Sketchleys of Spain

Here's my latest review for MusicOMH, and the first to which I've given 5 stars - but, fair enough, it's a killer (though if I could get away with not giving marks out of 5, I'd be all the happier).  I think I might start delaying my MOMH posts, as it's behind a paywall; I don't think I can never share things with you, but perhaps I could wait a month, which would be the equivalent of waiting until a print mag was off the shelves, and therefore fair game to reproduce.  Course, the problem is I'll probably forget, but we shall see.

DRY CLEANING – STUMPWORK (4AD)

Mixing a Dry Cleaning gig must be a nightmare. The band creates such a dense sound, interlocking riffs twining thornily, that a declamatory vocal would be the instinctive choice, but Florence Shaw’s delivery is always muted, pastel-toned, and dispassionate, as if a dentist surgery’s automated receptionist had started offering existential commentary (Press 1 for appointments, press 2 for a wry encapsulation of the human condition). But simply burying the vocals in the mix, shoegaze style, won’t work because Shaw has a huge library of micro-inflections that give unexpected depth to the often disjointed lyrics: the line “If you’re rich you look good, that’s not news” on opener 'Anna Calls From The Arctic' is pitch perfect, and the tossed off plea “Can you not?” on 'Kwenchy Kups' is like a whole character study in three syllables. Luckily, that’s some venue engineer’s dilemma for another day, and on Stumpwork we can revel in every subtle vocal intonation, as they play against the knotty rhythms.

Although Shaw has stated that the lyrics on this album have moved away from the found texts of their debut New Long Leg, it definitely feels more collage than essay, lines rubbing unexpectedly against each other, the poetic cheek by jowl with the preposterous. But themes swim out over repeated listens even where individual songs remain oblique. A major concern on Stumpwork would appear to be finance and the impulsive consumer, with different tracks noting “I’m bored, but I get a kick out of buying things”, “That’s what money’s for, isn’t it? For spending”, and the hilarious “Nothing works, everything’s expensive, opaque, and privatised. My shoe-organising thing arrived, thank God”. Press 3 for sales and self-justification under late capitalism.

The album also features a roster of tiny instances of intimacy, such as “let me squeeze you and do your hair”, or “I’d love to hold you across the middle and be your shoulder bag”. The title track features a gloriously prosaic undercutting of the school of pop romance in which hearts flutter and nerves tingle:

I feel your approach/ All the hair on my arms raise up/ Because you are wearing a fleece/That has become electrified

Even on 'Gary Ashby', the only song that’s fully decodable, about the loss of the titular pet tortoise, the mundane and quotidian are deftly presented in a way that makes them feel surreal and otherworldly (Press 4 for Harold Pinter and Alan Bennett). And even this hides the menacing mysterious line “Dad’s got blood on his head”.  And if unexplained wounds don’t surprise you, sudden moments of potty-mouthed filth just might - Press fucking 5 for some shit or other – which sound doubly incongruous in Shaw’s tranquil unruffled tones. The debased handicraft of the album cover, spelling out the title in soap-adhered pubes, might have served as a warning that the odd bit of smut might pop up. Most inexplicable is the claim “I’ve see your arse but not your mouth, that’s normal now”, though perhaps Naked Attraction gets heavy rotation on the Dry Cleaning tour bus TV. 

Mesmerising as the words and delivery are, the album is also musically excellent. Like the debut, there are clear nods to classic alt rock, especially in the fleet-footed but anchoring basslines – Press 5 for Peter Hook and Kim Deal – but the sonic range is broader this time, from the warm jangle of' Gary Ashby' which nods towards The Blue Aeroplanes, to the sludgy unfunk groove of 'Liberty Log', replete with woozy tape wobbles. The last few tracks are the most exploratory, with dubbier textures and the intense hypnotic guitar sounds of post-rock (or even post-metal), but the biggest surprise is at the other end of the album, where 'Anna Calls From The Arctic' swoons in a humid, sun-sleepy synth and clarinet bliss-out, as if Penguin Cafe Orchestra were trying to imitate 808 State’s 'Pacific'. By the time the goth hypnotism of 'Icebergs' fades away, with a quietly dawdling sax that sounds like hip-hip banger 'The 900 Number' dropping off to sleep, you’ll be ready to flip this wonderfully enigmatic record over and return to track one.  Press 0 to hear these options again and again.

Vowel Obstruction

I discovered today that production company Celador is a play on "cellar door", claimed by certain people (eg Drew Barrymore) to be a highly euphonious phrase, and not a sort of flower or Spanish aperitif as I'd imagined.

CLT DRP/ CONGRATULATIONS, A New View, Jericho, 11/9/22

We joke that Congratulations might be a rock Cliff Richard tribute – and, be honest, a drop-tuned stoner burn through “Devil Woman” would be a joy – but the Brighton quartet are even more unexpected. Firstly, in their bright primary-coloured threads they look like Mystery Inc have fallen on hard times and started a Butlins showband, and secondly they sound like...everything. At once. Seriously, one track reminds us of Rage Against The Machine, The Cramps, and Bucks Fizz in the space of 4 minutes, and whilst not every song is as wilfully lopsided, there are plenty of tracks chucking spiky post-punk guitar solos at fat, fuzzy glam riffs, and then putting an abstract pop chant over the top, like eclectic oddballs Islet on a cocktail of Sunny Delight and mezcal. They even schmooze out a camp pseudo-Prince jam, where even the irony is in air quotes. Perhaps we imagined this whole beautiful mania. Confabulations?

Their hometown tour buddies CLT DRP are clearly having their own little version of Only Connect. We’ll leave you to work out what the name signifies (spoiler: sadly it’s not OCELOT DRAPE). The trio deal in aggressive electro rock, and whilst this might bring to mind images of Chicks On Speed or Peaches, they are both weightier, throwing out denture-rattling synth patterns and tympanum-skewering ring modulated guitar, and more controlled, with a glorious line in clinically battering drums and vocals that can do a lot more than just screechily hector (although they do also screechily hector pretty damn well). There are moments that recall Atari Teenage Riot, some passages that update the stalking noughties darkstep of Distance, and even one track with the funky flavour of early Beasties, albeit with rather more enlightened gender politics - COOL TO DO RAP? - but the real surprise is how much metal there is underpinning the imposing rhythms. But dissecting the sound is probably less important than revelling in the aural thrashing we’re getting from this digital cat o’ nine tails (or maybe CLEATED ROPE)

Honour Thy Myth Tapes As Hidden Intentions

Spent about 2 minutes wondering whether the "surname" here was Fanni Tutti, or just Tutti.  The rest of the review wrote itself, lovely record.

COSEY FANNI TUTTI – DELIA DERBYSHIRE: THE MYTHS & THE LEGENDARY TAPES – ORIGINAL SOUNDTACK RECORDINGS (Conspiracy International)

It’s pretty universally recognised that electronic composer Delia Derbyshire added the arrangement and production trickery that turned Ron Grainer’s Dr Who music into one of the BBC’s most iconic TV themes, and it’s comparatively common knowledge that she was involved in the psychedelic tape noise classic An Electric Storm by White Noise, but who knew that she had a preternatural intuition when it came to vinyl, being able to identify different passages or instruments just by looking at the grooves? It’s a moment that comes up early in Caroline Catz’s docudrama Delia Derbyshire: The Myths & Legendary Tapes, and this near magical ability creates an unexpected connection between the subject and industrial pioneer Cosey Fanni Tutti, who has ben known to delve into the arcane, who features heavily in the film, and whose soundtrack music is now released, a little belatedly. Much as the film is idiosyncratic, mixing biographical dramatisations with Fanni Tutti’s artistic responses and occasionally morphing into fantasy, the soundtrack is not simply a series of remixes, or an attempt to imitate Derbyshire’s techniques, but is inspired by the Derbyshire archive and her original studio notes. Fanni Tutti calls the outcome “an alliance of our sensibilities”, and trying to work out where the line between the two composers lies is futile - although there are samples of Derbyshire speaking on 'Snuff Chorus' and 'Tatum Ergo', her fruity giggling voice sounding oddly like Camilla Pilkington-Smyth’s vocal fragments which were scattered across early Art Of Noise records). We also hear muffled vocals on 'An Individualist'. Does this represent Derbyshire struggling to be heard in a male-dominated and deeply conservative Beeb? Or does it just sound cool?

There’s surprisingly little here that truly resembles the applied sound manipulation Derbyshire was asked to undertake for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The goofy tones of 'Four Bebe' sound like vintage commercial library music, of the sort collected by Barry 7 on his Connectors compilations, and 'Psychedelic Projections', the album’s only example of a real beat, has the tropical bounce of synthesised exotica that might have provided the bed for a long forgotten travel show. 'Most of Animals' is an intense steamy rasping drone, but it ends with the ersatz sounds of toucans, crickets, and elephants, like a more playful version of David Tudor’s synthesised 'Rainforest' pieces and one can imagine a snippy BBC producer’s note “lose it all except the last 10 seconds”. The title of 'Cosmic Static Noise Wasps' could easily be imagined as the sort of wild, abstract request made to the workshop by an adventurous producer (if not in Derbyshire’s era, this sort of thing must have been a daily occurrence for Paddy Kingsland soundtracking The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy).

The track does indeed capture the buzz of intergalactic bellicose vespids (probably) but it is also a deep and dense two minutes of sonic exploration. Much of this album is a beautiful showcase for creating enticing textures from minimal sources; check the spooky dynamo hum of 'Delia Tones' or the sturdy aural barrier of the aptly named 'Ceiling Of Sickening Sound'. The thoroughness of Fanni Tutti’s treatments is suggested by titles like 'Guitar (Twickenham Studio 3)', which sounds nothing like a guitar but quite a lot like a cross between a cello and a cyber-tuba, and 'Cornet Lament', which might have once been a brass instrument but now comes across like a medieval reed instrument lost in the underworld (should have called it 'Shawm Of The Dead').

Perhaps the album is a little too long and disconnected for a single listening experience, and some listeners might find that the character of the music changes from track to track - cheeky one moment, unnerving the next - but this is possibly evidence of the record’s soundtrack origins (not to mention consistent with Throbbing Gristle’s approach). Regardless, it’s a wonderful selection  to dip into. Pick up the disc, find a bit that looks tempting, and see where you end up – and if you can spot the space-wasps in advance, you might just be a sound-wrangling genius too.

Supernormal 2022 Part 3

 There are inevitably a handful of things that don’t quite land. Reciprocate’s plaintive US alt-rock style doesn’t excite, coming off like a wheedling petulant Pavement, and - it pains us to say - Nightshift, whose buzzy mantric tunes have potential, but whose performance seems tentative. Oh, and we’re also invited to climb over a stile, go into the wood, and look at a blue polystyrene cow (and then to go straight back, because there’s really not much to do once you get there). But to balance this there’s always something inexplicable and intriguing, like LDSN/Yakki Da!, who play melodica and make wonky loops from fragments of a story about going on holiday we can never quite decode, like a child’s summer holiday project being sucked into a black hole, or The Tuna Raffle (not a band or an artwork, but a raffle for a shitload of canned tuna; no, us neither). 

The final live set of the weekend is Birmingham electronica legend Surgeon, whose relentless clanging techno set is a joy, and also a masterclass in how to make something endlessly fascinating from minimal means. In a way, this is a great metaphor for the whole festival, which is a Sellotape and sawdust affair run on hope and good will rather than wodges of cash or corporate sponsorship partners, but which manages to surprise and delight with every iteration, constantly feeling new by never losing its core identity. Asking whether Supernormal is a good festival is like asking whether manna is good fast food, it’s so far ahead of the competition in Oxfordshire (and probably the universe) that the question is utterly meaningless. So here’s our final judgment: smashing.

SIDEBAR

“Mum, can we go see Taskmaster?”

“No need, we have Taskmaster at home.”

Molly is “Taskmaster at home”, running around the miniscule Colour Out Of Space stage, florid and flustered, attempting to achieve 30 one-minute tasks with no particular resources, before a klaxon announces that she’s (almost certainly) failed. It’s stupidly entertaining, and typical of a strain of clowning that runs through this year’s festival. An act like Secluded Bronte, including films criticising the cameras they’ve been shot with, is witty, but Taylor & Luck are flat-out hilarious, dreaming up a preposterous Abingdon ghost story with accompaniment that is half free improv, half Foley. There’s a lofi comic absurdity to so many of this weekend’s sets they could have been taken to Ipsden or Edinburgh with equal justification, from the brilliantly named Run The Bath, which is essentially “Emo Philips plays Ivor Cutler on V/Vm Test Records”, to Fluxus plumbers Usurper, the Mario/Chuckle Brothers mash-up we never knew we needed. The absolute monarchs, though, are The Slipshod Ramblers, a duo in what might be homemade albino Womble outfits playing bleak, Beckettian folk songs, and getting them exactly wrong: “Death, she knocks for us all” they intone, but probably only because we died laughing. 

Supernormal 2022 Part 2

Actually, the sidebar is in the next post (stupid tag limit).

Or perhaps there is no brand. The festival as a whole is more about being open-minded and open-eared than any specific group of styles and genres, meaning that not every act is challenging.  Société Étrange use bass, drums and electronics to create dubby burbling which is like To Rococo Rot with the krautrock froideur replaced by a cheery warmth: this is friendly music that would invite you in for tea and ensure you had the last piece of cake (Kick out the jam sponges! Release the battenburgs!). Also liable to become your sonic best friends are Dean Rodney Jr & The Cowboys, whose summery grooves and golden stetson could enliven any shindig, whilst Shovel Dance Collective are a brilliant British folk outfit who could inspire jigs and singalongs in any village hall, whilst reminding us just how many of our nation’s traditional songs are about celebrating the downtrodden and oppressed. Possibly most enjoyable of all are Dischi, an urban pop duo from Manchester who bring unbounded fun to their light bouncy backing tracks in a  style that might recall Althea & Donna, Daphne & Celeste, and Fun Boy Three all at once. But if that sounds too mainstream, the little Queef Qult stage reliably delivers a diet of queer cabaret and DJs playing absolute certified bangers all weekend, or you can make some masks with a proxy Lord Summerisle ready for a midnight screening of The Wicker Man. 

Perhaps as a result of the non-hierarchical nature of Supernormal, where performers become audience members, and punters become collaborators, the crowds seem to naturally intuit the right response to any set. So, Thomas Stone’s refined contrabassoon pieces are met by a quiet contemplative audience (excluding a dragonfly who is buzzing madly against the Barn’s window, and that somehow merges wonderfully with the automated rattling snare sounds); people laugh at Feghoot’s preposterous performance (one person tries to play keyboard, the other tries to fuck it up, genius simplicity); they dance to the wry literate indie funk of Comfort which merges Sultans of Ping FC with LCD Soundsystem; and go batshit bonkers to the industrial techno of Samuel Kerridge. Then they do all of these at once for Pink Siifu & The NEGRO ALIVE’! Experience (sic), because they’re a Jameson-guzzling collision between Funkadelic, Public Enemy, and Rage Against The Machine, with a little Snoop Dogg snakiness to the vocals to keep big grins present, on- and offstage.

Hot Crocks

Here's the review of the reliably amazing Supernormal.  If you read the version in the latest Nightshift, this is the director's cut, featuring an extra section at the end about some of the less musical elements, which I proposed as a sidebar, but which the editor just barred.  Not moaning, by the way, it's a challenge to get the mag all jigsawed together in time for printing deadlines.

Because of the tags limit, the putative sidebar is in the next post.

SUPERNORMAL, Braziers Park, 12-4/8/22

Because Supernormal is a cross between a village fete and a revolutionary happening, they have an old-fashioned crockery smashing stall – the only differences being that it’s miked and amplified at a ridiculous volume, and that the plates are daubed with negative concepts that we can symbolically destroy (“Tories”; “patriarchy”; err, “plates”). The very first one to be obliterated on Friday reads “judgment”, as if to make this review redundant from the outset. But in a way criticising Supernormal is pointless, because the line between viewer and performer is blurred at best: only half the people here are paying customers, and someone you’ll be chatting to might turn out to be the next act half an hour later. In a telling moment, somebody leaping onstage to boogie to Aya’s abstract dance set gets a cheer as big as the musician, and at what other festival can you create a graphic score and have it interpreted by a pianist? And the other reason criticising Supernormal is pointless is that nearly everything is excellent, whether it’s a gloriously varied three days of music, a horsebox filled with mystifying charity shop artworks, the bar prices, or the lovely stewards cooling sweltering crowds with plant misters.

It might have been three years since the last Supernormal, but the organisers’ desire for intensity has not waned, and any visitor must expect to have their ears - and possibly cerebellum – pounded regularly. Jooklo 5 Beans set the bar, creating a disorienting percussion-heavy avant-jazz onslaught with spiralling electric piano that nods towards 70s Miles, but Gutternsipe leap the bar with a maelstrom of drums, guitar and electronics which is somehow pummelling and intricate at the same time. Then Brighton duo Human Leather take the bar, break it over their knee and wade into us like Begbie on a bad day with their outstanding sludge-punk, guttural syllabic vocals making each song sound like the mating call of the Judoon. Which leaves NYC’s Imperial Triumphant to replace the bar with a solid platinum battleaxe and enact a ritual culling, their baroque widescreen black metal matched by their polished high priest masks; believe it or not, their name is an understatement; double believe it or not, Kenny G is on their new album, which is surely a first for a Supernormal act.

Speaking of heaviness, Lo Egin add sax and trombone to a metal template, finding a space between New Orleans funeral parades and doom trudges. It’s a brass metal fusion...or do we mean alloy? Skull Mask from Mexico also stretch traditions by drizzling rootsy guitar licks with eerie hurdy-gurdy noise, until it’s like listening to a mariachi musician via haunted ear canals.   

But there is also room on the bill for subtlety and delicacy. Violist Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh plays one of the few sets in Braziers House, summoning a web of harmonics and glissandi from which fragments of folk motifs can be picked, like the shanties of the damned. Alison Cotton’s closing set in the Barn on Friday also uses viola, but creates a more spectral sound to which haunting vocals are added, in a style reminiscent of some of Sheila Chandra’s drone-based work. Hannah Silva weaves a spell often with voice alone, looping imitations of infant burbling and producing live recreations of glitched recordings, like a post-modern Norman Collier, and an even deeper enchantment is cast by Noriko Okaku and Helen Papaioannou with “That Long Moonless Chase”, utilising the immersive potential of The Vortex stage to show beautiful animation interpreting a collage of two folktales from different continents which have been mangled by online translation services, plus a bit of skronking sax, just to stay on the Supernormal brand.

Chip Priests

I just got back from Supernormal festival, so you can look forward to a review in the forthcoming Nightshift (preview: it was ace).  Here's my latest for MusicOMH in the interim.  

HOT CHIP – FREAKOUT/RELEASE (Domino)

Boogie is long overdue a mainstream revival. The misleadingly monikered microgenre added a bit of gutsy R & B bounce to sleek disco rhythms as the 70s bled into the 80s, and then played them in such an intensely uptight, airtight fashion you’d think they were planning on sending twelve inch singles to the Mariana Trench. What admirer of early Foals’ buttoned-down pop wouldn’t get a finicky frisson from Earth, Wind & Fire’s cover of "Got To Get You Into My Life"? How many people nodding along to the airbrushed sounds of Everything Everything wouldn’t find something to like in the antiseptic rubber bounce of Heatwave or Pure Energy? Hot Chip might be leading the revival by building "Down", the opening track from their eighth album, around a loop from boogie obscurity "More Than Enough", by Universal Togetherness Band.

To keep the wryly knowing groove going, "Eleanor" comes on like an early 80s Kool & The Gang cut at an alternative universe school disco, whereas the title track is chunkier, opening with the repeated robo-mantra “Wild beast/ Freakout, release” - imagine the backing singers from "Electric Avenue" trying to remake Fatboy Slim’s "Eat, Sleep, Rave, Repeat" and you’re halfway there - and ending with a delicious Chicago house descending synth line; it even has a slight similarity in the vocal line to "We Are Family", just to retain the vintage mobile disco vibe. But this opening trio is a trick, wrongfooting you into an album, not of retro-bangers, but of restrained and introspective keyboard contemplations. Despite the Dionysian flavour of the title, Freakout/Release could more accurately be titled Comedown/Regret, wistfully noting the passing of the good times. The lyrics return to this post-party melancholia again and again, the mojo having fled suddenly, pop euphoria having been replaced by the quotidian: “Music used to be escape, now I can’t escape it” ("Freakout/Release"); “We raise our glasses in remembrance/ When only yesterday we took our chance” ("Not Alone"); “Ain’t it hard to be funky when you’re not feeling sexy?” ("Hard To Be Funky"). Hot Chip’s previous album was entitled Bath Of Ecstasy, but this one is more like a cold shower of middle-aged regret, with a good splurge of Radox Pomegranate, Hibiscus & Remorse exfoliating body scrub.

Not that the music is cold, there’s a swirled-brandy warmth to these songs which rescues them from self-pity. "Broken" has a stately resignation which is part Pet Shop Boys, part barely remembered Canadian synth-poppers Kon Kan, "Miss The Bliss" is Frazier Chorus chilling out post-club, and "Not Alone" has a soft fuzziness which is not far from current festival faves Glass Animals, but the clearest sonic touchstone is The Beloved (albeit without the loved-up, starry-eyed grins). The whole album is perfect earbud fodder, well balanced and rich, and with plenty of interesting elements to pick out on later listens - check the dirty, dirty bass break in the title track, or the freeze-dried Chic guitar of "Hard To Be Funky". Only "The Evil That Men Do" falls flat, trying to be a woozy shuffle but coming across as a messy, half-recalled Seal song (though maybe we’re still smarting from discovering it wasn’t an Iron Maiden cover). 

"Out Of My Depth", however, is an outstanding closer, an affirmatory torch song over epically phased keys which owes a little to 21st century Sparks, and even shares some DNA with the theatrical  valediction of Queen’s "The Show Must Go On". With a promise to “make time my only enemy”, perhaps this song makes peace with the ruefulness and contrition of the preceding eight tracks. This album is a pleasing, mature release...though a little more freakout wouldn’t have gone amiss.