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.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

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).