Guitars! Back with guitars! Or perhaps just one guy with a guitar played several times.
This time I am going to be quickly in and out. Wong is apparently a run-away Christian, who found a more suitable redemption through punk rock and Jack Nicholson in "Easy Rider". I don't think the gawky enthusiasm I associate with US Christians has completely dissipated. This is seriously sunny music, dappling my ears with different rays of guitar playing across the sky.
There's some deviation from one track to another, but not a huge amount. Only towards the end and the last two tracks does the sound toughen up much. And that doesn't matter. Because it sounds goooood. There's a lot going on and plenty to miss. So I won't sketch it out any further here. But I shall listen again. Oh, yes.
Opener "The Beach Stop" features a cracked young woman's voice over fizzing techno bits and pieces, sounding like a self-help tape. "Chordblocker, Cinnamon Toasted" sounds more like about Facebook being a cunt-blocker, but I don't understand how that would work. But my ears start to stick up on the third track, "Metrotopy" - heavy, clattering clap-based power and growling key stabs.
"Wienuss" whips about tightly too. "They Know Your Name" gouges its way with a Dalek-like voice on top and employs many bells and whistles and slicing together voices at the end. A hyperactive Kraftwerk. "Syncropticians" lurks about in the undergrowth, spitting and blurting. But I'm starting to lose focus again.
"Cricket" doesn't sound too much like the game I know. "iMatch" throws down a hefty chunk of 8-bit business in along with the tune. But I'm not finding my way into the album at all. Each new turn throws up another wall in front of me. Each track segues into the next and I can't get my fingers in any cracks.
"Polaroyced" is channeling an Eighties spirit in a big way. "Gearknot Cherry" starts out like a haunted piano, before dropping through a couple of gears. "Baku Hipster" (another great title - no shortage of great titles on this album) is chopped up Azerbaijani (?) and drums and video games. Can't get to grips with it either. Maybe MoM are best when they're lassooed around a big personality like MES. Maybe I should retire my ears and try and smell my way around the album.
"Seaqz" sees out the record with some acid squelch. I love a bit of acid squelch. The rest of the album is a frustratingly impenetrable experience.
Carrying on my idea of the pop impulse, this album (from the first two tracks at least) is not pop - but a resemblent cousin, rock with last minute plans. Still heavy with preconception and pre-meditation. "Featherbrain" seems a mistaken name.
The title track begins with tinkles and taps. An opposition of "old habits" and "new dreams" inside her "twisted soul". There is rattling and a persistent chord progression on a rasping acoustic guitar. It's an uncomfortable tune over which Hanne is taking herself to task. "Noah" has a corrupted mix with the piano cutting out in different ears. Then there are soaring vocals, running in and out of each other until you hear the breath run out in her voice. "I Sing You" has strings scraped and distant harpsichord and a scent of Kate Bush running with the hounds. "The Bigger Me" ends on a whistling kettle.
"The Time and I and What We Make" is epic, bigly epic. I wonder to myself whether it's a sex song. It has that sky-touching feel about it. This is what it sounds like when Norwegians cry. "You Gonna" has a Tom Waits junkyard lurch - "It's about finding your place/But don't get too comfortable." "Erik" sounds as though it could sung by her Dad, perhaps a guy called Erik, perhaps I don't need to worry about that. Either way, it's in Norwegian and sounds wise and sad and ends with whistling. Maybe that's what it sounds like when Norwegians cry.
I read that parts of this were recorded in a chapel. It has the creak of an intimate wooden place, of walking up an old staircase in the middle of the night. Maybe the right place to tackle all her devils.
Interesting title. I wonder what the theme is? Bedroom pop is the medium. Although I might refer myself back to the ideas about pop I had earlier in the week. Pop as instinct and rock as studied action. So maybes this is bedroom rock.
The title track is about frustration - and it's frustrating that the line "In an England without rain" is followed by a mumble. My hopes to get the bottom of the album easily are halted at the beginning. But the other lyrics suggest it's about whether people are listening. In fact, this seems to be the dominant theme of the album - performance and audience. "The Something Sonata" is literally about the experience of "nerves crackling" in front of a bar audience. The opening track is about
There's also a traditional Japanese touch to the arrangement of some of the tracks - especially in the intros to "Glockenspiel" and "Love is a Vortex" and the opening track, "I Feel Like Making A Record". The former and final are both about staying in and making music, "like a diamond of the pressure it's under". (Bam!) The liberation of song arrangement by technology has opened up the music industry to an even greater range of agoraphobics than ever before - with a net increase in mundane paranoia and domestic themes, which I'd welcome myself. It brings them closer to the authorial lifestyle of screenwriters, novelists and the like. "Only the shallow know themselves", he says, quoting Oscar Wilde. He's one of those songwriters; the Oscar Wilde-quoting ones.
"The Wrong Door" drifts even closer to the Hot Chip model that this lounge music has running through its DNA. Perhaps because it is about a bit of a romantic encounter late at night which is shot through with disappointment and sturdy metaphor - a very Hot Chip scenario. "Black Eyes" also moves around the ladies but sounds more like The Chap. Still picture everything happening in a house though.
By the way, for the record, his voice also reminds me of Poole popsters Betika and Anglo-Welsh lo-fi MC Akira The Don; that low-key,conversational baritone. This guy is from Leeds, and we don't generally enough from Leeds these days.
They do find time to wail occasionally, if in a rather minimalist way - for example, "I Didn't Realise" ends with an incendiary guitar solo of happily few notes. "Do our immune systems align?/Sometimes we twist apart/Sometimes we intertwine" - it's that Metaphysical poetry business again on the floor-filling "Double Helixxx" outro. I like it, the poetry of the bedroom philosopher.
The stream for the album is here: http://recordsonribs.com/blog/new-talk-less-say-more-england-without-rain/
Made my final shop at Cob Records in Bangor today. The shop's been there in Lower Bangor since 1979 and supplied many of my friends with their first record purchases and is going to close in a couple of weeks' time. Sad times. So I went back on St David's Day and bought a few last pieces of vinyl to go with the second-hand tapes and CDs I'd bought there over the years. And this album caught my eye.
A group of intent looking fellas, early Eighties tasches and tight leather jackets, leaning on a table with a map of Wales stretched on the table. They're all looking up from the table to camera. It's "It Takes A Nation of Millions..." six years early and with stocky Welsh guys instead.
The sleevenotes on the back set the scene (once I translate them) of a tour in 1982 with Dafydd Iwan, a big name in Welsh language music and folk singer, and the folk band, Ar Log - which means For Hire. They decided to make an album ("Between Fun and Touring") of some folk tunes and some political numbers about the Falklands crisis and a controversy around Special Branch bugging a public phone in Penygroes near Caernarfon with a view to catching Meibion Glyndwr activists.
I'm a sucker for harps - and there's harp action from the start on "Dail Y Teim" (Leaves of Thyme), which is an old school tune that I recognise. Maybe it's my Irish heritage or a vague osmosis of hirael from my Anglesey upbringing, but my heartstrings are plucked along with those of the harp. Or maybe the stealthy approach of my fifth decade has robbed me of my contempt for middle-aged folk-rock?
The fact that there is some political sinew to this album and the straightforward aesthetic of the cover and the sense of records meaning more in those narrower times wins me over. "Maen Nhw'n Paratoi at Rhyfel" is about the build up to the Falklands War: "They're preparing for war/To keep the world free". I can't really measure the lyrics as again I'm not Welsh enough, so they could be uninspiring doggerel, but the performance is convincing. Then "Abergeni" is a flute and guitar instrumental with Henry VIII style flourishes.
"Dechrau'r Dyfodol" could come from a musical about the first blossom of Spring in terms of the music, eddying in far swirlier musical waters than the rest of the album. Stand out track, although what is starting, I don't know. "Ciosg Talysarn" decides to treat the phone-tapping story with an ironic generic twist, a Thirties boogie woogie feel, but I can hear the anger corroding the air from here and now.
"Lleucu Llwyd" I recognise from something by Cymric Cassetteboy-likes Y Lladron, something simple and folky and harpy. Then "Cerddwn Ymlaen" (Best Foot Forward) closes the album with more uplifting fiddle and harps and all I can cling to are the harps and Dafydd Iwan's winning voice. And so ends my experimental-ish vinyl voyage into Welsh folk for another wee while.
Rating: 1982 Wales Staring out of Condemned Shelves
Spends a lot of time in the desert, this lad. Teaches yoga and that. Part Ethiopian, part Mexican, part American. Should we describe someone by the nationalities of their forebears? Probably not. (And anyway, we know there were only three bears, right?) But there is a mystical bent to this guy, a touch of the cosmic. His "heritage" does nothing to contradict it. Although he does live in Vegas, so stick that ethnographically anywhere that smokes.
Cymbals crash at jazzy tempos. "Timeout" in particular has a Flying Lotus feel. There is a fug across the sound. I can hear the desert, my friends - the desert dreamed up in Roman music studios by Ennio Morricone. A desert sound evolved from recording instruments very close up. Like on "Rubberband", where the chorus are clipping in full throat, the drums command respect and he blurts into a dictaphone.
I like a braggadoccio MC with a stentorian flow, of course. But I also like the mumbling, confessional dudes as well. And Gonjasufi falls to his knees safely within that category. The whole album was recorded under his breath. "Forgive me/Because I've done it again." ("Skin")
"White Picket Fence" territory this isn't. The opening track bubbles up as if from underwater, very dirty water. "Feedin' Birds" has that Morricone pimp limp and mentions "mistletoe" and seems to be angry about some kind of betrayal, but I can't make it out. "Venom" is a scratchy outtake from Portishead's "Dummy" - gelid menace, slushy around the corners.
"Nikels and Dimes" is an introspective Outkast jam with the exuberance turned to discomfort, starting with a kid being tickled or chased or something hysterical like that. "Nickels and dimes/Sticks to my mind", he begins. Looking for balance - "Your breadcrumbs, my friend/Could feed them again/Again and again". Turns out as the tune fades that there's a wheezy, candlelit cafe tune been running in the backsound. Nice.
Yes, there is talk of Mount Zion ("Blaksuit" and "Timeout"), but I'm not sure where this will be found or how he plans to find it. There is only a fog of fuzzy beats and croaking words and reverbed found sounds. No co-ordinates that I can make out. But I'm enjoying the fog muchly much.
I still haven't been able to get my ears on the album of remixed versions of these tunes yet, so I've gone to have a listen to the source instead. This came out in 2010, a round-up on Honest Jon's of a handful of South African artists representing the "New Wave of Dance Music".
It's fast. And it sounds quite unlike anything else. Cheap keyboards weave in and out of another at pace and something that sounds like xylophones or thumb pianos are swiftly moved across. Nimble, darting tunes for limbs nimbler and more darting then mine. Zinja Hlungwani's "Ntombi Ya Mugaza" has a soulful feel about it, very rapid Deep House - "I'm a gentleman/Can you hear me?" Their other track "N'wagezani My Love" is even more of a lover's Afrorock number with a bit of call and reponse with what sounds like a small woman's choir. He also has four tracks of the twelve, so I'm thinking he's the heavier hitter.
BBC don't seem to bother with any of the romantic pretensions (although my knowledge of South African languages leaves me short here as always). They're much more about dance and the occasional hyper-speed chatter over the top. Tiyiselena Vomaseve's "Naxaniseka" seems after faster again. (I'm really coming up with some profound insight, eh?) "Vanghoma" has a scary voiced man at the end, perhaps connected to the scary clown outfits the people wear on the cover. (See? Profound. I was hoping Google Translate might help out with the titles, but no furry dice.)
Tshetsha Boys sound closer to what I'd expect of African guitar music. "Uya Kwihi Ka Rose" strays into English impenetrably here and there with "size ten" and "ten centimetre" amongst the sped-up fragments of chants. "Nwampfundla" bears an incredible title that I may talk with my wife about as a middle name for our first born.
So all in all mysterious and no nonsense at the same time. Look forward to seeing people I know (like myself) trying to figure out how to dance to this at some hipster-ish gathering at some point. And to hearing the remix album properly.
Rating: You Can Take The Music out of South Africa
