Oblique House Music

It might be worth mentioning in passing that Here Come The Warm Jets is one of the greatest albums ever made.

EMMA HUNTER/ LONDON GRAFFITI, Its (sic) All About the Music, Jericho, 16/3/23

Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards are a collection of mysterious, unusual, or downright paradoxical prompts to help anyone hitting a creative brick wall, perhaps most famously employed during the recording of Bowie’s Berlin trilogy. If we were invited to add a new Zen zinger to the deck, after witnessing Emma Hunter tonight it would be, “Restrict the options to expand the possibilities”.  The Hunter palette is elementary, just Tom Bruce on drums, and Emma on guitar and vocals; this latter pair can be put through a looper to build up extra textures, but this means that all the elements have to be immaculately placed to avoid any messy bleeds and clashes. Although the first thing to impress you about the set might be the rich layers of vocal harmonies (encore ‘Treacle Well’, with its breathy vocal sections, sounds gloriously like Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’ exploding in a cathedral made of mirrors), what you might marvel at later is Tom’s inventive and ornate drum parts, which manage to fit in the gaps between Emma’s complex constructions whilst still oozing character and ideas. Jazz drummers might play in the pocket, but Tom inhabits the very seams.

Emma’s vocal melodies are touched by wonderfully subtle embellishments, trills, and curlicues, which nod towards techniques and traditions from the Mississippi delta, Spain, and North Africa, whilst always sounding natural and unforced. This is especially clear on ‘Morire’ (meaning to die, or fade away), a new single launched tonight which concerns someone drifting inexorably into alcoholism. We can definitely imagine Marc Almond interpreting the song’s tragic emotion well – though definitely not with Emma’s cast-iron pitching.

The ingenious exploration of limitations shown by Emma is contrasted by London Graffiti’s support set. They have plenty of charm, a literate cross between thoughtful British indie and melancholic American rock that sits somewhere between Counting Crows and Elbow. Singer JP has a warm, unhurried voice that edges towards the urbane passion of Paul Simon, but occasionally the lead guitar clogs the songs’ arteries with solos and wah-wah interjections that get in the way of the tunes. The last two numbers are more stripped back, and all the better for it.  London Graffiti put in a strong showing, but sometimes you just wish their approach was more...oblique.

Grotesque (After The Grim)

I sometimes wonder whether I subconsciously give a slightly lower rating to records where I don't even get a download for my troubles.  Was this album a zip file of MP3s away from 4 stars?

SLEAFORD MODS – UK GRIM (Rough Trade)

Ten years ago, when Sleaford Mods first came to the public eye with Austerity Dogs, few people would have banked on them still delivering the goods six albums later – partly because maintaining that bile-spitting intensity seemed unrealistic, and partly because those pallid early press shots made it look as though at least one of them would have succumbed to scurvy before now. But those who knew that there had already been five albums under the Mods’ name before 2013 will have been less pessimistic. Impressively, this latest album channels as much dyspeptic rage as any previous release, and showcases some interesting developments.

UK Grim harbours some fantastic writing. There’s the unvarnished poetry of lines like “When your heart hangs like a loose stool that won’t drop”, but there are also surreal and mystifying barked pronouncements, as if righteous ire and deep sadness are bursting from Jason Williamson in every possible direction: is 'I Claudius' about dysfunctional families, half-remembered 70s telly, nationalism, and off-duty Santas scoffing chips? Or all, or none, of the above? The outstanding 'Force 10 From Navarone', featuring the current titan of sardonically allusive pop, Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw, captures all that’s best about Williamson’s current writing, laying down a carpet of potty-mouthed non-sequiturs which are almost hilarious but ultimately hauntingly melancholy, including the syntactically fractured dream-state cracker joke refrain, “Jason, why does the darkness elope? Cross-sectioned; it’s not a drink, and I don’t fucking smoke”. 

Despite this, some of the lyrical targets feel obvious. The last few governments might be the worst in the post-war period, but simply saying so doesn’t make for interesting art. Lines like “In England nobody can hear you scream, you’re just fucked, lads” aren’t hugely satisfying, and Williamson’s often preaching to the choir (or at least screaming back towards the rabble). It’s fitting that satirical collagist Cold War Steve created a video for the title track, when 'Tory Kong' stretches the conceit of a tired broadsheet political cartoon over three minutes. Moments like this proves that barn-door targets are disappointingly easy to hit, even when you’re pissing at them. 

Whilst the linguistic half of Sleaford Mods is developing in two very different directions, Andrew Fearn has turned in his most musically satisfying set of tracks to date. The Fallesque watchwords are still simplicity and repetition, but there is an attention to detail that gives many of these tracks real quality, from the distorted Blade Runner ostinasty of the title track, to the chunky muscular beat of 'D.I.Why' which could almost have been lifted from a vintage Run DMC track (the song’s observation that hipster musicians dress like avuncular TV steeplejack Fred Dibnah provides the album’s first laugh-out-loud moment). 'Tilldipper' is a roiling rant with a bassline like rubble doing the conga, but this is balanced by the crepuscular wistfulness of 'Force 10 From Navarone', complete with a cheap Casio Spanish guitar line that could bring tears to your eyes, or the organic squelch of 'So Trendy' which resembles the Teutonic coolness of To Rococo Rot more than it does the punk and hip hop to which Fearn’s productions are usually likened. Incidentally, 'So Trendy' features the album’s other excellent guest vocal, with Jane’s Addiction/Porno For Pyros’ perv-in-chief Perry Farrell intomning like a googly-eyed modern prophet (“Check out all my squiggly veins. I got 57 screenshots in one hour just in case”). 

It’s unclear whether future Mods releases will lean more towards literary invention or blunt tirades, but by this point, nobody should be surprised if they’re still spitting and firing in another ten years. Perhaps they’re already beaming back messages from the future: in the 'Force 10 From Navarone' video, where the performers appear as glitchy holograms of the sort R2-D2 might project – “Fuck me, Obi Wank Kinobe, there is no hope”.

 

Sleep-Porker

 I love this record.  Sometimes, music doesn't need to be complex, just good.

PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS – LAND OF SLEEPER (Rocket Recordings)

Back in the early 1990s, Therapy? were the metal band it was OK for Select readers to enjoy. They turned out a petty strong bunch of grinding industrial rock tunes, but they snuck them under the indie radar by having sensible haircuts, making jokes about James Joyce instead of Jeffrey Dahmer, and eschewing the umlaut for the question mark. Tiny changes, on the face of it, but enough for Therapy? to find themselves on CD shelves next to Curve and Echobelly. Thankfully, metal and general sonic heaviness are far more acceptable to your average consumer nowadays, but anybody who’s seen a show over the past decade by Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs – and we hereby give notice we’re not typing that lot out again – will notice that they still look different from their psych-doom-stoner peers: baseball caps and Bermuda shorts in place of leathers and cowls, barefoot cavorting in place of hair-swaying and messianic shape-throwing. If there were still such a thing as the alternative mainstream, Pigs would be the heavy band most likely to be accepted by it.

Which is all very well, but all on the surface. A joky name and the odd spangly shirt might make Pigs atypical, but when it comes to making intense weighty noise, there’s nothing wry or ironic about them, and Land Of Sleeper, their fourth album, might be their chunkiest offering yet. The gloriously named Ultimate Hammer sets the scene, a filthy ultra-chug which is Blue Cheer without a hint of the blues, which suddenly slows to a crawl like a snail whose Benylin martinis have just kicked in. The switch to this Sabbather-than thou trudge turns a heavy rock bast into an entity with its own gravitational pull, and when the tempo picks up again, a buzzing whining lead line smacks you across the face like you’ve just got into a bar brawl with a mechamosquito.

A similar method is used on Big Rig, which opens with the bellowed lines “There is a sphere or burning tar, it’s all around/ Everyone in this god-forsaken English town/ Are washed away it’s filthy residue each day/ But like a mould it grows ensuring our decay”, like a syntax-shrugging cross between HP Lovecraft and John Betjeman, before dropping down into The Valley of the Sluggish Riff. This time, there’s more of a tension between the immovable object of half-tempo grooves, and the irresistible force of a headlong amphetamine rush. It’s like listening to a band that can’t decide whether it’s Eyehategod or Motörhead. But  more psychedelic.

Not every track plays the same trick (though it’s a bloody good one, and you’ll be glad to be the patsy every time the ruse is pulled): The Weatherman is a mystical, ritualistic chant, which just gets more solemnly sacramental the more ideas get thrown at it over nearly 7 minutes, and Terror’s Pillow builds the onslaught on a dinky nursery rhyme figure played on a pair of egregiously distorted strings. But, no matter how often the music pulls back to something more spacious, like the telegraph-wire bass rumble half-way through Atlas Stone, it’s only a matter of time before the vast guitars come lumbering back, their rough scuzzy contours having roughly the same excoriating effect as a quick jog in a pair of pumice-stone jodhpurs. Abrasive yet euphoric, Pigs continue to supply the world with wired and vivid music - “What a time to be alive”, as Ultimate Hammer would put it.

 

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.