O Positive

Not only was this a fantastic day of music, run by excellent people, the review was an absolute blast to write.

OH, COMMUNITY! FESTIVAL, Florence Park Community Centre, 7/11/21

Oh, yes please! This wonderful all-dayer is perfectly named, being not just a chance to catch some new music, but also an opportunity for the almost forgotten before-times practice of hanging out, chatting about sets, and buying merch from friendly faces. Fittingly, many performers are also present for the other acts, not least half of new duo The Dumplings, who runs the desk for the rest of the day. Their chirpy, punky bulletins are scrappier than Scrappy-Doo on Scrapheap Challenge, and they have a micro-song celebrating Divine Schism founder and local lynchpin Aiden Canaday: O, Captain! my Captain!

Fortitude Valley and Fightmilk are muscularly melodic indie bands providing tuneful oases early and late in the running order, the former giving classic jangle an invigorating shot of grunge-adjacent energy a la The Breeders, whilst the latter spring from the less theatrical end of Britpop, and balance serious lyrics with extra brut wryness between songs. Both have albums mere days old for sale: oh, don’t mind if we do...

Local favourite EB delivers her intriguing unrap in the hugest tinted glasses, like a cross between Su Pollard and Horatio Caine. Musically, though, she’s more a mixture of Peaches and Gwen Stefani, and “Rodeo Queen” manages to revel in the pleasures of urban pop whilst acting as feminist satire on the culture: O, tempora! O, mores! Yay Maria also rides the laptop rhythms, and if there’s sometimes more reverse reverb than songwriting on display, the set has the unpretentious cabaret vibe of early 80s underground New York. We imagine Grace Jones, Keith Haring and a pre-record deal Madonna bopping at the front: oh! you pretty things.

Chunky emo-flecked rockers Junk Whale deliver a strong set, too exciting for one reveller, who smashes the venue’s delightfully old-school mirrorball whilst leaping, fist-aloft, across the dancefloor: O Superman. Things calm down for Alice Hubble, a synth duo (meaning there are two members, but happily more than two synths) who proffer slow, bleakly buzzing but oddly euphoric songs in a style we christen Giorgio Moroser, making one want to become a heartsick cyborg: oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt.

Shake Chain’s set is approximately Birth Trauma: The Musical. Whilst the band plays the sort of taut, psych-fuelled aggression-rock that Fat White Family promised but never quite delivered, performance artist Kate Mahony crawls slowly from underneath the stage, wrapped in a coat, limbs sticking out like the Isle of Man flag gone Cthulhu. She slowly grows into an astonishing howling vortex of bemused rage which is half Chuck Schuldiner from Death, half Moaning Myrtle, and by the end she’s raging behind a Beuysian totem built from the venue’s furniture whilst the band imitates military munitions: oh! what a lovely war.

Only Codex Serafini could follow that, a quintet enacting high-octane ritualistic space jams in black masks and bright pink robes, like the Squid Game guards jamming after hours to exorcise the horrors they’ve witnessed.  This is as close to witchcraft as one can get with a saxophone: oh, oh, oh, it’s magic! And they evidently summoned something impossible from an indescribable dimension (or Amsterdam) in the shape of Personal Trainer, equal parts LCD Soundsystem, Talking Heads, funk revue, art happening, shirts-off hardcore communion, and pep rally. There are abstract passages suddenly coalescing into ultra-tight backing vocals, there’s a bassist on a singer’s shoulders, there’s percussion played standing on a table because...well, frankly, by this point, fuck “because”. Sounds like a horrible mess? O ye of little faith. And then, suddenly, we’re out in the strangely silent suburban streets on a chilly Sunday night, wondering when the next bus is: oh, Christ is that the time?

Revenge of the Seth

I've never been cock-a-hoop about Lakeman, likable chap though he is.  This album has not changed that, but the last track is absolutely lovely, so seek that out.

SETH LAKEMAN – MAKE YOUR MARK (Honour Oak Records)

“The pandemic gave me a real determination to come out musically stronger and I really dug deep into myself for this album”, says Seth Lakeman. “Being able to record and play with the band again was really quite spiritual.” Whilst COVID isolation has inspired a thousand musical projects, from lofi experiments, to baroque electronic confections, to self-exploratory introspective musings, to songs about how weird it was when you couldn’t even go down the pub, Lakeman is seemingly one of the few musicians who has responded to the lockdown months with the philosophy, “hell, let’s just write some big tunes then play them with a kick-arse band”. This honesty and likeable simplicity reflects what’s best about Make Your Mark, as well as informing the less enticing elements. 

It’s a cliché to liken a musician’s work to their birthplace, but these sturdy songs sound as though they’re built to stand tall and resilient in a buffeting Devon wind. These tracks are big-boned and sinewy, bold tunes that stride stoically where other folk artists might soar ostentatiously or trip along pertly – which must have been a change for Benji Kirkpatrick, best known for playing in Bellowhead, officially the cheekiest folk wink-droppers of their generation.  Incidentally, Kirkpatrick’s performances on chiming mandolin and other stringed instruments have an elegant directness that’s as liable to bring to mind early 90s Peter Buck as Simon Mayor or your favourite folkie.  But if one were to pick this band’s star it might just be Alex Hart, who adds backing vocals that temper and sweeten Lakeman’s clamorous lead, as demonstrated by the drone-driven "Love Will Still Remain", where she’s soft and sinuous on the verses, and icily imperative on the choruses.

"Bound To Someone" has a heart-tugging melody that recalls Christy Moore in intimate mood, and its opening “his face was rough and rugged/ Wild as a stirring breeze/ Hard as the granite clifftop” is typical of the album’s thematic thread of humanity living with – or against – nature. Swaying ballad "The Lark" celebrates the natural world, whilst the atmospheric "Shoals To Turn" is more explicitly conservationist, and more than one listener will interpret the album’s opening salvo, “Did you hear the final warning?/ Too late, too loud”, as having an apocalyptically ecological tone. A high point comes with The Giant, which uses the language of high myth and folk balladry to tell the story of a beached whale, and a concerted effort to save it, whisked along with one of Lakeman’s trademark rousing fiddle melodies. At the end the song gets misty-eyed about the good that can be found in people, remembering that “There are those that detest and deprave/ But there on the edge of the wave-torn rocks/ There were those with the power to save”. 

Elsewhere, the album moves from wearing its heart on its sleeve, to ripping that sleeve off and waving it aloft behind the barricades. "Side By Side" and "Underground" are both blood-stirring clarions, and if they lack a little subtlety, the energy is infectious. But the title track is an extended riff on Rakim’s claim that “it ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at”, which has the platitudinous feel of a hastily composed graduation speech, and the single "Higher We Aspire" is just a collection of somewhat tired saws. Top tip: your album should never have more than two lyrics that could be published on Facebook under a picture of a tai chi master silhouetted on a beach at sunset. The music can also sometimes tip into the banal, exhibiting the clumpy preachiness of worthy ‘80s rock - it’s not too hard to draw a line between "Side By Side" and John Farnham’s "You're The Voice"!

However, closing track "Constantly" dispels any such concerns. It’s a long and mournful night breeze of a song, promising that the narrator will continue to exist in streams, frosts and lonely hills. It may be a message from a departed loved one, a continuation of the naturalist theme, or the most beautiful adaptation of Ecclesiastes’ line “all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again” in two and half thousand years.

This Wheel Shan't Explode

Here's the latest musicOMH review.  Not a record to set any pulses aflame, to be honest (not least because pulses can't be set aflame, I now realise).  Mostly harmless.

YOUTH – SPINNING WHEEL (Youth Sounds/ Cadiz Entertainment)

Wait, just checking, this is Youth’s debut solo album?  Yes, this is musician and producer Martin “Youth” Glover’s first foray under his own name despite a career lasting over 40 years, that has taken in the monolithic rage of Killing Joke, dance euphoria with Blue Pearl, dub and Orbient soundscapes, acting as midwife to psy trance with Dragonfly Records, and creating pastel pop sketches with Paul McCartney in The Fireman.  And this album sounds like exactly none of these.  Wait, just checking, this is that Youth’s debut solo album, right?

The album was inspired by the 70s rock and pop that Youth consumed when, err, a youth, but for the most part these aren’t the primary reference that leaps to mind.  The title track and single has a misty folk-pop shimmer that resembles The Lilac Time, and a refrain that’s only a long flower-child hair’s breadth from "Instant Karma", and what this album most often sounds like is a smoky 90s studio-bound post-indie outfit playing with ideas from that moment where the 60s collapsed into the 70s.  This approach works best on "Pure", which boasts a somnolent plodding rhythm, ghostly swooping strings and a general wooziness that sounds like a sleepy young Ride swiping ideas from "Venus In Furs"; similarly, "Charlotte Says" starts - as the title might suggest - like a Lou Reed song, but one without the ornery gruffness, all edges being smoothed and all corners bevelled in a pleasing fashion.  This album works best at moments like this, sweet and soothing – not exactly ambient, but soft and comforting like a nest of scatter cushions.

"Sha La Laa I Love You" is the track that addresses the pre-punk musical landscape most obviously, celebrating the pubescent arms-aloft bubblegum singalongs of The Bay City Rollers from a knowing distance, and if it never quite manages to capture the melancholy undertow to pop nostalgia that Jarvis Cocker or Luke Haines might bring to the table, it’s an infectious little nod towards one of the few windows of pop history that has not undergone a major revival or reappraisal.  

There is a hint of the elegant patchouli waft of Tim Buckley or John Martyn around hippy ditties "The King Of The Losers" or "Hear The Dolphin"s, which float by relatively likably, but "Charcoal Man" attempts the full naïf nursery rhyme Syd Barrett approach, dealing with the titular rustic labourer living in a bag at the bottom of the garden and doling out folksy wisdom like a noble savage Cottingley fairy: despite a briefly intriguing "Mr Kite" circus interlude it ends up rather too feather-light, concluding tritely that people are lonely and that we’re all “prisoners of our luxury”.  The album’s only true nadir, though, is "Smiling", the sort of cheekily crappy demo doodle you’ll probably find at the far reaches of the recent multi-disc Let it Be package.  This is the only point on the album where there’s no evidence of a born producer’s sonic fingerprint, and even if some of the songs are thin and Youth’s voice more functional than flashy, there’s always a sonic warmth emanating from the speakers.

Spinning Wheel ends well with "Close My Eyes", a refined rootsy amble that sounds something like Noel Gallagher toying with unusually introspective lyrics, concluding with a nearly four-minute outro that builds on a single repeated phrase in a fashion that’s part "Hey Jude", part "Shang A Lang", and part "Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space".  Just before Youth and his melody disappear into the sunset, tartan scarf flapping the breeze, he promises a “dance together barefoot in the sand”.  Fair enough, but perhaps some of us would prefer another go at dancing naked in the rain, instead.

'Barny & The Jets

Here's another review for musicOHM, which you can spot in its natural habitat at https://www.musicomh.com/reviews/albums/damon-albarn-the-nearer-the-fountain-more-pure-the-stream-flows

Annoyingly, I didn't even get a download of these tracks, just a crappy secret streaming link, so now I have to work out whether to buy it or not.  I mean, it's definitely worth buying, I'm just being a diva.

DAMON ALBARN - THE NEARER THE FOUNTAIN, MORE PURE THE STREAM FLOWS (Transgressive)

Lawrence (Hayward) possibly has the strangest career trajectory of any British musician. Having started with Felt, a tremulous indie outfit exuding literate sensitivity whose ‘80s albums only sound more dingily fitting the more your old tapes warp and decay, he moved on to Denim, who traded in rinky-dink synthesised novelty songs about tampons and tinned vegetables. Nobody saw this coming. It’s like if Milan Kundera started writing for Modern Toss.

 But Lawrence’s path only stands out because the left turn was so sudden. Most musicians with a long career, assuming they don’t descend into self-parody or join the nostalgia treadmill, end up different from where they started, the metamorphosis is just more incremental. Damon Albarn’s development from bouncy mini-mod to plangent balladeer is not one that too many bowl-cut revellers leaping about to "There’s No Other Way" might have predicted – although the undoubted high point of Blur’s first album, the relentless weeping dirge of Sing, provides a small clue in retrospect.

The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows is a lovely album, and a big step forward from Albarn’s previous solo effort, Everyday Robots, which was pleasant but forgettable, and mostly noteworthy for its interesting samples. Fountain is like the morose ghost of that album, a collection of gloriously misty, chilly song skeletons that parade past without ever quite revealing their secrets. This is doubtless partly due to their genesis: these pieces, inspired by Icelandic geography – and you know that if this were a ‘90s Melody Maker review there’d be a picture captioned “Nice one, geyser” – were originally intended for an orchestral treatment, but the pandemic meant that they were realised with far simpler means. Closing track "Particles", for example, is an intimately mournful paean to someone unspecified over a frostily moonlit electric piano, which could almost have fit onto Paul Simon’s masterpiece of mid-thirties melancholy, Still Crazy After All These Years, and claims that “the particles are joyous as they alight on your skin”, like a surreal physicist’s version of The Carpenters’ "Close To You". At the other end of the record, the title track paints Damon as a crepuscular wraith weaving through a frozen surf drone, with some quite beautifully eerie Jarboe-style backing vocals.

Elsewhere the song structures are a fraction more fleshed out, from the brash bedroom Bond theme of single "Royal Morning Blue" to the bowties-undone late-night swing of "Darkness To Light", a sort of sad spectral cousin of "To The End". "Daft Wader" (yes, seriously) is the closest to an Everyday Robots piano ballad, but is invaded partway through by the relentless bleeping of the Reykjavik champion barcode-scanning team (possibly). It also features an inscrutable reference to “cross-dressers of these terrible roads”, and the lyrics on this album are poetically allusive, which is perhaps unsurprising as the title is cribbed from a poem by working-class Romantic visionary John Clare. One song opens in Borgesian style with the statement, “The tower of Montevideo has many rooms”, before describing a cat who “lies on the daybed and abandons the world as the hours slide off the page like clouds”, like a louche feline Byron. You have to admit, it’s a fair old way from “Popscene, alriiiiiight!”. 

The instrumentals are no less intriguing, "Giraffe Trumpet Sea" tumbling jazzy notes like a low-key Pat Metheny, and "Esja"’s wide-angled soundscape resembles mid-‘80s Tangerine Dream, whilst special mention must be made of "Combustion", which jumps unannounced from a groaning Penderecki string nightmare to a free jazz boogaloo in the disco of the damned. The album’s rhythms mostly come from the sort of antediluvian drum machine that can make all of two sounds, “pok” and “tss”. This is introduced in second track, "The Cormorant", which has a beat like Blur’s cheery "Lot 105", but where that was a bingo hall Bontempi shuffle, this is a cold constellation of keys and disconnected guitar gestures with the tiniest dub influence, like the revenant phantoms of the Twin Peaks road house band jamming after hours. 

The album isn’t perfect, and although Albarn’s vocals are well phrased and honest, they can occasionally puncture the atmosphere by coming off as wheedling - in another universe there’s a version of this record with Scott Walker on the mic, and it’s mind-blowing – but it’s an immersive, mysterious listen. We might have expected Albarn in his fifties to turn pop statesman and offer well behaved tunes on a grand piano, but instead we get fragile, autumnal isolationism...or “synthesizers in the rain”, as Lawrence might have put it. 

Justified & Enceinte

Two posts in one day.  But the reviews were written weeks apart.  So not that noteworthy.  Tum ti tum.

MOTHDROP/ GRAVID/ CHALK HORSES/ FIRE HEALER – Gravid, The Jericho, 25/9/21

Tonight’s gig is billed as “an evening of live psych”, but if psych to you this means tie-dye kaftans and songs about pixie hootenannies you’re liable to be going home to your toadstool glade unhappy.  Some define psychedelia as music that takes you to another place – although we might counter that this is what all music does, if it’s any cop.

Where Fire Healer take us is the turn of the 90s, probably watching the opener for Front 242 in their techno-friendly days, with some spacious grooves built on the sort of digidub basslines Youth might have had a Rizla-sticky hand in.  Although each track starts from a similar point, they extend their tendrils into different styles, from rink-dink spy theme organ, to a deformed cousin of “Misirlou” on a distorted mandolin, to a guttering torch song vocal.  It’s easy for this sort of live looping improvisation to be indulgent twaddle, but Fire Healer delivers a warmly charming set.

Chalk Horses are a more refined proposition, consisting of cello, bass, guitar and lush harmonised vocals over electronic backing tracks.  They lightly nod towards the post-club folktronica of Ultramarine, but their elegant chamber-pop sounds more like Waterson:Carthy as produced by White Town.  The first couple of numbers don’t always gel – which might be more to do with backing levels than performance – but they soon find a hypnotic space (or maybe they were always there, and we had to find our way in).  The limpid vocal are quite lovely, but the understated star is the guitar, and our notebook contains references as various as Fripp, Renbourn and highlife maestro Ebo Taylor.

Gig organisors Gravid are the most obviously psychedelic act on tonight, and yet the most straightforward.  Their chugging rock jalopy comes right at us down the centre lane, foglamps blinding and thick smoke belching behind (which might not all be from the exhaust).  It’s basically Hawkwind, but without the wind, and impossible to dislike.  On the downside, the keyboard-player is shockingly underused, and an attempt to slow things down becomes a Slack Sabbath jumble, but they end with an excellently taut Joy Division bulletin (of course, Joy Division were always a psych band, they just took us to Interzone, not the warlock’s pantry).

Techno artist Mothdrop has been DJing all night, but we’re treated to a brief live set in the crowd as the kit onstage is dismantled (neat logistics!).  There’s a crisp post-Detroit efficiency to the rhythms which reminds us of B12, but they build and mutate with lovely sound design, and some ultra-reverbed vocal howls stop the ambience getting too cosy.  As promised, this gig took us many places, but it finally takes us to a chair via the bar, just to get our breath back.

Genesis Exodus

Here's my second review for musicOMH.  I bloody love this record, and advise you to get it if you enjoy semi-abstract sonic collage...or even if you don't.  It was especially pleasing because I thought the album would be basically fine, based on the older Calix records I've heard.  You can read it in the wild here, https://www.musicomh.com/reviews/albums/mira-calix-absent-origin.

MIRA CALIX – ABSENT ORIGIN (Warp)

The story goes that in 1959 Brion Gysin declared literature to be “fifty years behind art”, before demonstrating the cut-up technique to an attentive William Burroughs.  But, if Gysin’s statement was true, music was only very slightly ahead in the race, and the technology allowing musique  concrète tape splicing was still shiny and fresh when Gysin was wielding his scalpel.  Fast forward a mere decade, though, and multitrack studio methodology meant that almost every recording was effectively a montage, and in our digital world it’s almost impossible to envision a music-making that doesn’t consist of placing discrete elements together.  For this new album, Mira Calix has studied fine art collagists to create a record from samples and fragments of previous projects that reinvigorates the concept of the audio collage in the age of drag-and-drop assemblage, and which is arguably their best work to date. 

Calix came to prominence when Warptonica was becoming a recognised series of gestures, a defined genre to be emulated, and revisiting their debut, 2000’s One To One, we find a series of IDM workouts which are adept and enjoyable, but hardly shocking: anyone with an I-Spy Book of Late 90s Electronica will be able to tick off Plaid tinkles, Autechre awkwardness and dark Aphex brooding before a few tracks have passed.  Absent Origin, on the other hand, is as idiosyncratic as it is immersive.  

Opener A Mark Of Resistance starts with tiny slaps and claps, moments of skin-on-skin contact that gradually increase in frequency like building rain heard inside a tent, before spoken or chanted samples are weaved over the top, in a manner that recalls the finger clicks and found fragments of Elizabeth Price’s Turner-winning video The Woolworth’s Choir Of 1979.  This sets the blueprint for the construction of the rest of the album – if techno can be thought of as having a grid structure, most of Absent Origin may be envisaged as a swarm.  It also introduces a concern with feminism - or at least strong female voices - expressed through the delightful contrast of the snippets “Her wounds came from the same source as her power”, “Free our sisters, free ourselves” and “Cross my path, your ass’ll get whipped!”

Although the album is best experienced as a single hour-long event, an aural pool in which to become submerged, there are myriad highlights.  Silence Is Silve introduces some delicately pretty piano amongst the found sounds, which is reminiscent of Anne Dudley’s work in The Art Of Noise, and also boasts scissor samples so gloriously crisp you worry your headphone lead might get cut (it’s tempting to think of these snips as Calix collecting her source material, and the duct tape unpeeling sounds on Fractions Fractured Factions showing how they got stuck together).  Bower Of Bliss pushes porn groans and a whirring mecha-snore into a blizzard of strings in a manner that is far from blissful, and is immediately balanced by Wooddrifts’ bucolic flute and archival description of an isolated creative hideaway.  A stately piece like An Infinite Thrum (Archipelago), which adds syllabic fragments and birdsong to strings in a way that recall 90s Balanescu Quartet is contrasted with  Transport Me, which seems to adapt Charles Ives’s compositional conceit of being equidistant between two marching bands, except that this time we’re hemmed in by five radio receivers, a New Orleans funeral march, a colliery silver band, an electro workout, and a beautifully fruity voice reading poetry (which might just be Edith Sitwell).  Oh, and someone recites some lyrics from Toni Basil’s 1982 hit Hey Mickey, just in case that melange sounds too predictable.

The only moments where this album falters are some instances where slightly more regimented rhythms are introduced, such as on There Is Always A Girl With A Secret and the wonderfully titled Like Jenga (Only It reaches All The Way To The Sky And It’s Made Of Knives): programmed or looped drums are so much a part of the lingua franca of contemporary popular music that it jars slightly when they are paired with more abstract material.  This is a minor criticism though, and by the time the melancholic Schoenberg soprano has drifted into the ether at the end of The Abandoned Colony Collapsed My World, you’ll be ready for a repeat listen – although you’ll hear so many different elements the second time round, you’ll wonder whether the album isn’t secretly mutating whilst your back’s turned.

Super Fly!

Here we go, this is my first review for a new editor.  I am now writing for musicOMH.  I can tell you that it's a good site, full of high quality writing and a broad spectrum of music (they have a classical reviewer, which I love); I can tell you that you know it's good because my Nutshaft chum Sam Shepherd has written there for years, and he's the one who proposed me as a new contributor; I can't tell you what OHM stands for, it seems to be a secret; I can tell you I always type OHM by mistake, given that this is a magazine I wrote for about 15 years ago.

You can read the review in it's original form at https://www.musicomh.com/reviews/albums/herbert-musca..and you probably should, I dare say it will help with advertising revenue or something.

HERBERT – MUSCA (Accidental Records)

Bad workmen blame their tools, but bad musicians celebrate theirs.  The longer someone tells you about the custom strings and hand-burnished finish on their guitar, or about how their modular synth set-up is 100% Soviet era technology from the Latvian state broadcaster, the less interesting their music tends to be.  A similar breed exists within field-sampling obsessives, who will proudly tell you how their entire sonic palette is sourced from a single turnip, before proceeding to play the most uninteresting chunks of generic techno.  The major exceptions to this rule have always been Matmos and Herbert, both of whom tend to apply rigid sound-sourcing strictures to their projects, but who deliver music that’s varied, thoughtful and – most importantly – actually good.

But whilst Matmos make twitchy, glitchy artcore, Herbert’s music has always had a warm melodic heart and at least one foot on the dancefloor, even when the sonic sources are making a high-concept political point (check the critique of industrialised food production on 2005’s Plat Du Jour).  Musca is the latest album in Herbert’s “domestic house” style – musca domestica is the scientific name for the common house fly, entomology fans – and utilises samples from the farm on which he lives, alongside real instruments and a raft of vocalists.  Of course, thousands of artists will have spent the last 18 months writing music about being stuck at home, but very few will have realised said music by banging bits of their actual house.  In doing so, Herbert may have produced the quintessential lockdown project

If this preamble brings visions of wonky lofi collages, however, the truth is that Musca is an album packed with wide-angled production, crisp sounds and clear, limpid vocal lines.  The truly impressive trick here is not that Herbert has managed to make a record from sounds including pigs snoring and foxes growling, but how quickly you forget all about it; the opening minute of slow gravel-crunching footsteps and distant birdsong is false advertising, and is soon replaced by a pulsating piece of ritualistic house with a sinisterly smouldering Massive Attack vocal, on Two Doors.  For this is an album, not of austere isolationist soundscapes or dreamy escapism, but well crafted songs, with a roster of strong, expressive singers (none of whom Herbert met before or during production, fascinatingly).  Highlights include Chain Reaction, which drapes an intermittent, sultry bass and rich, intimate vocals over a naggingly repeated little boing sound, which is probably what Clippy the paperclip sounded like in a fit of pique, and The Impossible, a tap-drip dub with snaky hollow percussion, sounding like an existentially troubled cousin of Björk’s Human Behaviour, that ends by slowly backing into an endless corridor of reverb (or maybe just the bathroom). 

Many of the tracks sound like putative club choons that were artfully kept from growing to full maturity, and at their best these bonsai bangers marry space and delicacy with vocals that are soulful but breathily intimate.  When Mel Uye-Parker sings “you’ve got to be somewhere, you’ve got to be here”, in another universe this is a euphoric refrain in a festival anthem, but in the context of social distancing it has an entirely different interpretation – especially when riding the sort of ersatz “snare” that sounds equally like someone hitting a cassette box with a biro and an excited locust.  Similarly, Siân Roseanna’s smooth croon that “a feeling like this always lasts” in Tell Me A Secret becomes rather less hedonistic when imagined as the mantra for lockdown week 37, the claustrophobic jitteriness exacerbated by a spiky rhythm that resembles some cutlery stuck in a tumble drier.

 There are moments when Musca loses this enticingly odd atmosphere, most notably a couple of piano jazz ballads which skirt perilously close to Diana Krall’s vanilla sophistication, and the album is definitely a little too long - then again, what could be more authentically part of the COVID experience than time seeming to drag occasionally? - but overall Musca is disarmingly intimate and intriguing.  The album ends with Gold Dust, a grinning Rhodes pop groove that surprises by going beyond the spare clarity of preceding tracks with a huge Nelson Riddle meets Quincy Jones brass arrangement.  Perhaps, to represent someone double-jabbed and off into the world again after so long in the house, the tentative, introspective songs have been joyously replaced by what sounds like something by Shirley Bassey...albeit with extra bass, naturally.

Being Pleasured Aurally

Here's my review for the latest Nightshift, the first to be available as a hard copy for over a year!  It's sincerely exciting and a little moving to have the scabrous Demo Dumper in print again, if for no other reason than so the unbelievers can burn it.

In other news, I will now be doing some reviews for a website.  My reviewing chum Sam Shepherd volunteered me, and I had to do a micro-application form in which I detailed my three favourite albums of the past 12 months.  There wasn't much science in it, but I thought they were fun little summaries, so as a bonus treat, here they are:

Oneohtrix Point Never – Magic Oneohtrix Point Never (Warp)

Vaporwave can be fun, but most of its creators seem to be trying to recapture the innocence of youth, and might be equally happy shutting down Ableton and joining the “who remembers Pyramints?” messageboards.  Whilst Daniel Lopatin’s mature masterpiece nods (sleepily) towards all the hypnagogic tropes – tape deck hum, VHS flicker, corporate ident synth – there’s a depth to the songwriting, which matches ornate pop with emotional  directness, half ELO and half double glazing ad jingles.  The radio dial-twirling concept might be played out as a way of structuring an album, but this parade of gaseous mini-epics is more like someone flipping through the Rolodex of your half-remembered dreams.  With some really nice DX7 noises over the top.

 

Dry Cleaning – New Long Leg (4AD)

Since punk, boredom has often been weaponised, so that a yawn is just a slower paced sneer.  What’s refreshing about Florence Shaw is her unconfrontationally bored delivery, somewhere between indolent and exhausted, too laconic to stretch as far as melodies, a suburban precinct sprechgesang celebrating the surreality of the mundane.  The mordantly funny non sequiturs in the lyric sheets read like Sleaford Mods if they responded to the modern world with wry defeatism rather than twitchy disgust.  It’s musically no slouch either, sparse hypnotic classic indie motifs riding elastic Steve Hanley/Peter Hook basslines off into the distance.

 

The Bug – Fire (Ninja Tune)

Sometimes, though, as well as the literate ennui you just want some righteous ire, and this album is nothing but sonic anger, sometimes smouldering and malevolent, sometimes spittle-lipped and raging.  There are some pandemic-flavoured statements, and a few allusions to global politics, but really it’s no more a meaningful dystopian satire than most black metal is a coherent deconstruction of Christian morality, it’s simply a celebration of fury.  Just check the track titles.  “Vexed”.  “War”.  “Hammer”.  “Fuck Off”.  Especially “Fuck Off”.  And while the rich roster of doom prophet vocalists rail, the tracks rumble and rasp, dense, deep and insistent, like geological klaxons.

ENJOYABLE LISTENS/ MOOGIEMAN/ THE MAY, All Will Be Well, Port Mahon, 28/8/21

 We talk about musicians “playing” a gig, but it’s quite rare that this implies a childlike experimental glee.  Crouched over an array of electronics that he admits he only partly understands, The May takes us down ludic alleyways of electronica, sometimes erudite in the vein of Orbital’s philosophy ‘n’ bass classic “Are We Here?”, sometimes much dumbasser with 90s beats and buzzing synthlines (one COVID-safe raver inadvertently giving us Altern8 flashbacks).  There’s a witty wastrel edge to The May, recalling obscure Planet Mu signing Tim Exile’s “nuisance gabbaret lounge”, and the whole thing is as much fun to watch as it apparently is to create.  All The May’s bleepy gear even comes in a little wagon, like he’s Linus from Peanuts off to Megadog.

 Seeing event host Moogieman solo is rare nowadays, although that was how we first encountered him.  Where he once wielded an acoustic and sang cheeky Radio 4 songs, he now has sparsely programmed electronics and intones sententiously.  A huge improvement, in short.  At times there’s a cosmic, consciousness-expanding feel to the words at odds with the deadpan delivery and minimal sonics – think Wilhelm Reich recited by Laurie Anderson – and one piece is what we imagine a Scientology induction is like, but the beating pop heart of metaphysical rant “Mr Curator” still shines through, the indie fanfare of the band version turned into a sleek melding of The Blue Aeroplanes and Suicide.

 Enjoyable Listens is Luke Duffett, his phone, and several hogsheads of cabaret showmanship.  He gyrates and sways like an Animatronic Bryan Ferry, and croons his poetic balladry in the style of Lloyd Cole or Tony Hadley (and even, at times, early Vic Reeves).  His songs are ostensibly simple fare to tug the hearts - and loins - of an audience raised on estate agent pop and John Hughes movies, but there’s an addictive passion to the performance, which takes place in the crowd as often as onstage, that reminds us of Jack Goldstein.  We even end up singing along to a Bonnie Tyler cover, which is only a step away from pier-end schlock, but that step has been so elegantly taken you could easily  miss how masterful Duffett’s performance is.  That’s the total eclipse of the art.

New Corvid Variant

Well, hi there.  Now that Nightshift is back!  back!!  BACK!!! (as Neil Tennant used to say), there should be regular monthly reviews up here again.  Two things to note, unrelated to this review:

1) In addition I have an, err, extra "writing credit" for this issue, having come up with the headline Pandemic's People for an article about acts that formed or started promoting themselves during lockdowns.  I'm pleased to note that they are all too young to get this joke.

2) I now see that the odd reviews I put up since the last Nightshift, which were done on another device, have come out all funny.  I was going to change the formatting, but decided to leave it, as a memorial to the COVID era.

Stay safe.

SEBASTIAN REYNOLDS – CROWS (Faith & Industry)

Ever since he was a Nord-wielding nipper, Sebastian Reynolds has been adding keyboards and electronics to some of Oxford’s most adventurous bands.  The likes of The Evenings, Keyboard Choir and Flights of Helios tempered their sonic expansiveness with a wry wink, perhaps even bordering on cabaret, but in recent years Reynolds work under his own name has been a more mature and muted affair, though retaining the joy in revelling in a great sound.  This latest piece, split into two parts, might be his best work yet.

The prelude is built on an introspective, snaking clarinet line, which sounds like Movietone’s Rachel Brook trying to capture the diaphanous breathiness of a shakuhachi, and under which Greig Stewart’s steady, insistent drums progress incessantly, bidding the image of a deep thinker wrestling with a koan whilst staring from a slow train at a mist-wreathed landscape (if not the theme to a Buddhist Bergerac).  The track proper ups the tempo, leading a portamento party into an electrified cage, whilst an Underworld-like synth lasers semi-randomly around a root tone, in a fashion which recalls Dead Cities era FSOL.  Two remixes complete the package, Pradit Saengkrai turning the solid rhythm into an elastic-legged lope, whilst L’Etranger transmutes the melancholic mistiness into the sort of brash drama that could be a UFC champ’s walk-on fanfare.  Forget the feel-good hit of the summer, this sinuous serving of emotional atmospherics could be the feel-conflicted hit of the autumn.  Nights are drawing in, close the curtains and get this on your stereo.

Comme une Tete Radiophonique

I described The Young Gods as "stadium" here.  It was pointed out to me that they don't fill stadiums.  But, I stabd by it as a descriptor of the broad strokes of the music I've heard.  Replce with "main stage" or something if you're a stickler for gate-size accuracy.

NOIR DESIR – DES VISAGES DES FIGURES (Barclay, 2001)

My first thought when playing this album was that it made me think of The Young Gods.
 
Actually, my honest first thought was that I thought this would have more of a world rock vibe, until I realised I was thinking of les Negresses Vertes.  Turns out that there was more than one band with a French colour in their name in the dustiest recesses of my consciousness.
 
Anyway, for those who don’t know, The Young Gods are a Swiss stadium industrial band, who are not hugely interesting, but probably decent enough propping up an early evening festival slot in Lucerne.  But in 2008 they released an album of acoustic recordings, including a rather excellent version of Suicide’s “Ghost Rider”, which suddenly made the band far more interesting (I’m pretty sure BradX made me aware of this record on the main site).  At its best, this album has the same impact, where tightly controlled, judiciously reined in, sotto voce playing adds wonder to some foursquare rock tunes.
 
Opener “L’Enfant Roi” is built on an riff which becomes far more engrossing played on an acoustic than it would fully amped, backed by some white noise effects which sound like wind on distant steppes. Similarly, the title track begins like the shy ghost of Radiohead inhabiting some folk buskers, before ushering in some mournful squeaky gate clarinet which reminds me of Mark Hollis’s self-titled LP.  “Son Style 2” is even more Radioheaded, a misty lead-footed guitar part playing behind intimate, perhaps even confessional vocals, which still carve out a rock shape, with shades of “Lucky” or “Exit Music (For a Film)”.
 
Sadly, “Son Style 1” is one of a few moments when the sound ramps up and we find ourselved in relatively uninteresting rock territory (it’s probably a few more hours in this Lucerne field before The Young Gods come on, is it too early for a beer?).  There are also a few instances where a nice organic dub groove – think Mezzanine era Massive Attack recreated in wickerwork – gets a bit too blustery and turns into 90s U2.
 
But, any wrong turns or lapses in rockist taste (foot in mouth, or foot on monitors, as applicable) are forgiven with the final track.  “L’Europe” is nigh on 24 minutes of hums, backwashing static, longwave tuning half-muted guitar chords and barely vocalised clarinet which slowly becomes distended until it’s a strange sort of restrained rap and a clinically castrated funk, all backed by eerie Twin Peaks woodwind and buzzing.  My GCSE French is nowhere near good enough to understand it all , though there’s a part about “le marmite de l’hermite” – and surely Hermit’s Casserole is a lost Canterbury prog act – and a detourned inspirational quote, “La vie commence maintenant...et maintenant...et maintenant”.  It all drifts away to leave what might be hand-drums and duduk at a neighbouring campfire.
 
My translation of the band’s name is Black Longing, which sounds pretty maleficent. Folk wisdom tells us that the devil has the best tunes, and that the devil is in the detail.  Extrapolate, and we can conclude the melodic magic on this LP happens in the sonic subtleties rather than the big gestures. 

Negu Technic

 

NEGU GORRIAK – GURE JARRERA (Esan Ozenki ,1991)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8SUNJIB6vU&t=1457s

If you only listen to one industrial hip-hop punk collage album in a language you can’t place this fortnight, make it this one.  
 
Or, I don’t know, a different one, I have no frame of reference.  But, regardless of a complete lack of context, this record is pretty much the distillation of energy in music, and as such is a wonderful ride. The opening is a one minute car crash of block-rocking beats, clunky samples and what might be a keening Armenian duduk.  There are a few of these little interludes in the album, and they’re surprisingly the most enjoyable parts.  Some of the edits are so cleaver-clumsy I often couldn’t tell whether I was listening to the album or whether a YouTube advert had cut in unceremoniously.
 
The proper songs (for a given value of “proper”) are huge chunky rockers with a post-electro beatbox framework, which fall somewhere between Big Audio Dynamite and Ministry with a manic punk gurn.  There are moments when I’m reminded of acts as disparate as early Beastie Boys, Rage Against The Machine, Aerosmith and EMF, but Negu Gorriak will never be mistaken for any of them, as they bundle frenetically into each track as if thjey have to get the record done before dinner burns.  Like many foundational punk and rap artists, it feels as though the itching desire to say something has over-ridden any concerns as musically bourgeois as second takes or edits.  Of course, I don’t know what it actually is they are saying, but we figure it’s mostly pointed, and someone or -thing is doubtless the target of the (admittedly blunt) sonic weaponry.  
 
There are times when the sloppiness is frustrating – bringing in the robo-vox from “O, Superman” for all of 3 seconds before abandoning it is particularly mystifying – and times when the songs are such dumbass rock generica it’s only the sonic rawness differentiating them from the soundtrack to any beery frat party, but the experience as a whole is galvanising, which is what so much popular music is ultimately all about.
 
Final track “Euskal Herri Nerea” is a surprisingly tight piece of rubber-bassed ska rock, as if to prove that they can do it by the book if they choose, they just have other things on their minds most of the time.  Well, fair enough, mark us down as convinced: Up the revolution!  Or down!  Or whatever it is we’re supposed to think!