The Goller out of Bass

Why do so many people take their young kids to Costa in Tesco?  Do they think it's like a great day out?  Do they think it's designed for crawling and running up and down?  Unwarranted grouse, I admit, but it gets on my tits, I'm just trying to do the crossword quietly after my shopping.

This was a really good gig, though I confess I was done with it about 20 minutes before the 72 minutes were up.

RUTH GOLLER - OCM, Holywell Music Room, 15/2/22

Some musical combinations just feel right, no matter how many times they’re heard: power trio; string quartet; bebop five-piece; “three MCs and one DJ”, as the Beasties put it. But there’s plenty of scope for new or atypical ensembles, and tonight Ruth Goller from Melt Yourself Down and Acoustic Ladyland - though perhaps most celebrated round these parts as a member of the excellent Bug Prentice - presents her album Skylla using a bass guitar and three vocalists: this makes sense if you know that Skylla, or more commonly Scylla in English, was a multi-headed monster from Greek myth.  The folk-horror angle is amplified by the band’s decision to wear head-dresses that look like stylised animal skulls adorned with black feathers, as if they’re the Summerisle choral society.

The vocals are fascinatingly fragmented, each of the three singers often delivering single words, or even dissected phonemes or disconnected mouth effects, rather than fluid melodic lines. This creates a mysterious pointillist effect, a haze of individual vocal moments hanging in the air, or overlapping, more like a Cubist version of a single singer than any traditional chamber choir.  This method fleetingly brings to mind many varied reference points, from the Stockhausen of Hymnen, to early Laurie Anderson, to Funkstörung’s Björk remixes, to an undead Swingle Singers trudging into a dessicated wassail. Sometimes, however, the voices come together to deliver a melody in close harmony, and the effect is shocking, like a blurred and jumbled image snapping briefly into focus: the line “you left too soon, I lost my soul” feels especially chilling. The bass tends to keep in the background, generally adding little clusters of harmonics behind the skein of voices, but there are stretches of solo work, which can sound like a wall of NYC loft guitar, or snippets of cues from a 70s spy movie, or even a first wave grunge bassist trying to play like Ornette Coleman.

The monster Scylla is most famous when paired with Charybdis, a deadly whirlpool, and to be “between Scylla and Charybdis” means you’re treading a dangerous path. In a way Goller is doing just this, presenting what is effectively a solid 75-minute piece which often feels more like the floating space debris from an exploded song than a cohesive whole, but ultimately Goller and her supremely talented vocal trio navigate this tricky route, doubtless to continue their musical odyssey elsewhere.

Vowel Movement

Top tip: if you do the vacuuming, and your eyes start to water profusely, it means it's been too ong since you last did the vacuuming.

IOE AIE – SHELLS (DDC Music)

The band name looks like something your untrustworthy uncle would try to play in Scrabble – “But it’s the rutting call of the Kenyan ice otter!” – though it stands for It’s Only Ever Autumn In England. Climate scientists might refute this assertion, but it’s typical of the wry poetic chilliness of this new trio, featuring occasional Foals collaborator Kit Montieth. Their debut album Shells is an intoxicating collection of crepuscular techno tracks intertwined with sententiously intoned vocals, like an introspective, slightly paranoid Underworld.  Opener ‘Four Quarters’ sets the tone by coupling knotty, pun-laden lines with a misty version of a club banger, as if Faithless had been formed by Faber & Faber editors, with a hypnotic high-speed train rhythm only emphasising an air of hollow sadness (Trans-Europe Depressed, anyone?).

Elsewhere there is almost a whiff of oiled EBM leather to ‘Divide’, a soupy late Orb digidub haze to ‘The Pacific’, and a dizzying synth build worthy of Luke Slater to the second half of ‘Autumn In England’, but perhaps ‘18’ will cause the biggest waves, a wryly mournful coming-of-age magic realist narrative delivered over a relentlessly snaking ostinato, like a rave comedown version of writer Kirk Lake’s experiments in sonic storytelling.  The final track, ‘Cities & Memory’, proffers a funkier samba-like rhythm and global travelogue lyrics, but it’s not urbane windswept euphoria that will bring you back to this excellent album, but the melancholic mystery at its secret heart: dark autumn nights are eternal, and mellow fruitfulness is off the menu.

O Rother, Here Art Thou

I don't usually get smug about things I wrote, but I do feel that describing albums like Phaedra and Rubycon as sounding "like they were made by robots controlled by the weather" is pretty much on the money.  You can see this piece in its natual habitat at https://www.musicomh.com/reviews/albums/michael-rother-and-vittoria-maccabruni-as-long-as-the-light

MICHAEL ROTHER & VITTORIA MACCABRUNI – AS LONG AS THE LIGHT (Grönland Records)

Sometimes, listening back, one can be surprised at how human a lot of krautrock sounds, no matter how many times journalistic shorthand refers to the music as “motorik”. At one end of the genre are the communal freak-out bands, like Amon Düül, who are so earthy you can almost smell the unwashed hair and a pot of lentils bubbling away in the corner, but even the sleekest kosmische combos betray the emotional meat controlling the sounds: Neu! have the energy of an excited garage band no matter how streamlined the music gets, Jaki Liebezeit could play like a metronome but Can still sound like a band who want to get you drunk and take you out on the town, and even Kraftwerk have always been more man than machine. Arguably, the only act from the kraut pantheon who truly managed to erase their humanity were Tangerine Dream, whose mid-70s sequencer-driven albums sound like they were made by robots controlled by the weather (and even they discarded this and became a ponderous synth-rock band a few years later).

Which is interesting because this new album by Michael Rother (founder member of Neu! and Harmonia, and briefly a guitarist in Kraftwerk’s early days) and Vittoria Maccabruni is often chilly and dispassionate in the way that vintage krautrock rarely was, and amongst the electronica even Rother’s guitar parts seem designed to sound as clinical as possible. It’s also often rather lovely, once you let yourself be carried by the machine-honed linear rhythms and the simple melodies. “Edgy Smiles”, the lead single, sums up the approach, opening with pointillist little notes that are like Tibetan temple bells played by the cheeky Moog on trash classic “Popcorn”, which are soon underpinned by a brooding rhythm, and joined by a buzzing nasal guitar line that sounds like the work of a cyborg Santana or a mecha-Mike Oldfield. The composition is elementary and many of the sounds unashamedly dated, and it resembles nothing so much as the theme to a mid-80s prime time drama show theme without any of the, err, drama: imagine a version of Airwolf penned by Harold Pinter. What’s most noteworthy about the album is how many old-fashioned thin and tinny synth tones it uses, without ever being a nostalgic pastiche; if you want drums that kick or bass that shudders, best look elsewhere, but if you want skirls of cheap white noise like in an Amiga game set in the Arctic tundra, the opening of “exp1” is for you. 

Sometimes it feels as though this album is an attempt to engage with the music tech of the late 80s and early 90s, but with the pervasive influence of techno and other dancefloor-oriented genres completely shrugged off (although the toms at the start of “See Through” might remind some of The Drum Club’s chill-out classic “Follow The Sun”).  “Curfewd” has an enjoyable low-key menace, and could be the tension underscore to a stalking scene in some vintage piece of video store schlock, like Trancers or Maniac Cop, whereas “CodriveMe” has a rhythm built from quantised heartbeats and iron lung respirations, although again it doesn’t use this robo-flesh ambience to create any sort of Tetsuo body horror, and has an unthreatening pedestrian lope, which could soundtrack a benign Darth Vader taking his servo-suit for a walk down to the post office to mail his tax return. There’s also a little hint of spaghetti western to the shimmering heat-haze guitar in the track’s second half, and is the closest Rother gets to expressiveness in his playing...which is, frankly, not very, and even Father Dougal probably wouldn’t break out his “Easy now” placard in response.

The album’s only misstep is “You Look At Me”, which is like a drizzly minimal half-tempo take on a rave-pop anthem. The frost-rimed sound is pleasing, but Maccabruni’s vocals are neither glacial and impersonal enough to build an atmosphere nor engaging enough make the melody live. Far more successful are the reverbed vocal fragments of “Forget This”, which creates a stately sonic miasma like a foursquare Seefeel.

The album brings back that western movie feel for the final track, offering us a slow ride into the digital sunset in “Happy (Slow Burner)”. Whilst this album might be understated and deliberately lacking in emotion, it does indeed hold the power to make you happy.

 

 

You Gotta Get (Further) Up To Get (Further) Down!

This is not an astonishing review, but I wrote it when I had COVID - actually, I have a strong suspicion I contracted it at this gig - and wasn't feeling very good; that's my excuse and you can't prove otherwise.  Oh, unless you're one of those clever people who can poove COVID is made up, of course, naturally your arguments are incontrovertible.

DEEPER/ HURTLING/ MOOGIEMAN & THE MASOCHISTS, Divine Schism, Jericho, 9/12/21

One of the pleasures of this job is watching poor acts becoming good. But even more so is watching good acts become unexpectedly better. Down the road tonight, Young Knives are touring their fifth, and definitely best, album whereas we’re watching The Masochists. We thought they’d penned their career highlight in ‘Mr Curator’, a mandelbrot-mutating satirical rant about industry “creatives” which is like a Nathan Barley treatment written by Wyndham Lewis and Allen Ginsberg, but they followed it with the astonishing freeze-dried Frankie Knuckles funk of ‘Ghost Driver’. Both these are played tonight, yet are eclipsed by new tracks: ‘Psychotronic Dream’ is a Moorcock acid travelogue squeezed into a krautrock version of 60s garage, and elsewhere some unnervingly intoned monologues ride the minimal thrum of a pop band having a crack at Basic Channel. Frankly, we don't dare guess what they’ll do by December 2022.

We’ve not seen Hurtling before, so can’t comment on their development, but our expectations from the opening song were proven wrong, as a refined shoegazey elegance gave way to some more visceral power trio noise. We’re reminded of Belly – not that Hurtling sound like them, but both bands’ ostensibly elegant arty pop soon exhibits a love of old-fashioned rocking out. Not that this is a problem, mind, as they nod towards the less emotional end of grunge, a la Tad or Mudhoney, or perhaps Sonic Youth in their more straightforward mode.  Perhaps none of the songs will set up home in your head, but the sound is gloriously powerful (as you might imagine when one member plays in My Bloody Valentine’s touring outfit).

Chicago’s Deeper don’t give us time to make assumptions about their sound, they simply pick us up and hurl us into the middle of it. They trade in uptight elastic rock in the manner of Devo, but with all pristine edges frayed and surfaces smeared with oily finger-marks. Their concise rock bulletins have an insouciant urban swagger, like Wire multiplied by the Strokes, and occasionally they go for a more atmospheric yelp and become an amphetramine-addled Cure, but whatever variation they apply, the music remains infectiously taut, and the performance authoritative but joyfully relaxed (and Shiraz Bhatti’s drumming is relentlessly fantastic). Forget this job, watching bands like Deeper is a pleasure for anyone, full stop.

O Positive

Not only was this a fantastic day of music, run by excellent people, the review was an absolute blast to write.

OH, COMMUNITY! FESTIVAL, Florence Park Community Centre, 7/11/21

Oh, yes please! This wonderful all-dayer is perfectly named, being not just a chance to catch some new music, but also an opportunity for the almost forgotten before-times practice of hanging out, chatting about sets, and buying merch from friendly faces. Fittingly, many performers are also present for the other acts, not least half of new duo The Dumplings, who runs the desk for the rest of the day. Their chirpy, punky bulletins are scrappier than Scrappy-Doo on Scrapheap Challenge, and they have a micro-song celebrating Divine Schism founder and local lynchpin Aiden Canaday: O, Captain! my Captain!

Fortitude Valley and Fightmilk are muscularly melodic indie bands providing tuneful oases early and late in the running order, the former giving classic jangle an invigorating shot of grunge-adjacent energy a la The Breeders, whilst the latter spring from the less theatrical end of Britpop, and balance serious lyrics with extra brut wryness between songs. Both have albums mere days old for sale: oh, don’t mind if we do...

Local favourite EB delivers her intriguing unrap in the hugest tinted glasses, like a cross between Su Pollard and Horatio Caine. Musically, though, she’s more a mixture of Peaches and Gwen Stefani, and “Rodeo Queen” manages to revel in the pleasures of urban pop whilst acting as feminist satire on the culture: O, tempora! O, mores! Yay Maria also rides the laptop rhythms, and if there’s sometimes more reverse reverb than songwriting on display, the set has the unpretentious cabaret vibe of early 80s underground New York. We imagine Grace Jones, Keith Haring and a pre-record deal Madonna bopping at the front: oh! you pretty things.

Chunky emo-flecked rockers Junk Whale deliver a strong set, too exciting for one reveller, who smashes the venue’s delightfully old-school mirrorball whilst leaping, fist-aloft, across the dancefloor: O Superman. Things calm down for Alice Hubble, a synth duo (meaning there are two members, but happily more than two synths) who proffer slow, bleakly buzzing but oddly euphoric songs in a style we christen Giorgio Moroser, making one want to become a heartsick cyborg: oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt.

Shake Chain’s set is approximately Birth Trauma: The Musical. Whilst the band plays the sort of taut, psych-fuelled aggression-rock that Fat White Family promised but never quite delivered, performance artist Kate Mahony crawls slowly from underneath the stage, wrapped in a coat, limbs sticking out like the Isle of Man flag gone Cthulhu. She slowly grows into an astonishing howling vortex of bemused rage which is half Chuck Schuldiner from Death, half Moaning Myrtle, and by the end she’s raging behind a Beuysian totem built from the venue’s furniture whilst the band imitates military munitions: oh! what a lovely war.

Only Codex Serafini could follow that, a quintet enacting high-octane ritualistic space jams in black masks and bright pink robes, like the Squid Game guards jamming after hours to exorcise the horrors they’ve witnessed.  This is as close to witchcraft as one can get with a saxophone: oh, oh, oh, it’s magic! And they evidently summoned something impossible from an indescribable dimension (or Amsterdam) in the shape of Personal Trainer, equal parts LCD Soundsystem, Talking Heads, funk revue, art happening, shirts-off hardcore communion, and pep rally. There are abstract passages suddenly coalescing into ultra-tight backing vocals, there’s a bassist on a singer’s shoulders, there’s percussion played standing on a table because...well, frankly, by this point, fuck “because”. Sounds like a horrible mess? O ye of little faith. And then, suddenly, we’re out in the strangely silent suburban streets on a chilly Sunday night, wondering when the next bus is: oh, Christ is that the time?

Revenge of the Seth

I've never been cock-a-hoop about Lakeman, likable chap though he is.  This album has not changed that, but the last track is absolutely lovely, so seek that out.

SETH LAKEMAN – MAKE YOUR MARK (Honour Oak Records)

“The pandemic gave me a real determination to come out musically stronger and I really dug deep into myself for this album”, says Seth Lakeman. “Being able to record and play with the band again was really quite spiritual.” Whilst COVID isolation has inspired a thousand musical projects, from lofi experiments, to baroque electronic confections, to self-exploratory introspective musings, to songs about how weird it was when you couldn’t even go down the pub, Lakeman is seemingly one of the few musicians who has responded to the lockdown months with the philosophy, “hell, let’s just write some big tunes then play them with a kick-arse band”. This honesty and likeable simplicity reflects what’s best about Make Your Mark, as well as informing the less enticing elements. 

It’s a cliché to liken a musician’s work to their birthplace, but these sturdy songs sound as though they’re built to stand tall and resilient in a buffeting Devon wind. These tracks are big-boned and sinewy, bold tunes that stride stoically where other folk artists might soar ostentatiously or trip along pertly – which must have been a change for Benji Kirkpatrick, best known for playing in Bellowhead, officially the cheekiest folk wink-droppers of their generation.  Incidentally, Kirkpatrick’s performances on chiming mandolin and other stringed instruments have an elegant directness that’s as liable to bring to mind early 90s Peter Buck as Simon Mayor or your favourite folkie.  But if one were to pick this band’s star it might just be Alex Hart, who adds backing vocals that temper and sweeten Lakeman’s clamorous lead, as demonstrated by the drone-driven "Love Will Still Remain", where she’s soft and sinuous on the verses, and icily imperative on the choruses.

"Bound To Someone" has a heart-tugging melody that recalls Christy Moore in intimate mood, and its opening “his face was rough and rugged/ Wild as a stirring breeze/ Hard as the granite clifftop” is typical of the album’s thematic thread of humanity living with – or against – nature. Swaying ballad "The Lark" celebrates the natural world, whilst the atmospheric "Shoals To Turn" is more explicitly conservationist, and more than one listener will interpret the album’s opening salvo, “Did you hear the final warning?/ Too late, too loud”, as having an apocalyptically ecological tone. A high point comes with The Giant, which uses the language of high myth and folk balladry to tell the story of a beached whale, and a concerted effort to save it, whisked along with one of Lakeman’s trademark rousing fiddle melodies. At the end the song gets misty-eyed about the good that can be found in people, remembering that “There are those that detest and deprave/ But there on the edge of the wave-torn rocks/ There were those with the power to save”. 

Elsewhere, the album moves from wearing its heart on its sleeve, to ripping that sleeve off and waving it aloft behind the barricades. "Side By Side" and "Underground" are both blood-stirring clarions, and if they lack a little subtlety, the energy is infectious. But the title track is an extended riff on Rakim’s claim that “it ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at”, which has the platitudinous feel of a hastily composed graduation speech, and the single "Higher We Aspire" is just a collection of somewhat tired saws. Top tip: your album should never have more than two lyrics that could be published on Facebook under a picture of a tai chi master silhouetted on a beach at sunset. The music can also sometimes tip into the banal, exhibiting the clumpy preachiness of worthy ‘80s rock - it’s not too hard to draw a line between "Side By Side" and John Farnham’s "You're The Voice"!

However, closing track "Constantly" dispels any such concerns. It’s a long and mournful night breeze of a song, promising that the narrator will continue to exist in streams, frosts and lonely hills. It may be a message from a departed loved one, a continuation of the naturalist theme, or the most beautiful adaptation of Ecclesiastes’ line “all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again” in two and half thousand years.

This Wheel Shan't Explode

Here's the latest musicOMH review.  Not a record to set any pulses aflame, to be honest (not least because pulses can't be set aflame, I now realise).  Mostly harmless.

YOUTH – SPINNING WHEEL (Youth Sounds/ Cadiz Entertainment)

Wait, just checking, this is Youth’s debut solo album?  Yes, this is musician and producer Martin “Youth” Glover’s first foray under his own name despite a career lasting over 40 years, that has taken in the monolithic rage of Killing Joke, dance euphoria with Blue Pearl, dub and Orbient soundscapes, acting as midwife to psy trance with Dragonfly Records, and creating pastel pop sketches with Paul McCartney in The Fireman.  And this album sounds like exactly none of these.  Wait, just checking, this is that Youth’s debut solo album, right?

The album was inspired by the 70s rock and pop that Youth consumed when, err, a youth, but for the most part these aren’t the primary reference that leaps to mind.  The title track and single has a misty folk-pop shimmer that resembles The Lilac Time, and a refrain that’s only a long flower-child hair’s breadth from "Instant Karma", and what this album most often sounds like is a smoky 90s studio-bound post-indie outfit playing with ideas from that moment where the 60s collapsed into the 70s.  This approach works best on "Pure", which boasts a somnolent plodding rhythm, ghostly swooping strings and a general wooziness that sounds like a sleepy young Ride swiping ideas from "Venus In Furs"; similarly, "Charlotte Says" starts - as the title might suggest - like a Lou Reed song, but one without the ornery gruffness, all edges being smoothed and all corners bevelled in a pleasing fashion.  This album works best at moments like this, sweet and soothing – not exactly ambient, but soft and comforting like a nest of scatter cushions.

"Sha La Laa I Love You" is the track that addresses the pre-punk musical landscape most obviously, celebrating the pubescent arms-aloft bubblegum singalongs of The Bay City Rollers from a knowing distance, and if it never quite manages to capture the melancholy undertow to pop nostalgia that Jarvis Cocker or Luke Haines might bring to the table, it’s an infectious little nod towards one of the few windows of pop history that has not undergone a major revival or reappraisal.  

There is a hint of the elegant patchouli waft of Tim Buckley or John Martyn around hippy ditties "The King Of The Losers" or "Hear The Dolphin"s, which float by relatively likably, but "Charcoal Man" attempts the full naïf nursery rhyme Syd Barrett approach, dealing with the titular rustic labourer living in a bag at the bottom of the garden and doling out folksy wisdom like a noble savage Cottingley fairy: despite a briefly intriguing "Mr Kite" circus interlude it ends up rather too feather-light, concluding tritely that people are lonely and that we’re all “prisoners of our luxury”.  The album’s only true nadir, though, is "Smiling", the sort of cheekily crappy demo doodle you’ll probably find at the far reaches of the recent multi-disc Let it Be package.  This is the only point on the album where there’s no evidence of a born producer’s sonic fingerprint, and even if some of the songs are thin and Youth’s voice more functional than flashy, there’s always a sonic warmth emanating from the speakers.

Spinning Wheel ends well with "Close My Eyes", a refined rootsy amble that sounds something like Noel Gallagher toying with unusually introspective lyrics, concluding with a nearly four-minute outro that builds on a single repeated phrase in a fashion that’s part "Hey Jude", part "Shang A Lang", and part "Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space".  Just before Youth and his melody disappear into the sunset, tartan scarf flapping the breeze, he promises a “dance together barefoot in the sand”.  Fair enough, but perhaps some of us would prefer another go at dancing naked in the rain, instead.