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.