Fragmentating Rhythm

 Reviewed a mystery record. Really liked a mystery record. Everything's coming up Jazzhouse.

BEATS & PIECES BIG BAND – BIG IDEAS (Efpi Records) 

Three times in this zine I’ve reviewed, not my favourite album, but a record I’d recently bought and never heard before. I’m not sure why, but it’s either that I’m wary of the process of public self-curation and the ossification of critical canons, or it’s that choosing a record to review is much more hassle than actually reviewing it. But at least previously I’ve had some sort of leg-up. I reviewed an album I’d bought from a band I’d seen live, I reviewed an album by a band of whom I was aware, and even at my biggest reach I reviewed an album by someone I’d never heard of, but it was a tribute to Charlie Parker and I definitely know who he was. 

But this time I’m reviewing an album by Beats & Pieces Big Band, about whom I know nothing, on a label that is a new name to me, that I bought from the charity shop recently. I can’t empirically prove it, but I inferred it had been donated by the same person who’d donated CDs by Django Bates and Dave Douglas that I’d already stuck in the basket, so I took it.  What’s a quid, eh? 

In this case, it’s an excellent price, this is a very strong album. Big bands can be wonderful, but one thing they’re not traditionally associated with is variation. They can be huge, classy cruise liners, cutting elegantly through a calm sea of legato melody, they can be smokily sophisticated, puffing up scented billows of muted trumpet atop which singers in evening dress may float serenely, and they can be clanking jazz factories, steam pouring from every corner, baritone saxes skronking at right angles like loose pistons...but once they set up a sound, they usually stay there. Beats & Pieces go on unusual dynamic journeys, and we get this in the very first bars, ‘Bake’ opening with a brassy blast which immediately drops to a simple 4/4 drum pattern, which is soon joined by some crackly digital thunder – if it was just a loose lead on the bass it sounds great, so they were right to leave it in – and then suddenly we’re in a wah-wah a Rhodes playground which is pure 70s cop show (OK, OK, or 70s porn). This is followed by ‘Yafw (Part III)’ which is an odd name for a second track, but even more odd is the machine-tooled systems music piano part, which sounds like ‘Take 5’ recomposed by robot Steve Reich. The third track is ‘Three’ (makes more sense) which pulls the rug from beneath us entirely, a rambunctious opening dropping to a slow bass wander, with tiny insectile trumpet parts, before slowly building to a riotous conclusion. 

I won’t bore you with an equivalent play-by-play of every track, but there are certainly lots of different pieces stitched together by this band – and there a few beats too, ‘Elf’ leaning towards a New Orleans funk strut, and ‘Anymore’ alternating between thoughtful, limpid piano and a chunky groove which is approximately doom trip-hop. Perhaps the biggest surprise is ‘Broken’, the eighth and last track on the CD which begins with slow glacial tones like one of ECM’s most ambient releases (though less reverby, natch). Unexpectedly a vocal enters, though she doesn’t sit atop the band like Ella or Frank would, she’s hidden in the middle of the mix, her tone unassuming and reticent, like a ghost asking for directions. The end of the track drifts quietly away, dissipating like mist. What a lovely, rich album. And funnily enough I popped into a charity shop just yesterday, and found another Beast & Pieces Big Band CD, which I snapped up for 99p. It was released in 2015, so come back in a few months, you never know... 

The Foggy Foggy Duplicate

Another post already? Yep, and we're looking at 2011 this time. The year march onwards at a speed of 12:1.

ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER – REPLICA (Software) 

The irony of boundaries is that they look more logical the further away from them you are.  

Imagine someone being gutted at not being allowed to buy a single beer one day before their 18th birthday who would have shrugged 12 months before. By the same logic a hair metal band would be perfectly happy about what constitutes grindcore, whereas a Carcass acolyte might well laugh at you for suggesting that they should be filed under this heading, sniffily asking whether you’ve even heard of goregrind. Seems like the only thing more contentious than trying to define the stylistic edges of a genre is trying to pinpoint where it began. 

However, if you wanted to find one of the main tributaries that fed into what became known as vaporwave - God, how I hate leaving out that U, but I guess if there were ever a movement where tiny branding decisions were significant, vaporwave is it – watch a brief 2009 video by sunsetcorp, a YouTube account with a whole 8 videos to its name, entitled ‘Nobody Here’. It’s a tiny, misty loop of Chris De Burgh’s ‘Lady In Red’ accompanied by a video of a cheap feedback effect from the VHS era. It’s a beautiful piece of work, somehow heartbreaking because the source material is so hackneyed...but having said this, a fresh listen reveals that musically ‘Lady In Red’ is actually pretty great, though De Burgh’s vocal is pompous and preening, and the lyrics are trite (plus if he “hardly knows” the woman why is he surprised he’s “never seen” her looking so nice and so many people asking her to dance? Unless he’s a stalker. Which frankly I wouldn’t put past De Burgh (Legal note: I would put it past De Burgh)). It turns out that this video was the work of Daniel Lopatin, AKA Oneohtrix Point Never – I won’t tell you the derivation of this stupid name because it just makes it even stupider – and he released the audio with a generic matrix title on his 2010 album Chuck Person’s Eccojams Volume 1. This album effectively marked the dawn of vaporwave, though a thousand people will argue that I’ve got this wrong. From my own point of view, vaporwave is intriguing as it’s the first time a retro, nostalgia-driven cultural form was too recent for me: yes, I recognised what they were talking about, but I never experienced it. I didn’t use CD-ROMs at school, I’ve never played Ecco The Dolphin. I understood the glances backwards, but I didn’t feel them (the –algia suffix in “nostalgia” denotes pain, but my memories of the mid-90s Gap website, or whatever, are fully anaesthetised). 

Anyway, although the Chuck Person release got lots of trendy column inches (digital or otherwise) it was the following year’s Replica that made more of an impact (everything’s relative, mind, Lopatin is hardly Bono). It is primarily built on small, looped synth or piano elements, some of which are so short I’m certain they are supposed to evoke skipping CDs, enshrouded in slightly degraded tape sounds (though it’s all for textural effect, if you want to hear some true crumbling tape noise check out The Disintegration Loops by William Basinski from earlier in the millennium). Listening again now, I’m surprised at how lovely this album is, and it achieves something far beyond a knowing wink towards the reference points. 

Highpoints include the opener ‘Andro’ which features a tumble of percussion above a wistful fuzzy synth which sounds like the quiet intro to a happy hardcore banger, and as such is a little reminiscent of V/Vm’s Death of Rave project from a few years earlier; the minuscule fragments of Romantic piano that make up ‘Power of Persuasion’, which are overlaid by an epically melancholy Blade Runner synth; the big low vox-humana keys and loud crunchy eruptions of ‘Remember’, which sound like someone striking giant matches in a robot monastery; the title track’s little aspirated vocal sounds, which could equally be Ladysmith Black Mambazo or Rolf Harris; the little repeated moment in ‘Up’ which sounds like a snatch from a corporate ident, making us feel as though we’re digitally flying repeatedly between two vast chrome letters in a hangar made of clouds. If there’s a low point it’s the beat-em-up FX as semi-rhythmic percussion on ‘Child Soldier’, which become a tad annoying.  

The album ends with ‘Explain’, a pleasing group of FM-synthesis angels crooning. Eno’s first ambient album was subtitled Music for Airports, but this actually sounds like being stuck next to a tiny looping digital billboard in a busy duty-free perfume concession. Except, you know, really lovely. How Lopatin managed to take such annoyingly naff material and make it sing is the alchemical mystery at the heart of this record. This may be all tarnished rubbish, but I’ve never seen it shine so bright. 

It was amazing. 

 

 

 

 

 

Twinkle Pickers

Now that Nightshift has finished, I'm not really reviewing new records or gigs. I'm sure that something will arise to replace it, or I'll find another outlet, but in the interim all I'm writing is the retrospective's for LFTWY.  So here's one of them.

FUZZY LIGHTS – TWIN FEATHERS (Little Red Rabbit Records) 

I’m mystified when acts stick to a single format for releasing their material, and especially so when that format is vinyl. I like vinyl well enough, but what I like less is spending £25 on a big awkward record at a gig, manhandling the delicate thing back home on the bus, and then only ever playing it in a single room in the house. I’d say, balancing portability, durability, quality, and price, CD is the best format. Why wouldn’t a musician wish to cater for all preferences on the merch table in these straitened times? It’s crazy how often I’ve witnessed potential customers turning away when they discover that big platters are the only thing on offer – the concept that nobody plays CDs now is a big fat myth. 

I mention this because, in April, I saw Cambridgeshire’s Fuzzy lights play a great gig in Oxford, a huge, beautiful burst of “What if ‘Sister Ray’ were an English folk song?” fiddle-spiced intensity (if you’d like to read more about this gig, check out the write-up at https://nightshiftmag.co.uk/2026/may.pdf). I was doubly delighted to find that the table in the corner was groaning with CDs, dating back some years, and when there’s good merch, I purch. One of the two CDs I bought happened to come out in 2010, so it's time for one of my trademark first-listen reviews (you can rest assured nobody else in this publication is going to start doing something so stupid). 

Obscura: 2-note glock, 2-note guitar at a higher tempo, lambent strings, musical saw. This is very different to what I witnessed at the gig, it’s refined music, and almost sounds as though it could be part of the soundtrack to an episode of Poirot (one where the mystery he cannot solve is the human condition). 

Fallen Trees: This has a fuller sound, the strong violin lines and underlying chords have anslightly klezmeric, East European air. The vocals are soft but commanding, and could be a lost innocent child, or an ageless sorcerer. A long cymbal-thrashing crescendo has more of the DNA of the show I attended. 

Through Water: The guitar part is reminiscent of Radiohead’s ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’, and this time we have a male voice. It sounds like a Mark Lanegan song lost in a snow blizzard. It’s quite lovely. 

The Museum Song: The last track felt chilly, this one is more like the heat haze from summer tarmac. The violin and guitar are as great as previous tracks, but I’m noticing the bassist now for the first time, who has some nicely intertwining little lines. The drums are malleted and unobtrusive. This may be about a museum but as there are no vocals, it’s hard to be certain. Ooh, gorgeous little pizzicato overdub at the end. 

Lucida: Harmonium, and quite gorgeous silky violin lines that sound as though they’re about to go into ‘The Lark Ascending’.  I had no idea that Rachel Watkins could also play this sort of sophisticated chamber folk as well as the raucous wails I witnessed live. 

Rituals: With it’s strummed acoustic and hushed male voice this is perhaps a tad too polite. Frankly something weighty and more ritualistic wouldn’t go amiss. The saw makes a welcome return though, and once the trombone comes in it picks up. This possibly didn’t need to be the longest track on the album at 8.13.  

Shipwrecks: Less the sound of vessels scuppered on vicious rocks, more a chill wind blowing between the spars of a long-destroyed vessel on a bleak shoreline. Although I typed that before the last two minutes absolutely exploded into post-rock noise,so what do I know? 

Slowing Time: Like a dewy-eyed folk version of Slint. 

The Sea And The Weather: A yielding, fuzzy ditty to end. I might have expected the crescendo of two tracks ago to conclude the album, but perhaps that’s too obvious. 

Well, that was a lovely listen. I guess not as viscerally exciting as the concert, and I suspect the more recent albums, and maybe the record sticks to a narrow furrow, but there ae many worse ways to spend an hour of bank holiday Sunday than this. Though you can doubtless enjoy this album whenever you like. And, hell, I’ll even let you off if you have it on tape. 

  

Dropper's Delight

A fun one. Russ reviewed my choice of Scott Walker's The Drift, which he didn't enjoy but did respect.  I reviewed his choice of The Pipetes, and I...well, read on...

THE PIPETTES – WE ARE THE PIPETTES, Memphis Industries 

Russell and I have decided to review each other’s alums this issue. Please do not search for a reason. We are merely seeking to stave off the ennui of existence. That means I’m reviewing an album I’ve never heard, though the act name rang a bell. It’s a good name, isn’t it? Conjuring 60s girl groups and Spector-stable teenpop, but also sounding like a band made up of science teachers (reminds me that I’ve always thought that a great name for a band of off-duty middle managers is The Lanyards). The sound matches the name, being plasticky B-52s neo-trash garage with a girly punk edge - think “Shampoo are in the sixth form now”. The opening pairing of ‘We Are The Pipettes’ and ‘Pull Shapes’ is winning and frothy, and ‘Why Did You Stay?’ adds a little more substance, with grown-up strings, some vintage Cliff guitar and a few ‘Leader of the Pack’ backing vocals. ‘Dirty Mind’ is a little generic, though, and most notable for threatening to go into Maxine Nightingale’s ‘Right Back Where We Started From’. 

‘Judy’ is a highlight, a mid-80s Shakin’ Stevens song with some Grange Hill lyrics. It’s not a huge step away from Pulp, with the lyrics retelling a kitchen-sink microdrama. However there are a couple of tracks like ‘A Winter’s Sky’ on the album that are kind of forgettable; the trouble with pasticheing these 60s girl groups is that they usually had absolutely smoking vocals, whereas The Pipettes, for all their charm, are more Bananarama than The Supremes when it comes to vocal chops. And this means the tunes have to be top notch to stand out, whereas ‘Tell Me What You Want’s is merely fine, sounding like a late-80s Phil Collins number (it’s those strings) I’d much rather have the ‘Hey, Mickey’ steal that is ‘Your Kisses Are Wasted On Me’ any day. 

I’m listening on YouTube, which is not normal for me as a hard-media evangelist – Jesus, the adverts – but it does mean that I can tell that ‘Because It’s Not Love (But It’s Still A Feeling)’ was a single, as there’s a video to watch. The tune is a nice soda-pop hop, with handclaps and everything, and the visuals are bright and cheerful, even if they look like an unadventurous Eurovision staging from 2014 (I think it’s the strange box the girls keep getting in). Suitably for a single it has the richest vocals so far on the album, with some pleasing harmonies. 

‘Sex’ is less fun that the name threatens, but ‘One Night Stand’ is more bouncily enjoyable, and at 1.40 is a perfect length for music of this sort (insert joke about average length of sexual encounters here). Ooh, ‘ABC’ is another single. But it misses a trick by animating the band members rather than capturing their natural charm - seriously this looks like the credits of some knock-off Channel 5 version of Eurotrash which doesn’t have any rude bits. The song is decent and sprightly, despite having an awkward line in the chorus that is at least a syllable too long, but calling your throwback teen-pop song ‘ABC’ is tempting fate considering that’s one of the true greats: might as well call it ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ or ‘Beethoven’s 9th'. Oh, wait, is it the end of the LP already? ‘I Love You’ is rather sweet, and then we’re done. Well, that was most enjoyable. Perhaps there were about three tracks that felt inessential, but it’s hardly the first album I can say that about, and considering only one track here breaks the three-minute mark, these missteps don’t last long. Nice one, Russ, thanks for the recommendation, good unpretentious pop music. I’m off to buy a pencil case I so I can write the band’s name on it in biro. 

Zu Format

Another from LFTWY, we're up to 2009 here.  The 2010 issue is out now, if you have a couple of quid doing nothing.

ZU – CARBONIFEROUS (Ipecac) 

16 or 17 years ago my friend James announced he’d booked Italian heavy prog-noise act Zu to play in Oxford. It was a last minute arrangement, he’d missed the deadlines for mention in publications, but he threw up a poster or two in the venue. It was a Sunday night. About 12 people attended. James lost loads of money (somehow, the fact that he’d bought the three of them towels for their rider tickled me more than is reasonable). Still, despite that unfortunate red entry in his ledger, the other 11 punters and I had a wonderful time with their baritone sax-led chunk punk action (it was a baritone, but I seem to recall that they, or possibly James, called their style “death bassoon”). 

This 2009 album is as good a way of experiencing their sound as any, and a fascinating sound it is, lead-heavy but fleet-footed simultaneously, squealing sax flayed above fat rock rhythms spattered with digital detritus. They can thump, they can churn, and they can, on occasion, even boogie, dropping discoid hi-hat rhythms into the midst of the bludgeon (and listen to the bass in ‘Beata Viscera’, it’s positively funk-adjacent). ‘Cthonian’ is typical, sounding like a rusty android stretching in the morning whilst a pile driver smashes concrete just outside the window. But, then, maybe ‘Carbon’ is also typical, foregrounding the snorting sax to create a hyperactive grot-jazz hoedown in hell. It’s a surprisingly varied album, with a track like ‘Axion’ being both a head-down speed-industrial pummelling and a pensive film noir cue. 

‘Soulympics’ may have an unforgivably naff title, but the glossolalia void growls are gripping, and the pylon-thrum bass sounds equal parts Fugazi and (very early) Therapy? There are even some nearly melodic vocals over the top. ‘Mimosa Hostilis’ sounds like a forklift with diarrhoea. ‘Orc’ sounds like a canine mage casting a spell on some crabs in a rubber glade. I can’t judge sounds any more. The record has destroyed my ears. Play it again. Turn it up. Pass me the towels.  

Rodent All Terrain Armoured Transport?

 The 2008 issue of LFTWY might be my favourite, it has a couple of very interesting pieces, plus this...

RATATAT – LP3 (XL Recordings) 

I’m sure we all have mystery records on our shelves, for which we can find no provenance. Did I buy this? Did someone give it to me? Did I bag it in a forgotten tombola? I own no fewer than 4 CDs by Ratatat, despite having no idea whom they might be nor any recollection of procuring them. At best guess, they were promos sent out for review (though not to me, of that I’m certain). They’re pretty decent, mind, which is why they’re still on the shelf today. This album – I'm guessing their third, but I’ve been caught by that particular Wilbury trick before, so I’m staying non-committal – fits in a post-trip-hop world, having down-tempo groovy sections, glossy bouncy pop sections, and the odd ersatz rock move. It’s not very serious, but neither is it actually funny; it’s referential, but not really satirical or critical; it’s like library music for reluctant readers. 

There isn’t really much depth to this album, but the surfaces are most attractive. ‘Shiller’, the opening number, sounds like someone trying to play the X-Files theme on some toys (imagine if someone had described a Plaid track to someone who just woke up from a 40-year coma, this is probably what they’d come up with), but then some cheeky chorus guitar comes in, and it sounds like a section from the very end of Tubular Bells. Similar studio-bound unrocking guitar sounds crop up regularly across the album, nasally insistent, and sometimes with purring flange effects, and it all gives an unusually handmade edge to what is ostensibly a machine-made record. Random aside: the name ‘Shiller’ makes us imagine Sean Connery appearing on Blind Date. 

Some tracks feel like market-trader knockoffs of contemporaneous dance acts, with ‘Falcon Jab’ giving us restrained Nile Rodgers guitar and sort of Frampton-talky-guitar-thing sounds over a chunky beat recalling Daft Punk, whilst ‘Flynn’ is a slinky confection, halfway between vintage soundtrack cues by Roger Roger and winking dancefloor pop by Röyksopp. ‘Dura’, with its harpsichord and ambling beat seems like a clear nod to Dre’s Eminem productions. 

There are occasional tunes with rhythms featuring clipped percussion and arpeggiating bleeps, placing them somewhere between an Eski-era grime beat and the Donkey Kong 64 soundtrack - check out ‘Mirando’ and ‘Bird Priest’ for examples. Other tracks lean on less electronic references, such as ‘Mi Viejo’ with its tabla, acoustic guitar and Herbie Flowers-ish bass, or the Western chase theme played by a baseball organ which is ‘Gypsy Threat’, whereas ‘Imperials’ is more atypical, coming across like an RnB jam in a bamboo junkyard, and ‘Mumtaz Khan’ sounds like Mothra doing Boyz II Men, before a that guitar comes in again, and threatens to go into the ‘Hotel California’ solo (I promise I’m not making this up).  

This is probably not the favourite 2008 album of anyone in the whole world, including Ratatat, but it’s a breezy, colourful bit of fun. I just listened to it twice in a row, and enjoyed it even more the second time. If that trend continues it will be the greatest 42 minutes in the history of humanity by next weekend... 

What Do You Mean, Myth?

If you're following along (which you're not), you may have noticed (which you didn't) that this is my review for the 2007-themed edition of LFTWY, but we've not yet had the 2006 review. That's because I haven't got a copy of the 2006 issue, though the editor will get me one some time, I hope. Obviously, I could still upload my review, but I like to do so once I've read the whole magazine. So, the 06 review will pop up at some point in the future, don't worry (which you already don't).

 !!! - MYTH TAKES (Warp) 

I’m never quite sure about artists who are celebrated because their work is primarily of interest to their peers – you know, a comedian’s comedian, a poet's poet. Nobody ever heard “Oh, he’s a great chef, but only other chefs like his soup, everyone else thinks it tastes like surgical stockings in brine”. Not trying to be a reverse snob about it, but every time I hear about a guitarist’s guitarist all I unearth is someone with honed chops and no musical sense. So, whilst I could say that this album lives on the strength of the bass, it’s not just for Pastorius anoraks (I actually like Jaco Pastorius, though, even if some of his fans are tedious, so let’s say Mark King). 

!!! claimed their name could be anything you wanted so long as it was a single syllable repeated three times. My friend Mark called them Jeff Jeff Jeff, whereas my proposal at the time is not for publication in a polite zine. Bloody stupid concept, really, but they were a good band, taking the punk funk that was so influential in the noughties, but keeping it sleek, psych, and danceable – more ESG than Gang Of Four, in short. This album, as befits a Warp signing, is controlled, rhythmic, and inventive – though when I saw them live at a Swiss festival around this time they were surprisingly lackadaisical and silly, one of them spending as much time waggling one naked boob at the audience as playing.   

The title track has plenty of groovy no-wavey NYC cool but takes it to a midwest prairie, complete with eerily calling fauna, and Morricone-ish guitar chords. ‘Must Be The Moon’ is a thin pseudo-hip hop beat, a bit like a Tone Loc tune played by a payphone, with blowhard sex-conquest lyrics which are a bit like ‘Cool For Cats’ crossed with early Beasties. Then the slimy, eel-like bass comes in, slinking along and the magic happens, ushering in an industrial dub second half with reverby clangs that are like asthmatic aluminium catching its breath – a few tracks on the album do this, coming off like Jamaican 12” tunes, with a standard first half, and a “version” tagged onto the end. ‘Bend Over Beethoven’ pulls a similar trick whilst nodding towards 23 Skidoo (and is a brilliant title, you have to admit). 

‘A New Name’ has falsetto, but is otherwise a bit generic. ‘Heart Of Hearts’ is a rigid rhythmic grid, but there’s lots to unpack: perhaps it’s like a sonic nonogram puzzle (in which case, solving it would probably reveal a tin of Pabst and a beanie, perfect for the noughties hipster). There’s a lattice of guitar and synth, with that bass somehow anchoring things and shifting like sands at the same time. Really nice left-hand clav too.  This is one that’s most like LCD Soundsystem, who were trendy gods at the time.  

The vocal on ‘Sweet Life’ is a bit uninspired, and the cymbals clatter somewhat messily, but the pointillist synth bass is lovely. ‘Yadnus’ has quite a “standard” guitar strum structure, like it’s related to a Stones tune on some level. ‘Break In Case Of Anything’ boasts spacy wah-wah guitar, and maybe a smidge of Can in its relentless round-the-toms rhythm. There are really nice horns, coupled with dub-siren bleeps. The record rides into the sunset with ‘Infinifold’, uncharacteristically groove-free, with male and female vocals in unison. It has a little touch of melancholy, though not too much... nothing to stop some light boob-jiggling if the mood took. 

I would heartily recommend this album, as well as the others they made for Warp around this time (I have no idea what later releases are like, apparently the last was in 2022). !!! may not be a band to change your life, but is this highly enjoyable, tactile and intelligent music? Yes yes yes.  

Look Deep Into The Parker

Seems like a good while since I last posted a review, but we have 3 in quick succession.  First up, here's my take on an album released in 2005. Don't worry if you've not heard of it, I hadn't either.

FRANCESCO CAFISO & STRINGS – A TRIBUTE TO CHARLIE PARKER (Umbria Jazz/ Giotto Music)

The closer we get to the present day, the less likely it is that an album has a significant presence in my mind. I turned 30 in 2005, and from this point onwards my income  allowed me to purchase so many more records than I once could have imagined, whilst the time I have to actually play them has withered, so twenty-first century albums just impinge less on my psyche, no matter how good they are. When it comes to the cultural experience, distant landmarks loom so much larger than those in proximity. It’s like perspective in reverse. 

So, once again for this issue I’ve just grabbed a CD from the little pile of recent ultra-cheap random charity–shop purchases which happened to have been released in 2005. This review will be written as I spin the disc. As with the Ladytron review I’ve not heard this record, but unlike Ladytron, I’ve never even heard of the artist.  The first question that springs to mind is how one might create a tribute to Parker. His big achievement was in his technique and the fluidity of his playing, the way he brought new ideas to jazz, and it seems that a tribute to that would either involve copying solos note-for-note (a bit pointless), or similarly bringing your own character to standards (in which case, it’s not meaningfully connected to Parker). Even with Hendrix, another great who brought a riotously fresh angle to well-trodden musical structures, there are at least a bunch of his songs to cover, but Parker only penned about twenty tunes. A quick glance over the tracklist reveals no ‘Yardbird Suite’, no ‘Ornithology’, no ‘Ko-Ko’, and every single composition was firmly part of the musical backdrop before Parker got to grips with them. How will this pan out?  Pressing Play...now! 

‘I’ll Remember April’ wafts in with some nice rich syrupy strings. Oh wait, is this all based on Parker’s influential With Strings album (or, originally, pair of 10”s - Pedantic Ed)? Yes, looking more closely at the cover, it very much is – not only does it use the same colour scheme in its quite hideously ugly sleeve, but it says it there in capitals, I just hadn’t noticed. This puts the interpretative element into even more of a straitjacket, as the arrangements are all nailed down, though in another way it makes more sense, perhaps like a new performance of a classical suite. 

Having a little search whilst ‘What Is This Thing Called Love’ spins I find that saxophonist Cafiso was 16 when he made this record. By Gad, already I can see that the playing is preposterously good and confident for that age. His tone so far is more wheedling than Bird’s rich warmth, but that at least brings his own voice to the music. The backing band/chamber orchestra is most elegant too, work has gone into this. ‘Out Of Nowhere’ continues the sophisticated feel, and it’s a great composition from back in 1931 - I first came across it because The Cardigans nodded to it in ‘Travelling With Charlie’ from their retro-twee classic album Life – and it was specifically the perfumed swoon of the Parker version they were thinking of, I’m certain. Then we get ‘Everything Happens To Me’, another grade-A song, and those billowing strings and sweeping harps capture the early-50s vibe immaculately. 

But ‘Summertime’ falls just a little flat. Maybe I’ve heard the tune too many times in my life, but also the sax feels too busy, trying to fill all the gaps rather than flowing, and with a raspy edge: if there’s one thing you can say about Bird, it’s that his playing sounded organic. But a highlight is ‘Dancing In The Dark’ - no, not that one – the sax is so fluent, and it contrasts with the reliable, slightly square arrangements underneath it in just the way Parker’s original takes did. Also, I see that the median sales price on Discogs for this CD is £8.99, I apparently got a bargain. 

As the album continues, my attention begins to wander a little. Perhaps 18 tracks is just too much of this style to experience at once – after all, the first With Strings 10” featured a mere seven. But the tracks are quite formulaic, opening with the strings swelling; a fast nimble sprinkle of sax notes, normally in a descending pattern; the main melody stated twice with a little ornament; an orchestral break; then solos. It definitely works, but a switch-up wouldn’t hurt, which is why ‘Just Friends’ grabs the attention, with the sax line sprightly but not jittery, and gesturing more closely to the sort of thing Parker might have done with a smaller jazz combo, and this is followed by ‘April In Paris’ which puts a focus on the oboe almost as much as the sax, and feels like a vintage Sinatra arrangement. The Latin percussion introduction to ‘Repetition’ - no, not that one – sounds like wild carnivalesque bacchanalia in this context, but it’s the penultimate track, and perhaps should have come in earlier. The final track is the only original, a solo blues called ‘Prayer For Charlie’ and it’s rather lovely, saying more about Cafiso as a player than the rest of the album. 

Overall I’d rate this album as impressive, and possibly as good, but I’m not sure what purpose it serves, beyond being a calling card for a talented young musician: more a demo reel than an artistic statement. The battle between emulating With Strings and adding a personal twist isn’t always won, and throwing in pieces that weren’t part of the original sets feels like overkill. I will keep this record, it is certainly worth another spin or two, and would serve compilations well. One day, though, the lure of £8.99 may prove too much... 

Versailles Chorus Versailles

And here's the final instalment in my latest batch of LFTWY reviews. Warning: contains Eurovision.

SÉBASTIEN TELLIER – POLITICS (Record Makers) 

There have been plenty of great art statements in 21st-century Eurovision. From Verka Serduchka’s reductive grinning singalong which dared you to take something about as complex as ‘The Birdy Song’ seriously in 2007, to Käärijä’s somewhat petrifying Poddington Peas bovver-boy stomp in 2023 (which Bambie Thug presumably saw and thought “you call that unnerving industrial electro, do you? Wait till my song next year...which is also sometimes a jazz ballad”). There’s even the stone cold genius of Rambo Amadeus in 2012, who brought the most low-key funky groove ever to the big stage in Baku, but turned off most people by stumbling about like a greasy bewildered wino, and got a special rule instigated after the random draw put him first in the first semifinal, thereby confusing vast swathes of the viewing audience from the outset, so from now on the producer crafts the running order. Oh, and of course there’s Konstrakta’s ‘In Corpore Sano’ from 2022, which is pretty much the greatest song of the millennium with a stage show giving Matthew Barney and Peter Greenaway. 

But amongst this feted/hated group of tricksters there is one excellent piece of pop art playfulness which didn’t really ignite the voters or the pundits, for some reason. In 2008 Sébastien Tellier rode onto the stage very slowly in a little golf buggy to deliver a strange breathy, wide-eyed little tune, half-scruffy, half-dapper, like a melange of Dennis Wilson and Jarvis Cocker. A third of the way through he sucked helium from a beach ball and made his voice go all squeaky. His backing singers were women with beards stuck on (Conchita Wurst precog!). It must be one of the Frenchest things ever seen, despite being the only time a French Eurovision entry has been in English. 

A few years before that, his second album Politics came out, though it wasn’t a big hit, reaching number 123 in his home charts, and achieving bugger all anywhere else. But it’s really quite good fun, and here are some highlights. 

• The fact that the opening track is called ‘Bye Bye’ and is like a 70s Paul Simon song gone awry, with nice warm brass that just splurgily collapses halfway through like someone took the Spanx off
• The fact that ‘Wonderafrica’ does indeed sound like a funkier cousin of the precipitation-blessing 80s classic 
• The fact that ‘Broadway’ is not brassy and stagey as the name suggests, but is soft and burnished and honeyed in a hammock of strings 
• The fact that ‘Ritournelle’ has Tony Allen on drums dropping a light, flighty groove for nearly 8 minutes which sounds like the funky drummer went on a Ryvita diet, and has no vocals but some almost Bruce Hornsby piano chords 
• The fact that ‘Benny’, immediately afterwards, has the silliest, hammiest vocals possible to make up for it - you have to love the way he delivers “human rih-soar-zees" 
• The fact that ‘Mauer’ has a stoned maggot of a synth wending all the way through 
• The fact that ‘Ketchup Vs. Genocide’ is called ‘Ketchup Vs. Genocide’ 
• The fact that the album finishes with ‘Zombi’, which sounds like music from a game in Fun House or something and is quite preposterous 

 

 

Logo Technics

 Another from LFTWY, and my first article about an Oxford act. Trademark were so good live.

TRADEMARK – FEAR: DISCONNECTION (self-release) 

The first review I ever wrote for publication was in November 2002, for BBC Oxford’s website, having started to get involved with Oxford’s music scene a little earlier, so with this issue we enter the era where I can talk about local records I bought direct from the creators. I promise I’ll steer an evasionary course away from old war stories and anecdotes about people you’ve never met, though. 

Trademark were a live favourite of mine, a trio of lab-coated geeks when who wrote wonderful techno-pop tunes, played them live brilliantly, threw in incongruous one-off covers, sometimes had a giant perspex plug, and were not unknown for tripping over their own gear onstage. This is their 2003 release, although some of the songs got a lick of paint and turned up again on their debut proper, Want More, released a year or two later by Truck Records. The base sauce for their concoctions was simple, consisting of crunchy, intricate rhythms in the style of contemporaneous Warp acts such as Black Dog, big bold 1982 synth lines, and surprisingly emotional, if far from histrionic, vocal melodies. Oli Horton’s voice was never perfect, and he tended to get a bit pitchy, but as with Marc Almond this often worked in the songs’ favour. Sometimes when he sang in a lower register, as with ‘All Too Late’, a clomping Depeche-a-Sketch joint on this album, the notes are more reliably hit, though perhaps a tiny fraction of the character is lost by this. 

It’s still a great tune, though, and this CD if full of them. Interestingly, on revisiting this album, the lighter tracks sound the best: whilst they were never an industrial or EBM band, some songs are bigger than others, whether that’s from a fatter bass drum kick or a more impassioned vocal (‘My Life In Stereo’ has a blasted cabaret feeling which made it perfect for opening gigs). The pick of the chunkier tunes is ‘Sawtooth Lust’, which is something like an abrasive mechanoid take on Bowie’s ‘Breaking Glass’, and is interesting for the joint vocal by usually mute member Paul Soulsby. The lyrics on this one feel forced and awkward, though the line “I saw an eyesore” is amusing, something a goth Giles Brandreth might come out with. 

Of the less aggressive songs, ‘Helpless’ is the softest, in sound and outlook, a song of attraction 100% free of priapic desire, simply about how a certain lass can make the singer go a bit wibbly, featuring the ultimate nice-boy lyric “Don’t let me fail her as a friend”. It sounds wonderful, with a Broadway ballad melody delivered in a delicate falsetto, and a warm bassline that’s purest Pet Shop Boys. ‘Sine Love’ is also lilting and beautiful, using the sine wave as a metaphor for purity in love (no big prize for guessing how the lead synths sound on this and ‘Sawtooth Lust’). The hissing digital percussion sounds like Aphex Twin whispering in your ear. But even this work of beauty is beaten by ‘Stay Professional’, an understated British romantic tragedy with SNES harp and staccato synth stabs. It has the natural-artificial simplicity of a zen garden, and sounds like an Erasure song melancholically gazing at a moonlit lake. 

Self-released albums like this are fascinating. It’s a proper statement rather than a cheap demo, but it’s still half-lost to posterity: the Trademark Wikipedia page acknowledges it, but intriguingly replicates the typo that appears on the printed disc which isn’t on any of the packaging. I have no idea how many copies were sold, and whether they were retained by the purchasers, so my CD may be one of only a handful in the wild (though I have just discovered they made an album in 1999, which ran to 25 copies). Although anyone intrigued by this review should definitely seek out Want More instead, Fear: Disconnection has a nascent charm, and if nothing else it shows how much graft goes into honing a band before its professional debut release – but maybe that statement barely even means anything in 2025. 

 

No Nose Is Good Nose?

I saw Lunchtime For The Wild Youth editor Russell Barker last night at a gig, and fine company he was. He also passed me the last 3 issues, so here's my thought on an album from 2002, with '03 and '04 to follow soon.

SPARKS – LIL' BEETHOVEN (BMG) 

Two things sprang to mind as I turned over this record sleeve, prior to spinning it for the first time after purchase. 

Firstly, that’s a weird place to put the apostrophe. It’s an abbreviation of “little” so “li’l” would make more sense, and there’s precedent, such as the US comic strip Li’l Abner. Lewis Carroll would probably favour “li’l’”, judging from the way he wrote words like “sha’n’t”, and in a pure sense that fits the best, but I’ve never seen it in the wild. Later, in the mumble rap era the apostrophe was tossed out altogether as too old-fashioned, and we got Lil Wayne and Lil Yachty (and how overjoyed was I when an American rapper finally came up with the name Lil Savage). 

Secondly, I was reminded of an article in a long-ago Fall fanzine, which drew parallels between the gruppe and Hancock’s Half Hour episodes: just as we could imagine Tony moping in shows called ‘Fit And Working Again’ or ‘Bournemouth Runner’, we could imagine MES ranting about blood donors in songs named ‘The East Cheam Centenary’ or ‘Lord Byron Lived Here’...and that’s before we get into CB radio. Similarly, the names of tracks on this album just perfectly sum up comical fragments of life, like sketches where you don’t actually need to write the dialogue: ‘What Are All These Band So Angry About?’, ‘I Married Myself’, and ‘Ugly Guys With Beautiful Girls’ are just too immaculate. 

If the songs barely need more than a title to conjure images, it’s lucky, because in lots of cases that’s about the sum of the lyrics. ‘How Do I Get To Carnegie Hall?’ is just an old gag split into bits and repeated – a Brit would have to imagine someone singing “My dog’s got no nose” over and over – whilst ‘Your Call’s Very Important To Us, Please Hold’ describes the experience of listing to the robotic corporate phone voice at great repetetive length, like a Warhol diary extract.  

Musically this record was odd at the time, but makes perfect sense now. Sparks’ previous records had been wry glam rock enigmas or sunshine-smiling digital pop bangers (which were still wry), but this album has hardly any drums, as alluded to by opener ‘The Rhythm Thief’, and the music is mostly little cellular ersatz orchestral motifs shuffled and stacked. Sparks seem to have got into the likes of Glass and Adams, whilst their twentieth-century composition influence bag held fragments from Stravinsky and Bernstein (whilst their dog’s got Nono’s (I apologise unreservedly for that joke (I don’t really))). This is not the sophisticated chamber tunage of Van Dyke Parks, but neither is it the joky half-formed zombie-pop of Denim – perhaps the best contemporaneous analogue is The Magnetic Fields.  

‘My Baby’s Taking Me Home’ is possibly the album’s high point, pretty much just the title repeated forever.  It’s small and huge at the same time, like a stadium anthem written by Morph. The album ends with ‘Suburban Homeboys’ a single which must not have inspired much faith of a hit from any stakeholder, full of witty sketches of the titular middle-class scallywags and cheeky parping synth tuba playing pseudo-techno riffs – shouting schlager, schlager, schlager! It sort of sounds like a Broadway book number crossed with a US college song, which no actual homeboy would ever be seen dead nodding along to (“My posse repping this track? Nah, my dogs got no-nos!"). “Props to our peeps and please keep your receipts” might be one of the best couplets in the last 40 years of pop...and doesn’t it sound a tiny little bit like a modern-day Tony Hancock? 

Ganja Crew

The last of the latest batch of LFTWY pieces. I rather like this one, though it does very slightly poke fun at other contributors to the zine.

LADYTRON – 604 (Invicta Hi-Fi)

We probably all have a phonobiography, a list of music that is intrinsically tied to certain eras in our lives. We read a lot of that in this very zine, records that spun as writers met their spouse, recovered from measles, or finished Manic Miner, discs dropped like markers on the Google Maps of their own history. Well, the past is a foreign county, LP Hartley reckoned (in between fly fishing and making jam, probably, I’ve done no research), so why not a country I’ve never visited? One where I don’t even know the currency or the approximate average rainfall: an Azerbaijan of times past, let’s say. 

So, the other day I went into the charity shop where one could get 10 CDs for a fiver - which is really too many for a deal, but I can rarely walk away from them - including 604, Ladytron’s debut album released in February 2001. I have never heard this record before, and have only the vaguest memories of hearing a track or two by them in the past, and I’ll type this review live as I listen for the first time.  Warning: may not include full sentences. Or full sense. What we're gonna do right here is go Baku, way Baku, Baku into time. 

mu-tron: Stomping descending motif.  Wiggly pre-wub bass tones.  Layers of treacly synth, a bit like a Add N To (X). Atonal elements.  An almost melancholic stately melody line on top, hints of Aphex. This is great, actually. 

discotraxx: What language was that?  It would be cool if it were Azerbaijani, but It was probably Bulgarian, judging by the fact the vocalist, Mira Aroyo is from there, as Wikiedia tells me.  Must stop checking Wikipedia, this temporal foreign country doesn’t have Ordnance Survey. Anyway, adding Marilyn Monroe-as-a-girl vocals changes the vibe, not yet sure whether I like that as much. Cantering bassline with a Bangelis vibe (that’s Vangelis that slaps harder, FYI).  

another breakfast with you: Telephone type noises, reminding me of that B12 track ‘Telefone 529’ (I’m allowed to look that up, don’t write in). Thin organ.  you can hear the live playing in the topline, it’s not quantised. Sort of like half a Madonna song. 

CSKA sofia: I guess I’m not allowed to look up what those letters mean, but I guess Sofia is the Bulgarian capital, not some girl. Kitsch instrumental with Farfisa-like tones and non-dance drum machine parts.   

the way that I found you: Simple uninflected but slightly breathy vocals make this like Broadcast, without the VHS horror and art archivism.  Simple romance for consumers. 

paco!: Clearly an homage to Are You being Served: “4th floor, electronica, fake antiques, and lingerie”, which is a rum mix. Nice thin bongo rhythm, glides mechanically but smoothly, like a long shopping centre escalator. 

commodore rock: The title makes me thing of ‘Computer Club’ by Datarock, though perhaps Commodore Rock is in the navy (the capitalisation is pretty random on the sleeve, so I have no idea). Proto-techno gyrations, the first time this LP has made me feel like dancing. Crunchy Nut Cornflakes advertising jingle by Model 500. French-accented spoken vocals remind me of Dr Calculus (see previous LFTWY article, if you know what’s good for you). 

ZMEYKA: Violin scrapes, and interesting background noises. Not in tune, or even noticeably related to what’s happening up front. Reminds me of MES methods, and it makes what might be a slightly generic eletro plod more interesting. 

playgirl: Tapping into that sort of Barbarella wide-eyed innocent sexiness. Bit dated, to be honest, but still no harm done. The chords cycle comfortably, it’s decent, but a bit static and thin on ideas – compare this with Stereolab’s take on 60s chintz, and it loses. 

I’m with the pilots: Shimmying sassy little bassline.  Sounds like it could be a Christine Aguilera track. Sprechgesang vocals, wry and aloof, like Black Box Recorder, though this doesn’t have the supercilious humour. 

this is our sound: Title is valid, they do sound like this (I mean, there’s a paradox there, but you get the gist) – perambulatory paced synth bass, simple drums, airy ditty vox. 

he took her to a movie: Unashamedly ‘The Model’. Like, not even trying to hide it at all. Title is most of the lyrics. Warhol faux-simplicity. 

laughing cavalier: Abstract and moody, like something from a Czech art film. Only a minute long, so no time to type any mo- 

lady bird: It’s two words, so maybe it’s about the old US first lady, not the insect. Quite close to a chart pop song, if the buzz and clunk were brightened and smoothed. Hints of Kylie. Nothing wrong with that, mind. Nice synth-glock outro. 

JET AGE: These capitals are driving me mad, I’m spending more time checking these are right than reviewing. Is there a snippet of the percussion breakbeat from ‘Apache’ by Incredible Bongo Band? A more wintry tone than the rest of the album. 

skools out: Quiet and tinny music, with the vocals very loud (are my computer speakers a little broken?  Surely it can’t be as “AM radio on the other side of a sand dune” thin as this.  Oh wait, the bass and mids have come in, as you were). Bassline one is from classic grease rock – I guess because of the titular ref to Alice Cooper (though their music is more elegant, for the most part, this sounds like something Ten Benson would have swiped from some forgotten dumbass protoglam single). There is no hidden track, the 90s are over, fools. 

Well that was quite good fun. I honestly liked the album, but just inspiring this stupid idea for a zine article was worth my 50p - which at the current exchange rate is 1 manat and 14 gapiks (yes, I looked it up...but I kept the mean precipitation as a sweet mystery to uncover another day). 

Ha, Marsupial Star

As promised, here's another from a LFTWY annual round-up. I'm pretty happy with this piece, it makes a valid general observation, whilst still acting as a review of the record itself, and it's pretty concise (there are no word limits at LFTWY, but I still keep myself to a few hundred, I think it's better for all concerned).

KID KOALA – CARPAL TUNNEL SYNDROME (Ninja Tune) 

You all know what guitarists are like. These blokes – they're always blokes – spend countless hours arguing about technique, studying the minutest elements of their heroes’ performances and attempting to emulate them, giving ability primacy over invention, and being, you know, no fun at all to be with. But, true though this might be, it’s triply true of turntablism fans. I can think of no instrument that is so tied to a narrow clutch of stylistic tropes as DJing and no group of fans that are such a bro-centration of conservatives (listening to deckheads arguing about how vinyl scratching is better than the modern digital version for five minutes is enough to make you long for that sweaty guy in the blues jam lecturing about valve amps). Do a quick search online for great turntable performances and you won’t find sweet musical excerpt, like Eric B clinically exploring a vocal phrase whilst Rakim takes a break on the mic, you won’t find the foundational methods and creations of Grand Wizard Theodore, and you sure as hell won’t find experimenters like Christian Marclay or Otomo Yoshihide. What you’ll find is hundreds of extracts from DMC mixing championships over the years, and a slew of clips in which a DJ does exactly the same things, but just fractionally faster, slicker or, occasionally, whilst standing on their head. More than any other slice of musical life, DJing is intrinsically connected with competition. Scratching isn’t art, it’s athletics. 

Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is a great DJ record because Kid Koala has technique coming out of his tufty grey ears, and has a crate-digger's sense of a funky rhythm to loop in classic hip-hop style, but he also has exactly zero interest in showing off, and instead a huge desire to intrigue and entertain. You can definitely dance to some of this record – or, at least, nod along whilst slumped in a sofa in the early hours – and ‘Fender Bender’ and ‘Roboshuffle’ aren’t too far from the sort of grooves you might get from DJ Shadow or Cut Chemist, but a lot of the record explores abstraction in a way that’s as close to Martin Tétreault as it is to Grandmaster Flash: check the tiny insectile clicks and chitters of ‘Scurvy’ , or the tiny fludge sounds stacked up on ‘Nerdball’, which are fast as hell and doubtless mindblowingly difficult to pull off, but also a world from the clean cuts that accepted technique requires. Lots of spoken elements are sliced or sped up so intensely that they are disconnected from any meaning, untethered phonemes swarming like flying ants, and when statements are clear, they are normally comical, from the wry knowingness of a Foley artist discussing how to make different noises or a stand-up ridiculing DJs, to the outright gagginess of the two ‘Barhopper’ tracks, which act as surreal lessons in pick-up artistry by jamming together lines form a multitiude of sources.  

The funniest parts of the record require no words at all though. ‘Drunk Trumpet’ sounds exactly as you might imagine, a hilariously woozy attack on a horn sample over a stumbling double bass lope, and I can’t imagine anyone not laughing at the wonky poultry party that is ‘Like Irregular Chickens’. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is a brilliant album to play to someone who doesn’t like hip-hop DJing so they can find out what a thoughtful and witty artist can create, but it’s an even better record to play to somebody who likes it too much, just to remind them that creativity is always more important than dexterity. 

Pole Opinion

I have received a new batch of LFTWY issues, so expect 3 old album reviews in quick succession. This is from the 1999 issue. Small but crucial typo from the print version fixed, accuracy fans!

POLE – 2 (Kiff SM) 

The great paradox of dub is that it sounds simultaneously cosmically other-worldly, and entirely organic. For all the toms that sound like they’re being played inside Krakatoa, or the hi-hats that sound like they’re being beamed in from Venus, you can never forget the physical input required to make this music: fingers pushing faders, hands leaping between dials, tape spooling in a battered Echoplex. Although there were plenty of decent records produced in the early 90s’ European digidub micromovement, the slick computer effects lack this earthy ruggedness. A few years later, Stefan Betke, AKA Pole, managed to rough up the smooth digital sheen, not with analogue equipment, but by using a digital device that was lightly shafted (the act name comes from something called a Waldorf 4-pole filter which Betke dropped on the floor, and which started going all wobbly). 

Opener ‘Fahren’ sounds most like Pole's digidub predecessors, and the synth melodica line recalls early Zion Train, but although the music is spacious it is neither ominous nor groovy. You might rightly call this dispassionate clinical music “cavernous”, but it sounds like a surveyor mapping a Victorian culvert, rather than someone lost in a haunted cave. ‘Stadt’ opens with plenty of hisses and crackles, and is superficially similar to the glitch music found on Mille Plateaux records around the same time, but it still manages to retain the ghost of a reggae riddim. 

‘Streit’ opens with a squitty little rhythmic twitch, the sound of a salivatory gland wired up to a dot matrix printer. Theres a slithering two-note bassline worming through the track, but again, you’d be hard pressed to skank to this one. There are equally unrhythmic strands of percussive noises on ‘Huckepack’ (which apparently means piggyback in German, but in my mind it will always be the Teutonic variant of vintage dance craze the hucklebuck). Here a tiny recurrent strand of pips – not so much a motif, more a tic – sounds a lot like someone unzipping a tent. 

Other ersatz sounds are the highly treated drum noise on ‘Hafen’ whcih sounds like a piece of cardboard coughing, and the pseudo-organ stabs that hang in off-beat clouds on ‘Weit’ so that listening feels like pushing one’s way through a forest of sere, dead bullrushes that crumble at the touch, whilst higher-pitched notes hang like zombie mosquitoes just out of reach. Except, you know, pleasant. Although the four albums Pole made in this style sound like a dead end now, an evolutionary avenue that died out whilst a more dominant strain mutated into dubstep a few years later and eclipsed its cousins, there’s still more than enough to intrigue on this record, arguably the pick of the four. This is music that doesn’t sound human, but equally doesn’t sound cold and regimented like most music that celebrates its lack of humanity. Warm yet impersonal, flawed yet robotic, there’s nothing else that sounds quite like this on my shelves. 

REMinders

The last of the latest batch of LFTWY annually-themed reviews, this time partying like it wee still 1999.

R.E.M. - UP (Warner Bros) 

I like Bill Berry, and it always feels a little bit like betrayal that one of my favourite R.E.M. albums is the one they made right after he left. Still, they had the decency to make it with hardly any live drums. Come to think of it, even the programmed drums and are so far back in a fuzzy mix that they feel less like percussion and more like a sort of misty backdrop to a German Romantic painting of a bloke on a craggy mountain. Up is a big major label album by a superstar band, but it’s really a demo writ large, a quiet album of sketches with a tape-hum atmosphere; “hauntology” was a still a few years away in the pop-critical lexicon but this album shares some of that microgenre’s lofi sonic memory-triggers, and in retrospect seems to be an indie bedfellow to the electronic blurriness of Boards Of Canada’s Music Has The Right To Children, also released in this year.  

The band knew they were going to lose a few fans of their stadium bangers with this record, and so decided to put ‘Airportman’ at the top of the tracklist, like a dragon guarding the entrance. It has a hypnagogic Eno feel which pre-empts a lot of what Radiohead would be doing a couple of years later. Still, it’s easy to forget that there is plenty of precedent for this sort of introspective, lightly experimental music in the R.E.M. catalogue, and many people who like to holler along to ‘Man On The Moon’ on Greatest Hits Radio might be nonplussed by the precedents here: the unpretentious ‘New Orleans Instrumentals’, the wraithlike mumble of ‘Star Me Kitten’, and the improvised ambient drama of ‘Country Feedback’ (which is the best song R.E.M. ever wrote, in case you were wondering). There’s more Frippy guitar on ‘Why Not Smile’, though there it’s joined by baroque gamelan doo-wop loops. 

The not-very-single-like-at-all-really single ‘Daysleeper’ is barely more solid, doused in radio static and quiet keys which are the aural equivalent of the beige office walls in yellow electric-light at which the narrator presumably stares. The lines “I cried the other night, I can’t even say why” are still improbably beautiful, even all these years later. It’s followed by ‘Diminished’, the sun-drowsy Sunday afternoon snooze balancing the wintry midweek worknight. It has a stoned loping bass and percussion boasting some of the untroubled drawl of The Folk Implosion around the time of the Kids soundtrack. It also has a hidden track at the end, even though the album still has two more tracks, which is pretty unusual. ‘Suspicion’ has some of the weltschmerz boogie of Paul Simon’s masterpiece Still Crazy After All These Years, with a surprisingly lovely vocal line which harks back to the soft mumble of the band’s first two albums. 

There are also a few songs a little closer to the rock template. ‘Lotus’ is a simple electric piano vamp, like a looped fraction of a Supertramp or Gilbert O’Sullivan rhythm, with lovely late-60s guitar (though there are still no histrionics). ‘Walk Unafraid’ is a rocker that dare not squeal its name, inspired by Patti Smith, who of course previously guested on ‘E-bow The Letter’. (Random aside:  when ‘E-bow The Letter’ got its first play on The Evening Session they claimed that the title meant that the letter L had been elbowed from the word elbow, which is a misunderstanding of cryptic genius.)  

A lot was made at the time of the Brian Wilson influence on the record, but it’s only really ‘At My Most Beautiful’ which brings his great songs to mind (though ‘Parakeet’ has a whiff of the sandbox as well). It’s more Bleach Boys than Beach Boys, though, fuzzy and scraped thin. Leonard Cohen was given a co-credit on ‘Hope’ which has saved me 20-odd years of racking my brains to work out what the vocal reminds me of - ‘Suzanne’, if you’re wondering – and has the most timid, wooly drum machine sound ever, like the opposite of Mantronix. 

At just over an hour, this is only about half of the album, and it’s all strong, except perhaps ‘Sad Professor’, which is shapeless in an awkward way that drags a little. Back in 1988 Mudhoney released a foundation stone of grunge with Superfuzz Bigmuff, but Up could have been called Hyperfluff Softscuzz, such is the warm C90 burr wrapping all of these songs. Once ‘Fails To Climb’ has concluded the album, sounding like Tangerine Dream scoring an old Anglican hymn, you might just feel like sitting silently for 5 minutes, preferably in a dim crepuscular light.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

The Ups And Downs

It's finally time for me to write about The Fall for LFTY! I've been holding off picking one since the year-themed specials began, and this is the one that got up and waved to me.

THE FALL – LEVITATE (Artful) 

“There is no culture is my brag,” declaimed Mark E Smith in 1982, but he might equally have stated, “There is no consensus concerning my oeuvre”. There are many noteworthy things about The Fall, but one that rarely gets mentioned is how little agreement there is amongst admirers about what constitutes the best material. Beatles fans might argue at length about minutiae of the fab output, but as close to none of them as makes no difference think With The Beatles is better than Revolver, whereas no randomly selected bunch of Fallophiles would get close to honing in what are the best and worst records. Perhaps this is because all Fall albums contain gold cushioned in straw, a mixture of incredible music and perplexing old nonsense, sometimes in consecutive bars (and perhaps this is what makes them so constantly mystifying and exciting). But even so, 1997’s Levitate is an album that is rarely top of anyone’s pantheon, as it’s an awkward, uneven album, where jokes fall flat and smiles turn sinister, where euphoria comes with a hint of wintry regret, where musical inspiration comes with a scribbled Post-It note saying “Will this do?”. 

And I’m here to claim that this is what makes it essential to the story of The Fall. 

First up, let’s dismiss the historical context. Yes, this is the last album to feature the great Steve Hanley on bass, The Fall’s longest-serving non-ranting member, and it was released not long before the Brownies incident, in which the group collapsed on a NYC stage and after which MES was arrested. People claim you can hear the tension on this record, but I’m not sure it is any more true here than in many other places. Nope, the reason this record sounds so odd is that it has the credit “produced by Mark E Smith”, and may be the closest we’ll get to the inexplicable sound that hummed in his head. 

First up, there’s undeniably good music here. ‘Ten Houses Of Eve’ is built using a Fisher Price My First Breakbeat TM with a tarmac-thick vocal trill/hook borrowed from The Seeds’ ‘Evil Hoodoo’.  The breakdown - or do I mean stumbling halt? – which laments “If only the shards could relocate” over eerie piano is lovely. ‘Hurricane Edward’ oozes melancholy and you can almost feel a cutting wind blowing across stubbly autumnal fields even as you have no idea what the lyric about a farmhand might mean. ‘4 ½ Inch’ is an industrial car-crusher trying to do big beat, and is glorious. ‘The Quartet Of Doc Shanley’ has an amazing sludgy bassline, which said S Hanley later admitted to nicking off The Osmonds, of all people. The Wire’s reviewer noted that ‘Jungle Rock’ best encapsulates the Fall sound, even though it’s a cover; certainly the tuning and wonky antidub space in the mix would not pass muster in the majority of bands.  

‘Spencer Must Die’ is hypnotic and chilly with whispered lyrics, and is forgettable, but only in the sense that it’s a wonderful discovery every spin. It ends pretty much in the middle of a phrase, which brings us on to the strange portion of the record. ‘I’m A Mummy’ is a tossed-off 50s novelty song with some toxic trebly guitar, and it’s hard to work out why it’s here, or indeed, anywhere. ‘Masquerade’ sounds as though 40% of the track is missing, a messily syncopated inscrutable little song.  ‘I Come And Stand At Your [sic] Door’ is a plodding cover of the famous song-poem about a young Hiroshima victim, which almost sounds touching, though this effect is minimised by the redundant instrumental version’s unsavoury, dismissive name, ‘Jap Kid’ (I mean, come on). ‘Ol’ Gang’ is a good scuzzy kraut groove, utterly marred by the quarter-arsed vocals which seem to have been dubbed (daubed) on at the last minute and which feature almost the same hackneyed opening couplet as THE PREVIOUS TRACK. The title track is a simple little tune with the drums mixed as loud as the rest of the band put together, and it’s likable but, again, feels overbalanced. 

Add to this the fuzzy disco-pop of ‘Everybody But Myself’ which sounds as though it was mastered from a fourth-generation C90, and ‘Tragic Days’, a pointless 90 seconds of tape noise, and that’s the album. Levitate falls almost exactly in the middle of The Fall’s recording career, 18 years after their debut album and 18 years before their swan song. It sounded wrong and illogical on release, and still has the power to confuse and enrage. It’s a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a shit mix. It is great because it has no desire to be great, and doesn’t know or care when it’s awful. It captures the purest essence of The Fall. 

I have literally this second realised that the album’s title basically means the opposite of the band’s name. That contradiction is the album in a nutshell. It’s essential. You probably shouldn’t buy it.  

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. 

Piney Gear

Happy new year!  Unless you read this within 8 hours of my posting it...or unless you read it months after I posted it...or unless you read it twelve months after I poster it, in which case, it works again.  So, whilst I'm here, happy Easter and happy Passover and happy flying ant day.

MU-ZIQ - ...IN PINE EFFECT (Hi-Rise) 

I went to school with Squarepusher. He was a year above me. I once told him that bass solos were pointless. That is my IDM anecdote. 

My IDM discussion point, the one that leaves me shunned in parties, is how nobody can decide where to file μ-Ziq. Some record shops treat that Greek character as an M, because that’s pretty much what it is; some read it as representing the syllable “mu”, as I have above; some don’t look carefully and file under U; some just ignore the weird squiggle altogether and stick it under Z (nip into Oxford’s HMV for evidence of this, clearly the worst of all approaches). I maintain that this is because the name is unique, and I for one cannot think of another act where a character from another alphabet has to be named, rather than sounded, to pronounce the act credit.  Oh sure, loads of acts have done it with numerals – 2 Live Crew, 4Play – but not letters. And before you ask, grabbing a Cyrillic or something and sticking it in your band logo might look cute, but it’s not the same thing (System 7 once released a record where the name was made up from the digits 1-7 at different angles, which was clever...and a damned sight more interesting than the drab hippy trance on the disc).  

Whether this typographical oddity is why Mike Paradinas’s output is not quite as celebrated as those of his chums Richard James, Luke Vibert and Tom Jenkinson, I couldn’t say. Maybe it’s because he tends to stick to a narrow and tested palette of sounds (and, yes, ‘Within A Sound’ on this album has those trademark crunchy drums that sound like someone putting the boot into a box of Frosties in an aircraft hangar). And even within his oeuvre, this album gets less love than I think it deserves: the opening duo of Tango N’ Vectif and Bluff Limbo get props – perhaps because they were on Rephlex – and 1997’s Lunatic Harness was the one to get the lavish rerelease treatment, but for my money, ...In Pine Effect is the pinnacle. Maybe I just like that ellipsis at the start – how do you file that, eh? 

The album as a whole is neat smash-up between clanky, intense techno and easy listening, with ‘Phiesope’ sounding like some laid-back KPM library music that might have popped up on behind a montage on Holiday 83, with strummed guitar and xylophone...or cheap synthesised equivalents, anyway, because this album does seem to revel in the otherwordly qualities objectively naff sounds can have, in common with a lot of Paradinas’s work – check out the “hip-hop producer does hotel lounge music” vibe of the Jake Slazenger records. Perhaps the wonkiest example is ‘Roy Castle’, which adds ersatz horns to a perky beat, though they’re less in the style of the eponymous jazzer-turned-presenter than Herb Alpert’s cheese-grin efforts. In related news my brain has suddenly started singing the words “Tijuana Brass” to the tune of ‘Do You Wanna Dance’ as made famous by Cliff – send help. 

On top of that we have tracks like ‘Dauphine’, which starts out with brooding menace but turns into the sort of squelchy synth boogaloo that might have accompanied Morph’s antics, and the title track which is just a big dumb fragment of some fake boogie-woogie repeated for a while (and ‘Green Crumble’, even more so). But it’s not all rollicking fun. ‘Mr Angry’ delivers on its nominal promise by being a greasy chunk of Aphexual tweaked percussion over which someone howls with rage. A lot. Whereas ‘The Wailing Song’ sounds like someone tried to condense Górecki’s 3rd symphony to a few minutes using a budget keyboard. ‘Problematic’ doesn’t seem too unusual, until an ear-scratching lead synth line gets all atonal round the edges. 

I have also just this minute found out that the CD version actually had fewer tracks that the vinyl version. That just didn’t happen in 1995. Now I’m annoyed that I have been missing out on 8% of the album. Might put ‘Mr Angry’ on again... 

Sole Music

The Lunchtime For The Wild Youth reviews tend to come in batches, as the editor sends me occasional packages of recent issues. In this one, covering 1994 releases, I look at two discs of abstract ambience, which as you might imagine none of the other writers do. Someone does review Disco Inferno, though, god to know someone else in the world likes them.

V/A - ISOLATIONISM (Virgin) 

The potted pop histories tend to leap from grunge to Britpop, but there was another significantly influential genre nestled between the two in the guise of ambient (jungle was also big business, but wasn’t an album genre at this time, and only became one when it morphed into drum ‘n’ bass). In the wake of The Orb’s success, lush and primarily beatless music sold a fair few copies and filled a fair few columns. This allowed Virgin to scour their back catalogue and throw together a bunch of double CDs, offering a new generation some mostly excellent music from names like Sylvian, Eno, Fripp, and Froese. The compilations were decent, even if the covers were hideous. 

Volume 4, however, was unusual because not only was it mostly comprised of new material, but it was a collation of colder, bleaker sounds under the title Isolationism (what would more likely be called dark ambient nowadays, and post-industrial beforehand). The set was pulled together by Kevin Martin, who is best known as The Bug today, but then was thought of (if at all) as half of Techno Animal with Justin Broadrick. He sets out a mini-manifesto in the sleevenotes – peak mid-90s arty digital design making them bloody hard to actually read – to drag ambient away from the joss-sticks-and-joints crowd and back to the experimental mindset of New York minimalism and Krautrock, painting Future Sound Of London as the anodyne ambient enemy (which seems harsh, as a record like that year’s Lifeforms is pretty inventive and not afraid to be unnerving and creepy at times, and there are tons of better candidates for scapegoat...perhaps there was some bad blood from Broadrick’s sampling of pre-FSOL acid classic ‘Stakker Humanoid’ in his Godflesh guise). To be honest, there’s not really a meaningful ethos or ideology behind the record, but it is a fantastic two-and-a-half-hour journey, and I bet it shocked a few 90s neo-hippies who bought it expecting more friendly tones from the likes of Laraaji and The Grid. Interestingly, although this was last comp to go under the Ambient name, future releases kept the AMBT catalogue number, though these stray ever further from the ambient concept (not that they’re not generally good, and I recommend seeking out the early post-rock selection Monsters, Robots & Bugmen, both the Macro Dub Infection sets which are also Martin’s curatorial work, and David Toop’s selections of favourite singers, guitarists, and electro producers).  

Here are a few Isolationism highlights: 

ICE – The Dredger Techno Animal also show up on the album with some chain-rattling eeriness, but this alternate project from the same duo is better, boasting a thick hawser dub bassline overlaid with metallic sax scrapes.   

:zoviet*france: - Daisy Gun I’ve included this partly for the nice papery delay on offer, but mostly just because I like the way the punctuation marks look. 

Labradford - Air Lubricated Free Axis Trainer Again, this warm tunnel of organ with buzzing spring sounds is good, but mostly I just like the name. 

Paul Schütze - Hallucinations (In Memory Of Renaldo Arenas) Considering the ostensible froideur of the compilation, this is quite a funky groove, with a submerged ostinato and relentlessly rolling percussion. 

Scorn – Silver Rain Fell (Deep Water Mix) Sounds like a hip hop behemoth clumping along in the next valley. 

Disco Inferno – Lost In Fog An odd addition as their music is very poppy underneath all the MIDI monkeying (their second album, DI Go Pop from this year is worth tracking down). 

Total – Six In that strange zone where noise is so abrasive it becomes soothing. 

Nijiumu – Once Again I Cast Myself Into The Flames Of Atonement Keiji Haino, by any other name. As ritualistic as the name suggests, but quite restful. I’ve only just realised that the name implies the guy keeps fucking up and having to make up for it. 

Aphex Twin – Aphex Airlines Probably the main selling point for the compilation. This is from the absolute pinnacle of Richard D James’s output, where great albums like Selected Ambient Works II, Surfing On Sine Waves and I Care Because You Do just seemed to spill out. He even tossed great tracks onto compilations without fanfare, such as ‘My Teapot’ on Warp’s second Artificial Intelligence album, and its sister track ‘Phlid’ on a Select magazine covermount (I had no idea what the track name meant at the time, and I now wish I didn’t). This track is like a tired ogre with indigestion, and perhaps not up with the best work, but all Aphex is worth hearing. 

AMM – Vandoeuvre  A very different approach from the free improv stalwarts, which is not harsh or unsettling, and in fact comes across quite cosy and cuddly. 

O’Rang - Little Sister Tex Mex in dub?  Something like that. 

Final – Hide The volume leaps up about 30 seconds in: is this art, or a mastering cock-up? 

Lull – Thoughts It’s a touch obvious, but effectively cold and windswept. It’s the work of Mick Harris, erstwhile Napalm Death drummer, I bet you weren’t expecting that. 

 

Mad Capulet Markets

 Christmas, innit? So, yeah, happy Christmas, or whatever.

ELVIS COSTELLO & THE BRODSKY QUARET – THE JULIET LETTERS (Warner Bros) 

I used to buy cassettes from Boots. That seems like an absurd false memory now, as if I’d bought spanners from Holland & Barrett or Anusol from Timpson’s, but Chelmsford Boots had a decent little music section, and when my parents were buying grown-up stuff like shampoo and aspirin (I'm pretty sure not Anusol, and I'm not going to check), I’d browse through the records. They often seemed to have some very good tapes on special offer at the counter, and I recall every one of these that I bought was a cracker: Lou Reed’s Transformer, Coldcut’s What’s What Noise? (my introduction to Mark E Smith, believe it or not), Baby Ford’s Fordtrax, and this one. I was 17 for most of 1993, so I suspect I might have been in Boots on my own by this time, but I don’t recall; I’m certain it’s the last thing I bought from there, though weirdly I remember buying marked-down copy of the triple-tape Secret Broadcasts set by Glenn Miller from Oxford’s Boots when I came up to study a couple of years later, and I find it pretty amazing they were still doing music in 1995, it can’t have lasted much longer. 

The album is a series of epistolary songs for solo voice and string quartet, apparently inspired by people who wrote to Juliet Capulet – presumably C/O That Big Crypt, Verona - with their troubles. Only one of the 20 tracks addresses this theme specifically though, the others zipping over all sorts of ground, which has allowed Costello to give reign to some highly inventive lyric-writing. Some of the words are very funny, and this small chamber set-up means every one is easily audible, which I think Elvis relished – listen to the swift judgment of Damnation’s Cellar (which looks like an Entombed song title, but is about bringing people back with a time machine), and the Gershwin-level tricksiness of ‘This Offer Is Unrepeatable’, a satire on hard-sell Christianity in the form of junk mail: “Girls will be swooning because you’re exciting them/ Not only fall at your feet but be biting them...The wine that they offer will go to your head/ You’ll start seeing double in fishes and bread”. There are also some heart-wrenchingly emotional songs on display, which teeter on mawkishness but manage to survive, and ‘The Birds Will Still Be Singing’ can still bring a lump to the throat. 

The whole endeavour, of course, is pure South Bank show shit, the sort of Arts Council bait perfect for a middle-aged artist with an eye on a Sunday supplement spread, but what’s noteworthy about this album is how often it rises above middle-brow novelty. The music is strong with a broad sonic palette, from drawing-room elegance to arthouse intricacy, with plenty of aggressive percussive playing and excellent use of sudden dissonance to balance some incredibly catchy tunes. Costello is in fine voice too, his scuffed intense vibrato sounding oddly like Horace Andy at times, and his pitching and sense of drama are immaculate - but if you were worried that he’d gone opera and lost his punky rots, check the mad-eyed screech of ‘Swine’’s final word, “penknife” (this “letter” appears to have been carved into flesh). Amongst all this there’s space for a very straightforward soulful pop song, ‘Jacksons, Monk And Rowe’, a slightly inscrutable tale of a large close-knit family which doesn’t seem to be a letter at all, and this Pop Private Eye has concluded that it was written before the Brodksy project began and swiftly adapted. 

Many people at the time were disappointed at how far this was from Elvis’s new-wave roots, though that’s odd because we’d already had the country-beard vibes of King Of America and the lush, McCartney-bothering Spike and Mighty Like A Rose. Still, those who missed the full-throttle brain-pop of the late 70s only had to wait one more year for a return, with what might be the best Costello album, Brutal Youth...but that’s a tale for another day (or next issue, who knows).