Tun(e)s

Another record review for Nutshaft, and a pretty damn strong record it is to.  I'm looking forward to getting back to gig reviewing soon, though, I think I prefer that.

BARRELHAUS – AZIMUTH (self-release) 

If the riff is the basic building block of rock music, then Azimuth is a Legoland day pass. For their second album no-nonsense duo BarrelHaus have retained the rugged simplicity of their debut but branched out, so although this album is still built from big riffs on a foundation of bigger riffs held together with ostinato putty, there are a number of variations on display. So, whilst ‘GAD’ is a slouching Sabbath beast, it’s immediately followed by the high-octane punkabilly of ‘How Did You Die Today, My Dear?’. ‘Red Rag’ has a lazy mariachi lope which is balanced by ‘Ballad Of The Former Mariner’ and its playful QOTSA blues-suet stickiness. ‘Diet Cheese’ waddles like an overfed ZZ Top whereas the bright, trebly chords of the excellently named ‘Your Friends Don’t Have To Like Each Other’ take us on a sprightly dance – at least until the heady grunge chorus, which makes you want to don a greasy old TAD T-shirt. 

At a sliver over thirty minutes, Azimuth packs a lot into a small space, and is the sort of album you want to play again as soon as it’s finished (perhaps all those ruffs are coated in MSG). If there’s a downside it’s the lyrics, which are definitely not bad, but co-opt some pretty shopworn material - “It’s a game of give and take”, “Red rag to a bull”, “She doesn’t suffer fools” - but really the songs are just riff delivery systems, and it doesn’t matter what a track like ‘Down With His Ship’ is about, so long as the righteous bludgeoning anger is communicated. And did we mention the riffs?  

Young, Gifted, & Plaque

Another piece for my pal Russ's Lunchtime For The Wild Youth zine, this time focussing on records released in 1986.  You can buy the hard copy and read all the reviews at Merch | Lunchtime For The Wild Youth (bandcamp.com)

DR CALCULUS – DESIGNER BEATNIK (10 Records) 

Stephen Duffy is one of Britain’s most underrated songwriters. He may have found a late-career payday writing for Barenaked Ladies and Robbie Williams, but most of his work is unknown to the general public: a founder member of Duran Duran, he left a year before they signed to EMI, making him the yacht-rock Pete Best; as Tin Tin he had a couple of glossy pop hits with albums to follow, which are treasured by the popnoscenti but mostly forgotten; he’s made 12 albums with The Lilac Time, who in their late-80s heyday were a literate folk-pop outfit, a sort of Fairport Convention for polo-necked Lloyd Cole fans; he made a beautiful album of French cinema-influenced chamber-pop nostalgia which even a co-credit for Nigel Kennedy couldn’t convince punters to splash out on; and he was in Me Me Me, with Alex James and the drummer out of Elastica, although that’s an exception because it’s shite. 

But of all the obscurities in the Duffy back catalogue, none is less known and more deserving of love than Designer Beatnik, the sole album by Dr Calculus, a shockingly prescient chunk of ambient house funk pop collage surrealism which sounds so far ahead of its time, I had to double check it was actually released in 1986 (at which point I discovered some of it was recorded in 1984, and had to have a little sit down). This knowingly arty ecstasy-influenced soundscape – the back cover cheekily places “m.d.m.a.” after the titular doctor’s name – predates almost any piece of club music detournement you can think of, coming a year before The JAMs, and two years before any of Akin Fernandez’s Irdial Records acts, and a few years before The Orb hit their stride. Only the Situationist Synclavier* of The Art Of Noise is a true pop-angled experimental predecessor here, and the debt is clear from the style of the sleeve, which was designed by Stephen and his brother Nick (who is also in The Lilac Time, do try to keep up at the back). 

The 11 tracks generally fall into two camps, the strangely danceable and the proto-chillout. The former throws magpie lyrics or vocal samples over rectilinear electro drum machines and meaty horn parts, courtesy of members of Pigbag’s brass section, with a few psychedelic flourishes; the latter layers field recordings, woozy pitched percussion, and the sort of post-Miles doleful horn lines that would have made a 1993-vintage Wire reader drool, and they still sound contemporary today. ‘Moments of Being (Reprisal)’ lies somewhere between Penguin Cafe Orchestra and Global Communication and captures an extract from a chat with a bikini model talking about boredom and Special Brew, and the title track boasts a gorgeously striated trumpet with full-on phaser and what might be a couple of backpackers catching up in North Africa.  

But the album still finds time for oddities like ‘Man’, a loving parody of acid jazz before the genre really existed, and ‘Perfume from Spain’, a sleng teng rhythm in so many inverted commas it can barely stand up straight, with the poshest white girl rap imaginable - although it also features a verse by Junior Gee, one of the UK’s first rappers, whose 1983 track ‘Caveman Rock’ is a nice Newcleus-esque footnote in British hip-hop history. Oh, and the album’s lyrics, if that’s the right word, steal from Hamlet, invoke a yuppie eroticism with lines like “You are my neon love in the hot baths”, and revel in pop-art Burroughs non-sequiturs like “Sacred heartbeat outlaw.  I wanted to be a painter. Hello honey, I’m home”.  

If you want to hear an album that sounds as though it might have been made by some uber-trendy producer last month, whilst also capturing the open-eyed optimism of mainstream songwriters discovering cheap music technology in the 80s, seek out Designed Beatnik.  And remember, as ‘Dream Machine’ puts it, “the film begins when you leave the cinema” - which might be profound or a piss-take, you won’t be entirely sure. 

 

*AoN used a Fairlight, rather than a Synclavier, so far as I know, but why waste a nice snappy bit of alliteration? 

Double Single

Here's a review of an old band very definitely returning to form from the latest Nightshift. In the copy I said that this was a single and B-side, whereas it transpires it's 2 different singles released at once, which just seems stupid. The whole concept of a single is meaningless now, isn't it, so I've just left it as it was. Sue me.

SELF HELP – SPACEMAN (Self-released) 

When Self Help’s rhythm section left, we thought it was all over. Lizzie Couves (bass) and Silke Blansjaar (drums) brought such an enticing mixture of laidback swagger and insistent precision you weren’t sure whether the songs were slumping down in a pub booth like a tipsy friend or screaming at you like a square-bashing sergeant major. Perhaps it took a brief period for the band to settle in as a quintet, but this single is a joy, and as strong as anything they released with the old line-up.  

The title track is about the slow asphyxiation of childhood dreams in the vacuum of adult life, but its huge glam guitar and reverby 50s sci-fi effects still make you want to jump up and shake life by the lapels. Sean Cousins’s vocal is impassioned, but with a slightly dazed off-mic sound reminiscent of Prolapse, and the whole song sounds like it was recorded in the greasy kitchen of a dirty diner. 

The lyrics to ‘Enrage Engage’ ponder conspiracies and the future of tech in a pretty generic way, but the music is excellent, with sticky-burr synth tones teetering on the edge of atonal ugliness whilst the drums are crisp, and bright guitar chords slice like a sashimi chef’s knife. A flourish of indie-psych guitar and some snide vocal wah-wah lines have a hint of later Blur, but the track has a stoned wildness that’s more like Mudhoney. Whether your youthful aspirations are flourishing or mere desiccated memories, these tracks will make your life briefly brighter.