Wednesday 28 November 2012

Holiday

OK, so here's the deal: I haven't really been able to find the time, the energy or the inspiration to pick up on the Galaxie 500 issue, and therefore I'm going to take a proper break and come back to the blog in the new year after the nightmare of the Christmas / new kitchen installation mash-up is over and done with and a distant memory (barring law suits of course).  Please, please do join me in the new year when we're up and running again though, I really appreciate the idea that anybody has a look at this nonsense now and then and I absolutely promise it'll be daily action again from 2nd Jan.  After all, we've got loads of records by France Gall, the greatest pop singer of all time, coming up straight after I've broken through the Galaxie 500 wall.  Have good Christmases and let's get the party started again 2nd Jan.  Cheers all!

Monday 12 November 2012

Galaxie 500 gave me writer's block!

I couldn't think of anything to say. At all. So I've taken a little break, as you may have seen, to work out what's going on this year's Christmas best of the year CD.

All back to normal tomorrow. If I can think of anything to say about This is Our Music.

Cheers!

Wednesday 31 October 2012

LaRM day 166 (Serge Gainsbourg)

OK, so, let's get cracking with our Serge-fest, starting at the beginning with 1958's Du Chant a la Une! and 1959's No.2 (also referred to as Serge Gainsbourg Aven Alain Goraguer et son Orchestre).  The first phase of Gainsbourg's career centred on a kind of louche cafe jazz, of a decidedly unoffensive but quite modern style, and which was designed to allow his exceptional wordplay and wry observational commentary to take the centrestage.  There are some lovely little jazzy piano riffs on these early albums and there's a fantastic sense of confidence from Gainsbourg who, despite having initially been reluctant to appear in public, preferring to act as a songwriter only, comes out as strongly as possible as a performer of these sharp little bits of cynical jazz.  Early signs of the arrogant cultural commentator and provocateur that he was to become are already firmly on display in the biting references to social style and musical grasshopperism that the French beat set engaged in, and while Gainsbourg found it all too easy to ape mambo, hard-bop and 40's trad jazz he also found it all too easy to twist the language to whatever purpose he felt inclined and the result throughout the early albums is a pleasant light-jazz musical surface disguising a casually clear-eyed mocking cynicism and it's all superb stuff.  It's worth noting by the way the cover of No.2 which sums up Gainsbourg's work of the time superbly, with Gainsbourg louchely smoking a cigarette and looking quizzically at the viewer over a bunch of roses and a gun.  Incidentally, the reissue I have of these albums contains some amazing bonus material, particularly remarkable being the Juliette Greco demos that he wrote and oversaw, despite being her protege.






















Although it's messing with release chronology the next thing is the compilation Du Jazz dans le Ravin (1996) which covers the early years of Gainsbourg's output, from 1958-1964, effectively covering the entire first phase of his work.  Again, this is all pleasing to listen to, there's nothing immediately recognisable as confrontational in the sound of the calm light jazz guitar and piano (although, again, Gainsbourg twists and turns the jazz in all kinds of delicate ways to emphasise whatever points he is making in each song) and there are some fantastic songs here.  Bearing in mind that Gainsbourg was churning songs out, mostly for other performers, during this period it's a remarkably high quality of material throughout that he released in the late 50's and early 60's.  That kind of quality control would desert him when he moved into the more directly provocative next stages of his work, and although it's later stuff that's much more famous there are still some big and influential numbers on these early records ('Intoxicated Man' set out the stall for much of what was to follow thematically, 'Chez Les Ye-Ye' pretty much created and defined the Ye-Ye style which ruled French pop for years, and 'Le Poinconneur des Lilas' which became something of an early calling card for many French performers).  It's also worth noting that although notoriety would overtake the work, Gainsbourg was incredibly forward thinking, employing all kinds of rhythms and styles, particularly African, into his jazz-based songs in the early 1960's.











Gainsbourg's affair with Brigitte Bardot led to our next two albums, and in some ways to the next stage of his career.  I suspect that his exposure through Bardot to a more commercial, more multi-media and more exploitative world led to him upping the ante with regard to both the bitter smartness of his lyrics and his overall determination to shock.  1968's Initials B.B. is also Gainsbourg's consolidation of a move away from jazz and into a wider range of styles, from hyper-pop to slippery, gloomy rock.  There's a lot of US themed material and Gainsbourg's hungry fascination with the influence of that culture for good and ill is played out on 'Comic Strip', 'Ford Mustang' and 'Bonnie & Clyde'.  The opening title track is a superb statement-making thudding piano, drums and sawing strings piece with Serge utilising his soon-to-be trademark spoken, murmured and whispered vocals and 'Bonnie & Clyde' is a great, wobbly bit of gloomy pop, sinister and fun at once, with Gainsbourg and Bardot taking the parts of the outlaws and accompanied by a fluid and funky bassline and vocal whoops. There's some great fuzzed up rock guitar in 'Black and White' and 'Qui est "in", Que est "Out"' and there are latent hints of the reggae influence that would become prominent in his work much later (closer 'Marilu' was massively reggaed on a later re-recording).  As good as the earlier jazz stuff was it relied very heavily on Serge's verbal mastery, and Initials B.B. shifts the balance a bit and as an album it's much more varied and much more exciting.












Initials B.B. was followed by what appears to be a collaborative album but in fact is not, 1968's Bonnie & Clyde.  The title track is pretty much the only actual duet and that's taken from the previous album anyway, and only two or three of the rest of the tunes were made by the pair, with the rest being stuff they recorded separately.  Bearing in mind that a lot of this material had appeared on Initials B.B. it's difficult to really understand why Bonnie & Clyde was released.  Nonetheless it's a great album, with Gainsbourg continuing to indulge his love/hate relationship with American culture to the max.  There's another appearance for the sarcastic 'Comic Strip' as well as the title track of course, but the album also has 'Bubblegum' (was the sarcasm hiding a desire by Gainsbourg for success in the States I wonder), as well as the superb 'Pauvre Lola', a rollicking bit of pop music, and one of Gainsbourg's greatest songs.  There are some great re-recordings of 'Intoxicated Man' with the jazz taken out and an even more jazzed, string-laden 'La Javanaise'.  The Bardot only stuff is unsurprisingly the weakest, but only because she was such a second-rate performer, the songs themselves are quality Serge.











And so we come to the motherlode, the core of Gainsbourg's career, the touchstone, Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971).  How to describe a masterpiece?  One of the biggest problems with discussing Melody Nelson is that Gainsbourg made it as a concept album as thematically and lyrically unpalateable as possible, with its storyline essentially being that 43 year old Serge Gainsbourg accidentally runs down a teenage hottie in his Rolls-Royce, takes her home and, well, you know, they have a time of it.  It's pretty hard to handle, and yet, this is still unquestionably one of the greatest albums ever made.  In terms of its structure, its instrumentation and its mood it's absolutely light years ahead of its time, with funk bass and slicing guitars tinnily chopping away beneath the lushest possible string arrangements, while Serge murmurs his filthily seductive way over it all.  There are stabs and jabs of brass and tumbling piano, but they disappear back into the mist of the strings as quickly as they appear, and the whole thing is an absolutely towering achievement of arrangement, for which most likely all the props really need to go to Jean-Claude Vannier who oversaw all of the orchestral recording.  Honestly, I get all caught up with myself and tongue-tied trying to explain just how superb Melody Nelson is musically speaking, it's a truly monumental piece of mind-bendingly original and influential work.  It's framed by two 7-minute long pieces taken from the same session of woozily seductive orchestration to set out the story, with low-key bass and guitar understatedly driving the strings with Serge giving us the outline (the second of which also has a spectral vocal group underpinning the music).  The five short pieces in between are alternately an absurdly lush two-minute ballad ('Ballade de Melody'), a charming little waltz ('Valse de Melody'), a tiny folky piece with added trumpet ('Ah! Melody'), a sleazily funky chop show ('L'Hotel Patrticulier'), and a massively funky guitar workout ('En Melody', complete with daft giggling).  Considering that the subject matter (which turns out to be not quite the simple filth-out that it first appears) was typically Serge-ian in its louche pretence at not caring whether it shocks an audience or not (while trying desperately to do so of course), you can put that to one side and just dig one of the most extraordinary records ever made.  (I've got the 40th anniversary edition which has a bunch of extras, including a documentary about the making of the album (criminally it doesn't include the album length film that Gainsbourg and Birkin made at the time, but I've linked that through the album cover below) and a selection of alternate versions which are very similar to the originals, slightly longer in some cases and with some studio talk, and two versions of one extra not very good track that was understandably cut from the album)











It's quite tough to get hold of Serge's next album, another concept piece this time about farting and poo, so we have to move directly on to 1975's controversy baiting Rock Around the Bunker.  Yes, it's a third concept album in a row and this time round it's a light-hearted comedic romp about Hitler's last days.  One can only assume that Serge was disappointed that he hadn't created enough of a storm by this point and was going all out to provoke.  Rock Around the Bunker kicks off with a jaunty squealing slide guitar and lively backing singer rock workout, 'Nazi Rock', and it makes hay with the idea that you can't discuss any of this in anything other than sombre tones.  While Mel Brooks may have got there first with the idea that you can use the Second World War as a source for comedy, particularly as a way of neutralising the insidious long-term impact of oppression, even he hadn't gone as far as Serge does on Rock Around the Bunker to make absurdist fun of it all.  As one bar-room rumble or bounce along pub-rock song goes by, with lyrics about Eva Braun's personal taste and the final solution, you find yourself wondering why it's such silly fun when it should be beyond horrifying.  I think the answer is that Serge didn't do anything for its own sake and although he liked to play the drunken provocateur I think the truth was that he was an extraordinarily clever and thoughtful man.  All the same you'll probably have trouble listening to 'Smoke Gets In Your Eyes' in the same way again.











The last of the 70's concept albums was 1976's L'Homme a Tete de Chou, which tells the story of a man who becomes obsessed with a hairdresser (the Marilou character who crops up often in Gainsbourg songs), goes totally bonkers and beats her to death with a fire extinguisher and ends up in an asylum, convinced that his head has turned into a cabbage.  Overall the album is much closer to Melody Nelson than Rock Around the Bunker, being composed of louche, funky workouts with some string arrangements, but it's less successful than Melody Nelson and much less focussed (although it's considerably better than Rock Around the Bunker).  All kinds of styles are used in the course of the album and it feels disjointed and a bit unstructured.  There's cheesy reggae-lite, pop rock, jazz-funk and throughout it all there's Serge himself delivering his seedy tale in his now obligatory spoken delivery (by this point the endless booze and fags had completely knackered his already uneasy singing voice).  It's a great album really, but it lacks Melody Nelson's towering, epic ambition and the smaller frame feels constricted rather than tight.











And finally for today, but not quite for Serge, we have the French compilation Master Serie, Vol.2 (1988), which covers material from 1964-1984, but the majority of which is post 1979.  I picked this up on cassette when we were on a holiday in France when I was about 15 and my mum and dad were mystified as to why I would want anything by Serge Gainsbourg, but that's because they only knew, like most people then, about the silly 'Je t'aime...Moi non Plus' single and not that he was a total genius.  Anyway, because most of the stuff on Master Serie, Vol.2 is from late in his career it certainly didn't convince them of anything other than that he wasn't up to much.  However, it has got 'New York USA' from 1964 which is an astonishing demonstration of how outward looking and forward thinking he was, with its African drumming and backing vocals which make Paul Simon's attempt decades later look like embarrassing tokenism and it also has 1968's 'Requiem Pour Un C..' which has a fantastic rolling rhythm section, which was sampled wholesale for the Folk Implosion's 'Serge'.  The six songs from 1979's Aux Armes et Caetera and 1981's Mauvaises Nouvelles des Etoiles are heavy reggae, recorded in Kingston with some top-flight Jamaican session musicians and it's hard to know exactly what prompted him to try it, but inexplicably it actually works. There are also three songs from 1984's Love on the Beat, another loose concept album about rent boys, and as an album it's peculiar enough without the concept, being a slick synth-heavy, lecherous pop record, which sadly doesn't work at all.


Tuesday 30 October 2012

LaRM day 165 (Peter Gabriel-Charlotte Gainsbourg)

Woo-hoo, it's a gigantic Serge-fest on the horizon!  First we have to finish of old baldy Peter Gabriel and do a few of Serge's girl's albums.  Gabriel's 2010 effort was the orchestra, piano and strained voice combo of covers album, Scratch My Back.  Now the price of vanity is scorn from some, and unfortunately Gabriel hadn't cemented the deal with this.  The idea was that he would record an album of songs by other artists, and each of those artists would simultaneously record covers of Gabriel's songs.  Nice idea, but the fact that the other artists album would be called You Scratch Mine smacks of arrogance, and that coupled with the fact that it hadn't occurred to Gabriel that they might not want to join in or might be annoyed by his covers of their work also seems not to have crossed his mind.  The result? Well, Thom Yorke was apparently so aghast at Gabriel's version of 'Street Spirit' that he immediately pulled out, Bowie said he simply wasn't interested, the Arcade Fire had "conflicting arrangements", etc. So far, so dicey and the You Scratch Mine project ended up being the release of a few songs on iTunes.  Ah well, it's actually a little bit of a shame because although Scratch My Back is almost aggressively brainy in its approach and undeniably mature (ie, very po-facedly grown-up) in its execution, it is an interesting and arresting record.  Every song, from Paul Simon's bouncy 'Boy in the Bubble' to the Magnetic Fields' 'The Book of Love' is boiled down to its emotional core and stretched out and presented as stately musical statement.  What's cleverest about it is that it takes the central melodic theme of every song and then presents the whole thing as if it were written to be presented with such depth.  Gabriel himself is in good voice and the orchestral settings for the most part work very well.  There are points at which you feel that he made the job a little easy for himself (Elbow's 'Mirrorball' is not, in truth, a million miles away from his own style of vocal melody) but on the whole it's a surprisingly effective set of covers, especially considering that the idea of a 2010 covers album by Peter Gabriel sounds like one of the worst things imaginable.











Charlotte Gainsbourg may have made a highly respectable name for herself as an actress, but as a singer, mneh.  Anyway, the reason that she really ever came to anybody's attention is because at 13 her lascivious old provocateur dad Serge made her roll around in her undies with him in the video for their duet single 'Lemon Incest'.  Pretty gruesome, but we'll get on to old Serge a bit later.  At 14 she released a pretty dismal pop album and a couple of singles and then went into acting full-time, only returning to the recording studio in 2006 for the album 5:55.  I remember that 5:55 got great reviews when it came out, but listening to it now it's all a little underwhelming and really it may have been more to do with the cameo star power than the record itself that got the attention.  Most of the material on the album was written by Jarvis Cocker and there are contributions from Air and the Divine Comedy, as well as the whole thing having super-producer Nigel Godrich twiddling the knobs.  The sound is a kind of lacy twilit drift with the gently ethereal keyboard washes and reverb-heavy extra instrumentation that Air specialise in being the order of the day for the majority of the record.  Gainsbourg's voice is not dissimilar to her mother Jane Birkin's, it's a breathy, fairly tuneless thing but which it's possible to utilise to good effect in these wispy musical settings. There are some great delicate songs, including the surprisingly poppy 'The Operation' and 'The Songs That We Sing', and as befits Jarvis and Neil Hannon's particular world views, the lyrics are biting and cynical, particularly about relationships.












Gainsbourg's next album, 2009's IRM is easily the best record that Beck has made in the last few years.  Effectively IRM is a Beck album in every sense but the vocals, and although it doesn't sound like his post-modern stylistic mash-ups, it still has his idiosyncratic signature all over it.  The fact that he has adapted and moulded his own sound to create something specific for Gainsbourg is proof that he's still got stuff to do, which is a relief because I thought he was pretty much washed-up by 2009.  But it's not just Gainsbourg's voice and her name on the cover that defines her role - the title is a reference to the life-threatening injury she sustained in 2007 necessitating many MRI scans - and her presence on the record is considerably more than perfunctory, her vocals and her personality being the real core of the album.  IRM is a marked improvement on 5:55's late-night bohemianism, being a dark and adventurous record, full of funny noises, thudding and fractured rhythms and disconcertingly oblique lyrics.  There are off-kilter blues numbers ('Dandelion'), creepy mood setters ('Vanities' and maddeningly unnerving closer 'La Collectioneuse'), indefinably ethnic string-led songs ('Voyage'), screwy folk ('Me and Jane Doe'), amongst all kinds of other things.  The whole record is a slinky, creepy thing and it really is quite, quite brilliant.










Charlotte's most recent release is the peculiar Stage Whisper (2011) which is eight studio songs, off-cuts from the other two albums and new tunes, and a live set from 2010.  The studio tracks all sound like decent but not quite as good songs from the albums (with the exception of 'Got To Let Go' which sounds like a low-key track from a Noah & the Whale album, unsurprising bearing in mind Charlie Fink wrote and oversaw it) and the live stuff is also pretty good, but not so remarkable as to get overly excited about.  Stage Whisper is interesting enough and just about warrants a release for its contents, but it definitely has the air of a stop-gap release.











I think I'll leave it there for now though so we get two clear days of pure Serge from tomorrow.

Monday 29 October 2012

LaRM day 164 (catch-up-Peter Gabriel)

The debut album by Clock Opera, called Ways to Forget (2012) is another great bit of retro genre-mashing.  It's from the same school as Everything Everything's debut but the focus for Clock Opera is much more a kind of M83 style of 1980's revisionism than the jerky new waveisms.  Interestingly one of the most obvious influences behind the album is the Blue Nile and while Ways To Forget is much less glacial sounding or emotionally direct as the Blue Nile, the basic fusion of a kind of emotional intensely with electronics is very similar and indeed the vocal delivery is like a meeting of Paul Buchanan's world-weary beauty (there's a clear nod in the delicate 'Belongings') and Jimi Goodwin's skyscraping emoting.  There are some problems, the lyrics are sometimes pretty poor and the whole thing can get a bit overblown now and then ('Man-Made' is a bit much with it's rocked out central riff), but when it's good it's great, and the endless nods to a late-80's mix of indie and electro-pop are really well worked out, and there are some supremely well structured big choruses.











 Being the sister of an uber-producer is going to put people on edge when you release your record, and so it has come to pass for Mary Epworth, whose lightly freaked-out, fuzzy edged folk-rock has left people either scratching their heads or grudgingly admitting that it's pretty good.  Personally I couldn't care less whose relative she is, I think there's some interesting stuff going on in debut album Dream Life (2012).  Once you get beyond the big Dusty by Adele opener 'Long Gone' there's some real gold.  Interestingly you can actually hear what she was getting at with 'Long Gone', I think it was meant to be like the opening songs on Sandy Denny's albums, the big, showy number that opens the show (Epworth was first really noticed when she took part in a tribute to Sandy Denny a couple of years back), and the influence of Sandy is pretty clear throughout the record.  Single 'Black Doe' is rightly being described as the best thing on the album, with its loping, looping banjo riff and Epworth's breathy but direct, Dot Allison-ish vocals.  In fact Dot Allison is probably a reasonable comparison, Dream Life is very similar to Allison's albums with their gauzy haziness, darkened tone and unexpected instrumentation.











So that's that for the catch-up and it's on to G with a surprising number of Peter Gabriel solo albums.  Now, obviously, in this post-prog world we're finally allowed to admit that we all love the Gabriel.  I certainly do and the first album, released in 1977 after getting his stuff together following his departure from Genesis, is a fantastic bit of absurdly over-the-top prog.  The whole thing is set out, something in the style of an overture, by opener 'Moribund the Burgermeister' which has soaring choruses, beautiful vocal melodies, silly squelchy electronics, stupid funny voices, an unnecessarily intricate arrangement and impenetrable lyrics.  It's total prog, no question, and it lays out the elements of the songs to follow, from 'Solsbury Hill's gentle pastoralism to 'Here Comes the Flood's massive and hugely impressive emotional and musical grandstanding.  There is, of course, some inexcusable rubbish - the Kurt Weill riffing of 'Excuse Me' (natch) is pretty dreadful and the bar-room piano jazz by way of prog workout of 'Waiting for the Big One' is something of a bore.  But the big rock of 'Modern Love' and 'Slowburn' and the ridiculous disco-rock of 'Down the Dolce Vita' are good fun and the album as a whole, although terribly uneven and inconsistent, is an enjoyable bit of daft prog.











The third Gabriel album, released in 1980 is a marked improvement on the debut, a much more serious record and much less of a prog exercise.  It's still an odd and very muso record, but the songs are much more clearly defined, and the silliness has been turned into something rather more determined.  The sound that would make him a gazillion pounds on So is just starting to coalesce on the third album and you can hear where he was heading quite clearly.  If anything, where prog is just muso noodling, from this point on Gabriel was trying the impossible, to make art out of rock music, and although it's a doomed ambition it's one that I can't help but have some respect for, especially when it's coupled with an equally doomed but serious minded attempt to make valid political statements in the same format.  It's too easy now to hear 'Biko' as a boringly worthy, liberal-hearted bit of polemicism, but it's worth listening to the sound of the thing again, if only to be reminded that it's as much the feeling as it is the lyrics of the song that are trying to make the point; and although we seem to like to scoff at trying to be serious in these light-hearted Nuts reading times, I'm quite happy to applaud attempts at saying something of some weight.  Anyway, that's the thing about the third Peter Gabriel album, it's dense, it's extremely dark and it's shot through with a paranoid misanthropy ('Family Snapshot' and 'Not One Of Us' are particularly bleak), but it's still engaged, musically, psychologically and ideologically and where it may seem to be the product of a time that we don't have much respect for, I think it's a great record.











The rock as art idea is taken to its furthest point with the fourth self-titled album (released in 1982).  It's almost entirely composed and recording using the Fairlight keyboard, using samples as the foundation for all of the music.  Everybody was using the Fairlight at that time and it was seen as being a kind of liberating glimpse of the future.  Most people used it to bolster their hideous Level 42 style sound, but Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel took it as an instrument in its own right (they were all wrong, it wasn't the future because good lord it's a dated sound now) and did much more interesting stuff with it.  Anyway, the fourth album is an extremely spooky record, it's all about atmosphere.  I can remember when I was about ten years old and alone in my parents house, I put on a tape thinking it was UB40 (I was 10 remember, that's my excuse) but my dad had taped the Gabriel album over it and when 'The Rhythm of the Heat' started I was so scared by it I didn't dare move a muscle.  All that gloomy banging and chanting and clattering and howling, it was all terrifying.  Listening to it now, it's still a fantastically evocative song and it's a real freak-out of an intro to an album.  Every song is pretty powerful in its own way, with strange pulsing throbbing noises and tinkling arhythms, and the majority of it is quietly unsettling.  Lyrically it's pretty dense and preempts his Real World work in a way, with songs spanning the globe and human history - it's ambitious, certainly, it fails often, certainly, but Gabriel is smart enough to stay sufficiently oblique to let the mood take the foreground always.  There were a lot of interesting and challenging records being made by the early 1980's but even so, like them or hate them, nobody was making records that sounded like this.











After releasing a live album and a soundtrack Gabriel went back to the studio with the ubiquitous Daniel Lanois in the producer's chair and a different approach.  From the Peter Saville cover onwards, everything about So (1986) screams commercial potential.  For a start the album has a title and the cover picture of Gabriel is in direct contrast to his smeared portraits of previous albums (which he says his record company told him "alienated women").  Thanks presumably to Lanois the sound is processed to oblivion and its digital clarity is absolutely pristine, in keeping with everything he's site managed over the years.  There's no doubt that everything about the record has become sort of iconic, from the 'Sledgehammer' video to the Kate Bush duet 'Don't Give Up' and personally, although I know I shouldn't, I really like it.  It's a strange combination of the emotionally engaging and the superficially facile and although the fretless bass, treated drum stuff has dated pretty brutally, at heart the songs really are good.  Ironically though it's at its best when it recalls the previous two studio albums and cuts back on the showy studio trickery and lowers the mood - side two's 'In Your Eyes', 'Mercy Street' and the album closer 'We Do What We're Told' are spooky and disquieting pop songs and reveal that underneath all the gloss is still an odd and idiosyncratic record.











Finally for today, but not quite for Peter Gabriel (we've got his, er, interesting covers album still to do), we have the sprawling compilation Hit, released in 2003 and covering his entire solo career to that date.  A lot of it has been dealt with already, but a surprisingly large amount of the content focuses on his post-So, less massive career.  The problem there is that after the success of So, it feels a bit like he couldn't find a way out of that particular sound and style and it's all been variations on a theme ever since, with diminishing returns.  The songs from the Us album from 1992 are OK and there are odd little contributions to soundtracks which are interesting, but there's some stuff that doesn't do much ('Growing Up' is pretty much a waste of time).  It's telling that for a compilation album you find yourself hankering for tunes from only the first third of someone's career.


Friday 26 October 2012

LaRM days 163 (Future Bible Heroes-catch up)

Stephin Merritt's work is something of an acquired taste at the best of times (once you've acquired it, you get it hard though) and his gloomy camp disco side-project the Future Bible Heroes' records are the hardest to get to grips with.  It's all very arch, as with all of Merritt's projects, and although his gloomy wit is as sharp as ever and his voice as gleefully mordant there's something just too knowingly electronic and poppy about it all and for me too much of it falls flat when compared to his Magnetic Fields releases.  Debut album Memories of Love (1997) has, as ever, some superbly written songs ('Helpless' and 'Blond Adonis' are flawless pop songs) and Claudia Gonson's nicely disengaged vocals are, as in the Magnetic Fields, a nice counterpoint to Merritt's low groan of a voice.  Although a lot of the music is recorded on natural instruments, it's all processed to the nth degree and it all ends up sounding too much like a retro project glorifying the mid-1980's.  It's a great record, no mistake, but it just doesn't really rate particularly highly when put against the other stuff that Merritt was doing at the time. 











The interim Future Bible Heroes release was the 'I'm Lonely (And I Love It)' EP (1999) which is more of the same, with Merritt joyfully recanting any professions of love in favour of being miserable alone.  The other songs on the EP are a bit second rate for Merritt with 'My Blue Hawaii' and 'Cafe Hong Kong' showing him indulge his taste for cabaret songwriting and schtick too much for my taste, but 'Good Thing I Don't Have Any Feelings' is another good tune with some stereotypically witty lyrics.











The second album, Eternal Youth (2002), I think is a lot better than the other two records.  The arch, campness of it all is left to some of the lyrics rather than being shot through the whole sound, and in fact the majority of the record is rather openly gloomy.  I've always felt that although Merritt's lyrics have always been blackly funny and extremely witty, the overall feel that he and Gonson (and third Hero Christopher Ewen) are best at creating is rather a melancholy one, and although the Future Bible Heroes were supposed to be the fun, camp version of the Magnetic Fields, they still sound better when they tone it down.  'Losing Your Affection' is a great opener of a downbeat pop song, but it's deceptively upbeat when compared to the rest of the album.  For the most part it's actually composed of slow and stately electronic mood songs more than outright pop (although that still gets a look in with the Yazoo by way of Grace Jones 'I'm a Vampire' and   ) and it's those gracefully dour songs that work the best (a dark 'Thousand Lovers in One Day' is superb) and there are also some really nice scene setting instrumentals (suggesting that Ewen has a bigger part to play than ever in the band).  Interestingly though it's really down to Gonson that the album sounds the way it does, with her ever knowing but mutable voice leading almost every song on the album, with Merritt only providing the occasional dour vocal interlude, and it's her confidence in carrying these songs that really makes them.  Oh and, the final song on the album, the heart-grazingly romantic 'The World is a Disco Ball' is a truly moving bit of electronic pop music.











The first Futureheads album (2004) hasn't aged as well as they might have hoped and it's partly because they stuck too rigidly to the jerky guitars, stilted vocals and time-signature fiddling Drums & Wires era XTC as their model (which, although one of the greatest models there is, needs some changing to make it relevant) and although the album has loads of great songs ('Decent Days and Nights' is really good) and is still great fun to listen to it just hasn't got that little extra thing to lift it out of the mess of XTC rip-off merchants (Field Music for instance have found lots of way of fiddling with the format).  One of the selling points for the Futureheads was the complex vocal arrangements and harmonies, and they are often brilliant, but just as often manage only to over-complicate the sound.  It's telling that probably the most memorable thing on the album is the late addition of their angular punkification of Kate Bush's 'Hounds of Love', which although a great idea, done really well, undermines the rest of the original material on the record.











And I never felt the need to pick up any of the subsequent albums, but Wolfgang gave me a copy of this year's strictly a cappella sort-of-covers album Rant.  Well, where to begin with this?  Wolfy's view is that you should take it at face value and enjoy it as a kind of bar back-room vocal workout for fun, but I just hear what sounds like some terribly over-earnest teenagers trying out their rather embarrassing vocal chops.  Bearing in mind that the vocal interplay and arrangements have always been a selling point for the band I suppose it makes sense that they would do this, but without the instrumentation it reveals the fundamental problem with the a cappella approach - it's really basically very corny. I saw them do their appalling demolition job on Richard Thompson's heartbreaking 'Beeswing' at the end of Late Review a few weeks ago and unfortunately the recorded version is identical, stripping away any emotion and leaving this silly vocal jumping about.  And there's the problem right there, the whole album has the same feel, a bunch of musicians who don't know or care about the fact that songs are any good because of the emotion, the sense of connection in them.  Instead the Futureheads have ended up making a record that sounds like a group of X Factor semi-finalists have got together to make a vocal album, and I can't think of a worse insult than that (although to be fair, there's no way anybody on the X Factor would be doing versions of 'The Keeper', 'The Old Dun Cow' or 'Summer Is Icumen In', let alone 'No.1 Song in Heaven').











So that's it for the letter F, but of course we've got some stuff to catch up on before moving on to G, starting with this year's album by Allo Darlin' entitled Europe.  An improvement on the already exceedingly charming first album, Europe is less obviously indebted to the twee-pop world and has a much stronger sense of character and determination.  In other words the band have gone from being a charmingly unfocussed ramshackle jangle-pop oufit to being a really great guitar pop band.  The songs are a lovely mix of Henry's Dress US indie and the Heavenly UK version with Elizabeth Morris' idiosyncratically Australian outlook and there are some absolutely gorgeous songs here ('Tallulah' for instance, whose title references clear influences Tallulah Gosh and the Go-Betweens).  As far as gentle indie pop goes Europe is as good as it gets these days and although it never reaches the heights of some of its forebears, it's still an absolutely lovely record.











So, I made my admiration for the first two Bat for Lashes albums quite plain earlier, and it irks me to have to admit that I'm having trouble with the new one, The Haunted Man (2012).  Opener 'Lilies' is great, opening up with a tribute to This Mortal Coil's cover of 'Song to the Siren' with its washes of treated guitar (a lot of Natasha Khan's stuff has been cribbed from old 4AD records, but never so clearly), and it's a lovely song, with nice nods to Kate Bush as well as P.J. Harvey (people have made a lot of the lyrical similarities between The Haunted Man and Let England Shake, but I think they're overstated, the emotional friction seems to me to still be between men and women on The Haunted Man).  Things go slightly awry with the overblown and underwritten 'All Your Gold' which makes worrying moves towards vocal grandstanding, something which Khan has never needed to do because her voice is remarkable enough without it.  Again, we've got noises, notes and vocal phrasing cribbed from other records, but the goth Fleetwood Mac-isms that worked on 'Daniel' fall a bit flat this time out.  You know there's simply not right when you've got professional songwriters on board and the fact that the bloke who "co"-wrote Lana Del Ray's 'Video Games' gets a credit on The Haunted Man suggests nothing so much as the handing over of control by Khan to her record company and for such a singular talent that seems to me little short of criminal (the song in question, lead single 'Laura' sounds, well, would you believe it, a bit like 'Video Games').  There are still superb moments on The Haunted Man, but the decision to strip things back (also not necessarily anything other than a keeping-in-step ploy) doesn't work as far as I'm concerned.  When you're trading in esoteric nonsense, as Khan does, you're doing yourself a disservice by not making it as ornate as possible.  In other words, if you're playing Dungeons & Dragons, don't pretend that your character is an estate agent.  Incidentally everybody has something to say about the cover.  My own view is that it's really rather clever and thematically it's absolutely in line with her work generally and this album in particular.  The fact that it's a marketer's dream is probably not accidental.











Finally for this week is the most recent album by Australia's snotty pop-punk outfit Bleeding Knees Club, called Nothing To Do (2012).  It's bratty (in a lo-fi, fun sort of way - not in the Blink-182 utterly, utterly shit sort of way) and it races along ranting about girls, skateboards and scabs with some half-baked surf melodies and buzzy Johnny Ramone style guitars.  It isn't any good, obviously, and after it's over you wonder why you didn't listen to something better instead, but it's a decent bit of fun along the way.


Thursday 25 October 2012

Another brief pause

Hello everybody, things have gone a bit ballistic (can things go a bit ballistic? I guess really it's all or nothing as far as ballistics are concerned).  Anyway, there's no way to focus on taking in the tunes today.  Hopefully things will be back in action tomorrow, but I'll update as we go.  Cheers all!

Wednesday 24 October 2012

LaRM day 162 (Fucked Up-Fuse)

We kick off today with what may prove to be the second greatest punk-prog album behind Husker Du's Zen Arcade, Fucked Up's David Comes To Life (2011).  As far as ambition goes, Fucked Up have it in spades and although all of their previous albums had demonstrated a tendancy to musical virtuosity (album length songs and 12 hour long live shows also demonstrate a willingness to prog it up) it's on David Comes To Life that it all comes together superbly.  Not only a double album with some brilliant and surprisingly complex arrangements, it's also a concept album, marking it out as being totally out of step with fashion and single-handedly proving the value of being so.  Check out those subtle but crazy time signature changes on 'Under My Nose', the uplifting, driving pop of 'Queen of Hearts' and 'A Little Death'.  In the end that's the true brilliance of David Comes To Life - it's unquestionably a punk album (tinny, Pink Eyes vocals are a consistent sandpaper shout, and in many ways it has a lot in common with Crass), but it's also a pop album, but it's also a prog album, but it's also a phenomenal rock album - somehow they've crammed the lot in together with nothing taking real precedence and it really is a superb achievement.  The only negative comment that I can make about it is that at double-album length it's Pink Eyes unvarying shouting that makes the songs start to lose their individuality towards the end of the album, but if you're paying attention that isn't really a problem and there are a handful of tunes on which he's joined by other vocalists who provide some lovely counterpoint singing.  The shouty punkiness of it all may be hard for some to take, but for anyone happy with the idea of a punked up Hold Steady (although that does a massive disservice to just how great David Comes To Life is) then Fucked Up are the gold.











Why haven't I got loads of Fugazi records? I've got no idea.  I would have assumed I had loads, but as it goes I've only got the OK but not great 3 Songs 7" (1989).  'Song No.1' is post-hardcore by numbers (although bearing in mind Fugazi basically wrote the post-hardcore rules that's neither surprising nor a bad thing), 'Joe No.1 is a piano and bass led instrumental, again, typically anti-punk punk from Fugazi there, but it's rather pointless, and 'Break In' sounds too much like Minor Threat for comfort.  Fugazi made some superb records but 3 Songs isn't the place to start.  I must remember to pick up In On the Killtaker one of these days...











Massive desert rock? If you insist.  Always destined to be in the shadow of Josh Homme's various projects, Fu Manchu nonetheless put out some great thick slabs of fuzzy sand-blasted rock, including the Godzilla's/Eatin' Dust LP (1999).  The Sabbath style heaviosity is pretty solid and there's quality riffage throughout.  If there's one slight downside it's that Scott Hill's vocals are too light for this kind of blistered stoner rock, and it's in the slight lack of discipline over the songs that Homme's outfits will always win out.  There's a looseness about Fu Manchu which, although entirely in keeping with the notion of stoner rock, in fact means that it's harder to really get inside than Homme's hyper-stylised and mega-tight approach.  In any event, Godzilla's/Eatin' Dust is still a great ton of heavy riffage.











Good old Terry Hall, he's always known how to make being on a total downer sound brilliant.  The only Fun Boy Three I've got is the Tunnel of Love 7", but it's another example of his usual mordant wit in a supremely well written pop-ska setting.  B-side 'The Lunacy Legacy' is less impressive musically but it's still a hilariously bleak bit of lyrical misery.











Many people think that Maggot Brain is the best Funkadelic album, but personally I've got a lot more time for 1978's One Nation Under a Groove.  Not only is the title track one of the funkiest bits of funk ever laid down, it's also an album in which funkmaster George Clinton lays back a bit on the often tiresome wackiness and concentrates on the business of getting his total funk on, and combining it with a joyous celebration of all things positive.  Although the title track, which opens the album, is easily the high point, all six songs on the album are fantastic, never letting up for a second, and showcasing the really exceptional skills of the whole P-Funk crew at the time.  There are some great guitar solos and licks as well as the usual exemplary bass work, and as much as it's a blistering funk album, it's also a hugely successful light-hearted psychedelic rock album.











Things had gone a bit awry in the P-Funk world by 1980's Electric Spanking of War Babies, and the whole record has a slightly wary, uneasy feel to it.  It's still as eclectic and funky as ever, but there's a rather timid tone to it all, suggesting that not only was there trouble in the ranks, but there was also trouble in the songwriting.  It may also have had something to do with the fact that Clinton was in sort of serious mode, and the overall theme of the album is the role of the media to promote aggressive US military action abroad.  Not an easy topic for a fun-loving funk album and the two sit fairly uneasily together.  Nevertheless Clinton was always a man with at least part of his mind on higher matters, and the album is still a great bit of funk-rock, it just doesn't scale the heights of One Nation.











My one-time flatmate in Brighton Marianne's insufferably humourless hip-hop loving boyfriend once declared the Fun Lovin' Criminals to be a "novelty rap act".  Well, he wasn't far wrong, but I've never seen the need for the sneering disdain with which he made the pronouncement.  Come Find Yourself (1996) is a long way from being the best record ever made, but as an exercise in stylization it's pretty successful.  There's no reason to believe in any of the schtick of the whole thing, its tales of bank heists, the New York underbelly and dope-fuelled scheming, but it's good fun to play along with and it really has got some perfectly decent tunes on it.  The mix up of laid back funk, hip-hop and rock was also not the most original thing going, but there were good and bad ways of doing it and to my mind the Fun Lovin' Criminals made a more than decent stab at creating a unified, sub-Tarantino world in their daft tales and slick songs.  Also, contrary to the opinion of most of my friends, I've got a lot of time for Huey Morgan's Radio 6 show, because I think it demonstrates that he does like all sorts of music.











Next are some records by super-ironic New York Dinosaur Jr rip-off lo-fi psychedelicists Further.  All of my Further records are on vinyl and very little of it is on the internet, so for a start we have to skip over the 'Born Under a Good Sign' 7" (1992) and move on to the handful of songs that we can find from the Griptape LP (1992).  'Real Gone' is a brilliant bit of muddy indie rock, complete with stoner vocals and juddering drums.  It's one of the highlights of the album, a demonstration of just how much mileage there was in J Mascis school of songwriting in the early 1990's.  Riffing on Sebadoh, 'Gimme Indie Fox' has the obligatory wah-wah working through the distortion, but again it's a great tune despite being so obviously indebted to its contemporaries.  The Sonic Youth references also come thick and fast and indeed Lee Renaldo even appears on a couple of tunes (not that you'd know it though).  In many ways Griptape is like a post-ironic masterclass on the indie world of the early 90's (we've got some Superchunk, some Sonic Youth, some Tad, some, well, you name it really, it's all there), and it's reassuring that despite the blatant plagiarism it's still a really enjoyable album.






















More of the same, but this time considerably more eclectic is Sometimes Chimes (1994), a double album that mixes up the squalling J Masic guitar style with a more laid back, more immediately psychedelic feel.  As a double album without a consistent character there's possibly too much of it, but like Bongwater albums, you can't help but wonder if it's all there through necessity rather than excess.  In any event I can't say much more about it because that's really my memory of it, there's not a great deal of it on the internet (only 5 of its 27 tunes).  Then we have the double 7" Distance (1995).  The stuff on here is a little bit cleaner, a little bit more structured and on the whole it's a decent collection of fuzzy indie rock.  Again though, this is memory rather than immediate experience because of the ten songs it's only lead track 'Springfield Mods' and 'Spheres of Influence' on the internet.  Considering the tribute to grunge style of the Further records it's sort of surpring that when they split up the various members all went into decent laid-back California Americana style outfits (the Tyde and the Beachwood Sparks respectively).






















And next should have been the double 7", 'Dana's Room' by Fuse but once again nothing on the net.  I can't remember anything about this other than that I bought it at a record fair in Brighton upstairs in the building that is now the grotesque middle-class nightmare of the Komedia theatre.










Tuesday 23 October 2012

LaRM day 161 (Bill Frisell-Frosted)

Avant-guitarist Bill Frisell has been churning out records forever and they are a pretty varied bunch, from jazz chop filled experimental rock to the prettiest acoustic fripperies. The Best of Bill Frisell Vol.1: Folk Songs (2009) covers material he recorded between 1989 and 2002 and compiles some of his easiest to listen to work.  Frisell's standard low-key experimental jazz elements are toned right down to leave his intuitive but extremely smart interpretations of American folksong and rural songwriting.  Rarely accompanied, it's down to his guitar work to carry everything but as an accomplished musician it all sounds pretty easy for him to get this stuff right first time.  There are some original tunes but a lot of the album centres on his readings of traditional songs and tunes by Hank Williams and the Carter Family.  It's lovely stuff, unchallenging as a listen (which isn't something that you can say about a lot of Frisell's records) and demonstrative of the fact that sometimes it's the quieter, less showy performers who can come up with the best output.










Possibly the compiling of this side of his work led to his album Disfarmer (2009), a lengthy record, written to accompany an exhibition of the work of the depression-era photographer.  It's a truly lovely record, often sounding like a soundtrack to any number of modern readings of the old West, and it's telling that it can create such an all-enveloping atmosphere with so little effort.  It's all very stripped down, guitar, bass, fiddle and occasional pedal steel and mandolin, but it's mostly about Frisell's guitar work, both writing and performing.  Again, there are a very covers of pieces by other country musicians, but this is country music in a very old sense, all instrumental and sparse and with a keen focus on atmosphere rather than big tunes.  Further away from Frisell's usual jazz chops than ever, Disfarmer is a really beautiful series of sketches of tunes rather than an album proper, but it's perfect as such.











Next up is Fabio Frizzi's superb soundtrack to Lucio Fulci's gore-splattered monstrosity The Beyond (1981).  It's a great film, of course, and it's a great soundtrack, loads of spooky electronic clangings and zappings, frantic bass work and the kind of schizophrenic character that lots of the soundtracks and horror films from Italy shared at the time, one minute calm and cod-classical, the next absolutely frenzied.  To be fair the soundtrack for The Beyond is less wilfully unpredictable than many (Morricone did some utterly bonkers stuff for horror movies, and Sciasia's sountrack to Metempsycho is pretty barking) and it takes the calmer Morricone orchestral cues and marries them to some post-John Carpenter spooked out electronics to really good effect. 











You know that thing that Laura Viers just can't quite do? That slightly spooked out, reverby singer-songwriter, post-Judee Sill thing?  You know, that thing where a deceptively simple song gets lodged in your head, despite having no discernible hook?  You know, that thing where the songs sound weirdly old-time, sometimes even written in waltz-time, sometimes just sounding like the unknown past?  Those things, you know, all those things that Laura Viers tries to do and just doesn't quite manage?  Edith Frost has done them all perfectly for some years now.  Perfectly.  Just check out the 'Ancestors' 7" for a start and you'll see what I mean.











You'd have to be a monster not to love Jane Wiedlin, not only because she's always been cool, but also because she's managed to stay cool when most other people would have broken.  Her album Fur may have been a lump of some of the most sugary chart-bothering pop nonsense, but it was still brilliant.  I mean, 'Rush Hour' will always be one of the great pop songs, and the fact that it was Wieldin that carried it just made it all the better.  Nevertheless, after the keyboards and chart placings went by the wayside she returned to her first love, fizzing pop-punk with her band Frosted.  Their only album, Cold (1996) is a bracing, ripping collection of 15 high-grade pop songs with a fuzzy, bratty edge, as befits Wiedlin's public persona over the years and although it was never destined to win any prizes for originality, it is without doubt one of the great unsung guitar pop albums of the 1990's.  Wieldin's years of training in popcraft is put to supreme use on these rampaging bits of pop-punk, and her high, ungainly vocals are as charming as ever, over the top of it all.  Interestingly her old Go-Go's bandmate Charlotte Caffey helped out with the writing of half of the tunes and you can really hear the old Go-Go's style quite clearly in a lot of it.  Which of course is pretty much as high a compliment as you can get as far as pop songwriting goes.


Monday 22 October 2012

LaRM day 160 (Freakwater-Dean Friedman)

Bluegrass revivalist pioneers Freakwater released their second album Dancing Under Water, in 1991.  As with all their work it's a brilliant piece of traditionalist reimagining, sounding similtaneously like something unearthed in a pile of dusty old 78's and a completely modern take on an old-time form.  It's clever stuff and hardly anybody else was doing this when they started in the late 1980's.  Unsurprisingly perhaps the original compositions are the weakest on the album and stand out as being more modern in their structure, but it's still a fine record throughout, with the ragged instrumentation of pedal steel, fiddle and acoustic guitar combining beautifully with Janet Bean and Catherine Irwin's superb Carter Family vocal pastiches.  One of the reasons why it sounds so authentic is the under-rehearsal of it all.  Although there's nothing remotely amateurish here, it really does sound like a group of musicians were hustled into a primitive studio and knocked this stuff out, and as an approach and as a sound it suits the post-ironic Appalachian bluegrass type deal perfectly.  Lyrically everything is perfectly judged too, with the fixations on murder, poverty, illicit booze and dead children sounding again like pin-sharp pastiches of the style they're working with.  Of the old songs covered on Dancing Under Water, it's Leon Payne's 'Selfishness in Man' and Matthew O'Bannon's horrifying 'Scratches on the Door' which are the real winners.











Third album Feels Like the Third Time (1993) gets off to a great start with the rolling, stumbling 'My Old Drunk Friend', a song which announces immediately that Irwin and Bean's own songwriting has taken a leap forward.  Indeed, the originals on Feels Like the Third Time fit in much better with the covers this time around and demonstrate that their fixation on the old-time approach was reaping real rewards.  The album is essentially more of the same as Dancing Under Water, minimal production and just-turned-up-at-the-studio performances, and the same guitar, fiddle, upright bass and occasional pedal steel, but there's an increased confidence about it, which makes it sound more modern, but also more authentic in its representation of a style from the past.  There are some surprising choices of covers too, including a lovely little riff on Nick Lowe's 'You Make Me' and a funny bluegrass mash-up including bits of the Cure's 'Lullaby'.  It's a great album and in some ways it's Freakwater's best.












The fifth album, Springtime (1997) is a bit cleaner and has some electric guitar work, which moves it slightly out of the specific revivalist agenda of the previous albums.  The songs are slightly more complexly arranged and there's the sense of a restlessness to the record, which I guess is understandable after four albums in pretty which identical style.  Springtime is mostly composed of original tunes and the whole album does sound both more modern and less stylised, closer to the country-played-by-indie-kids that had become popular by the time that the band made Springtime.  In that sense it fits more closely into a growing genre, but it also detracts from the idea that they were fairly pioneering in the genre themselves.  It's a lovely record though is Springtime and although it doesn't have the singular character of the earlier records, it's still a great piece of work.











Although the Association had the big hits it was the Free Design who made some of the most ornate fun-pop music of the 60's.  Sixth album, 1972's One By One, is a masterclass in harmony, melodic arrangements that are lighter than air, and understated instrumentation and it really is surprising to think that the band had absolutely no commercial success to speak of.  One By One actually is a relatively sedate affair compared to their earlier albums.  It's a rather more thoughtful, reflective record by comparison, but it's worth remembering that we're talking about in comparison with some of the most insanely effervescent pop music ever recorded.  One By One has its share of bubbly pop, but it also has the calmer 'Friendly Man' and the absolutely gorgeous slower number 'Going Back' which is one of the band's greatest songs.  There was trouble brewing and the band would only make one more album until reuniting in the 2000's, and that may explain the rather more pensive air to the album, and the lyrics which are considerably darker than anything on their earlier records.  As usual for the Free Design, the instruments that really share the centre stage with the heavenly vocal harmonies are the horn section which is used as a propulsive foundation for the songs.  It's all gold and although the more obviously cheery albums are easier to love, One By One is a great pop album.











Superb Spanish label Siesta had long championed the Free Design and in the late 1990's put out a series of compilation albums and singles, including a 7" which they called the Christmas Single #2, containing three old tracks (the excellent 'Christmas is the Day', the title track from the album 'There is a Song' and 'Little Fugue').  All three tunes are great, and the Free Design were a band for whom Christmas was made - their light touch and wonderful harmonies together with their innocent lyrical concerns are perfect for the season.










The first of the three compilation albums Siesta put out in 1998 (all of which compile material from the initial career from 1967-1973 and when combined contain most of the seven original albums) was Umbrellas, but it's worth talking about Umbrellas and Raindrops together bearing in mind they both compile different tracks from the same original albums and therefore are basically two parts of the same thing.  The material is not arranged chronologically but it's still pretty easy to chart the development of the band, from the almosy unbelievably naive super-melodic pop of the Kites Are Fun album (which had the astonishingly naive title track and the paean to running about in puddles 'Umbrellas' through to the gloomier, denser sound of final album There Is a Song (with its darker title track and relatively sparse 'The Symbols Ring').  Every album has its particular character, from the child-oriented The Free Design Sing for Very Important People to the cosmic pop of Stars/Time/Bubbles/Love (which actually has some of their best stuff on it), but the essential character of uplifting pop music with the occasional spiritual ballad remains true throughout.  Again, both Umbrellas and Raindrops are proof that sometimes you just can't tell what's going to be a success because this stuff must surely have been a shoe-in for chart action at the time, but it just didn't happen.





















And speaking of naive, folk-pop outfit Frente traded on creating a sense of innocent fun with their debut album Marvin (1992).  Marvin is a funny mix of stuff from straight down the line pop songs ('Accidentally Kelly Street' and 'Ordinary Angels' which sound like girly versions of the more melodic end of the Go-Betweens) to off-kilter jazzy numbers like 'See/Believe'.  Angie Hart's high, girl-in-the-playground vocals are a bit of an acquired taste, but if you can get to grips with her phrasing and intonation then her voice reveals itself to be really quite charming and, apart from anything else, it suits these breezy pop tunes perfectly.  Things are at their best on the album when they're taken most simply - it's the pop songs that work best by far and the more experimental edges, although an admirable attempt to bitter the sugariness of the whole thing, fall rather flat.  The single of 'Accidentally Kelly Street' has a few tunes that show off how much better their jazzier chops work when played acoustically as the versions of 'Oh Brilliance' and 'Testimony' prove.





















After a dismaying appearance on Home and Away, the lead single from the second album, 'Horrible' (1996) is a terrible song and didn't bode at all well for the album, although the B-side, an acoustic version of another album track, 'Destroyer', is much better.  I never heard the second album and don't particularly feel the need to.











The voice of suburban New Jersey, Dean Friedman, said a lot more about the time and place he was from than contemporaries like Bruce Springsteen.  Not for Friedman the overblown tales of youthful desperation and the need to burst out into the night, oh no.  Friedman was strictly housebound, his songs being about people quite happily going to the deli to pick up nibbles for the party later at which maybe a bit of covert swining might go on.  In many ways Friedman's lounge songwriting and Noo Yoik delivery disguised a really quite bitterly cynical edge, which could often be cuttingly funny.  However, as with the rest of his work, his self-titled debut album (1977) is mostly notable for its parodically unsubtle cultural signification, all big hair, massive moustache and none more New Jersey delivery.  In some ways it's the kind of thing that could only have happened in 1977, a soundtrack to Cyra McFadden's The Serial and pre-empting the opening titles to Head of the Class.  It's a great record mainly because it's such a terrible record and such a supremely evocative record of such a supremely silly time.











Even more successful in evoking that very silliness is second album Well, Well Said the Rocking Chair (1978) which has not only an inexplicable plasticine picture on the cover featuring not one but four versions of Friedman's face, but also an inexplicable Everest scaling falsetto in the opening line of the title track.  In fact 'Well, Well Said the Rocking Chair' is a fantastic piece of absurdity throughout.  'I've Had Enough' has some amazingly corny rockin' guitar soloing and the album also has one of Friedman's most extraordinary successes, the duet 'Lucky Stars', the lyrics to which I recommend looking up.  In fact don't bother because the youtube link on the album cover below will be to the remarkable 'Lucky Stars', which I demand you watch and enjoy.  Dig that sax work while you're at it too. "4 in the morning, I'm in the mood for some corned beef on rye", so opens the unbelievable 'The Deli Song (Corned Beef on Wry)', which basically has Dean singing us through a night in the Big Apple, in which he is joined by various bit parts (waitresses, girlfriend, etc). It's magic stuff, bold, confident and really, really ridiculous.  You get the impression that Friedman considered himself a kind of pop music Woody Allen ("I don't know if it's something I ate, or if I'm in love"), giving us all the flavours of an ironic observer in the big city, but the trouble is that while Woody's films of the late 70's still seem like perfect portraits of a time and place Friedman's songs sound like a perfect summation of why Woody's romance was unrealistic, the truth is that it was probably all as crap as Friedman's records.  But you see, that's why Well, Well Said the Rocking Chair is so very, very brilliant.











Next up would be the Very Best of Dean Friedman 1977-1982 but considering that its 16 songs are all taken from the two albums we've just done, there's no point in discussing it.











Another nice bit of nu-rave meets shoegaze is found in the supremely well-ordered and confident eponymous debut by Friendly Fires (2008).  Interestingly listening to it now it's difficult to tell if its a sound that has dated already or still sounds pretty good.  But that's most likely because I still have a lot of time for anything that takes the shoegaze guitar sound and uses it for any purpose and although a lot of the latinate percussion and M83 style-keyboard layering might well sound a bit of a touch sell quite soon, I think it all still works pretty well. The only difficulty with it is that even when it's riffing on Talking Heads (the vocal line of 'In the Hospital' is almost laughably reverential) the whole thing is just too clean, too well-constructed and as a result it's lacking any rough edges to keep you listening out for.  As Aswiny just said, once the record's on you're going to enjoy it, but rare indeed is the occasion when you're going to actively think, oh yes, the Friendly Fires, get that on.  It's more than a decent album and for all its Talking Heads by Eno by Slowdive wrapped up in nu-rave garb, there's still something vital lacking.  Maybe it's a heart.  Whatever though, 'Paris' is still one of the great late 2000's dance tunes, if only because it sums up a very specific middle class idea of ambition (and rips off M83 so precisely).