Apollo, Gee!

Two LFTWY retrospective reviews in quick succession. I think this one lands much better than the last.

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS - APPOLLO 18 (Elektra) 

Wackiness is a terrible curse. It took me a couple of exposures to Oxford's superlative dreamy folk-pop band Stornoway to realise how special they were, because the Grumbleweeds goof-off that is 'The Good Fish Guide' made me shy away instinctively. Whilst not taking yourself seriously is usually a good idea for band, if you look like you're in some benighted rag week you've gone too far. They Might Be Giants (hereinafter “TMBG”) have certainly skirted the precipice of "I'm mad, me" many times, but pull back at the last second. On Apollo 13 probably the closest to cringe  is 'Spider' a bit of throwaway stop-start mambo with samples from 70s TV staple Monkey, but even this is actually fun, and lasts less than a minute anyway. Elsewhere 'She's Actual Size' pastiches 40s gumshoe talk over a Harle-flavoured sophisticated sax duet, 'The Statue Got Me High' is 60s bop with lead-booted drums and some accordion, and 'Hypnotist of Ladies' is a great scuffed indie half-inch of the Bo Diddley beat.  

And then there's 'The Guitar' an odd detournement of 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ made famous by Tight Fit (though it was a cover of The Tokens (though this was based on ‘Wimoweh’ by Karl Denver (though this was a translation of Solomon Linda's 'Mbube' from 1939))). This is, apparently, in some way about space exploration, and this album was part of TMBG's deal as "musical ambassadors" for NASA in International Space Year: you have to assume that NASA was stiffed on the deal, because apart from a few randomly dropped terms like "constellation" and "space suit" this collection of new wave bounces and adult nursery rhymes won't be convincing anyone that their tax dollars are best spent on the final frontier.    

Although Apollo 18 didn't tell me anything about space, 'Mammal' is educational, and I certainly didn't know the words "monotreme" or "echidna" until I heard it. References often run quite deep in TMBG's little referential world - it was about 30 years after buying this album that I understood that the ocean creatures fighting in space on the front cover were a reference to a famous tableau in the American Museum of Natural History in New York (I learnt this from the film The Squid & The Whale, which is a miserable sketch of a miserable family arguing a lot and is best avoided - no wonder producer Wes Anderson now only makes films of expressionless ciphers interacting in airless beige and pastel anterooms). 

Amongst all this is 'Narrow Your Eyes' a deceptively serious and wonderful love and break-up song (cf "They'll Need A Crane' a few years earlier), which says a lot more about the complexities of relationships than the charmless divorce porn of The Squid & The Whale.  Seriously, it's a shit film, don't watch it.  Where were we?  Oh yes, Apollo 18. Musically there are plenty of TMBG tricks and techniques, with lots of chirpy pre-Beatles references to early rock, Tin Pan Alley and cheap musicals all squished together with the drums turned up so it sounds like a non-menacing Clinic, and typically very long multi-clause sentences spread over whole verses. Apollo 18 is the last the 'Rhythm Section Want Ad' albums, where the TMBG cobble tracks together with elementary drum machines and any muso pals who are kicking around, and interestingly their next album, John Henry, is a proper grown-up rock record with a permanent band.  It's good too, though it might be the last TMBG album you actually need to own.  

I probably have to mention 'Fingertips' here, an exhausting parade of micro-songs, pop jingles and single lines that sounds like an ADHD spin through a whole week of Radio 2 shows, but it’s worth it for the (possible) piss-take of Morrissey at the end. Oh yeah, I forgot the song 'Turn Around'. That one is a bit annoyingly wacky, sadly. Still, 17 out of 18 is a pretty great hit rate, and as ‘I Palindrome I’ begins with the words “Someday mother will die and I’ll get the money”, we can leave the album certain that there’s more on offer than zany games and carnival winks. 

Baby's Got The Blends

Another little summary for my friend Russ's Lunchtime For The Wild Youth zine, this time focussed on albums from 1991. I don't think I do a great job on this one, but it's true that the record is far better than it has any business being.

KRAFTWERK – THE MIX (EMI) 

There are many prodding poles used to nudge an artist over a contractual finish line: best-ofs, B-side collections, live sets, remix anthologies. But the least common is the rerecording of old material, often in a stripped back format, employed because brings the listener closer to the heart of the music [did you mean to type “costs very little to produce”?].  Kraftwerk are famous for many things, but producing one of the few artistically satisfying examples of the “new jog round old paddocks” genre is one of their least celebrated achievements. 

The band hadn’t released an album for 6 years when The Mix hit the shelves, an album of 11 classics – well, 10 if you admit that 'Dentaku' and 'Pocket Calculator' are the same song in different languages, and 8 if you’re prepared to note that 'Abzug' and 'Metal on Metal' are just bonus bits of 'Trans Europe Express' - given a shiny digital makeover. The tracks sound fantastic, all muscular and sleek, with a new techno heft not overpowering the crackly transistor bubblegum charm found in the originals. Some of the tracks cleave very closely to the original arrangements, with opener and lead single 'The Robots' being the familiar song wearing its big bot pants. The next track, 'Computerlove' is also pretty much in line with the old version in arrangement terms, but it’s encased in a burnished techno carapace owing a fair bit to Model 500 (which seems like a fair bout of influence exchange). One might argue that The Mix fills any sonic gaps in the original songs with electro-Polyfilla killing off the human heart that used to beat within, but if any band can make a virtue of soullessness, it’s Kraftwerk. 

The record is most fun when it throws in some new, and surprisingly playful, innovations. 'Pocket Calculator' hasn’t been playing long before it throws in some odd jazzy clusters of percussive buzzing synth notes, as if mecha-Cecil Taylor had dropped into the studio, and 'Homecomputer' opens up clean dubby chasms beneath that famous rising motif. Perhaps most noteworthy is the absurd drop into a three-register vocal break six and a half minutes into 'Autobahn' with cyborg trills that sound like an Italian opera troupe have all swallowed Stylophones. 

Astonishingly, not only is The Mix satisfying as an album in its own right, but it marked the point at which Kraftwerk essentially stopped writing new music and returned to their back catalogue in an inward-looking spiral that continues to this day, marking out an improbable space between heritage act and conceptual art: as the final track title has it, this is Music Non Stop, but also music with no new starts. 

 

This is the Title of the Review

 Below is a review. This is the introduction to the review.

MARY LATTIMORE/ WALT McCLEMENTS/ AFTER THE THOUGHT, Divine Schism, Common Ground, 15/9/24 

Matt from After The Thought’s strumming hand is attacking his guitar strings on ultra-Gedge setting, but the sounds in our ears don’t match the image. Instead of thrashed jangling chords, we get soft snowdrifts of glistening sound, an undulating, endless vista in which to get thoroughly lost for thirty minutes. Like a lot of the best longform drone music, nothing seems to be happening, but take your bearings every five minutes and you’ll find that the sonic landscape has utterly changed: sometimes there are thick low tones like a bank of shruti boxes playing at once, at other times the tones are brighter and more layered, and at one moment it sounds like a barbershop quartet surrounded by bees being pulled into a black hole. The set ends with a melancholic sample of World War I song ‘We’re Here Because We’re Here’, with a tune stolen from ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and the misty effect is pure Gavin Bryars. 

Walt McClements’s accordion produces similarly billowing waves, but the sound is more intense and dynamic, an array of peals highlighting overtones from all those free reeds. He also tends to cycle through stately funereal chords in a clearer way to Matt, as if Yann Tiersen had decided to try to become a one-man Silver Mt Zion. It’s a quite wonderful set, and the highlight comes when the LA-based musician picks up a trumpet to unfurl bold lines over the rich swell of his accordion buttons, which is simultaneously mournful, euphoric, and eerie, like a Badalamenti-Morricone showdown. 

He’s the perfect person to join harpist Mary Latimore on tour, as they both pit elegant delicacy against enveloping textures in their playing. Lattimore takes frequent momentary breaks from her technically impressive string plucking to toy with an effects box in her lap, and garnish the music with 57 varieties of pitch delay. It’s almost as if she’s seeing whether she can derail the beauty of her pieces with unexpected tweaks, and it’s surprisingly how often the music resembles 90s electronica, from the well-dressed arpeggios of New London School Of Electronics, to the wonky wobbles of Cylob. There is a danger that the lavishly applied FX might reduce everything to a small parade of tricks, but each time the set threatens to become samey, there's a new gem displayed, from the limpid loveliness of ‘For Scott Kelly, Returned To Earth’ to a final duet with McClements. Plus she was on Neil Halstead from Slowdive’s virtual pub quiz team, so she’s definitely cooler than anyone reading this. 

Supernormal 2024 Part 3

 Shocking material gets a far more original airing in Fish El Fish’s set in The Vortex, a blacked out, and sometimes unbearable stuffy stage hosting many multimedia shows. Accompanied by visceral collages of images from medical textbooks, and over rubbery squelches and thick gloopy effects, a pitched-down voice recites a barely comprehensible monologue dealing with corporeal disgust, sexual shame, and a shocking new interpretation of the children's TV show title Johnny Ball Reveals All [Can we check with Ginny Lemon’s lawyers before publication?]. Far from a harrowing experience, the set is hilarious, especially when the speaker sounds like Mark Radcliffe’s Fat Harry White persona stuck near an equine orgy in a traffic jam. Appealingly appalling. Other acts who harness the power of the Vortex’s large projection screen are Wojciech Rusin, whose digital animations of mutating classical architecture are joined by harp, contrabassoon and a mezzo singing parts that wouldn’t be out of place in a Handel opera, all of which are inevitably electronically fucked with, and Susannah Stark, capturing Sheila Chandra’s folk-drone vocal style alongside single accordion notes and hushed percussion beneath a huge abstraction monochrome drawing. But La Brea Pulpit work the venue the best in compete darkness except for two thin blue spotlights, making their oppressively complex, restless electronic noise all the more intense. If Space Invaders were filmed with the merciless detail of Saving Private Ryan’s opening scene, then cowering under one of those crumbling bombed bridges might sound exactly like this. 

Punk of course finds its place on the line-up, picks being Bristol’s Gimic, who bring a surprisingly groovy shimmy to artcore bludgeons, Fashion Tips’ Chicks On Speed energy, and the barely processable skree-treble wall of Cuntroaches, who destroy grindcore beats and Motörhead riffs with digital noise and whose version of ‘Happy Birthday’ makes Hendrix’s ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ sound like James Last. Some acts are punk in outlook rather than sound, notably Slagheap, a joyous quartet who can hardly play, but whose inept, barely formed songs have a weirdly cohesive pop centre, and whose lyrics about eating too much pie are worryingly relatable. Some very young children also bash out a clunky stumbling creche and burn clatter after the GLARC workshop, and they are already making improv jams twice as well as Al Karpenter, a band whose vacuous jumble of charmless noises and cool posturing quickly irritates.  

However, although a couple of acts gesture towards topics without expanding the discourse – sure, equality good, capitalism bad, but how about a tune? - there are very few missteps on the bill, and some towering highlights. Sister Punch is an indescribable piece of Commedia dell’Arse theatre in which a gone-to-seed Mario wrestles a slutty dogperson and bursts balloons, and Zohastre are drums, electronics, tape hiss through a wah-wah pedal, and an unnerving plastic owl – the part where it sounds like a hurdy-gurdy playing Underworld’s ‘Rez’ made us grin like fools. Also up there are Tristwych Y Fenywod, with misty and airy Welsh vocals, a tiny plucked dulcimer through delay, muddy dub bass and ‘Metal on Metal’ digital drums. Imagine Broadcast doing Clannad. Smote’s set builds from the machine-tooled repetition of Einstellung, through Can-tight grooves, to Pelican post-metal flourishes, and is bloody great. But perhaps the act we enjoy most is CHEWY SHE, who leap from a Hawkwind synth intro to ultra-tight Sparks-flavoured electro-disco, with impeccable choreography and even costume changes. Who’d have thought a pinnacle of Supernormal would be rehearsed, professional pop music? Even hardened alt-culture types can back look at their prior expectation at the end of this glorious weekend and say “Sorry, I haven’t a clue what this is”. 

Supernormal 2024 Part 2

 Acts stretching the definition of musical sonics are YOL, who simply rubs items against the floor to make squeaky gate/hiccupping chicken sounds whilst ranting about a “national bucket hat shortage” for 12 minutes (which is about 20 times better than you imagine), and Mosquito Farm, much of whose set involves bouncing balls into close-miked vessels on a jumble of retort stands - or more accurately, mostly missing – over clanky loops. It looks like a carney rube failing to win at an alchemist’s sideshow, and sounds like Tom Waits’s relaxation tape. The Thicket stage mostly hosts rituals and magical lectures this year, and whilst Janis & The Sonic Travellers’ performance – a kimchi recipe disguised as a seance, enlivened by La Monte Young violin spirals – is diverting, the area feels under utilised. Having said that, nipping over in the early evening on the dubious advice of a punter who claims that Dr Jerry Thackray (FKA journalist Everett True) was going to cover Fall songs there, we discover a deserted glade and the enchanting ambience of Matthew Olden’s sonic installation ‘The Irrepressible Force’, a computer-controlled mélange of drones and creaks; at Supernormal even a prank turns out to be an epiphany. 

Our time in Ipsden would not be complete without some free improv in the barn, the pick of which features Rachel Musson (sax), Mark Sanders (drums), and Matt Davis (trumpet), whose technique is less extended than elongated, playing through the spit valve and using a tambourine as a mute. 

Techno is well represented this year. Nkisi closes Friday’s live roster with what sounds like an 80s Doctor Who tension cue stretched out for an hour. We get turn of the millennium glitchy loops from Dangsha, squishing Mille Plateaux style clicks into thick, compacted, fuzzy minimal techno: Underfelt Resistance, anyone? Two consecutive sets are more danceable, the classic late-90s crusty style of Portugal’s excellently gurning Zancudo Berraco reminding us of Meat Beat Manifesto and the more urbane of Megadog’s regulars, whilst Rrose’s hypnotic rhythms are more sleek and inhuman. Rrose presumably took their name from Marcel Duchamp’s female alter-ego, proving that drag and high art have been connected for a long time, and there’s a strong queer cabaret element to this year’s line-up; if the frankly filthy Midgitte Bardot has the best name, Ginny Lemon reduces us to childish giggles, drawing us into the tent with a riff on Verka Serduchka’s Eurovision classic ‘Dancing Lasha Tumbai’, and keeping us in there dicking about like a hungover avant-Chuckle Brother. Their improbably funny rewriting of ‘Toxic’ about RuPaul has a “few legal edits”, and therefore is entirely composed of wordless mumbles. Lydia Lunch is less guarded in conversation, baldly calling Nick Cave a cunt, whilst dropping such nuggets as, “A nice clean set of balls goes a long way”. She’s an amusing X-rated raconteur, but her schtick is ultimately the rehearsed platitudes and self-caricature of more mainstream after-dinner speakers. 

You Know My Ipsden Lie

Supernormal is always fantastic, but this was one of the best. I very much hope it returns in 2025.

SUPERNORMAL, Braziers Park, 2-4/8/24 

The opening act at Supernormal is Spiritual Advisor & Nice Strangers, about which the programme states, “Sorry, I haven’t a clue what this is”. We can’t tell whether this is the compiler giving up, an obscure conceptual joke, or a hint that Graeme Garden will be doing some bucolic festival puns - “Bring me the hedge of Alfredo Garcia!” - but the fact that we considered all of these options and more proves the extent to which Supernormal sits outside the standard festival experience. If the average music weekender consists of acts trotting out their biggest hits, punters killing time until the headliners arrive, epic queues and agonising bar prices, then Supernormal is a communal experience in which performers and audiences mingle together without a sniff of a VIP area, and in which every change of act offers a surprise...not always a welcome one, mind, but that’s part of the fun. Connections can be drawn between acts all over the bill, so in true Supernormal spirit, this review will entirely ignore the running order. 

Shake Chain are a band we’ve seen many times in Oxford. In most environments the clear split between the band on stage playing excellently wiry post-punk and performance artist Kate Mahony doing some maggotty crawling around (or outside) the venue is shocking, but such is the semipermeable membrane between audience and performer at Supernormal, her brattish toddler presence in the crowd barely raises an eyebrow, though her mewling and puking vocals still sound great. Other acts who spurn the stage’s boundaries are Robyn Rocket, who strolls slowly round the field delivering soothing little delayed trumpet lines over ambient washes and susurrations and is probably what they play when the ECM office is hungover, and Maria Uzor, who spends a good percentage of her set dancing or kneeling in front of the stage. Her intriguing, bouncy songs have a pop heart, an experimental mind, and a raver’s sweaty trainers, as she co-opts a vintage Hoover synth sound and a digital tom rhythm resembling Raze’s ‘Break 4 Love’. Slimelord also make some classic genre nods, but not the ones we expect from the name: yes, they can churn out sludge passages, but underneath that they’re barely disguised death metallers, all cantering riffs, barked vocals, and a bassist whose windmilling hair gets caught on the Shed stage’s splintery roof. 

Connections to deeper traditions occur throughout the weekend, especially in those sets happening in or around Braziers House itself. Paul Dunmall’s solo sax set drops in the odd free improv sputter and squawk, but his fluent smiling lines sound more like Paul Desmond with the odd sheet of Coltrane sound, and his piece on soprano gestures towards Parkerish runs and eddies. Paddi Benson & Grace Lemon’s uilleann pipes duos, with a little rhythm guitar underpinning, were inspired by ballroom dances held in Bedlam Hospital, but are not wild or careening, instead inhabiting a lovely space between folk forms and cellular minimalism. We don’t have the expertise to state whether Jali Fily Cissokho’s Senegalese songs exist within any tradition, but we know that his kora playing is wonderful, spicing delicate cascades of notes with slashing chords. Yakka Doon plays pure 60s coffeehouse folk in the sitting room, and we imagine John Renbourn or Bert Jansch chiming in at any moment. An acapella number is especially beautiful, particularly as our position behind a piece of antique furniture means we can’t see anything, and it sounds like a tuneful ghost - “Show the spectre some affection”, as Leo Robinson notes in his modern day take on Harlem Rennaissance/beat jazz poetry. Isiah Hull delivers his writings alongside the band GG, who often sound like a stuttering Slint who can’t quite get started, and we christen the marriage of emotional verses and laissez-faire sonics “slachrymose”.  Wormhook also features spoken word and austere monastic singing, though phrases like “toad pulpit boil nexus” make for more dense texts, accompanied by a pseudo double bass made from a big branch and a length of rough hawser, which creates a powerful guttural rumble, but isn’t big on variation. Infinite Livez’ lyrics are poetic in spirit, but his delivery is soulful and looped, like an understated lofi Jamie Lidell, and his occasional flute invokes Rahsaan Roland Kirk. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Underdogma?

I go to Supernormal, the UK's best festival, in a few days, which is exciting.  Watch out for a review in a month or so. 

THE SUBTHEORY – SHARK TANK (self-release) 

Sometimes we reviewers get paranoid about only making comparisons with old music, but as this new album by The Subtheory makes lyrical references to both vintage Cypress Hill and DJ Shadow, we feel justified in looking to the 90s for touchstones. From the smoky Loop Guru tabla groove of ‘All Other Things Can Wait’ at one end, to the prowling Mezzanine bass of ‘The Wolf In The Fairytale’ at the other, this album masterfully nods towards trip-hop and downtempo classics from the dying days of the twentieth century. We can also pick out the cultured cool of Lamb on ‘Footprints’, a laconic rap on ‘Blessings and Lessons’ which embodies the unhurried mentor spirit of Faithless’s Maxi Jazz, and the after-hours-hip-hop-DJ-discovers-forgotten-spy-theme flavour of Portishead is captured immaculately on ‘Crown of Thorns’. 

But Shark Tank’s real victory is that it sounds like more than a list of impeccably curated reference points, and exhibits real character. A lot of this is down to the vocals of Cate Debu, a thistledown diva whose airy melancholia gives the songs depths that a thousand other chill-out acts wafting through chrome-and-velvet bars can only dream of. Guest vocalists lift the record to even greater heights, Pet Twin adding his introspective burr to the insidious snaky bass of ‘Song of the Damascene’ (which despite its title sounds less like a thunderbolt conversion and more like a lingering sense of dreadful doubt), whilst Emma Hunter’s unmistakable voice lends authority to the chorus of ‘The Sicilian Defence’. The Subtheory have licensed a lot of music to soundtracks, and perhaps there are one or two pieces here that are tastefully unobtrusive enough for a Netflix drama, but too smoothly polite for a proper listen, but this is a minor gripe: whether you lived through the 90s or have only spun the playlists, Shark Tank is both authentic and original, which is a tricky – or even Tricky – target to hit