Evenings on the Gin

An incredibly short piece today, a review of a single track for Nutshaft.  Happily, the review I'm writing for the next issue will be of a gig, it seems like an age since I last wrote one of those.

JUNIPER NIGHTS – TIME TO REST (Self-release)

For a good few years Juniper Nights have been a reliable local act, enlivening many a bill with their warm indie elegance (think Easter Island Statues with a slight taste for the twinklier end of Radiohead). 'Time To Rest' is their latest track, and the first to capture a new line-up. It’s not a world away from their earlier work, with James Gallagher’s soft and sweet vocals as winning as ever, adding character and taste like aural dolcelatte. The song is a little let down, though, by a politely chugging Travisoid rhythm, of roughly the speed and intensity of the miniature train that pootles round the grounds of a country house – the song is about crap jobs, but instead of the anger or wit of '9 To 5' or 'Take This Job And Shove It' it just sounds as though the daily grind has exhausted and defeated the band. It just needs a bit more clout to land. For those about to rock, we salute you; for those on the miniature train, there’s a signal box next to the floral clock.

Giving You The Inger

The editor asked me to review this one, I'd never heard of the act.  Glad I did, though, it's a really strong album.

Inger Nordvik – Hibernation (self release) 

Nick Drake and Joni Mitchell. Two artists for whom the greatness of their recordings is indirectly proportionate to the awfulness of most musicians they’ve influenced. The former has inspired a phalanx of open-mic wraiths mumbling about how lonely they are, and the latter unintentionally gave the green light to enough tastefully pretty tunes about self care and nature rambles to sap the life from any coffee shop employee. It seems almost wilfully wrong-headed to think that these elements were what made Drake and Mitchell great – it’s like a Numanoid proselytizing recreational aviation and 80s Tory policy.

On Inger Nordvik’s second album of folk-flecked piano songs a very clear line can be traced back to Joni Mitchell, but she and her band is unusual in picking just the right elements to bounce off. Sure, the songs are succinctly jazzy and the vocals sweetly breathy, but like Joni’s best work there’s a knottiness to the playing and a sophisticated complexity to the arrangements: take the clockwork construction under 'Go Back'’s exquisite vocal line, or the arco bass acting as a sinister undertow to the calm limpid surface of Waiting. The entire band is outstanding, but special praise must go to drummer and percussionist Ola Øverby. In contrast to the bounce he supplies to the cocktail-umbrella urban pop of Fieh, he brings a twitchy precision to Hibernation, from the delicate ride taps on Secret that make it sound as though the kit has been caught in a warm spring rain to the uptight buttoned-down fills of album opener 'Denial' - which sounds like Fleetwood Mac’s 'The Chain' migrating from a blustery tundra to a humid afternoon on the Ganges plain in three minutes.

Listening to Hibernation is like leaping between icy coolness and inviting warmth, possibly reflecting the songs’ genesis in a small cabin on the snowy northern coast of Norway. The title track opens with a glacial post-rock billow before being thawed by toasty bass, ending up like a strange optimistic cousin of Radiohead’s 'Pyramid Song' that could give you a cosier glow than radioactive Ready Brek. Nordvik’s voice is similarly quite lovely, and full of different characters, sweetening the gruff sincerity of Mark Eitzel, tempering the kooky artistry of Stina Nordenstam, freshening the cool detachment of Sheila Chandra, and recalling Jeff Buckley without his pervasive miasma of smugness.

Amongst these riches, the album does occasionally tip over into a cute refinement, such as on closing track 'Ask You' which the ears enjoy but which dances away from memory, and 'It Follows' slightly mars its wholesome earthy groove - imagine someone had crocheted a Portishead song - with a somewhat precious lushness. But, overall Hibernation is the sort of delightful flora where the delicate leaves and complex tendrils turn out to be as gorgeous as the flowers.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cale, Cale, Rock 'n' Roll

This is one of those albums where, if I think of the songs, they sound great, but if I actually play the songs, they sound....decent.  Worth hearing, but not Cale's best.

JOHN CALE – MERCY (Double Six)

 The story of 21^st-century hip-hop is the story of collaboration. Contemporary fans exploring Paid In Full, the classic 1987 album by Eric B & Rakim might be surprised to find that the full list of artists involved is a) Eric B; b) Rakim. Today the equivalent would feature beats from a pool of producers and guest vocals from a coachload of rappers and singers, regardless of the names on the front cover. On the plus side, this reduces the chances of stagnation and keeps artists creative, but it does make for albums without much of a tonal centre. Whilst the glossiest of pop productions might involve a vast phalanx of producers each ensuring that a specific snare sound is maximised for airplay impact on the preferred aural demographic - or something - the serial-collaborator model is less common in other music genres (although jazz and improv are, and always will be, one giant pulsating swingers’ party of temporary hook-ups).

 In his first album of new compositions for a decade, John Cale has released his inner Cardi B and invited an eclectic mix of collaborators to join him on 7 of the 12 tracks. However, even though this roster stretches from eloquent electronica to sleazy indie to dilated-pupil neopsychedelia, Mercy is surprisingly cohesive as an album. Partly this is because it is victim of particularly grim modern mixing and mastering where every musical element seems to be in the foreground at once, and where reverb coats everything but without creating any sense of space (if you do hear anything behind the charmless sonic wall, it’s probably the ghost of King Tubby quietly weeping). More pleasingly, Cale’s vocals create a rich thread through the record, dragging their wry weltschmerz through each track at a similar stately pace, regardless of changes in musical style or tempo; apart from a slightly more sprightly tune in Night Crawling, which might have come from a 90s Bowie track, Cale is the melodic equivalent of a noh performer, his subtly expressive mahogany tones addressing ecology, theology, or Marilyn Monroe’s legs with the same monastic delivery – it’s no surprise that he was attracted to Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering because of her “puritanical” voice. The lyrics throughout are suitably sparse with an impressive imagistic allusiveness (though starting a song about Nico by crooning “you’re a moonstruck junky lady” is a huge misstep, coming on like some alternate-world Chris de Burgh wandering round the New York demimonde looking for stoned damsels to woo).

 The collaborative pieces are generally Mercy’s most enjoyable. Fat White Family help to give The Legal Status Of Ice a woozy, punchdrunk griminess, whereas Actress brings gorgeous burbling, chattering bleeps to an improvised vocal, sounding like The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide switching itself on and off in dense undergrowth. There’s a fractured R&B feeling to Noise Of You, like it’s a sexy slow jam created by a confused old wizard, and this vibe is amplified on Story of Blood featuring Weyes Blood, where breathy but sombre vocals pull against a sensuously slinky drum pattern, like a twisted urban impersonation of something on Prefab Sprout’s From Langley park To Memphis. This is immediately followed by Time Sands Still, with Sylvan Esso, which adds a warm dubby 90s element to a similar beat (scholars of forgotten chillout pop might be reminded of Smoke City’s Underwater Love).

 The album ends with Out Your Window, a somewhat plodding ballad with a piano motif that strongly resembles the refrain to Nobody Lives Without Love, Eddi Reader’s contribution to the Batman Forever soundtrack, of all things. The relentlessly hammered keys are wearing, and a nasal guitar is tasteless, but even here, at the album’s weakest point, we’re still surprised with the falsetto plea, “don’t you be jumping out your window”. Mercy may have a few forgettable tracks, but an artist with John Cale’s long and varied history will always find a way to intrigue the listener. But next time, John, why stop at 7 guest collaborators? Break out the Rolodex and let’s really go to town. 

Some Day My Principality Will Come

A very brief EP review this time.  I don't often do record reviews for Nutshaft, but this time there weren't any gigs to speak of worth reviwing.  I'm doing a single track review this month, for similar reasons, so expect a micro-post.

GIVE ME MONACO – LUMINANCE EP (Emseatee Records)

 The artist states that this is the second of a pair of EPs “centred around destructive and regenerative elements within nature”, but like all good house and associated genres, it sounds like shiny unnatural machines being corralled by a sensitive human mind – lucky, really, because the water cycle is doubtless very cool, but you can’t really dance to it. You’ll have no trouble flexing a boogie muscle to ‘Basalt’, which pits a classic constantly tweaked acid-trance riff against some bright melodic figures that might have leapfrogged straight from an old Yellow Magic Orchestra album, whilst a breathy vocal fragment threatens to morph into A Guy Called Gerald’s ‘Voodoo Ray’.  On the other hand, ‘Caldera’ – yes, all the tracks are connected with volcanic geology – has a sleeker rhythm with a likembe loop and disconnected vocal phonemes that might remind Thames Valley ravers of the much mourned Coloureds. If ‘Lahar’ and ‘Magma’ are possibly a little less memorable, the four-tracker as a whole is packed with warm bounce. As ingenious as it is igneous.

Is Slang?

I've just submitted my latest MusicOMH review, which starts off talking about hip-hop before reviewing John Cale. This one spends more time talking about hard bop than one might expect for a techno review. I can't really defend these choices.

TERENCE FIXMER – SHIFTING SIGNALS (Mute)

Most vintage jazz albums had liner notes, and most of these liner notes consisted of streams of dated slang terms. Pick up your favourite Blue Note or Prestige classic, and although the music might now be celebrated as some of the best of the mid-twentieth century, the sleeve is liable to sound like an awkward aging uncle, exclaiming, “Hey, even on a relaxed blowing session, this cat is cookin’. They don’t just have chops, they have soul. Check out the spicy licks as the trumpet and drums trade four-bar passages”. The music has aged far better than its context, the one still feeling fresh and relevant, the other quaint and archaic. We’re witnessing a similar change in attitudes regarding techno. If Terence Fixmer’s seventh album had been released as little as twenty years ago, you could expect press releases banging on about a dispassionately anonymous producer wielding unfeeling technology. This earlier era of electronica may not have seen the full Nat Hentoff approach - “Hey, even on a white label remix, this faceless producer is facelessly producin’. They don’t just have all the manuals for their devices, they have an utterly robotic absence of humanity. Check out the ineluctable, emotionless high-pass filter as the synthesiser and drum machines repeat the same four bars for twelve minutes.” – but it was certainly bigger on cyborgs and fractals.

It’s great that we’ve reached a point where we can listen to a strong album like Shifting Signals for its musical qualities, rather than as a sci-fi signifier. This is doubtless partly because computers are now something we carry in our pockets, rather than the domain of tech-wizards , and the idea of a dance producer connecting and sequencing actual hardware seems as charmingly whimsical as a skiffle band with a tea-chest bass, but also because a near forty-year-old genre which has so clearly influenced the mainstream no longer sends shocks (regardless of how much the guitarist at your local pub’s Sunday jam session witters on about proper musicians being threatened by this new-fangled stuff). Shifting Signals makes clear nods towards specific moments in techno’s history, such as the mournful Aphex horns hovering behind a rubbery loop on Reset, the almost funky bounce and muffled vocals of The Way I See You which recall Baby Ford’s terribly under-rated BFORD9 album, and the minimal Jeff Mills march of Automaton (OK, there are still the odd nods to robo-chic in techno’s DNA, that could have been a Model 500 title from 1985). 

Although there are moments of sonic sleekness on display, such as the shiny burnished hum of The Passage, the album is at its best with grimy textures and Fixmer proves himself to be a master at marshalling dirty industrial sounds. Corne De Brume – or Foghorn, in English – opens with a wavering static buzz resembling a detuned telly being spun on a rotary washing line, and is topped by some rusty distorted notes. They could cleaned up and airlifted into a different track as euphoric ravey airhorn blasts, but here they sound as if there was a loose connection in the studio, adding a rough glitchy texture. Roar Machines is built on a similarly scuzzy baritone synth line, which is tweaked and twisted throughout. It almost sounds as though it was based on speech patterns...though if you hear actual words, maybe it’s time to remove the headphones and go and get some fresh air. 

A couple of tracks are less memorable, but the only real mis-step is lead single Synthetic Mind, a plodding track whose simple piano part was influenced by John Carpenter, but which recalls the ponderous coffee-table techno and dolphin holograms of Cosmic Baby; but even this is enlivened by long descending synth tones, which could have soundtracked Hans Gruber falling from the Nakatomi building had Die Hard been set in the Jet Set Willy universe. To return to the glory days of jazz, this meticulously constructed record might not be the work of a trailblazer like Miles or Coltrane, but it sits alongside the thoughtful craftsmanship of Horace Silver and the gutsy kick of Cannonball Adderley: a pleasure for cool hepcats and cold androids alike.

Dylan, Like The Beams Of A Balance, Is Always Varying

I had an absolute blast writing this review.  The gig was such great fun (I think Bob was having more fun than everyone), and whilst 20% of the time I was laughing at some clunker of a wrong note or something, the other 80% of the time I was giggling with joy at the playfulness of it all.  Sincerely, every old rocker's gigs should be like this, hats resolutely off. to the man.

Archivists can note that I don't actually know who the promoter was; there wwre probably about 17 involved.  Hats off to the PR person for getting a brace of guest passes for little old Nutshaft, though, that was brilliant.

BOB DYLAN, NEW THEATRE, 4/11/22

The crowd pouring out of The New Theatre seemed to be split on whether this was a good or bad gig. Certainly it was gloriously odd. That Bob elected to play piano throughout was eyebrow-raising, but that he sat at a rickety old upright heroically out of tune with the backing quintet was a free temporary facelift. Even weirder, the nearest mic to the piano appeared to be 6-feet away, leading to a fuzzy, sub-aquatic mix straight from a David Lynch soundtrack (anyone who thought they’d been dreaming when they saw the gig announced might suspect they’d never woken up). And Bob did nothing to dispel the unreality, striking the ivories with authoritative spareness like Thelonious Monk via Les Dawson, and keeping the band on their collective toes with odd rhythms. Songs from the last album were played relatively straight – although they already sound like beautiful half-forgotten ghosts of drawing room ballads – but old tracks bore almost no resemblance to the original composition: they played “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” like they’ve never heard it before, and “Gotta Serve Somebody” like they’ve never heard any song ever, words crammed into an ill-fitting melody like a Nightshift writer trying to fit into their teenage jeans. These are not cock-ups, but deliberate playful decisions, risks that are entertaining regardless of whether they pay off.

 Received opinion is that Dylan’s voice is a batrachian croak for which the concept of individual notes is a faded memory. Certainly, for much of 1992’s Good As I Been To You he sounds as though he’s actually dying in the vocal booth (and then come back as a tipsy zombie for 2009’s inexplicable Christmas In The Heart), but after a decade of studying the urbane stylings of Sinatra, his voice has become a warm, avuncular buzz somewhere between Bing Crosby, Tom Waits, and Vincent Price. His singing tonight is sweet and melodic, and even if the mudpie mix means we catch maybe 10% of the words, his timing is impeccable, by turns dramatic and hilarious. Wayward phrasing is his super-power; maybe he was bitten by some radioactive rubato in Greenwich Village.

It’s a joy to see an elder statesman onstage who neither plays everything fixed-grin safe, nor cynically runs out the clock with half an eye on their bank balance. If this were a Dylan tribute, you’d bottle them offstage; if this were a new act, you’d be raiding their Bandcamp on the bus home. Fixing any of the oddities would have made this a better gig. But being a better gig would have made this a much worse gig.  

 

 

Piece of Bis

OK, I've decided that what I'll do is post my MusicOMH reviews one in arrears.  This means there will be an average of 4 weeks between posting on their site and here - but go and sign up for the site if you want them more quickly.  Here's a fun little album from some pop kids who probably now have their own kids.

BIS – SYSTEMS MUSIC FOR HOME DEFENCE (Last Night From Glasgow)

Pop music is synonymous with youth, of course, but nobody can stop time. The public is generally happy to see their favourite artists slip into middle age so long as they can still turn out a tune, happy to forego low hairlines and narrow waists, and everyone just pretends that jumping over the drum riser or busting out a slutdrop was never a big deal in the first place. But when an act celebrates their juvenility from the outset, aging becomes a harsher curse. Musical Youth might turn in a decent festival set, but there’ll still be a little cognitive dissonance you won’t get with UB40 and anyone who’s encountered The Nashville Teens on the nostalgia trail can only find their senescence risible. Sonic Youth were perhaps ironic enough to carry it off, but seeing their craggy, lined faces in their final years as a band still. And Neil Young is just taking the piss.

Bis have managed to walk that tightrope rather nicely. Yes, they may not all have been old enough to buy a pint when they first appeared on Top Of The Pops – the first unsigned act ever to do so, an achievement which puts them into both the record books and  the roster of classic pub quiz questions – but, despite the odd lyric about sweetshops or Teen-C power, their feeling of youthful effusiveness came from their fierce independence and love of euphoric pop music rather than any post-adolescent energy. And this has not changed on their sixth studio album, the same infectious bounce and sly wit is in evidence as it was back in 1996; they just go easier on the hairclips nowadays.

Some of the lyrics do reflect a more middle-aged mindset, where mortgages and school runs might take place of rollerblades and school discos. Headaches and Stress are not exactly titles one would have found on a 90s Bis album. Even when the themes are somewhat more universal, the band reveal that they’re in their forties: lead single Lucky Night is a grinning swipe at men who co-opt feminism as an item in their chat-up arsenal (“Patriarchy is a bad scene/ Baby, I’m the vaccine”), but it’s hard to imagine any bar-room lothario under 35 asking for someone’s email address.

The music still packs a sherbety punch, though, regardless of the topics covered, embellishing the fizzy, buzzing indie-pop of old with some sonic references which actually predate the band’s first recordings by 7 or 8 years. Stress is an indie anthem with Walken-tickling levels of cowbell, but also has a vintage rave breakdown, and some perky backing vocals from Manda Rin that sound pleasingly like Betty Boo. (I Got My) Independence – a track title to sum up the Bis ethos in every decade, perhaps – starts with some pounding Italo house piano, before morphing into a, Express Yourself-era Madonna tune via some crisp 909 snare. Lucky Night’s package holiday party sound is like something from the second-tier of Stock, Aitken & Waterman’s roster – think Sonia or The Reynolds Girls – and We Do Structures might have a name like an ancient po-faced Numan B-side, but has a winking hi-NRG rhythm with more in common with London Boys. There’s even a track entitled The Lookback, pledging that “we do the lookback to see where we’ve come from”, in case there was any doubt (and, for the record, the lush synth pads this time nod towards the Madonna of Vogue, with a hint of The Beloved’s melancholy 3AM wistfulness).

The sounds of 1989 are big business currently, and a band like the superb Confidence Man can take some vintage chart pop and some juicy Chicago house basslines to create a night at the Platonic NYC gay club of your dreams, but on Systems Music For Home Defence, Bis bring the same pleasures down to earth. Instead of big budget fantasies the album sound more like someone playing along to favourite pop tunes through fuzzy amps and singing with equal zest and wonky pitching into a marker pen microphone. And if that doesn’t sound like fun to you, you’re probably too old.