Sub Pub

I've just recently taken delivery of the last 3 Lunchtime For The Wild Youth annual-review editions, so expect to see some late-90s action here in the coming days.

dEUS – IN A BAR, UNDER THE SEA (Island) 

Having read a fair few of these zines now, I’m interested in how many people write about albums that seem to encapsulate a moment of their lives, or which got them through some difficult period. I’ve come to the realisation that I don’t really listen to music like that, even though listening to music is a huge part of my life. Firstly, I’ve never been one to cane a record, and I almost never listen to the same thing over and over – at least, not since I was about 13 and didn’t have many records to choose from. Music is tied to certain memories simply by ubiquity, rather than quality. For example, if I think of dance music from my university days, I don’t come up with the scattershot genius of Aphex’s I Care Because You Do, or the clinical precision of Photek’s Modus Operandi, but the cheeseball Clayderman trance of ‘Children’ by Robert Miles, or that Armand Van Helden remix of ‘Professional Widow’ by Tori Amos (although, listening again just now, this isn’t bad, even though the vocal samples sound like they’re saying “Honey, bring me toast to my lips, he’s got a big dick”...or is this an aural Rorschach test which is revealing something about my deepest thoughts?). 

So, for this issue I thought I’d review an album that, far from being a key milestone in my life or one of the greatest records ever heard, is one I can barely remember. dEUS – note to self, don’t start a sentence with the band name again, because the word processor doesn’t like the lower-case initial  – were a Belgian band who, in one of those odd quirks, had a minor hit in the music press with the lopsided Beefheartian indie of ‘Suds and Soda’ - it didn’t break the top 40, but go far more radio play and kudos than such a strange little European single would normally. I say “were a Belgian band”, but I now discover I should have typed “are a Belgian band”, as they’re still going, and the last five of their eight - eight! - albums have been number one in their home charts. Well, fair play. 

In A Bar, Under The Sea was their second album, and I bought it when it was released, although I’m not sure why: maybe HMV in Oxford had a big display for it, or something. I recall playing it a few times, liking it, but then basically putting it on the shelf and forgetting about it. So, here’s to the first spin in...who knows how long? What I discover is that it’s a very low-key album, from the tiny lofi scrap that is the opening track, to the mumbled lyrics, and after-hours jazz stylings of some of the numbers. The overall vibe is of busked ditties and organic hip-hop grooves, and good touchstones would be Beck’s music from the same period, Money Mark’s stoned organ doodles, or that brief era of low-slung beats on Folk Implosion songs. You’re far more likely to nod your head to this album than lose your mind to it. I have also decided that my lack of memory of the album is rather less about the quality of my memory than the understated nature of the music: ‘Serpentine’ is a sort of R.E.M. nursery rhyme with some nice pizzicato strings but it drifts by unobtrusively, ‘A Shocking Lack Thereof’ has lovely cheap metallophone elements sprinkled across it but underneath is a greyscale bluesy grumble, and ‘Disappointed In The Sun’ is a slightly wry piano tune sounding like a shy, awkward Ben Folds. 

Unusually, I find I like the singles the most. ‘Theme From Turnpike’ has some scuzzy jazz loops and comes off like a trip-hop Tom Waits, and this is followed on the LP by ‘Little Arithmetics’, a lovely tuneful little lope with a tiny hint of The Byrds, which is hugely catchy. ‘Roses’ starts off somnolently, as if it were a tentatively strummed demo of something designed to emulate Nirvana’s ‘Something In The Way’, but slowly builds a head of grungy steam until it begins to resemble Sonic Youth from a few years earlier. Only ‘Fell Off The Floor, Man’ doesn’t quite deliver, being a strange bit of disco at which different sonic elements have been tossed apparently without plan programme. Listening to this CD provides and important reminder: not every album needs to be earth-shattering. I enjoyed a lot of this, even if only a percentage of my attention was held at certain points. Not every record needs to be Rubber Soul, or Hex Enduction Hour, or The Goldberg Variations (Gould for me, thanks, if you’re offering), sometimes something lighter or slighter will work its own magic. Hell, I might even seek out dEUS’s 2023 album How To Replace It, stranger things have happened. 

The Final Chow Down

This is an unusual review for two reasons.  Firstly, I've reviewed something incredibly buzzy which is getting yards of column inches, and secondly I think it's pretty damned great. So, here you go, yet another review telling you that this album is ace and the band are awesome...I bet it's the only one to refer to Pauline epistles, mind.

THE LAST DINNER PARTY – PRELUDE TO ECSTASY (Island) 

The Last Dinner Party have not been known, over the past year or so, for reticence. And now, to join their well-stocked wardrobe, bulging book of press cuttings and fast-filling trophy cabinet, they’ve made an album which sounds huge, with an ornate flamboyance decorating pop hooks from the top drawer (of the dressing up box). How many other debut albums open with a full-on overture? This one starts with a lavish orchestral confection, equal parts Gershwin and Shostakovich, with a little hint of golden-age Hollywood glamour. The album’s title is probably not a reference to Steely Dan’s 1973 classic Countdown To Ecstasy, but in some ways The Last Dinner Party resemble Becker and Fagen’s sophistirock outfit, adding curlicues and complexities to popular song forms – although on evidence to date it's clear the former would be more fun to hang out with in the studio. 

Sonically, this album is varied but invariably bold, gesturing camply towards a raft of classic pop styles. 'Burn Alive' is blousy panto goth, 'The Feminine Urge' is pitched on the sturdiest of Spector drum patterns, and 'Caesar On The TV Screen' is blasted epic glam a la Marc Almond and its late 60s soul-pop shuffle could have served Amy Winehouse well (not to mention some gratuitous but delicious timpani rolls). 'Sinner' starts with an insistent piano which Aurora Nishevsky should really perform with a stick-on Ron Mael ‘tache, so readily does it evoke vintage Sparks, but blossoms into a controlled fruitiness with the flavour of Roxy Music’s late – and under-rated – albums. There’s a light Cardigans slinkiness to 'My Lady of Mercy', which suddenly bursts into a Broadway stoner metal chorus – quite fittingly, as the Cardigans were always unabashed Sabbath heads.  

In a blizzard of reference points, the band always sound cohesive, not just a list of educated nods, the music impeccably arranged and with true depth to the writing. Take 'On Our Side', with a tinkling piano, slow stately chords, and a high, yearning vocal line that isn’t far from the Coldplay of 'Fix You', but there are definite differences. Firstly, Coldplay don’t tend to end an epic ballad with an 80-second ambient hug sounding like a windchime being sucked down a cloud tunnel, but also, whereas Chris Martin’s lyrics are almost pathologically generic, where every stone is accompanied by a bone, and anything cold is simultaneously old, this album is incredibly well read, and wears its learning as lightly as the lace frill around a flouncy cuff. Literary and classical allusions are tossed in without smug fanfare. When a song claims of the titular 'Beautiful Boy' that “he launches ships”, we think of Marlowe’s Helen of Troy; when 'The Feminine Urge' proclaims “I am dark red liver stretched out on a rock” the image of Prometheus is raised; and 'Caesar On A TV Screen'’s “When I was a child, I never felt like a child, I felt like an emperor” must have been copped from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthian Girl Bosses.  

The lyrics are consistently port-rich in allusion and emotional drama. Grab words from across the album and you’ll find lust, envy, pray, sin, altar, lust (again) - it’s basically The Best Catholic Guilt Album In The World...Ever! But there is great humour in the writing too, the offhand wit of the playfully bookish. When 'Burn Alive' assures us “there is candlewax melting in my veins” it’s a bohemian thirst trap for sixth-formers existing on a diet of snakebite and Brontë, whereas the wryly bleak yet urbane statement “I'm falling like the leaves in Leningrad” is part Kate Bush, part Mark Corrigan. 

Admittedly, 'Portrait Of A Dead Girl' might have been better served by a rawer recording more in line with the band’s celebrated live shows than the frilly pomp of this version, and one too many slightly blustery guitar solos might have been shoehorned in, but widescreen ambitions should never be criticised, and as Prelude To Ecstasy ends with 'Mirror', a Cheryl Cole torch song with Nick Cave intensity and Bond-theme bombast, you have to conclude that this album is big, and it is clever. 

 

Percolator, With Jools Holland

 I love Sparks...but not so much that I can't sneak a Fall reference into the first line of a review!

SPARKS – THE GIRL IS CRYING IN HER LATTE (Island) 

Rather like Mark E Smith stating that he kept The Fall “at arm’s length”, Sparks have never fully revealed themselves. They are arch and artificial, but rarely resort to wielding the smug and clumsy tool of pure irony. Partly this is because of the music, an improbable triangulation between art rock, bubblegum, and Broadway, which is playground simple and post-doc complex by turns, but it’s also down to the performative vocal delivery: if Bowie is grandly theatrical, Russell Mael is more like the kid in the school production of King Lear who grins and waves at his mum. Tonal ambiguity is evident from the get-go on this album, it being impossible to decode whether the title track is a snide swipe at the urbane sad-gurl consumerist with Phoebe Bridgers on her AirPods, or a sympathetic lament that life is hard. 

A queue of identical weeping women stretching across Caffè Nero would make a good René Magritte painting, emotional and cold simultaneously, and this lightly unnerving atmosphere is reinforced by the surprisingly abrasive glitchtronica loop underpinning the bouncy melody, which could have been lifted from Fennesz, whilst 'Veronica Lake' boasts an undulating digidub pop rhythm which is pitched somewhere between Pole and Yello. Clearly, even after 50 years, Sparks are still expanding their palette, and though this is their first album on Island since the rollicking unglamorous glam of their mid-70s work, only 'Nothing Is As Good As They Say It Is' even slightly resembles that era, although it sounds more like They might Be Giants, with an ascending vocal line that recalls The Divine Comedy’s 'Everybody Knows (Except You)'. Incidentally, the song is about a 22-hour-old baby wanting to return to the womb because the world is rubbish – clearly you can become a sad boi/gurl before leaving the maternity unit.  

A strange subject for a pop tune this might be, but other tracks make this micro-vignette feel like a three-volume Wilkie Collins novel. 'Escalator' is tinny suburban Krautpop, and is written of the point of view of a commuter who sees a woman on an escalator then...doesn’t talk to her. It’s hardly 'Teenage Kicks'. 'A Love Story' has someone repeatedly ask someone politely to hold his place in a queue whilst he goes to score some dope for his girlfriend. It’s an unusual clash between middle-aged respectability and youthful hedonism, and a yobbish one-note keyboard part keeps barging into the bubbling synth backing, intimating that that the relationship is not healthy. There are plenty more pop concepts to be slyly detourned before the album is out: 'When You Leave' is about how much fun it will be when the boring guest goes, an inversion of the “get the party started” trope, making it the opposite of P!nk - presumably L!me Green - and 'Take Me For A Ride' twists the classic rock topics of fast drivin’ and law-breakin’ into harmless middle-class cosplay, expertly illustrated by a disconnected metal guitar smashing into skittish woodwinds direct from an MGM musical. 

'We Go Dancing' is the most gloriously unexpected musical gambit, a chunk of martial minimalism recalling Steve Martland or John Adams in his very fastest machine, which claims Kim Jong Un gets massed ranks to “dance” in formation at will because he’s the world’s best DJ (Run DMZ, if you will). Kim may be an easy, though valid, target for ridicule, but does the track draw comparisons between club music’s exhortations to dance and totalitarian commands? And, if it comes to that, does 'Gee, That Was Swell' intentionally nod toward the valedictory heroics of 'My Way' even as it becomes the first break-up song in history to conclude “Sorry, that didn’t work, but lovely knowing you, bye”? This album asks far more questions than it answers. 

Although The Girls Is Crying In Her Latte might not be quite the joyous nugget of recent peak, Lil’ Beethoven, it’s impressive that, on their 26th album, Sparks are incorporating new sounds and concepts, whilst till sounding exactly like themselves. They’re a band we should all embrace – at arm’s length, mind.