The 2kDozen 500: #62 - Burial, "Kindred EP"

Need to move fast as I'm still horribly behind for the month. New Burial EP.

Burial knocked everything into a six-foot hole back in that there 2007. Big noises became small, and the tiniest glitch and hiss became enormous, became everything. Ghostly vocals struggled to keep in touch.

Little seems to have changed in the world of Burial, which in itself is quite interesting. Had I the time I'd listen back to "Untrue" (although it's not that long since I last listened), I'd make more direct comparisons - but... Boards of Canada kind of moved on from their original sound, however glacial their recording speeds. Perhaps it's the case that Burial still has areas to explore within his original sound. He seems an ornery enough customer not to be pushed or pulled where he has no wish to go.

The title track reminds me of Photek, at least in its rhythm track. The sound of drum'n'bass cutlery being sharpened on the flinty hearts of the assembled movers and shakers. But it's boughs are still heavy with K-Soul weight and avalanche bass twitches.

"Ashtray Wasp" has an Aphex Twin title - in fact, perhaps the perfect Aphex Twin title. The usual sounds of tortured magnetic tape and rusted beats robbed and rubbed of any crispness. They should have delayed making Bladerunner until Burial was around to do the soundtrack. Maybe they should make a silent version so he can do the soundtrack album. (We have established he's a he, haven't we?) But soft! Amongst the asphalt crackles and wobbly, muffled AM radio vocals, is there a differentness? Some heavenward arpeggios that give the track a worn-down, mossy KLF kind of fell?

I think I like it. I'm not yet sure. To the Burialmobile!

Rating: Got to Get to Work, out of Time

The 2kDozen 500: #61 - Air, "Le voyage dans le lune"

I should really be watching the movie at the same time; but I'm too stingy to spring for it off iTunes as well and too impatient to hunt it down for free. So I'm going to go from memories of the sci-fi classic from the eaarly stirrings of cinema and my impressions of the album as an audio experience alone; then try and work out at what point the rocket sticks in the Moon's eye.

Liquid bombast for fuel from the off; which is surely a crucial ingredient. Queen soundtracked "Flash Gordon" for the sake of fuck, and that ought to be illustration enough.

"Moon Fever" sounds like classic Air. Indeed, there's a kind of lunar delirium that lurks behind a lot of their music. It also sounds a piano was fused to the skeleton of "Right Here, Right Now" by Fatboy Slim and buoyed up with enormous flatulent keyboard swirls. Then things get right progressive with "Sonic Armada" with the sound of a race of wasp aliens trying to communicate through interpretive dance exactly how we could improve the universe. It shudders nice.

"Decollage", I've just learned, means "take-off" in French, but there must be some conceptual overlay with the idea of creating new art by ripping pieces off some other piece. Or maybe not. I'm wading in waters outside of my easy knowledge. "Cosmic Trip" has the mustard of a driving paranoid rhythm track that represents the queasy momentum I'm sure I'd be feeling moving through space. I certainly don't need a large, echoing, professorial voice talking about "enormous mushrooms", thanks.

"Lava" sounds cool and serene - much more as in lamp than as in eruption. Although there are some banjo tectonics some of the way in. Banjotronix.

I've loved Air even since seeing "All I Need" on MTV in a front room in Belgium late at night with headphones on. This kicks in no heads, but I like it. I will bring this when I travel to the starosphere.

Rating: Jazz Warp out of Lunar Orbit

The 2kDozen 500: #60 - Laura Gibson, "La Grande"

It's a mix up of the antique and the fresh, this album. Much has been made of its harking back to a nineteenth-century Oregon and nostalgia and Old World instrumentation; but it sounds pretty contemporary to me at first. Then I'm currently sporting a big backswood beard, so I'm probably not qualified to judge. As she says herself on the penultimate track: "Time is not against us".

The title track is all Old West clip clop and spidery acoustic guitars, seemingly a tribute to the hands that worked the soil that shaped the new West. Clay on hands this and dust on boots that. I've not quite seen eye to eye with the Americana music since I first encountered its gathering together in the pages of Uncut. But I can sort of see the point of this: it has a bit of the leaden playfulness of Tom Waits.

"The Fire" sets off a borderline ham-fisted Les Dawson piano tangent halfway through, which is nice. "Feather Lungs", which is a great title, begins with a grumbling gramophone rattle. "Red Moon" has a quirky Mediterrean cafe feel. Some steel guitar sneaks into "Skin Warming Skin" and that is always welcome. "The Rushing Dark" summons up a tiny chapel, a rickety low-key Gospel workout, in which she mumbles in her "woody whisper" that: "I could not/Repent enough".

I think it's in the clarity and the meandering of Laura's voice where I hear the present, the modernity. When she sings "My love is fierce/Leaving your limbs/Barefoot and honey wild", I hear the now, not some ancient woodland in the Pacific Northwest. No matter how much the backing reaches to past musics.

 Rating: Mellow Now out of Spooky Then

The 2kDozen 500: #59 - Sharon van Etten, "Tramp"

I read a headline of Everett True's a few weeks ago that had stuck with me: that all the interesting, good pop music (or rock music, I'm not sure) was being made by women. Or rather, that none of it was being made by men. This may be why I've been quite aware of how many people that happen to be women have been responsible for the last 59 albums I've been listening to.

I don't really have any conclusion to draw from that. I wonder if there's any influence over how I listen, react or report? I might take a look back over previous thoughts to check.

So this is a fairly straightforward rock album, right? There's a back story that I've read about - the abusive boyfriend who told her that her music was shit because there was no distance. And some music people that heard her CD-Rs and stole her away from that monstrous life. Now, I quite like an ironic distance in a composer and even more so in a lyricist. So what might I make of this? I will be listening out of course for how much of this back story can be inferred from the songs within.

"Leonard" sounds familiar. There's a flutter to the vocal that matches the sweet tension in the music. "In Line" has the shuffling desert feel of slow motion dawns and cavernous hums and mournful, coyote cries. It gets to sound monochromatic after a while and I suppose how far you plunge into this musical world would depend on how closely your mood might run with hers. Sounds a cool route to run alongside her though. "All I Can" builds on the confidence, voice growing in power and a laid-back strut to the backing band. Only the words suggest the confidence is built on uncertainties.

"But my memory steals every moment I can feel./What will it take?/We all make mistakes."

"Tell me I'm wrong/Tell me it's not been that long" suggests another look back over theback story. There are magic, twinkling, uplifting noises swelling up behind "I'm Wrong" in a sliding, brassy fashion. This tune might best sum up her movement to where she is now; I suppose that's for her to know and me to guess at. Belief and trust are big lyrical themes right up until the last track, "Joke or a Lie" ("Put your coat on/Then believe me/I tried" are the closing words).

Rating: Desert Blooming out of Cellar Glooming

The 2kDozen 500: #58 - Field Music, "Plumb"

Back to the north east after Beth Houghton, but on more familiar territory. 6 Music loves these lads - and I suppose we should expect them to. They tick all those literary, intelligent, musically-complex boxes that middle-aged, thoughtful BBC acts ought to tick. That's not a criticism, but it's not a ringing endorsement either, is it?

The album cover is interesting, a combination of design and actual photos -  "A New Town" they've been thinking about half-sketched out. Plenty of questions in the titles ("Who'll Pay The Bills?" and "How Many More Times?"), all carrying a kind of sense of the domestic. Definitely music for the kitchen table, staring out at fast, grey skies. Where people hear XTC (and maybe have people have heard the same pastoral pop tones), I also get a strange sense of a Kate Bush backing band, a version without the eye-catching figurehead; or an organic Clor. The Brewis Brothers are always linked with Clor in my head. I think they emerged about the same time and shot the same cracked melodic rainbows out while they were at it.

"(I Keep Thinking About) A New Thing" sums up the self-reflexive pattern of the album, holding the same idea in the mind's eye, turning it over and over. "A New Town" has got to be the most-winningly bloodless syncopated unfunk I've ever heard. "Choosing Sides" starts like the theme to "Pob", which is good - a Saturnine tuba on the moon of Encephalus: "There is no model for what we have/It's only ever/Ever won by  accident." It seems the key track to the album after a couple of listens at least.

"I want a different idea of what better could mean/Which doesn't involve/Treating someone else like shit/I'm so complicit" There's a moral for city life right there that some of the more doleful elements of Mancunian society could pick up on. A northern Fight Club antidote.

"So Long Then" is a farewell to some love with McCartney-like cellos churning and epic gong crashes for no apparent reason, but it's just a slip of a thing lyrically: "See you there in the evening/Glass of wine and a beer for me/That was the thing you were leaving/Got the notes that you sent me/No reply but I wish that I/'d seen you before you had gone." And that's it.

Restless, soulful finger symphonies trying to examine what is going on and how they feel about it. Just peachy.

Rating: Drawing Plans out of Cloudy Premonitions

The 2kDozen 500: #57 - Simple Minds, "Reel To Real Cacophony"

Inspired by footage of the (orsum!) BBC4 documentary "Big In America" that showed a 1979 Simple Minds not being terrible on stage at some trendy, tiny club in New York, when I was browsing at a local vintage place and saw the vinyl of this 1979 release I forked out the fiver and ran all the way home.

I liked how vaguely shifty and callow Jim Kerr looked in the film (which I think was shown on the Old Grey Whistle Test that winter) and the blend of a sturdy, insistent bass lope with keyboard washes and heroic Bowie-esque guitar lines. (I suppose that should be Mick Ronson-esque.) I guess this was a pleasing mid-point between Johnny & The Self-Abusers first punky outpourings and the "Don't You Forget About The Belfast Child New Gold Dream And Kicking On The Waterfront" beast of pomposity they became.

"Changeling" (which I think may've been the lead single from the album) has a nice, juddering feel - partly from sub-Gary Numan electronics. "Citizen" starts with some nice claustrophobic drums and the long shadow of the Seventies ("Romance is no escape/But I'll escape") darkens it both lyrically and in the close production. I'm not sure whether "Factory" would be titled in homage to Andy Warhol or 

Anthony H Wilson - the echoey Hannetisms of the latter and the shiny ambition of the former.

In looking for pictures of SM in their alienated pomp, I read about how highly thought-of the rhythm section was at the time - post-punk idolatry up there with the Wobbles and the Tina Weymouths. (Is that "up there" strictly speaking; perhaps "out there" would be better?) Also the influence of Magazine is mentioned and I can tell why Kerr sounds different than in later years: he's doing a Howard Devoto impression. Nice.

"Premonition" has now been added to my Impossible Final Disco.

Rating: Seventies out of Eighties

The 2kDozen 500: #56 - Beth Jeans Houghton & the Hooves of Destiny, "Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose"

I've been kept from my blogging activities the last couple of days by the tingle of romance and the lure of strong drink and decent television. As a result, I've fallen badly behind the pace. Should be over 60 albums by now. So may have to be a bit of a blog blur while I speed through them that I've heard.

Houghton is a Geordie with a folky background. The album sounds more than a bit like The Fiery Furnaces in places, which is not necessarily a good thing. But in her mouth, the kookiness sounds a little more convincing. The voice is certainly clearer and more powerful.

There's an occasional tinge of rockabilly ("Atlas" being a good example) and there are naked women with the heads of lions on the cover. "Nightswimmer" is much better than that REM number - it has imitation harpsichord and a wry spring in its step. None of that baleful piano hammering. Even though it sounds as though her fella has flooded the bathroom.

Chamber strings are put to excellent pop use throughout ("Franklin Benedict" a fine example of that) - playing all the right notes necessarily in the right order. There may even been some bells in there. I get the feeling of a pop Quixote, but I can't work out the windmills.

Thumbs aloft.

Rating: Best Thing To Come out of Newcastle Since Carter