I'm Bringing Flexi Back

An unusual one today, it's a brief piece I wrote for a my friend Russell's zine, Lunchtime for the Wild Youth (https://lunchtimeforthewildyouth.bandcamp.com/). The issue is all about covermounts, so I wrote this.  Turns out that everyone else pretty much wrote "this free tape changed my life" type stuff, so I'm glad I took a different tack.  Why not buy a copy of one of Russ's mags?  I recommend Ghost Zine, written - or scribbled - by his son, it's a work of art.

The Oinkletts – The Oink Song/ Uncle Pigg – Oink Rap (Free with Oink! Issue 1)

 I was always the ideal editor’s target market, one who would scour the newsagent shelves every week and month and buy any magazine with a sufficiently tempting cover CD (or tape, in earlier days).  I still have reams of these, from dodgy old Q compilations, kept because of a ropy R.E.M. live track, to a surprisingly diverse range of films included with Sunday papers in the noughties, to a complete set of The Wire’s Tapper CDs.

The first ever covermount I got, though, was not a tape or CD but a flexidisc, a concept already pretty dead by 1986 when I bought issue 1 of puerile periodical Oink!, aged 10 (for those who don’t know, Oink! was to Viz what Grange Hill was to The Sweeney).  Unsurprisingly, the disc flexed one too many times well over 30 years ago, so I shall write this review from memory; sure, it’s bound to be on YouTube, but searching the music out seems the wrong way to approach this little piece of pink ephemera (I think the disc was a shade of porcine pink, but that might be the first of many mnemonic fumbles in this article).

Side A was a scrawny nasal little punk pop smirk which I’m surprised to discover wasn’t actually called ‘Poo Poo Tinkle Tinkle Parp Parp Oink’, as this was both the main refrain and what we listeners were encouraged to sing when life rubbed us up the wrong way.  I now see that it was heavily indebted to The Goons’ ‘Ying Tong Iddle I Po’, though it lacked most of the charm.  I heard later that it was written and performed by Marc Riley, so now I know what he did between being in The Fall and turning up on Radio 5 and launching his DJ career; he’s allowed a lacuna of crap between these two, I think you’ll agree.  I remember wanting to like this song, but actually finding it acutely annoying.  The nadir was the verse about teachers, stating

They make me wear school uniform

And stop me chewing gum,

I wish I were a bumblebee,

I’d sting them on their....elbow!

 Even at this tender age, I was aware that the verse-end non-rhyme swear-dodge was a hackneyed ruse deserving of my finest supercilious sneer.  Also I didn’t like chewing gum.  Also, I had heard that bumblebees die when they sting you, so pre-Lard’s staff-room victory would be pyrrhic at best.  Nowadays I’d doubtless link the adenoidal singalong to the work of Frank Sidebottom, though this is notably less really really fantastic.

 The B-side – or were both tracks on one side?  Yes, that seems more likely - was far superior, a chunkily minimal drum-machine clunk which was effectively a rewrite of Grandmaster Flash’s ‘The Message’, though if I knew this at the time I certainly only had the loosest conception of the original.  “Don’t eat pigs cos they’re made from ham,” advises Uncle Pigg (the fictional editor of the comic), “eat the nasty butcher man”.  The leap from vegetarianism to cannibalism in a single couplet amused my half-formed mind, as did the authoritative vocal presence.  Although I reasoned that people eat pigs precisely because they’re made from ham, and so was not swayed by this argument, the track was a hit on the Dansette-style turntable my parents had found in the attic for me. 

 This cheap and brash little artefact is not one that I advise you to seek out, more a sonic Kinder toy than a forgotten treasure, but even the terrible music we listened to when young shapes us.  Tellingly, I can still sing at least half of the lyrics from memory.  “I’ll sing it till I stop”, as ‘The Oink Song’ claimed in its dying moments.  Quite zen, really.  For a record made by a pig.

A Lass & A Lack

Well, here I go again trying to see if I can review a bad record.  I've always found EBTG very boring indeed, at best forgettable, at worst egregiously anonymous, but...this album is really strong.  Whatever they've been doing for the last 24 years was obviously the right thing.

EVERYTHING BUT THE GIRL – FUSE (Buzzin’ Fly)

 Back in the 90s, a review proposed that what made Pulp Fiction great was, not the playfully intertwined plots, the grittily witty dialogue, or Samuel L Jackson’s righteous sideburns, but the fact that it made a 50s-themed diner look cool, when everyone knows they’re rubbish. Perhaps that was not such a cute trick as inspiring schoolkids to quote Ezekiel, but it’s a good point. You get a similar feeling with 'Karaoke', the elegant closer of this neat ten-track comeback album, which paints a karaoke bar as a glorious hub of emotionally healing communion and creativity, an artistic hothouse, the Bauhaus with backing tracks. Our actual experience might tell us that these places are either drably depressing or boozily brash, but it crumbles in the face of Tracey Thorn’s cool certainty. Elsewhere on the album there are apotheoses of musical micro-events, from an after-hours lock-in session in a tiny venue on 'Run A Red Light' to a euphoric get-together on 'No One Knows We’re Dancing'. This latter track beautifully paints characters from a dancefloor demimonde with a few spare biographical strokes, and it’s easy to visualise the arrival of Fabio, “parking tickets litter his Fiat Cinquecento” (perhaps EBTG were reminded of urbane soul boy “Guy from Camden Town” sketched in 'Five Get Over Excited' by fellow Hullensians The Housemartins).

This celebration of minuscule moments might not convince if it weren’t done with such elegant sang froid. Thorn’s vocals on this album are possibly her best ever, a detached jazz-smoke contralto that sounds like a wryly introspective Sade, or Swing Out Sister with a doctorate. Her soft whispers are like someone rustling a manila envelope, and she makes dignified hushed pronouncements like Lana Del Rey as suburban Brit – she also enunciates immaculately thoughout, so play this album to your crotchety great-uncle who says that you can’t understand a word that pop singers are saying nowadays. But despite the attention given to the vocal delivery and the knottily poetic lyrics – “It’s the bar-take, not the door-split” is like something from early Simon Armitage - the album isn’t precious, adding some deliberately jarring Burial-style effects, coating Thorn in digital tape wobbles and pitch shifts. This is EBTG’s first album for 24 years, and it sounds as though the fuzzy vocal line to 'Interior Space' has been stored under the bed the whole time, gathering dust, pet hair and the odd spider corpse. There’s a chilly delicacy to much of this album, with 'Lost'’s slow layers of pseudo-gamelan synth lines coming off like Japan if they’d never unlocked the dressing-up box, and 'Interior Space' hiding an icy starkness in the centre of almost cheesily emotional piano, just as Angelo Badalamenti did on the Twin Peaks soundtrack.

Of course, this is an EBTG album, not a experimental electro-chanson song cycle, and there are radio-friendly tracks too. Anyone who has ever sat string at their overpriced bottle of beer in a shiny bar whilst 'Missing' wafted politely across the room will find tracks like 'Time And Time Again' and 'Forever' rather too nice. The first three track titles – 'Nothing Left To Lose', 'Run A Red light', 'Caution To The Wind' – seem to promise the kind of Dionysian rock abandon that would have Lemmy edging surreptitiously towards the exit, but Fuse could comfortably be played in any high street coffee shop without causing anyone to splutter into their cappuccino foam. Perhaps counter-intuitively, the more prominent the beats, the less exciting the song. Bu this is Fuse’s secret victory: if you don’t pay attention, it’s harmless background fluff, but if you concentrate there are mysteries and subtleties to discover that will demand repeated listens...and also, tuneful though they may be, these spare and spacious laments would be bloody hard to pull off at karaoke.

 

 

 

 

 

Hydrophobia HiFi

I've been writing for MusicOMH for about 2 years no, and I've not yet given a bad review, mostly because I choose acts I expect to be good, or who at least have enough of a recognised style that I thought I'd essentially enjoy what they did.  I'm trying, essentially, to engineer a situation wherein I write a bad review, I tried picking some random techno, which turned out to be rather good, so then I picked this album, just because the band had a name that made me laugh.  I expected ugly brash punk.  That is not what I got...

LANA DEL RABIES – STEAGA BEATA (Gilongo Records)

Over the past decade or so, there’s been a trend for act names to be cheeky puns on existing musicians. Joanna Gruesome, Chet Faker, Bob Vylan, Ceilidh Minogue, Alice Blooper...there are so many out there that it’s hard to know which one of those we just made up. Phoenix-based vocalist, producer, and multimedia artist Sam An, AKA Lana Del Rabies, must have one of the funniest monikers on offer, but their searing third album is certainly not a joke. Steaga Beata translates as “blessed witch”, and whilst there’s definitely magic in the music, you won’t leave this hour-long assault feeling consecrated or holy.

'Prayer Of Consequence' opens with an ominous swelling wave of eerily breathy tones and funereal synthesised cellos – it’s like The Shining’s slo-mo tsunami of blood rolling down the corridors of 4AD’s offices rather than The Overlook – before a chugging locomotive of the damned drum pattern takes over (the devil may be evil, but at least his trains run on time). This Hades Express beat comes back with redoubled energy on 'A Plague', a gristly slab of industrial menace which holds hints of Scott Walker’s late meat-punching vintage. There are times when the claustrophobic intensity and indecipherable wails of tracks like 'Master' or 'Mother' come off like an anti-matter Cocteau Twins, but the real touchstone for this album is Lingua Ignota’s howled catharsis. Steaga Beata may not quite scale the heights of Lingua Ignota’s Caligula, but its anguished ugly beauty is a very worthy companion piece. 'Grace The Teacher' offers a comparatively lighter touch, however, balanced between sweetness and despair as Leyland Kirby-style piano and strings get lost in a misty vortex of pining ghosts.  

There are occasions when the album’s dedication to bleakness can become predictable, when another track of droning churns, chilling screams and insidious whispers can leave you with 'Apocalypse Fatigue', as one of the track names puts it. 'Hallowed Is The Earth' provides a welcome change of pace and a deep trip-hop vibe, with a seasick sonic lurch in place of a bassline, recalling some of Tricky’s most esoteric productions, but loses its way halfway through, settling on the crackles and murmurs we’ve already heard. But even if the album doesn’t stray far from its discomfort zone, the sound is rarely less than powerful. 'Forgive' closes the album with an unusually clear and simple vocal melody – it almost sounds like a doubly dolorous Dolores O’Riordan – and beneath the scuzzy synthesised burr there’s a solemn celebration in the repeated refrain. If the album is a horrific film of conflict and destruction, this is the hopeful tone of the end credits.  Let’s hope for a sequel soon.