It's Gone Over Your Head

There's a paywall on MusicOMH now, which I'm not all that happy about (though I dare say they need to pay the bills somehow, probably this is the future of the web, you've had your free fun).  But, it does at least mean there's some point to my posting my reviews here.

SCALPING – VOID (Houndstooth)

In 1991, Godflesh released 'Slavestate', a single which added a sample of Humanoid’s cyborg techno hit 'Stakker Humanoid' to their austere churncore. Justin Broadrick later noted, “We got some shit from people, but we also accessed a whole new audience”. It seems almost inconceivable now that there was a time when fans of leftfield rock were still suspicious of any electronics more complex than a thudding drum machine, and when anyone wishing to broaden the palette would be met with cries of “sell out!” (although, conversely in the wake of Madchester so many drab indie chancers were grabbing desperately at 808s that flicking swiftly through Melody Maker could leave you with “there’s always been a dance element in our music” inkily imprinted onto every finger). On their debut album, Bristol’s Scalping are forging a deep new sound which is a direct development of Broadrick’s sonic hybrid, but whereas 30 years ago metal and techno were welded brutally together to construct a clunky battletank of a sound, now the splicing happens at DNA level, creating something lithe, fleet-footed and constantly mutating. If Godflesh was Mechagodzilla, stomping inexorably over anything in its path, Scalping are the T-1000 Terminator, melting and reforming before your eyes, before delivering an equally deadly blow.

'Blood Club' exemplifies this approach, consisting of a blasted heath of wintery sound like something from the Isolationism compilation - a cherished moment of madness in which Virgin Records decided that their cosy Ambient compilation series had been selling so well, they’d follow it up with two and a half hours of aural bleakness compiled by Kevin Martin – across which an insistent ostinato flits intermittently, as if Aphex Twin’s 'Didgeridoo'were rushing through a wasteland on a speeding train. 'Caller Unknown' similarly has an acidically squelchy line which fights for breath on a roiling sea of guitar scuff, and there’s a wonderful struggle on this album between pure, clear electronic sounds, which one can imagine being made on huge banks of shiny sequenced devices flickering with one hundred red LEDs, and dirty, polluted industrial/metal sounds, all amp-squeal and gritty hum – although actually this album was produced under lockdown without the members ever inhabiting the same room.   

There is variety on display here, though, despite the intensity. 'Silhouettes' is a claustrophobic underpass chase scene; 'Cloak & Dagger' is a brighter, more insistent groove that sounds like the theme tune to the Hades remake of The Krypton Factor; and 'Flashforward' captures some reverse reverbed vocals that might recall parts of the first Future Sound Of London album. Only 'Desire' doesn’t quite convince, bringing in some mournful post-rock guitar which it never quite knows what to do with. But a pair of vocal tracks provide the focal points in Void’s sinister simmer. 'Remain In Stasis', featuring Grove, is a sprightly piece of apocalyptic preaching that bears a small resemblance to the foursquare surveillance funk of Tackhead (only far heavier), but even better is 'Tether', featuring Oakland rapper DAEMON, a slow, steady chant calling to mind a terrible antimatter Faithless (and if you can’t get no sleep, it won’t be because of club euphoria, but because you’re worried DAEMON is lurking under your bed).

If there is a small criticism of Void, it’s that certain parts sound interchangeable, and one crunchy bass riff or eerie knives-sharpened-in-a-deep-sewer guitar sound could be sliced from one track and dropped into another without anyone really noticing, but equally, this proves how cohesive the album is. Scalping have produced 35 minutes of vehemence and vigour that has enough depth to repay repeat listens. If 'Slavestate' was an industrial-dance crossover, this is more like a metal-techno crucifixion.

Give Me Vonnegut Reason

The editor of the MusicOMH website changed my score out of 5 for this review.  They do that a lot.  I don't mind, it's their site, but more importantly, I don't like the idea of giving a score, and do it grudgingly.  So, you can guess whether this was marked half a star up, or half a star down, if you want to.  Kills some time, eh.  The grave is on the horizon.

SPIRTUALIZED – EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL (Bella Union)

If you want to describe Spiritualized’s new album in one word – perhaps you’re playing a parlour game at the birthday of a broadsheet music reviewer, or talking to a fourteen-year-old who skips the “boring intro” on a ninety-second TikTok video – that word would be “layered”. Every song on Everything Was Beautiful is beautifully put together, and there always seems to be another part to discover, another sound to pick out of the dense arrangements, another overdub to unearth somewhere in the depths of the mix. The record is a minor miracle of construction, and you get the impression that every sound was percolating in Jason “J Spaceman” Pierce’s head Brian Wilson-style long before it was captured on tape (especially once you discover that this album uses material from eleven different studios plus Pierce’s home recordings). However, this intense layering is also the album’s Achilles heel, and there are times when the music feels over-rich and stodgy, like a nightmare where you’re trying to run but are mired ankle-deep in suet and old Rolling Stones records.

The cover features pharmacological art by Mark Farrow harking back directly to Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space – and why not, it is one of the greatest sleeves of the 1990s after all – and in the opening moments you might fear that this album is simply a direct beat-for-beat retread of Spiritualized’s most famous record, like a Tubular Bells II for the melancholically medicated: the album begins with a direct analogue to Ladies & Gentlemen’s title track, with a sultry female whispering the album’s title, some quiet space bleeps and one of those stately, Pachelbel-flavoured circling chord sequences that come with a strong whiff of pained self-pity. Thankfully, this is just to ease us in gently and the track soon shows its own character, ratcheting into a thunking, reverby hymnal paean like an overweight Phil Spector backing track, behind which a lovely miasma of strings swirls and eddies. The lyrics adapt the hoary old Brill building “I’ll be whatever you want” formula, with lines like “If you want a radio, I would be a radio for you”, which get the point across (although you can’t take this stuff seriously once you’ve heard The Divine Comedy’s parody on 'If...').

A good few years ago, in his movie column, Nick Lowe - no, not that one - posited that Hollywood scientists were hard at work, trying to create a film constructed entirely of endings. As well as turning out to be incredibly prescient of our era of multi-movie adaptations of single books, and apparently infinitely expanding Marvel narratives which constantly climax yet never actually conclude, it’s a handy description of the average Spiritualized track. Most of the songs on this album seem to exist purely as delivery systems for extended outros, from the Lou Reed chug of 'Best Thing You Never Had', with a delightful beery trombone solo, to the bluesy trudge of 'Let It Bleed', to the drunken duck sax blurt freak-out that constitutes two-thirds of 'The A Song (Laid In Your Arms)', and which sounds gloriously like three Art Ensemble Of Chicago tracks playing at once.  'Mainline', the album’s high-point, just sounds like a long coda to a song that’s been edited out, an organic and euphoric built on some simple melodic material including the delicious Beach Boys purr of a bass harmonica. 

The album’s title might reference “everything was beautiful and nothing hurt”, a line from Kurt Vonnegut’s pacifist sci-fi novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Whilst Vonnegut’s hero was “unstuck in time”, Spiritualized are very much the opposite, each song taking a fragment of pop history – a dewy-eyed Patsy Cline melody, a Velvets lick, a ‘70s gospel horn refrain – and sticking to it, repeating and developing it until the tape runs out (or the drugs wear off). It’s as strong an approach as it ever was, and if nothing on Everything Was Beautiful feels truly essential to anyone with the Spiritualized back catalogue, it’s also a glowing example of their aesthetic. As the Arvo Pärt strings and mournful tolling bell at the end of 'I’m Coming Home Again' fade away, you’ll be happy to go back and start listening to all these endings once again.

Thribbed for her Pleasure

When people die we often say they had a good innings.  It's a cricket analogy.  But, by extension, when someone dies at 17, we don't say they had a lacklustre innings.  When a baby does we don't all shout "out for a duck!", do we?  Double standards.

KIRAN LEONARD/ DEAR LAIKA/ AIDEN CANADAY, Divine Schism, Florence Park Community Centre, 6/3/22

Aiden Canaday, who is both opening act and part of the promotion team, explains the otherwise inscrutable ‘Colour of a Lion’ by noting that his songs are mostly about “people who I love who are dead”, making him the sentimental, symbolist  EJ Thribb. Delivered with a tentative, lightly quavering voice over guitar plucks, accordion wheezes or stabs at the venue’s janky old joanna, the songs might often seem undercooked, but deliver unexpected moments of beauty, and we’ll take that over practised consistency any day. All too swiftly, the set is over. So, farewell, then, Aiden. “I left out the chorus, because I don’t know how to play it,” that was your catchphrase.  

Two of Kiran Leonard’s Trespass On Foot band perform as Dear Laika before the main event. Their set enacts a battle between songwriting and production, light and melodic keyboard songs being subjected to the sorts of extreme delay, flutter, and distortion that make William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops sound like smooth lift Muzak. There’s a track that sounds like the wistful ghost of Laurie Anderson on a malfunctioning transistor radio, one that sounds like a cyborg choir singing John Tavener, and one that sounds like Aimee Mann produced by a puckish, shitfaced King Tubby. There are times when you wish that the treatments were less extreme, and times you fear the songs aren’t all strong enough to survive without them, but it’s hard not to love a piece that sounds like ‘Pyramid Song’ with random interventions by Vangelis (puckish and shit-faced, naturally).

The tones are more earthy for Leonard’s band, consisting of a trio of guitars, a cittern, and arco double bass. The opening is wonderful, a chamber Godspeed You Black Emperor! piece with frantically strummed chords coming in fizzing waves, like a spring tide filled with Alka-Seltzer. This is followed by almost whimsically abstract folk, in the vein of The Incredible String Band, before a third track comes in with a vocal line so strong and sinewy it could have been borrowed from sources as diverse as a sixteenth-century Norfolk crabber’s song to a lost Maxïmo Park single. The set is as eclectic as it is enthralling, with Leonard playing unusual but still folky guitar lines like a Vorticist Richard Thompson, and boasting a surprise bass solo that’s all gruff harmonics and seagull laments. By the time the night finishes with an epic, hypnotic track built on a simple bass motif that’s like a recreation of the Fire: Walk With Me pink room music recreated a at west country barndance, all you can do is close your eyes and sway like a loon.  So, farewell then, dignity...

Beauty & The Beats?

I don't like this album quite as much as the one in the last review.  And it is sometimes actively annoying.  but I do respect it despite this.  Or because.

WALT DISCO – UNLEARNING (Lucky Number)

Pop music has always been partly a visual medium. But whereas in the past fans of Soft Cell, one of Walt Disco’s shiny spiritual progenitors, would have had to rely on record sleeves, glossy magazine shots and the odd Top Of The Pops appearance to excite the eye, nowadays there are fans who consume all their music through YouTube and Vimeo, and to those people Walt Disco are, frankly, a gift. Pick a video at random, and the sextet are liable to be dolled up in some warpaint-smothered abstract glam, looking as though The Mighty Boosh’s Vince Noir had started managing a volleyball team. The sartorial influences are clear, from Bowie and Roxy Music (especially Eno, whose feather boa seems to have tickled vocalist James Potter in every shot), to New York Dolls and a whole roster of new romantics, and there’s a healthy post-gender sensibility at play: the new rule is, wear whatever you please...so long as it’s spectacular!

But for most of us, visuals will always take second place to the music no matter how much riotous fun they are, and it’s pleasing that, like the creators of the best queer pop throughout history, Walt Disco take the theatrical transgression beyond the dressing-up box and into the music. A proscenium archness is applied like thick greasepaint at every conceivable point. At its simplest, this means a camp thespian formalism to the performances. 'How Cool Are You?' opens with a sneering “la la la” refrain which could have backed the emcee from Cabaret, and the song is suitably world-weary and worldly -wise, rather cutely rhyming “leather clothes” with “clever pose”.  'Cut Your Hair' is a wonky new wave track from an alternative universe where gusty Duran Duran songs were backed by Oingo Boingo, and its performative bluster is essentially a weaponised version of parent-conusing in 'Oh! You Pretty Things', with the sparkle-barked throw-down “You say we're stupid, I say you're old/ Since when did you grow so stupidly cold?”.  The track has a scribbled little guitar solo, which is so drenched in post-production effects it owes more to Skrillex than Hendrix.

In this, it is typical of the whole album.  If Unlearning were a person there would be not one inch of natural flesh on display, everything is treated, tinted, tweaked and tucked.  'Selfish Lover' is a sheeny plastic banger blitzed by FX, a dizzying hi-NRG discollage of Sparks and Japan, whilst 'Be An Actor' has a mutant rubbery bass which could have come from My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, with an ultra-Bowie vocal (presumably the actor in question is cracked).  Whilst this can make for an intense, and intensely contemporary, album some of the ersatz sonics can grate, and the vocals sometimes leap from the studied and theatrical and land in the pantomime where even Adam Ant might start to consider reining it in – if you want to know what a wounded elk sounds like singing in the shower after a bottle of mescal, check out the vocal on 'Timeline', which honks out a preposterous torch song which isn’t a thousand curtain calls away from something like 'Please Release Me'.

Even in this, the album is knowing, marking the half-way point with an instrumental entr’acte entitled 'The Costume Change', and thereafter the tone is more refined (though no less tragic, as the blasted torch song 'Those Kept Close' can testify, with its autotuned cries of despair echoing in the background). The last two tracks on the album are amongst the most effective. 'Macilent' is a masterclass in camp dominion, a Sisters Of Mercy/Depeche Mode industro-clang, listening to which it is impossible not to visualise oil barrels being beaten in an aircraft hangar, before 'If I Had A Perfect Life' descends into the seventh circle of distraction, with a V/Vm damned piano leading the band of into the wings as the cosmic houselights come back up.  For some the relentless artificiality of this album will make it hard going, and is likely that Walt Disco will make better records, but as a debut this is assured, individual, and liable to incite a thousand arguments about teenage clothing choices. Like all the best pop music.

Oto Trader

I very much like this album.  I'm not even sure why.  I feel as though it should be annoying.  But it's not.  It's great.

DESTROYER - LABYRINTHITIS (Bella Union)

If you were half-listening to Destroyer’s thirteenth album, you’d think it was decent. It‘s relatively tuneful, and nods towards some very trendy mid-eighties production techniques, somewhat in the style of Cut Copy, with some bonus disco rhythms and Art of Noise chunky beats keeping the party perky. Yeah, well done; great job; let’s move on. The more attention you pay, however, the more you discover everything about this album is somehow delightfully wrong. The full listening experience is perplexing, intriguing, sometimes perhaps infuriating, but rarely less than intoxicating. 

Musically, all the individual elements make sense, but tend to be placed together with artful abandon, joints and seams left on display. The opening few seconds of the album are an absolute rhythmic car crash, before 'It’s In Your Heart Now' coalesces into a goth amble, melancholic synth pads wreathing everything in a thick fog, before a quietly euphoric Manzanera guitar soars in at the three-minute mark. June is even more off-kilter. It starts like a pastiche of an Alexander O’Neal jam, Dan Bejar’s vocal peeping through lush plastic foliage of syn-toms, slinky guitar and twinkling keys, with fragments of egregious slap bass popping up unexpectedly and unpredictable synth noises and muted trumpet bimble about in the middle distance; but the strangest element is a low fruity beat poet voice which is dropped in near the end, apparently in mid-sentence, with the kind of self-assured ham-fisted edit that Fall albums had whenever the producer let Mark E Smith near the mixing desk. 

Considering this knowing sonic confection, the vocal delivery is suitably arch. There are moments of simple, melodic intimacy, but these are generally balanced by a snide camp acidity, as if Colin Vearncombe from Black had been taken over by Quentin Crisp. On occasion an elegantly blasted romanticism a la Hefner can be discerned, but a more frequent reference point would be the ironic carnival patter of Dave Couse from A House (but with extra irony). Strangest of all is the theatrically arcane intonation of lead single 'Tintoretto, It’s For You', which opens with the hammy exclamation “Do you remember the mythic beast?”, like we’re watching the Aphrodite’s Child panto: this is Bejar as trickster imp, who will ask you three riddles, and pick your pockets whilst you consider the answers.

It’s lyrically where this album is most original and idiosyncratic, though.  Sententious quips like “You’d pay good money for a million dollar view” could have come from the pen of Art Brut’s Eddie Argos, whereas poetic, painterly images such as “You lose your umbrella to the sideways rain” are more like extracts from The Blue Aeroplanes’ spidery notebooks. Elsewhere you’ll find gnostic nonsense, and the koans of potty-mouthed Zen masters: on how many albums cold you learn both that “Time and space combine and remain meaningless” and “Snow angles are just fucking idiots”? Typically the title track, where you might expect to find answers, is an instrumental, a lovely snaking synth bass overlaid with a collage of repitched vocal fragments and wordless child samples, sounding like both Boards of Canada and Jean-Michel Jarre’s best, though least known, album Zoolook.

The album ends beautifully. 'The States' is all misty-eyed keyboards and bouncy drums like The Beloved without the 3am ecstasy glow, or forgotten ‘80s act Kon Kan without the wacky-uncle wink, but the last two and a half minutes consist solely of echoing distorted notes stretching back into an extreme De Chirico perspective. Just when you think this is the end, 'The Last Song' arrives, a little ditty with the facepaint sincerity Lou Reed managed on Goodnight Ladies. It’s lovely and moving even as it apparently says nothing. The subject of the song moves to LA and we see them “fake say” hello and goodbye, but it’s hard to say whether the track is snide or affectionate. Maybe it’s both - after all, as June notes, “You have to look at it from all angles, says the Cubist judge”.

The title Labyrinthitis might bring to mind a vast maze, which is fitting because this album gets more mystifying the deeper in you venture. It’s actually a disease of the inner ear, which is even more apposite: this music gets into your head and makes you feel dizzy.