Totally Wired

 ...And here's my other review in the latest Nightshift, a more traditional gig write-up.

CRANDLE/ LEE SWITZER-WOOLF/ PLAGUE ARISH, ALL WILL BE WIRED, Library, 14/7/23 

Plague Arish is standing in at late notice, and whilst his improvised noise is a substantially more abstract and aggressive proposition than the rest of the line-up, he admirably doesn’t try to temper his material to mollify the small crowd, and dives straight in with some distorted buzzing stutters like a crossed-line conversation between Mr Punch and a robotic auctioneer. Crouched on the floor behind a jumble of devices in a voluminous black hoody and looking like Satan’s Little Helper, Plague Arish takes us on a sonic journey through digital waves crashing on a modem shore, rain that rusts itself as it falls, and the Metatron with nagging heartburn...or, if you’re less fanciful, a whole bunch of skreeps and blatters. Whatever it is, it sounds good (or occasionally horrible, which is, we suspect, the point). 

Like a grandmother advising you take your coat off indoors or you won’t feel the benefit later, Lee Switzer-Woolf could not have asked for a better contrast to bring out the melancholic delicacy of his songs. Built from a sparse palette of acoustic guitar, hissing drum machine, and spindly vocals, his songs cast a bittersweet spell which recalls Arab Strap at their least beered-up and potty-mouthed.  One track features a seasick loop which sounds like 20% of a RZA beat and a mordant spoken tale of a decaying relationship something like Croydon’s Superman Revenge Squad, but is immediately followed by a chirpy pop rhythm which could have been used by Tiffany. A surprisingly varied, but consistently enthralling set. 

If David Lynch ever managed a wedding band, they’d sound like Crandle. The duo turn their keyboard, tremulous vintage guitar tones, and cheesy programmed drums to a wide range of covers, moving from Shakira to Shania Twain via Alex Chilton and Leonard Cohen. They play these pocket torch songs like a Kinder Egg Chris Isaak and a Happy Meal Lana Del Rey, and if this might not be a set to shift anyone’s musical paradigms it’s certainly reason to shuffle some shoe leather, which is more than enough on a Friday night. 

Sonny Delight

I have two reviews in the latest Nightshift. This one was supposed to be for next month, but the editor asked for 200 words on deadline day to fill a gap, so in I went.  It truly is a cracking EP, seek it out.

MID AIR – THERE'S A SON (self-release) Well, this is a gem. There’s A Son might tell of someone “tongue-tied and compromised” who fails to ever fully connect, but the song hits the emotive bullseye, with a lilting and cultured melancholy like the R.E.M. of “Sweetness Follows” - imagine the weepy emoji carved meticulously onto age-varnished mahogany and you might catch the elegantly misty-eyed impression. Barney Morse-Brown from Duotone adds cello, which is as near as one can get to a kitemark for sophisticated music in Oxford. The closely twined lead vocals hang suspended in an amniotic pool of soft synth and stately guitar, but “On a Distant Shore” gives their lush sound a clearer setting, atop an unhurried urbane countrified riff that’s a tasty double portion of classic Fleetwood Mac (hold the cocaine). “Corpse in the Copse” might look like Elf on the Shelf for baby goths, but it has a breezy folk darkness as if someone described Nick Cave's “Where The Wild Roses Grow” to All About Eve then pressed record. The tinkling piano might edge a step too far towards the paddock of prettiness on this one, but this debut EP is hugely promising overall.

A Spanner & Their Works

You're not really supposed to read these bits, this isn't actually a blog, by any meaningful definition.  Good, that's that sorted, then.

ANOHNI & THE JOHNSONS – MY BACK WAS A BRIDGE FOR YOU TO CROSS (Rough Trade)  

The highlight of Julian Schnabel’s film of Lou Reed performing the entirety of his classic album Berlin is the luminous vocal on 'Candy Says' by Antony (as ANOHNI was known at the time). At the end of a light and quavering but surprisingly sinewy reading, Reed holds ANOHNI with a long appreciative gaze, allowing a fraction of a smile to brush his lips - which for that uneffusive old boulder was the equivalent of a 21-gun salute. The respect between the two musicians is highlighted by 'Sliver Of Ice', which is based on one of the last conversation Reed had with ANOHNI, in which he told her of the beautiful intensity of elementary experiences at life’s end. As ANOHNI puts it, “the simplest sensations had begun to feel almost rapturous; a carer had placed a shard of ice on his tongue one day and it was such a sweet and unbelievable feeling that it caused him to weep with gratitude”.  Over the sort of warm jazzy haze, you might find in the Elysian Fields Holiday Inn, ANOHNI’s delicate croon captures the experience with Hemingway bluntness: “A taste of water on my tongue, it was cool, it was good”. 'Go Ahead', the track immediately preceding this, makes a sonic nod to Lou Reed, visceral squeals of guitar noise threatening to engulf a sparse stately clutch of chords. The vocals, a parody of rock which would feel far more at home over a NWOBHM canter than this NYC noise edifice, scamper with deliberate awkwardness across the top. No wonder the track lasts only 90 seconds, any longer and the tensions in the song might yank it apart.  

Despite this pairing, Lou Reed is far from this album’s primary reference point. Instead, ANOHNI’s strong but spindly voice, and many of the lush arrangements, will recall that breed of vintage soul vocalists who balance suave sophistication with gut-wrenching emotion: think Smokey Robinson, Al Gren and, especially Marvin Gaye. 'Why Am I Alive Now' captures the essence of Gaye’s classic, What’s Going On, the gorgeous syrupy vocals, the shimmering strings and the hazy vibraphone managing to communicate cosy safety and self-critical uncertainty at once. 

ANOHNI’s voice has always been a glorious thing, with the lopsided, stumbling beauty of an hours-old foal or a butterfly slowly unfurling from the cocoon, but My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross is filled with lovely complementary arrangements, like the tiny flute phrases in 'Can’t' that melt away like ice on the tongue. The track has flavours of the well-bred soul of the 90s, urbane if not quite urban, and one might draw a line to Erykah Badu, D’Angelo, and even McAlmont & Butler...if you really get creative, 'Can’t' sounds like a slowed down and hollowed out version of Hue & Cry’s burnished yuppie pop. And just to prove that her voice is not just very pretty but also malleable, on 'Scapegoat' ANOHNI’s lines fracture as they drift into the distance like Horace Andy’s, and two registers appear to be in conversation on 'It’s My Fault', as on Cat Stevens’s 'Father & Son' (and the opening line “I didn’t do it, but I know that I did something wrong” seems to paint ANOHNI as the direct inverse of Shaggy). 

Divas and talent show judges spend whole careers selling the concept of “good” singing, a dead-eyed and lead-footed virtuosity which flattens all compositions and makes a mockery of interpreting a lyric. Although there are a couple of songs on this album which don’t set up camp in your memory, the vocals always astonish, from the sound of Jeff Buckley floating on a soul bisque on 'It Must Change' to the greasy gospel crescendo of 'Rest'. There’s one moment in this track where ANOHNI phrases the word “stone” in the zen-like line “Rest like a stone waits for the sun” with a micro-melisma, slingshotting swiftly across three notes: the phrasing is gorgeous, but it’s neither self-conscious nor showy, just a tiny perfect moment.  Lou Reed would doubtless give it a barely perceptible but heartfelt nod. 

 

 

 

 

The Pen Is Mightier

And here's your second review of the day, this time of a very famous international act  also worth listening to, but I suspect you know this already.

SWANS – THE BEGGAR (Mute) 

People used to say “Swans can break a man’s ear with just one beat of a drum”. At their inception, Michael Gira’s band of less-than-merry men were known for their sonic brutality, especially live, where many an exciting new career as a tinnitus-sufferer began. The addition of singer/keyboardist Jarboe heralded a new melodic sensibility, but the underlying aggression remained, a misanthropic sonic gall hidden below the sweetly tuneful surface. When the band reformed in 2010, after 13 years of silence, their sound was a little different, more spacious and subtle. A Swans album was still intense, but it was more often the intensity of a cold unwavering stare than of a spittle-flecked harangue. The Beggar, their sixteenth studio album, makes good use of the quietly ardent tone, and whilst listening is intentionally oppressive, it’s like the insidious continual whisper of conscience rather than the brimstone sermon, and even when songs reach a clangourous attack they tend to build frog-boilingly slowly from hushed beginnings. 

This is the case form the very outset, 'The Parasite' opening with 6 chilly, spare guitar notes which sound like the start of Ennio Morricone’s theme to a new Dollars film set in purgatory, before building to a stentorian drone to leave us eight and a half minutes later trapped in a church organ with some wasps - and if you think eight and a half minutes is exhaustingly long for a track, then strap in! 'Michael Is Done' begins with barely voiced moth-wing string flutters and an oddly sprightly nursery rhyme melody before swelling slowly towards the sudden eruption of a Spector wall of sound, complete with rattled tambourine and girl-band backing vocals (incidentally, the Michael in question might be the apocalyptically battling archangel, rather than the lyricist, but regardless, “He’s the hate in the love […] his words are burnt meat” seems to sum up the Gira aesthetic). Even when tracks start off imposing, they tend to get even bigger and darker. Take the title track, which grows from a sinister bass groove to relentless slave-galley drums, but 'Ebbing' takes the bombastic biscuit and, despite its name, swells and waxes a folky little vocal melody to a crushing crescendo: this is the soundtrack to a short alternative version of The Wicker Man where the locals just decide to sacrifice themselves and the entire island ends up in flames.  

Essentially, The Beggar has two flavours, gliding between sweet and sour, heavenly and harrowing, or – to borrow from first two tracks’ titles – paradise and parasite. Variations of these  are mixed and swirled on the confusingly named 'The Beggar Lover (Three)' for a shade under 44 minutes. Such is the density of this fascinating collage that it would take an entire review of its own to cover, but in lieu of a map, here is a list of notable landmarks: a paranoid miasma of strings, like a particularly fretful Ligeti; sinisterly sepulchral tubular bells; a smooth voice-over actor intoning lines like “Its appetite is endless and will never be filled”, as if on a 1990s guide to setting up your expensive stereo in hell; a percussive flurry, like summer rain heard from inside a cello; a lead-footed industrial rhythm paired with luxuriant siren vocals; disconnected robot phonemes strangely reminiscent of Jean-Michael Jarre’s Zoolook; sub-aquatic trip-hop; a timpani duel; a kid singing playground classic 'This Old Man' and totally fucking it up.  

For all their power, sometimes Swans’ portentous bleakness can become a bit, you know, silly. It’s hard not to giggle when a zombie-Cohen croak repeats “come to me, feed on me” for 45 seconds straight. There are also times, such as the 60s garage chug of 'Los Angeles: City Of Death', or the stately chord progression and gospeloid choir of 'No More Of This', that edge towards a safe rock stodge, like Spiritualized’s blackened goth cousins. Some might wish for more of the pounding drums and hellish vocals of old, others might hope for more of the experimental blasted patchwork of 'The Beggar Lover (Three)', but the album succeeds best through its unwieldy, unmanageable length. They say Swans can break a man’s spirit with just two hours of unstinting grimness. 

Aired Broadcast

Two posts coming at you like Cleopatru (pardon my accent), today.  Here's the first, of local acts nobody's heard of, but they're wroth bending an ear towards.

IN-FLIGHT MOVIE/ JUNIPER NIGHTS/ TIGER MENDOZA, Oxfordshire Music Scene, Port Mahon, 3/6/23 

Ian De Quadros has his finger in so many pies Environmental Health probably keep a dossier on him. He’s worked with such a roster of people, as collaborator or remixer, that no two Tiger Mendoza gigs are the same, in terms of either line-up or style. Tonight, Ian is joined in person by Dan Clear on guitar - chunky chords, delicate picking, or righteous shredding, as required - and virtually by the fantastic vocals of Emma Hunter and Mike from The Deadbeat Apostles (whose chunk-hop soul-revue guest spot ‘Easy Tiger’ is equal parts Propellerheads, Gomez, and Blues Brothers). ‘Green Machine’ gets a more organic reading than usual with hints of Mike Oldfield, as well as reminding this old Oxford electronica head of The Evenings’ version of the Channel 4 News theme. You truly never know what you’ll get from a Tiger Mendoza gig...unless you count quality. 

Juniper Nights also raise eyebrows slightly, their latest incarnation having ditched most of the Radiohead moves for a blurry psych-indie sound that threatens to go stratospheric but never quite does, which we christen faux-gaze. This is not a criticism, though, and their way with a fuzzy groove is pleasing. ‘Stop Motion’ is the set highlight, a bonsai Foals tune anchored by bass which is somehow elastic and staccato at the same time. 

Pairing synths with live drums works so well, it’s a wonder it doesn’t happen more often. In-Flight Movie are an object lesson, melding the propulsive neon sheen of 80s Tangerine Deam to the long-fuse explosions of 65 Days Of Static. They have a track about the flight patterns of red kites, which is about the most perfect concept for Oxfordshire post-rock anyone could ever dream up. Immersive yet often slyly funky, this set is excellent. Perhaps the slow and overly reverbed vocals could be improved, their dour goth tempo often pulling against the John Carpenter purity of the sparse passages and the hyperactive percussive climaxes, but this is a minor quibble. In-Flight Movie are such a strong addition to Oxford’s scene that it’s surely only a matter of time before someone suggests they work with Tiger Mendoza. Oh, we just did.