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.