing, the chatter of café tables on pedestrian streets, a suped-up Citroen pumping bass into the ether, bird song, church bells, motorbikes backfiring, constant whispering all around you, refusing to stay still, unsure what is real and what is real, a stream-of-conscious, someone else’s conscious, in your ear, all merging, coalescing. “The price of bread went up five pence today,” pause for breath, 6, 7, 8 – “and an immigrant got kicked to death again.” A sense of modern, urban disgust and paranoia, mixed with faint echoes of hope and an appreciation of the beauty that emerges in the city from time to time like a pinprick of light piercing a blackout curtain. But this isn’t distanced, this isn’t the voyeuristic isolationism of Radiohead; this is in the heart of the machine, living, breathing, describing what it is and how it lives rather than what it observes and, by that note, necessarily avoids. There is no avoidance here, everything is everything, equal value if not equal importance.
It’s difficult to lift just one moment from Disco Inferno’s humbling career. After assured but inauspicious beginnings indebted to, but arguably better than, Wire, Durutti Column and Joy Division, the band released a string of five EPs of the most staggeringly experimental, uncompromising, and plain wonderful music ever dreamt of, alongside the album D.I. Go Pop, which most decidedly did not ‘go pop’. But those EPs, despite their furious avant-gardism, did manage to go pop, restructuring the very nature of what pop music is, realigning the materials it could be constructed from.
“Summer’s Last Sound” made it clear that Disco Inferno were working well outside the parameters of their contemporaries, a delicate guitar strum emerging through legions of hazy birdsong, the tune carried only by a bass ululation, pointillist sounds of unknown origin dappling everything. Outside the permanence of the bass each sound uses its intangibility as a hook, melodies seeming to vanish before you can identify their source, tempting you in to look for them even as they disappear. And in the centre of this bizarre, beautiful sound, part post punk, part Bomb Squad, part gossamer, is Ian Crause, enunciating his fears with no veils of metaphor – “Mass graves uncovered / … I can sense real violence but I still don’t understand… / Foreigners get hushed-up trials / And you’re waiting for a knock on the door… / I’m scared for my life / For the first time in it…”, simile and proximity equalling and bettering metaphor and poetic distance. The other track from this EP (only two songs, but to call either a b-side would be an insult), “Love Stepping Out”, cascades guitar lines through infinite reverb, peeling church bells, and imperceptible moisture, again the tune guided by its bassline, everything else compellingly ephemeral. Despite the quality of their previous work (and the EP previous to this, Science, had been wonderful), nothing from their past had quite hinted at this level of strange beauty.
Repetition, alteration, divergence and recontextualisation are the essences of what Disco Inferno did across these EPs. Guitars are run through MIDI samplers so that individual notes trigger samples of anything and everything, common, everyday sounds used in bizarrely unfamiliar ways, half-melodies constructed from the noise of bursting fireworks, breaking glass, braking cars, chinking metal, the distant thrum of a crowd of children, ticking clocks, and dozens of other, less identifiable sounds, found, altered by position, given shape and transformed into the building blocks of pop. The delicate reverb of the spiralling riff to “Second Language” is offset beautifully by clicking camera shutters, the lyrics cursing an inability to communicate with just words, the tune exploding into an elevating guitar solo, still warped and weird but beautiful. The EP it led came out shortly after D.I. Go Pop, and “Second Language” made that album’s stark rejection of prettiness and accessibility even more pronounced. “At The End Of The Line” pushed it even further, more Durutti Column-style guitars and incandescent bubbling echoes anchored to another tuneful bassline and words from the depths of the urban sprawl, calmly accepting the dismay as factories vent gaseous blackness, while “A Little Something” explained fittingly that “When I was young I was taught a little song / I used to only sing it when things were going horribly wrong.”
Elsewhere across these EPs there is “The Last Dance”, straight-ahead postpunk pop music but re-imagined and reconstructed with added detail taken from the world outside, “A Rock To Cling To” which does the post rock trick of exploring and deconstructing a groove over an extended period of time, only this time the groove consists of multiple layers of melodic tinklings and smashings, metal being tapped by metal, glass being crunched. The ominous clouds of “Scattered Showers” are composed of a motorcycle race and a billion mosquitoes, “D.I. Go Pop” is My Bloody Valentine circa 1988 transposed into an entirely digital future where the interference comes from the sampled chaos of life rather than painstakingly constructed washes of guitar feedback, a harried vocal about “bastards” and trying to find somewhere to eat, noise like cars being overdriven through slamming gear-changes with no let up on the gas, bludgeoning and visceral but still touched with moments of sonic oddity so strange that it remains compelling.
The last of this run of five EPs floored Disco Inferno creatively. “It’s A Kid’s World” stole the drums from Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life” and took them on a wilfully bizarre daydream trip through vague remembrances of children’s TV and fairground rides, a crazed alchemy governing what at first seems like a haphazard mess of parping squeaks and squeals and transforming this most unruly set of ingredients into a delirious pop buzz. Whistles, trumpets, those incessantly thumping drums, dizzying twizzles of guitar… it’s nothing less than extraordinary that it fits together as a song at all, much less Disco Inferno’s most unabashedly joyous and shamelessly pop song. The following tune, “A Night On The Tiles”, buzzes a Parisian melodrama through a litter of tiny animatronic kittens before dancing a psychotropic Charleston. And then the police come to put a stop to it all. Literally.
Taking this music outside into the hum of the summer city, where its points and spaces and concentric circles splash and seep over every contour and pore of life, makes it all the more apparent that Disco Inferno were not only the most imaginative band of the 90s, but probably the bravest too. Across the EPs, in D.I. Go Pop and Technicolour, they formed an entirely new way for music to exist. Ten years and more on and ‘alternative’ music still hasn’t caught up. In the hubbub and noise of urban conurbations their music becomes your experience of the people and buildings and activity around you in a way that little else can; not a distraction or an escape or even a soundtrack, but your sensations, reactions, thought-processes. It merges with the world around you and you merge with it, making each listening a different experience, and each second a perfect refraction.
NJS
6/13/2004 07:19:00 pm
Drawing luck from petrol pumps
Some weeks ago, upon buying some petrol from Sainsburys, I was given a commemorative Euro 2004 coin. This coin is still in its plastic wrapper, concealed deep within my wallet. I am about to open it, and whichever England player's face is emblazoned upon it shall have the greatest influence over our performance this evening. Of this I am sure.
And it is...
Chris Kirkland?!
I think that means we're fucked.
NJS
6/13/2004 07:12:00 pm
Thursday, June 10, 2004
Rest in peace, Ray
Beat one player by knocking it against the wall (five-a-side), chipping it over the second guy's head, beating him, and then stretched too far for a second time. Not fully fit after the shin/ankle/foot debacle (still got a fucking huge lump+bruise). GROIN STRAIN. Ouch. Is it worth it? I then, being in pain, came home for a bath. And now I've drunk half a bottle of red wine and totally forgotten to vote and can't possibly make it to the polling station before 10pm. BOLLOCKS.
The hi-hat sound in "What'd I Say (Part 1)" is the best sound ever. At 73 I wasn't expecting any more great records, but a shame nonetheless. Have fun, Ray, wherever you go.
NJS
6/10/2004 09:33:00 pm
Burn Baby Burn
Mark Fisher, he of K-Punk, has contributed two key reviews to Stylus this week, one of Junior Boys’ wonderful debut album Last Exit and one of the Rephlex Grime compilation (not heard this yet, and seen differing release dates for it; might order it from Amazon alongside some other stuff). I am, it’s fair to say, delighted to have him on ship, and hope it can be at least a semi-regular thing in future. Who will we pinch next?
In town at lunchtime I saw a bloke in a wheelchair with a three-foot rubber tube coming out of his mouth, and at the other end his girlfriend/wife/sister/carer was lighting a fag so he could smoke it through the pipe.
Also I can’t seem to find a decent pair of sandals for less than £45. They’re all either gross, £8 a pair things that look as if they’ll not only fall apart but give you a rash whilst doing so, or else they’re far more expensive than I ever imagined. I was expecting to find a nice pair for about £30, and that would have been perfect, but if I’m gonna get a decent, rugged pair that wont make my feet waft as bad as the incinerator on the industrial estate (“are you boiling chicken carcasses?”) then I’m gonna have to fork out for some Eccos or Merrels. Fuck it.
Here’s a !!! review, which may or may not end up on Stylus tomorrow too, depending on whether Unterberger gets his fucking act together.
!!!
Louden Up Now
Nic Offer is a dick, this much is obvious from one spin of !!!’s second album. While the rest of the band are content (!?) to lay down the most outstanding psychotropic discopunk rhythm play imaginable, Offer feels compelled to smear shit all over the top of it. !!!’s first record was seemingly all about dancing, drugs, and losing friends to dancing and drugs, but Louden Up Now wears a more political heart on it’s sleeve, and thanks to mister Offer’s deportment it does it in the most puerile and profane manner possible. Just listen to the litany of scatological bile he spits at Bush & Blair in “Shit Scheisse Merde (Parts 1 & 2)”; admirable, if obvious sentiment made into a junior school playground lesson in what swear words you learnt from your elder brother after his French exchange trip.
This is far from his worst offence, though. “Pardon My Freedom” possibly has more instances of the word fuck (in the context of ‘not giving one’) than Super Furry Animals’ “The Man Don’t Give A Fuck”, as Offer chants a foul-mouthed chant about, well, something he doesn’t give a fuck about. Or a shit. Maybe censorship. Whatever it is that’s riled him, his ugly, near unnecessary swearing renders any salient point he might have been making completely irrelevant. He’s like Johnny Rotten on the Bill Grundy Show, asked to say something rude, to swear, on live television, and smirking like a mischievous infant as he counters with the rudest, naughtiest word he can muster; “fuck”. It’s not an act of rebellion or free speech. It’s not an act of punk (if we take punk as an anti-ideology ideology). It’s not an act of semiotic terrorism, removing the signified from the signifier and reducing words from ontologically loaded social faux-pas missiles into mere sounds. It’s not going to change the way anybody lives their life except to maybe make them swear a little more easily themselves. It wasn’t great in 1977 and it isn’t great in 2004.
But frankly who gives a fuck about Nic Offer anyway? Yeah it’s nice that !!! seem to be the only discopunk act who have something to say apart from how great it is to finally go dancing (unless you count LCD Soundsystem’s cooler-than-thou rants as ‘something to say’), but !!! aren’t Bob fucking Dylan, this isn’t fucking poetry, and praise be for that. Louden Up Now’s lyrics aren’t meant to sustain extended literary criticism; this isn’t a record about words. It’s a record about dancing. You should know the formula by now; one part house, one part post-punk, one part disco, two parts snotty hipster hate, all parts rhythm. And don’t go mistaking this for a funkrock record or a jam-band record either. The widdle-widdle repetition tendencies of large parts of !!! have been exorcised in favour of the more way-out and technologically friendly slant of “Intensify” and “There’s No Fucking Rules Dude”. Or to put it another way, the strafing psychedelic headphone-nation groove-rock of last year’s epochal “Me & Giuliani Down By The School Yard (A True Story)”, which is present here (and probably the strongest track, although not be too far), was a good indication of where they were headed sonically. That is piling as many ideas on top of one another as possible, winding everything back into the rhythm (melody only exists here inasmuch as it can add to the groove), mixing those juvenile vocals low enough that they don’t bother you when you obey the album’s titular command. Which is to say that it sounds kind of like Outhud with vocals and more guitars. No surprises there, then.
The hype machine that kicked into overload when “Giuliani…” hit dancefloors and record shops last year could well have seen Louden Up Now and !!! denounced as unworthy, but the truth is that they do that DFA-sound better than The DFA do it for other people; they’re better than The Rapture, and positively trounce the likes of Radio 4. Plus they’ve actually managed to release a proper, schizotech full-length before the discopunk zeitgeist loses momentum and descends into parody, unlike LCD Soundsystem, their only real rivals in quality, who are still seemingly content to be the biggest musical prickteasers in a long, long time. Nic Offer may be a dick, but his band are fucking great.
NJS
6/10/2004 01:22:00 pm
Tuesday, June 08, 2004
Walk How
It seems as though the fishermen (I toyed with the phrase "people fishing" then to avoid being 'sexist', but guess what?- they were all men; it's a very 'man' thing to do, fish) in Teignmouth take it a bit more seriously than the catch-nothing leisure-casters who populate the seawall in Dawlish on balmy evenings (I went west rather than east for my walk this evening [and I drove a bit too, shame on me]). Dawlish = jeans, t-shirt, little clean fishing rod, couple of hours after work chilling out by the sea. Teignmouth = proper big green galloshers wot go up to yr fuckin' chest, standing in the estuary, big dirty fishing rod, actually catching fish. Bizarre, eh? Who'd've thought it? Going fishing to catch fish?
NJS
6/08/2004 09:45:00 pm
Here is a picture of a tap
Monkey fucking tennis.
NJS
6/08/2004 06:21:00 pm
I don't even like current buns
Pick up a copy of The Sun today. Go on. Because on the front page, and again a couple of leaves later, The Sun inadvertently reveal the ailment that has afflicted one of England’s brightest young footballers. wtf is this I’m talking about? Joe Cole. Have a look for yourself; I’m sure you’ll concur. The problem with Joe Cole, as revealed by The Sun and suspected by many others for a great deal of time (stand up, Mr Hopkins), is that he’s too busy trying to be fucking cool. Look at him. He’s the only member of the England squad wearing shades on the steps of the plane, and then, in the pictures of the heads of individual players making their way to the plane, not just sunglasses but the telltale ear-attire of the cuntishly aspirational wannabe-cool dickhead; white iPod headphones. Now obviously I have no problem with iPods (hahahaha), but a; those headphones that come with them sound rubbish, b; they are a mugger magnet, c; you might as well wear a sign on your head saying “I’m cool a twat”. This last effect is doubled if you are about to board the England Football Team Plane to the European Championships. I repeat, Mister Cole, you are about to board the England Football Team Plane to the European Championships, wtf are you doing listening to your fucking iPod and wearing big-ass-ugly aviator shades?! Even a pair of Oakleys would be acceptable, because at least they’re vaguely sporty, but big-ass-ugly aviator shades are only worn by pilots and wannabe-cool wankers. AND SOMEHOW I DOUBT YOU ARE FLYING THE PLANE, EH, WOT WOT, TALLY HO?! Cole’s missed chance (‘chance’ = ‘SITTER’) against Iceland is yet more evidence of his fucking overbearing desire to be too fucking cool for school. ON A PLATE, all that is needed is one deft touch, simply redirecting the momentum of the pass, sending it past the keeper before the keeper even knows it’s been played into the box. But OH NO, Cole has to take a touch, has to show how balanced and cool he is, has to show that he can ‘do stuff’ in the box. So he wastes the initial chance, attempts to unsight the keeper, and then ROLLS IT WIDE LIKE A MUPPET, proving me wrong and Mr Hopkins right in one fell swoop of unmitigated idiocy. Joe Cole, you are a fucking tool.
As for Michael Owen’s inability to shoot with his left-foot, well, the less said the better. Except that I ACTUALY COULD HAVE SCORED THAT, YOU MUPPET, INSTEAD OF PANSYING IT INTO THE KEEPER’S HANDS WITH YOUR OVER-STRETCHED RIGHT FOOT LIKE A BIG GODDAMN GIRLY GIRL.
[Aside; William, quietly, stage left – “This is fucked-up, this music” : Nick, loudly, centre stage – “WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU EXPECT?! IT’S TOM WAITS AND WILLIAM BURROUGHS!!” End aside]
Saw a kid (approx. 14, male) wearing a t-shirt the other day with the slogan “I think therefore I’m single” across the chest. Eejit.
There was something else I was going to write about, but I’ve totally forgotten. If you know what it was, please do let me know.
NJS
6/08/2004 08:47:00 am
Monday, June 07, 2004
Until dialogue has taken up arms to impose its own conditions upon the world
Phoenix
Alphabetical
Sometimes, when the sun is hot and the sky is blue, only the clearest, cleanest, most subtly bittersweet pop music will do, and Alphabetical is the perfect record for the coming summer. Phoenix haven’t altered the formula of their debut album for their second record, they’ve just refined it. Melodies are catchier, songs are more tightly structured, and the production even more smooth and sophisticated. In short, Parisians Phoenix have got better.
Alphabetical is a triumph of weightless transience, its airy, liquid French dance-pop almost entirely unmemorable at first, but growing with familiarity into a wonderfully subtle, hook-laden album of continent-hopping (sub)urban pop which makes an ideological virtue of its superficiality.
English language pop often suffers at the tongues and dictionaries of non-native speakers who treat the idiom with too much reverence, afraid to corrupt it for the sake of imagination or insinuation, but this is never a problem for Phoenix. Partly this is due to the fact that in Thomas Mars they have a singer blessed with a beguiling voice of such languid tones that every phrase is delivered in a manner which conveys a level of perfect, empty sense. That the lyrics he is delivering are loaded with simple abstractions begging to have meaning projected into them completes the deal; “Everything Is Everything” could be a nothingness tune, or the line “the things that I posses / sometimes they own me too” could be a blindsiding rebuttal of anti-capitalist soul-searching, the refrain of “the more I talk about it / the less I do control” a refusal to submit to pointless philosophical pontificating in the face of existential reality. Likewise “I’m An Actor” and “(You Can’t Blame It On) Anybody” portray the band as pure, hollow entertainers, doing nothing more significant than playing the role of music, asking to misunderstand (over-complicate?) and deliberately contradicting themselves (“love is all / love is evil / day is night / right is wrong”).
But anyway, the music… Produced by Phoenix and recorded “in our basement”, Alphabetical is typified by sweet harmonies, gently understated melodies and easy rhythms, adding up to create a sense of almost complete weightlessness, but a rich, detailed and solid weightlessness. Artificial-sounding guitars, tiny sparks of piano and synthetic organ fills are backed by handclaps and drums that sound like handclaps; a hint of Stevie Wonder, a big slice of crisp 80s electric pop soul, a rarefied French technological sensibility; Phoenix are strange yet familiar, pop music with a deliciously corrupting hint of otherness. The aforementioned “I’m An Actor” begins with a moody but smiling stomp-jerk, while “Victim Of The Crime” could be the sound of Dr Dre producing Fleetwood Mac, delicious, gently rising choruses crashing out in a wave of Beta Band style percussive joy. The title track is a light-as-spring-rain-falling-upwards ballad, with a hint of Sly Stone in the crunchy bassline that underpins the opening, and yet more confirmation that pop music is at its best when shiny, hollow and disposable (“everybody knows that it really doesn’t matter at all”). At least half-a-dozen of the ten tunes here could be massive summer pop hits, in an alternate world where the sun if often out and the sky is usually blue.
Guy Debord’s revolutionary 1968 text, The Society Of The Spectacle, begins “the whole life of the societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles.” Arguably, his text is another confluence of spectacles in itself. Alphabetical is almost certainly another, and it’s great.
NJS
6/07/2004 11:15:00 pm
Sunday, June 06, 2004
A much updated ruin from a much outdated style
Nick Drake
Made To Love Magic
Nick Drake knew he was going to sell more records when he was dead than he did while he was alive. So well, in fact, that he wrote a song about this very certainty on his first album, and he called it “Fruit Tree”. The lyrics could be a gospel for how his myth has slowly prospered over the last thirty years; “fame is but a fruit tree, so very unsound / it can never flourish till it’s stalk is in the ground / … safe in your place deep in the earth / that’s when they’ll really know what you were really worth”. As rock ’n’ roll myth-making goes, it’s pretty prescient. Nick Drake knew he was too fragile for the world he lived in, knew that, because of the way he did what he did, people would find it hard to love his work knowing that he was a man, and all too easy to love his work knowing that he was a ghost. Precious. Tragic. Beautiful. Sensitive. Delicate. Doomed. These are some of the words that people use about Nick Drake, born in Rangoon, died in Tamworth-In-Arden.
They’re all bunkum, of course. Nick Drake isn’t some Platonic essence of the doomed romantic hero. He’s a man who made some records and then died in sad circumstances, a handful of anti-depressants and a headache that wouldn’t go away and a failed and failing career as a folk singer taunting him while lesser talents shone, adding up to a hellish, never-ending night of insomnia. Nick Drake didn’t take Tryptizol because he was depressed; he took it because he couldn’t sleep. Rock ‘n’ roll myth-making is just another way to sell a product, whether you’re throwing paint over the car owned by your record label boss, pretending to be managed by some shadowy svengali, or hiding your homosexuality from your teenage fans. Myth is important in music, but not because it adds wonder or magic or authenticity to an artist or to a body of work. Myth is important to music because it teaches us how much we are still driven by a need to be told stories, whether they be true or not.
My English teacher lent me Way To Blue, An Introduction To Nick Drake when I was a callow, occasionally drug-addled sixteen year old, high on The Beatles, The Verve and The Stone Roses. He said it would be like nothing I’d ever heard before. In return I lent him Screamadelica. I said it would be like nothing he’d ever heard before. We were both right. And it seemed like a fair swap. At university some years later I picked up the Fruit Tree box set, supposedly containing everything Nick Drake had ever recorded, the three studio albums (Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter and Pink Moon) and the outtakes and rareties collection Time Of No Reply. It was one of those things you buy because you feel you ought to own it. Unlike The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions however, I still do own it. I still do own Ulysses though, and I doubt I shall ever read it.
Things people neglect to mention about Nick Drake; he was very tall, and had incredibly strong fingers – to play guitar that fast, that powerfully, with such odd tunings, he had to have strong fingers. He was a sarcastic devil – “Poor Boy”, a jazzy number from Bryter Layter, openly mocks his status as a poster-boy for sensitive British folk music. He was a horny devil – “Hazey Jane 1” presents stark images of sexual jealousy, asking a lover if she “is just riding a new man / looks a little like me”. He was cruel – at school with Chris De Burgh he supposedly refused to let the diminutive “Lady In Red” singer join his band because he was “too short”. Nick Drake wrote as many songs about how much he loved to smoke cigarettes as he did explicitly about depression. (One apiece; “Been Smoking Too Long” and “Black Eyed Dog”.) Yet no one talks about Nick Drake as being “that folk singer who liked a fag.” The myth surrounding Nick Drake exists as much because people erroneously believe that slow, quiet and acoustic = sad, and fast, loud and electric = happy. “Northern Sky” is not sad; it’s beautiful. “Cello Song” is not sad; it’s strange. Most of his songs are not sad or depressing in the way that Philip Larkin is sad and depressing. Most of his songs are uplifting and beautiful in the way that Wordsworth is uplifting and beautiful.
The value of I Was Made To Love Magic depends on how much you buy into the myth of Nick Drake the tragic, romantic figure who was too beautiful to last, whether you are as excited by the prospect of a new photo of Nick Drake as you are by the prospect of a new song (and there is only one new song). There are long-thought-lost string arrangements by Robert Kirby, restored to some songs. The four ‘last session’ tracks from Time Of No Reply are remixed into stereo, the wisdom and worth of which is debatable; “Black Eyed Dog” certainly suffers having it’s stark, frightening edge, previously seared by the incongruously joyous guitar break halfway through, blunted by stereophonic clarity. He no longer sounds as if he is crying as he enunciates the words. There is an early version of “Three Hours” featuring Rebob Kwaku Baah, who would later act as percussionist with Can, but sadly the lines between Folk, Krautrock and Afrobeat are left unblurred. And of course there is the new song, “Tow The Line”, which can best be described as ‘sturdy’ and ‘Pink Moonish’. There is a reason why some things remain rare, why some things are deemed not fit enough to be anything more than outtakes.
Amazon user reviews reveal the usual Nick Drake fan hyperbole; this new release is “a MUST HAVE” and “a towering achievement”, “a good place to start” even. I long since gave away my own copy of the Way To Blue compilation to a girlfriend, but it is telling that whenever I dip into Fruit Tree it is to visit those songs that Way To Blue and my English teacher introduced me to. I see I Was Made To Love Magic as nothing more than another morbid, myth-building curio, further proof that Nick Drake was right all along about how he would be treated.
NJS
6/06/2004 12:43:00 am
Oh Yeah
Also, you bitches, do you like my nice photographs? I took them all myself, you know.
NJS
6/06/2004 12:38:00 am
It's 3am, Don't Know Where We're Going
How to write about this record I have been waiting two years and a decade to hear? How to deal with it without sounding like the bumbling fanboy? Is it magical? Is it better than Hex? Can I justify trying to get away with that pun?
I’m finding it very easy to listen to this record right now. Over the course of the last year I‘ve become familiar with the contours of most of its songs, as Graham Sutton has seen fit to leak them onto slsk a handful at a time for a few minutes, “to see what happens”. What happened was a focused frenzy, a flurry of faking, a bizarre amalgam of rare BP tracks, Boymerang moments and unmastered new material fobbed off as the album. Four tracks I’ve had since last August, two more since this March, the other since the end of April, the final one a snippet of something else to throw people off.
And yet, on Tuesday morning (perfect timing, C; I had the day off!) when the brown Jiffy bag got trapped in the letterbox and spent ten minutes hanging suspended above the doormat while I fed the cat, when I finally got to take it upstairs and load it into the Marantz and open it up, I was still surprised… Not just by clarity (the first thing MP3s lose is the space between the notes and rhythms, and one of the key ingredients in BP’s music since the start is space; there is, at times, a lot of space in ///Codename: Dustsucker), not just by scope, but by flow and sense. Separately the new tracks were intriguing, with moments of extreme beauty and/or awe/terror/magic, but they made no sense, I couldn’t see the joins, didn’t understand where, after ten years, this music was coming from, what its purpose was.
I’m not saying I do now, but…
Vapour trails of distant airplanes turning orange in the sunset, a smear of royal umber bruise. Universes appear within your iris, tremulous rumbles consume miniscule worlds. Glass and metal are pushed beyond physical limits, bend and break. Bark peels like skin from trees. Points of water evaporate under immense heat. Whispers drown out coils of industrial noise. Forward motion is reversed and progresses faster.
After nine months of negotiations and missed phone calls and busy weekends and delays (and Delays) and mixing and mastering and writing new songs, I’m finally at a point (once I’ve written this and formulated thoughts and realigned questions and fully soaked in Dustsucker and thought some more) where I can interview Graham for Stylus and find out how and why, why now, why this, what does it mean?
When I mentioned on ILM that this had arrived, Jess said he was afraid of hearing it, and I was too. TEN YEARS! Remember that scene in Grosse Point Blank when Jeremy Piven screams those two words over and over again at Cussack? TEN YEARS! It’s a long time. And no, Bark Psychosis haven’t broken any new ground. This isn’t a hip hop record or a dancehall record or a modern schizotechdancepop record. It’s Bark Psychosis, accelerated through ten years. Bark Psychosis where Graham Sutton earns a living (?) as a producer and engineer for other people and collaborates with a circle of musicians to make his own music rather than playing in a band. A new Bark Psychosis record. At one point there’s some melodica. At another there’s an unexpected 303 line. There are also acoustic guitars and female vocals and piano interludes and strange references to Chris Morris and sheets of gorgeous noise and moments of musical pointillism so acute that you almost faint.
A proper review in another 6 weeks or so.
NJS
6/06/2004 12:33:00 am
Saturday, June 05, 2004
I Came Into This Dream In My Coat & My Shoes
Hope Of The States
The Lost Riots
A fuss is being kicked up about the debut album from Chichester’s Hope Of The States for reasons that go beyond the mere quality of the record. Signed to Sony in a flurry of hyperbole, Hope Of The States are the tipping point of postrock, the moment at which the genre shifts into the mainstream, establishes itself in the collective conscious, and goes overground. Not only that, but in January of this year, whilst recording their debut album at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios, guitarist James Lawrence was found dead, another in a long line of rock n roll suicides, the only difference this time being that instead of at the end of his career, Lawrence was barely on the cusp of it. Bowed but not broken by their friend’s death, the band played on. The Lost Riots is the culmination of a period of anticipation, fervour and tragedy that few people could begin to understand.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor are the group most often name checked in relation to Hope Of The States’ sound, and the two groups certainly share a certain austere sense of doomed melancholy. Like Godspeed, States utilise a barrage of apocalyptic guitars and drums augmented with strings and horns, but they differ greatly with regards to structure and delivery; Hope Of The States trade in drawn-out, dirge-y rock formations, with singer Sam Herlihy’s vocals seen as the hook that will lead them to mainstream success. Unfortunately Herlihy’s vocals could also be a major stumbling block for the band, his tuneless, wannabe-American yowl impassioned and compellingly miserable but a tuneless, wannabe-American yowl nonetheless, almost bearable when delivering a litany of self-pity and self-deception (“Sadness On My Back”), but breathlessly uncomfortable when grappling with rockers like current single “The Red The White The Black The Blue”.
That Hope Of The States are posited as postrock is bizarre. Ten years ago when the term was first coined it hinted at an exciting, technological future for rock music, seeking influence outside its own history by looking towards jazz, techno, ambient, the avant-garde and anything else that could conceivably offer fertile new sonic ground. But a decade of sonic and emotional conservatism has transformed it into just another sub-genre; the strung out remnants of grunge made grandiose with lavish violins and noise. Hope Of The States have none of the dead-eyed, urban beauty of Bark Psychosis (vapour trails of distant airplanes turning orange in the sunset), none of Disco Inferno’s impulsion to realign the fabric of pop music (melodies made of shutter speeds and glass underfoot), and little apparent desire to explore sonic territories outside of those offered by a guitar.
What they do have is passion and intensity in tangible amounts, and a handful of modernist, minimal alternative rock songs that are bound to find them legions of fervent and devoted fans. “The Black Amnesias” is a windswept, dynamic instrumental that stutters and soars, and “Enemies/Friends” is an insurrection of martial drumming and slashing guitar. The album highlights come back-to-back halfway through, when the emotive country fiddle melancholy of “George Washington” (“the sound they made was sad but hopeful / stand up / be counted”) follows the bleak, arid cascades of “Black Dollar Bills”, before The Lost Riots tails off in an aimless flurry of (perhaps justified) epic self-pity and hollow ideology.
The most intriguing thing about Hope Of The States is how at odds with themselves they seem. Driven by an epic but unidentifiable passion, their music constantly hints at a wilful and painful desire to explode the formalities of melody and structure and self-destruct in whitelight catharsis, and yet they are continually reigned in by a sense of grudging conservatism, obligated and resented sensibility. The impression is that they may never take that extra step which would see them break into truly remarkable territory.
The Clientele
Ariadne EP
The Clientele have a commendable history of releasing scattered EPs that add to their peculiar and impressionistic vision, and Ariadne is no different. Inspired by a series of paintings by Giorgio De Chirico, the five tracks here take The Clientele’s muse of hazy, autumnal melancholia and expand it in directions they had begun to hint at on The Lost Weekend, released before their debut full-length last year. Ariadne comprises two short piano instrumentals, a hazy, wordless reverb-reverie, one song that sounds exactly as you expect The Clientele to sound, and, at its heart, a beautiful, spectral, 9-minute ambient organ drone, unlike anything they’ve done before. That this beautiful, beguiling EP is released on a tiny Spanish record label is a minor tragedy, but then its rarity is part of its charm.
NJS
6/05/2004 11:10:00 pm
Tuesday, June 01, 2004
Give Me Sight
Must be a dozen times today already.
NJS
6/01/2004 10:34:00 pm
I Had A Happy War
This message is not flagged. [ Flag Message - Mark as Unread ]
Date: Tue, 1 Jun 2004 18:47:25 +0100 (BST)
From: "******* *****" <******@yahoo.co.uk> Add to Address Book
Subject: fuck you
To: nick_southall@stylusmagazine.com
i just wanted to say that you have absolutely no taste in music and your are a git.bellx1 are a brillant band and you should listen to damien rice's album before you knock him.basically go to hell and burn.why don't you read what other reviews think of bellx1 and seriously re-evaluate you taste and view on music you dumb twat.
NJS
6/01/2004 07:16:00 pm
///:
NJS
6/01/2004 01:09:00 pm
She Can't Be Found
NJS
6/01/2004 12:38:00 pm
Dressing For The Evening
I am the victim of a seemingly coordinated barrage of abuse from Bell X1 fans. Well, I've had two emails and someone's written a nasty comment about me at the offending review. I am, it's fair to say, underwhelmed. It's not even as if I properly slagged it, I just said it was boring. I believe it's being re-released, maybe this is something to do with it.
In this line of 'work' one is called upon to listen to a great many records one would not normally listen to, including dull-as-ditchwater Irish indierock anthems. So, you know, arsed. That people get so upset about a review of a record suggests they should really find better things to do.
NJS
6/01/2004 12:22:00 pm
Back To The Wind
NJS
6/01/2004 11:37:00 am
Closed For Business
NJS
6/01/2004 11:25:00 am
Did You Ever Hear The One?
NJS
6/01/2004 11:21:00 am
Through The Wire
NJS
6/01/2004 11:20:00 am
Vertraue Mir
NJS
6/01/2004 11:15:00 am
///:
Dustsucker has arrived.
NJS
6/01/2004 08:40:00 am
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