I don't think I'm in the mood for this album. It's too 2012. It has that drippy Coldplay wash running all over it. Maybe a couple of months ago I'd have felt better disposed to it. And is this the second album I've heard called "Language" in the last month or so? What's up with that?
"We Should Be Swimming" must be a single, and seems to be about hiding from the world on the bottom of the seabed. Self-annulment, woohoo! And sleazy annulment at that. Henry VIII on his gap year. Man City fans may well be singing "Bitter Moon" tomorrow. That's just judging by the title. I tried to listen twice and it wouldn't go in. His voice sounds too much like Chris Martin's voice, the twunk. May I also point out that I really dislike the name of the band?
"You are silver-tongued, you are/Plain obvious" and "What kind of man are you to hold onto these feelings?" suggest that singing man is either very pissed off with someone or (and this is what I'd prefer to suppose) locked into unwitting self-loathing which he projects outward in every musical direction. "You Deserve Better" contains the phrase "as you and I walk/And touch the corners of the evening", which I like, but then it bubbles up all Radio One again, the gorge rising up from the drains; whooosh! The title is a bit self-loathing again though, eh?
I've just seen a picture of the band (above) and I'm beginning to feel guilty about how much I loathe them after seeing it. It cements ideas about why I don't really like them that I can't illuminate. They look like part-timers, and not in a good amateur way. And I fear the poison in his words, words that he "wields" apparently. "I keep you with the words/The words I wield". Alright, weirdo! "Never Leave", eh? Touch of dress down Patrick Bateman about the band. Compared with the clammy, distant sound, it's a little too sociopathic for my tastes.
Rating: Exaggerated Sense out of Coldplay Similarity
Twenty or so years ago, there was a special corner of my experience reserved for Gallon Drunk. There were also loungey bands, other bands that greased up quiffs and wore Hawaiian shirts, other bands that drank and muttered darkly; but there was nothing quite like Gallon Drunk. Their baritone, boozey glamour and edge of Nick Cave-like growl and rockabilly literary shapes made them stand out from whatever crowd I could muster in Anglesey at the time.
So there's a new album of their stuff. I don't know if they've gone away and come back like proper drunks or whether they've been hanging around semi-invisibly all these years - like proper drunks. It doesn't have the same stagger about it as the older stuff: "Stuck In My Head" sounds particularly poppy. Maybe they've had a moment of looking at themselves in the mirror and decided to stop trying too Bukowski.
"Killing Time" is drawn exactly from that same box though, including the tumbling, rumbling toms. "You've had your excuses/I've got mine": that's pretty neat. "The Big Breakdown" has more of a Blues Explosion rolling from side to side, which makes it a faded version of the schizophrenic panic they sounded like they were channelling back in the earli Nineties them. By "I Just Can't Help But Stare" I begin to suspect that there are two singers in the band, such are the split nature of the tunes.
There's some bottom end of the keyboard chill on closer "The Perfect Dancer"; it's quite low key in the other sense too. But there isn't much to drag my mind from their earlier incarnation, stranded out of many times as it was. Like an exciting version of Richard Hawley.
Interesting voice on the lead singer. Tremulous, almost squeaky, a hint of Japanese in the fibre - although she's from Essex, I believe. Still unsure as to whether it's annoying or not.
The title track sounds like Folk Britannica to me, without anyone taking too many pains to bring things up to date. Although if you were playing flutes in the late Sixties to try and sound as medieval as possible, I don't suppose another forty years would make much difference. "Valley" has Spanish picked guitar and sliding steel battling for cultural dominance in the background. I like the steel but the shuffling beat is far too C&W for my sensitive stomach to handle.
"Altars and Thrones" hangs about like a kestrel hovering above the motorway. "Just Like" sounds as though it should be behind one of those thunderous rock'n'roll revue things that rolled about in the Seventies with Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen or some other Messianic figure. Except we have the intercessions of this squeaky saint instead. Not feeling the need for redemption. "It Hurt Me" sounds like lead vocal duties have been taken by Sweet Baboo; perhaps that's why I like it more. Then it's back to the over-full sound again.
Ex-Black Flag, ex-Circle Jerks: OK, fill me in. I know near-as-to-fuck-all about that period/scene, all those DC straight edge intense types. Henry Rollins' neck; that's all I know about them.
His voice sounds pretty middle-aged, as I guess ALL punks are now. I was too young for punk proper and I'm practically forty years of old. He sounds a wee bit like a Mike Myers character. And the tunes are all as short and sharp as you might expect. He seems pretty wee too; Napoleonic punk fucker, the anti-Thurston.
I amn't sure who or what the "King Kong Brigade" might be, but I like the cut of the musical jib beneath them. It's like all the other jibs on the album only there are more of them and they're slightly more intense; "Learning to shoot/Before they can read." It ends with a sound like angry yappy little dogs. Neither am I sure of the "Jet Black Girls", but I like the chorus; "Out in the night/Immortality calls".
It seems a tight and simple format for the tunes, which blunts the impact of the messages. Unless you don't think there are messages, but one long, angry, buzzsaw guitar message to get across. Unless you're tuned unto the formula and I suspect tens of thousands are, banging their greying heads into nostalgic oblivion. But what else are the guys to do? It's their them-ness.
I was struck by the thought as I listened to this earlier today that Damon Albarn is "our"* Sting. I don't think he's as much of a prink as Mr Sumner or that everything is for the greater glory of Damon Albarn in the same way as the rainforests and Quentin Crisp and Nabokov and tantric sex have all been put in this universe for the greater glory of Sting. I liked Blur until very close to the end; but his solo stuff is pretentious in that dry way - yes, an opera about an Elizabethan polymath, sounds very grown up, Damon! It's a troubling thought that I quite enjoy parts of the album.
It is hard work in places, perhaps a little worthy and smacking of cardboard as a result; "O Spirit, Animate Us" shackles some sixteenth century worldview to his tired-sounding voice. There are a lorra lorra instruments on here - rauch fifes and dulcimers and harpsichords and what have you (provided you have a lot) - and a lot of different voices to populate the stage. It should be exciting, but it gets rather tiring.
I like the menace of the bass of "A Man of England", but it's lyrically empty. In fact, that might be my complaint throughout. The lyrics don't seem to do much but describe movements and planets and offer no great emotional depth. "The Marvelous Dream" might be a vision of the future from John Dee's time, almost sounding like Parklife at times, but I can't really get into the words. The word "revival" crops up a lot across a few songs, but I can't pluck out why.
"Temptation Comes in the Afternoon" starts out promisingly with some choral swoops but then the counter tenor screeches in over the top, sounding more than a little like Damon himself. I think there are references to angels and then some orgiastic noises. Some of the music - like on "Cathedrals" or "Tree of Beauty" - really stirs some of my stumps. In fact the last three tunes hit me on the listening button quite squarely. And babbling brook and birdsong is always a classy ending.
And yet...
Rating: Alan Moore Much Better Off out of It
* And I'm really not sure who "we" are, but I identify
with Albarn in a way I never could with Sting. It feels generational,
but I couldn't put a finger on what would link the generation together.
I'm not attempting anything as wrong-headed as criticism or analysis of MBV. I just want to record my impressions in a 2 Girls 1 Cup type way. That's what I've intended the previous 169 albums too, so let's see how we get on...
"You Made Me Realise EP" covers the first five tracks. Much closer to the Byrds business that was so prevalent in the late (but not that late) Eighties; but all the germs are there. The abrasive noises that would come further and further to the front loom slightly underneath the mix and would in the future pass right through our perspective, leaving only ghostly echoes of themselves. "Thorn" in particular. "Cigarette in Your Bed" (not a tune I've heard before I think) has more of the Loveless checkpoints than most of the tracks, just still a little pacey. One day soon, the drums would leave pretty much entirely - but not yet. "Drive It All Over Me" almost sounds like PWEI by comparison; but those proto-pedals are being pushed away from the metal. Interesting lyric too: "Get into your car/Drive it all over me."
"Feed Me With Your Kiss EP" was next, a bit later in 1988. The title track has been nudged on a bit by the first waves of grunge from the States - Mudhoney, Dinosaur, etc. (Would that be fair?) But the fairground swirl is still churning underneath, darkly brilliant. Hadn't heard "I Believe" before either - but it has corroded sounds dropping out throughout and blown-out bass bins undercutting a vaguely sunny Stooges piano-led pop tune. "Emptiness Inside" is much the kind of title I expect: it scoops and swoops as you'd expect, but with harder edges. A big bass drum opens "I Need No Trust", which is a little atypical, and the singing sounds slightly like the backwards dwarf on Twin Peaks. Velvet Underground closer to the surface?
Then "Soon". Nothing to say about that. Timeless and awesome. Music I can see myself remembering on my death bed. One of the keystones of my annus mirabilis. Kevin Shields, indie's very own Skynet, is beginning to instruct the machines to take over. "Glider", the title track of the EP, sets the controls for the heart of the bit of the brain that has to deal with repetitive, looped noises. Melody returns for "Don't Ask Why" in its own way and on "Off Your Face" ends with an incredible morphing of half-monkey, half-bent string chatter into a hazy, slightly disturbing outro.
Then we're on to the "Tremelo EP", which has the full cassette-left-out-in-the-sun blistered and woozy sound. There are technologies that will travel between stars, creating noises like this as they do so on "To Here Knows When". "Swallow" is much busier than I remember - bells and whistles prefiguring the likes of Loop Guru perhaps - with an extra bit of spooky noise on the end. "Honey Power" builds up with just that, layer after layer of gloopy sweetness. By the intro to "Moon Song" the drift off into structureless delight seems complete. It has the wistful air of a musical number, something out of a psychedelic version of Paint Your Wagon or something.
Then there are some other tracks that appeared on various 7inch releases and remix collections. "Instrumental No 1" rips off the same drum pattern as Madonna's "Justify My Love", which I always assumed was originally from Public Enemy's Nation of Millions, but now I'm not sure. Ghostly guitar noises are traced over the top. "Instrumental No 2" is much more about the thrashy, buzzing guitars again - but with a kind of Dick Dale atmosphere buried underneath the squall. The full ten minutes plus of "Glider" ends with a great reverberating bassaclysm. Then there are four previously unreleased and remastered tracks; and it's fairly easy to hear why they were unreleased. They don't offer a huge amount of newth or expansion on what has already been released. "How Do You Do It" perks my ears up the most but the dog-like guitar sounds in the background crop up in plenty of other places in the back catalogue.
I meant to make a point about how MBV titles are much more mundane than the gobbledygook ones from Cocteau Twins; but I forget what the point was. Ah, well.
"Somewhere between shadow and light/There are Cairo nights".
More unknown/forgotten wonders from the Peel Archive, which has now strided magnificently into the Bs. (I wonder how many Royal Opera Houses/public subscriptions it would take to expand this to the whole collection rather than the first one hundred of each letter and make it permanent.) (And will there be a hundred records beginning with X?)
This is a very toothsome record indeed - slinky as a dolphin in goosefat, leaking glamour from each and every invisible pore, expansive and Francophonic. It's from 1985 and it's massive. All bass and drum machines and breathy vocals. Almost like Prince dub. And I find any musical references to Egypt difficult to resist.
"Bones" has massed up banks of John Hughes movies, liquidised then frozen into thunderclouds that glower over the musical horizon with Idaho skybigness. If the TV series "Bones" had this as its theme tune, I'd have to watch it. It has that high Eighties guitar picking and percussive noises that point at excited fingers prodding at new equipment. There's a bit of "sexy" saxophone on "Change The Beat", which is less my cup of tea, too Seinfeld. The lyrics are in French, but seem to be about giving sleazy suitors the brush off. Although with that sax, love, you're asking for it, etc.
The Eighties definitely had its own take on sexuality: not just the power dressing and AIDS epidemics. But it was quite straightforward. "So Hot" is a good example, with the steamy bongos and chanting backing vocals giving it a colonial feel. I wish I could take this Eighties sexuality idea somewhere but I can't. Maybe it was given energy by the self-confidence of gay culture spreading out across the Overground. I really don't know.
Side B of B-Side begins with a chunky tide of slap bass and crashing percussive synths again, all the tension loaded up into one key press. That's "Paris - Taxi". "What I Like (American Dreams)" is even further out on that extreme-skeletal-funk type pedalstool. "I like men that shop/I love women that rock!" It's gauche, but just about successful. It's all that excitement again; when technology made anything possible but not easy. I'd love to get an idea of what Peelie thought of this back in 1985. "Beatnik" is another version of "Change The Beat"; I think I've seen what they did there; and I can hear that they made it more stuttering and urban and Eighties. "A Lot to Give" ticks the box marked George Michael/Debbie Harry Rap.
I like this record. I thumb it up. I hope that featuring in the Peel Archive will boost their profile and get a few ears wagging in their faded direction. B Side and Francois Holland - all nice and retro in France at the minute, eh?
Rating: Stuttering Funk out of Unimaginable Context
