LaRM day 19 (Asobi Seksu-At the Drive-In)

Today began with the first two albums by US retrograders Asobi Seksu. The self-titled first album originally released in 2002 is a solid indie rock album, with an obvious debt to shoegazers of yore. In fact it sounds like My Bloody Valentine with a female singer. The interesting thing about Asobi Seksu is the feeling that they don't take themselves too seriously and the fact that half of the songs are in Japanese is proof that they aren't too concerned with audience response. Of the many, many MBV tribute acts in the world Asobi Seksu are a really good one. The first album is pretty consistent, but the songs are fairly forgettable. As is often the way, second album Citrus (2006) is a marked step forward, with a cleaner sound and a clearer sense of purpose (that purpose being to sound even more like Chapterhouse than ever). There are even traces of the unfairly maligned Slowdive in here, and most importantly there are some lovely songs.

And so we move on to something about which I am apt to eulogise - Virginia Astley's From Gardens Where We Feel Secure (1983). This is quite simply the most beautiful record ever made, and sits easily in my top ten of all time. It's a completely unique, idosyncratic, utterly fabulous creation. An instrumental work played on piano with occasional woodwind backing and field recordings of birdsong and church bells, it charts the simple pleasures of idling in the English countryside on a single summer day, from dewy morning to balmy evening. This obviously makes the whole thing sound insufferably twee but it isn't, it's absolutely breathtakingly lovely. If you close your eyes, you're actually there, laying back in a lush field with the sun beating down on your face, or struggling to sleep because of the heat of the evening. If there is a crticism that could be made it is that the record is so painfully middle-class, it absolutely reeks of the privileged position of living in the countryside and having the luxury to laze about. For myself that criticism doesn't wash though, because frankly my fantasy is to be in precisely that privileged position. There's almost nothing more I can say about this record because it's all summed up by simply saying that it's the most romantic, lush, moving, joyful, wonderful collection of pieces of music outside of the classical music world.

And so from the sublime to the absolutely ridiculous, it's Germany's Atari Teenage Riot. Let's start the riot with Delete Yourself from 1994. In amongst the surprisingly unthreatening pummelling drum machines, jagged keyboard noise, occasional metal guitar figures and priceless TV samples, Alec Empire, Carl Crack and Hanin Elias telling us things like "life is like a video game with no chance to win", and "maybe we'll sit down and talk about the revolution and stuff" and shouting completely meaningless slogans are some genuinely great tunes. It's difficult to concentrate on trying to find them though because you're laughing so much at just how tragically earnest all this nonsense is. Delete Yourself is a sort of pre-gabba attempt at bringing politics and metal to the hardcore dancefloor and while it fails dismally it does succeed instead at being an endearingly loopy bunch of lo-fi hardcore electronica. Second album, The Future of War (1997) is more of the same but amped up even more, and to be fair, it does succeed in sounding less weedy than Delete Yourself. It still all has the feeling of being physically threatened by a puppy though. It thinks it's the hardest thing in the world and, well, it isn't. Again, there are some fantastic songs on here ('Destroy 2,000 Years of Culture', 'Sick to Death') and if you can get past the hurdle of how silly it all is, it's a great listen.

We'll skip over Burn, Berlin, Burn (1997) because it's just a compilation of tracks from the first two albums released for the US market. ATR upped the ante in every respect even further for third album 60 Second Wipeout (1999). For the first time there are live thrash metal guitars rather than samples, the drum machine poundings are harder than ever and the shouting and screeching even more pronounced. It's a fantastic record, there are some brilliant songs and the sheer unadulterated absurdity of the whole thing is beyond compare. It's brutal noise but thanks to the daftness of it all, it's still completely unthreatening. It's fantastic. Finally for ATR we have the Live at Brixton Academy album from 2000. This was a recording of a live show in 1999 which is literally almost half an hour of scraping, screaming industrial noise. There are no pretences to tunes, it's simply constant horrible noise. I can't possibly do it the justice that is done by the NME review (which scored it 11 out of 10) on its release and which is easily as nonsensical, idiotic and hilarious as ATR's records and most of which I therefore copy wholesale for your enjoyment here:

"Just 27 minutes long and compressed into a single track, this is not so much a performance as an attempt to punch a gaping hole in the space-time continuum and rip its throbbing purple guts out with a giant sonic pitchfork. It's aggressive, abrasive, breathtakingly brutal and unlikely ever to be chosen on Desert Island Discs. Key to this ground-breaking dissonance is new-ish member Nic Endo, mistress of merciless machine torture. While Atari shows once used recognisable beats, samples and riffs - albeit revved to the limit of speedcore distortion - Endo seems to have pushed them over the edge into a black hole of pure inhuman noise. For the strong of stomach, we particularly recommend the cataclysmic electropunk ejaculations around three minutes 40, the sound of Satan himself sharpening his huge mechanical rotating knives at 13 minutes 45, the Panzer division of crazed Pokimons committing mass suicide at 24 minutes 10, and the blessed relief which dawns around 26 minutes 48 when you realise the storm has passed and that which has not killed you has left you, er, feeling violently sick. Any appreciation of this record, then, lies not in orthodox critical standards but in how extreme and masochistic your taste for sonic punishment is - or how murderously grim your sense of humour. If you have ever discerned apocalyptic beauty in Neil Young's 'Arc', nihilistic purity in Lou Reed's 'Metal Machine Music', cathartic splendour in prime time Napalm Death or blowtorch majesty in My Bloody Valentine's nuclear meltdown finale to their 1991 tour, then 'Live At Brixton Academy 1999' will rock what remains of your brain until it spurts out your ears. Respect."

Brilliant, no?

So having endured the excoriating whiteout of Live at Brixton Academy it's quite a relief to listen to the fairly straightforward punk-pop of At the Drive-In's mini-LP El Gran Orgo (1997). Amongst the three minute punk nuggets (and sly nods to other bands - the reference to the Cure on opener 'Give It a Name' is tricksy) there is little to suggest the punk-U2 that they were to become, or indeed the punk-prog that Omar Rodriguez-Lopez would end up specialising in. With the exception of 'Fahrenheit' these tunes would sit pretty neatly next to the Get Up Kids or Sunday's Best without anybody really raising an eyebrow. Second album In/Casino/Out isn't much different, but there are a few more funny time changes and structural mucking-about but again, not such as to give away what the next album would sound like, which will start the new week.

Do have wonderful weekends, won't you?