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. 

Axis Of Dawson

Why doesn't hurt Siobhan Fahey if you throw fruit at her?

Banana Armour

NB The word "readers" was inadvertently omitted form the printed version of this review - my error, I fear - so now you can read it in fully idiomatic English for the first time.

RICHARD DAWSON/ ONE LEG ONE EYE, Divine Schism, Cowley Workers Club, 12/6/25  

Anyone who relishes the expansive bleakness of Lankum should immediately seek out Ian Lynch’s side-project One Leg One Eye, a duo focusing on drone, texture, and oppressive sonic fugs. Tonight's excellent set opens with metaphysical observations about the nature of God from sampled Irish voices atop thick, dark tones in a way that recalls the haunting atmospherics of From The Bogs Of Aughiska. Later a cortège-paced folk song is joined by buzzsaw drones and massed organ notes until it sounds like a spectral Luke Kelly guesting on Scott Walker’s Tilt with Charlemagne Palestine on keys. The track – in as much as elements can be extracted from the sonic blanket that overlays us for forty minutes – ends with what might be a bucket of cutlery emptied in a chapel. Both hurdy-gurdy and uillean pipes are played, but anyone expecting Séamus Ennis sprightliness or bouncy jigs will be confused – mind you, with the venue’s mobile disco LEDs twinkling behind the stage giving Phoenix Nights flavours, the whole set feels like a twisted dream. 

If One Leg sketch landscapes with sound, Richard Dawson captures characters with words. His songs are impeccably economical vignettes in the vein of Hemingway stories or the cool illustrations of Joyce’s Dubliners, except they’re almost impossibly English, with opener ‘Polytunnel’ asking “Could you manage a slice of toast/ Or a little bit of soup, my flower?”. Into this celebration of turnip-pulling a tiny line is almost hidden, “It's Karen who was always the green-fingered one”, offering a glimpse into a deep history for the narrator, and so many of tonight’s songs are about hobbyists – allotment diggers, YouTube ufologists, sponsored runners – undertaking tiny activities as if in defiance of a vast, and often unfriendly, world.  

This isn’t a poetry recital, though, and Dawson’s guitar playing is as fascinating as it is adept, swapping between elegant picking and crunchy abstraction like a hybrid of Davey Graham and Gary Lucas. Those who have trouble with his voice would find that the Dawson mannerisms – argue amongst yourselves whether they’re unconscious tics or a stylistic signature – even more pronounced tonight, especially the octave-leaping swoops to strangled falsetto or husky chest voice. But, like Dylan, he swaps melodic fluency for dramatic power, with ‘Jogging’ tonight being especially visceral, somehow a howl of rage and a clarion call for being alive simultaneously. In a way Dawson is Richard Thompson for socially awkward literature students; in another, he’s Chris Wood for Wire readers; but perhaps he’s simply unique. 

Thrust Never Sleeps

This is one of those gigs performed by old friends, which you go to out of loyalty, but which actually turn out to be excellent.

ANTON BARBEAU & THRUST/ CHARMS AGAINST THE EVIL EYE, Common Ground, 16/5/25 

Charms Against The Evil Eye inhabit that sweet spot characterised by free festivals at the turn of the 80s, in which laidback hippies rubbed against nascent new-wavers, mellowing proggers started to think about adding more tunes, and rock took on jazz influences without the self-conscious fusion fanfare. Many of Charms’ songs sound as though they may have started as bucolic John Martyn reveries before being sharpened and sped up with amphetamine intensity, all rubbery bass and hyperstrummed guitar. Set closer ‘Terry Walpole’s Camera’ chucks 60s psych-pop at us with punk energy, like Buzzcocks in kaftans, and more whimsical numbers still come with a caffeine jolt, putting extra canter into the Canterbury sound; even ‘Green’, the set’s most stoned and wide-eyed track is Caravan with go-faster stripes. It’s a delightful set, the band having quietly become a great proposition whilst you weren’t looking. 

Charms become THRUST to back Anton Barbeau, a prolific Californian songwriter who resided in Oxford for a few years in the noughties. Although he is keen to stress that it has been 7 years since he and the band have been in the same country, let alone room, concerns  on- and offstage about rustiness evaporate as they fly into live favourite ‘This Is Why They Call Me Guru 7’, a sort of bubblegum kraut-rock mantra. Barbeau’s best material balances literate surrealist troubadouring with drug-pumped spaciness and pure pop hooks - think Robyn Hitchcock Presents Popol Vuh Vs ABBA – and tonight is a glistening string of classics, from the compact chug of ‘Dust Beneath My Wings’ to the Eurovision–inspired sex-romp that is ‘Milk Churn In The Morning’, via the abstract collapse of ‘Banana Song’ (which might be the only moment the set veers towards egregiously wacky). Local folker Susanna Starling joins for a couple of excellent numbers, including ‘Leave It With Me, I’m Always Gentle’, one of Barbeau’s most elliptically lovely lyrics. It may have been years since he played in Oxford, but tonight may be the best set we've seen. To apply twisted Ant-logic, he should definitely visit less frequently more often. 

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.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

Stigmata Catch-up

Here's your bonus minireview. The editor of Nigthshift couldn't turn up in time to this gig, so I reviewed the first act.  You can find their review of the other acts, Traidora and Distraxi, at nightshiftmag.co.uk/2025/may.pdf.

HOLY WOUNDS, Whiplash, The Bully, 9/4/25 

It might just be suggestion because Holy Wounds feature Taz Corona from the mighty Undersmile, but we seem to detect a doom underpinning to their ritualistic abstract noise - even the most untethered section of screech and drone seems to come with an unspoken trudging beat. Taz plays guitar, growls and does that ghost-of-an-evil-child-monk voice she's so adept at, whilst Kieran Wakeman crawls on the floor doing...indefinable noise things. At one point he plays a horrific rusty scythe with a violin bow, and if it makes no discernible sound, we aren't about to dare tell him. 

Mothers of Inventory

This is my main review for Nightshift this month, but there's actually a tiny uncredited review in there as well.  Think of it as a secret track. I'll post soon. How exciting, eh.

INDEX FOR WORKING MUSIK/ BEDD/ MYSTERY BISCUIT, Divine Schism, FPCC, 6/4/25 

Mystery Biscuit’s cosy kosmische sound melds disco-kraut drums, spacy synths, and subdued indie vocals. ‘Balthasar’ is a thoroughly pleasing chug which inhabits a zone labelled “Pink Floyd funk” but perhaps the best encapsulation of the band is new track ‘Someone Killed My Dog’ - we hear youth culture is helping the police with their enquiries – which is 50% Lou Reed, 40% Hawkwind, and 30% Wooden Shjips...and if you think the maths don’t work, you might not be in the right dimension. 

We steer clear of talking too much about technique, there are vast, dusty swathes of the internet for that sort of thing, where every fourth word is “tone” (and the other three are Stevie, Ray, and Vaughan). But still, we must point out the incredible control of sextet Bedd, playing on a cramped stage through a relatively elementary PA, and yet always sounding beautifully tempered and effortlessly airy. Tonight’s set takes in sweet jangle pop, lofi trip-hop, epic surges of spangly post-shoegaze guitar noise, and even something like Animal Collective without the goofy stoned FX, but the songs are balanced and organic, even when the end feels a hundred miles from where they started. Jamie Hyatt’s vocals come from the unhurried 90s indie school, though there’s enough vulnerability to avoid Britpop smugness, and some of the harmonies bolstering the lead lines are quite gorgeous. The last song even has a keyboard line that recalls Daft Punk’s ‘Da Funk’, of all things. 

We hear someone describe London’s Index For Working Musik as “dark surf”, which isn’t a bad shot. Whilst they unfortunately don’t sound like a vampiric goth band doing twangy instrumentals (a concept that gives What We Do In The Shadows a new meaning), they do add a Nick Cave austerity to scuzzy hypnotic rock, whilst the prominent cello parts sometimes turn them into a chamber-music Cramps. There’s an apparently unintended, but pretty enjoyable hot mix on said cello, which either has the scraping intensity of John Cale’s viola, or hangs a Jesus & Mary Chain noise curtain in front of the band. In contrast to this, the best pieces are actually the most refined, with warm twinned vocals recalling country laments or even Pentangle. This slightly muddy set might be the one on which they’d like to be judged, but it’s still enticing, and perfect dour entertainment for some of Oxford’s dark serfs.   

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.