LaRM day 22 (Azure Ray-Bachman Turner Overdrive)

And the A journey finally ends with the third album by Azure Ray which is called Hold On Love (2003). This is a great record, a real under the radar number, which didn't really grab anybody's attention which is a shame. It's a successful version of sort of thing that Tegan & Sara try to do with relatively little success, a sort of gloomy spirited but musically engaging femininity. In indie-rock terms, it's a bit more ambitious, a bit smarter, and a bit more dour than most (and certainly than most white-boy indie-rock). It's very muted, it's the aural equivalent of looking through gauze, and it's clearly pretty heartfelt stuff. There are a couple of off moments, but tunes like 'The Drinks We Drank Last Night' and 'These White Lights Will Bend to Make Blue' are so fabulous, they easily make up for any longueurs.

B! At last. Now, as A took a month, I estimate that B should take us seven weeks. Let's see. We kick off with Katy B's On a Mission (2011). I should hate this record. Everything about it is wrong. It's cheap pretend dubstep, sung by a Brits School graduate who looks like Joss Stone. And yet, and yet... what is about this record I wonder? I really, really like it. What can I say, maybe I've just fallen for the hype like every other Guardian reading middle-aged idiot (and as a Guardian reading middle-aged idiot I do find it hard to not fall for certain stuff). If this were marketed differently, or if it wasn't the "dubstep it's easy to like" then maybe I'd hate it, but I don't, I like it a lot. Then again I don't hate pop music on the whole, so maybe it's not so surprising. Anyway, it's alright.

AAARGH, let's shout along to Babes in Toyland and their first album Spanking Machine (1990). I absolutely adored this album back in the day, adored it. It was one the key records that defined my taste at the time, and I really felt that it represented the best of one aspect of the US indie underground. It involves some rather, er, primitive drumming and wholly uninspired bass but the jagged guitar and screaming and shouting of Kat Bjelland really gave it some serious personality. It's claggy, thick stuff and listening to it now feels more difficult than it did back then but it's still an impressive and deeply individual record. In many ways it's a shame that Hole formed after Bjelland kicked Courtney Love out of Babes in Toyland because Hole sounded very similar, but much, much less interesting. 'Fork Down Throat', 'Vomit Heart', 'Dogg', really all the songs are great too. The follow-up mini-album To Mother (1991) is more of the same but is a rather more mixed bag. The better songs are the best they ever recorded ('Catatonic', 'Laugh My Head Off') but the duds are terrible ('Primus', 'Spit to See the Shine') and you can hear that they could take a wrong turn which in my view they did (partly because of the success of grunge affording any bands defined as "grunge" the luxury of higher budgets, which for the most part killed the creativity of the majority of those bands).

Right, next would be the first six albums by Babybird which came in a box-set for £3. There are a handful of decent tunes buried in this lot, but there's always seemed to me to be something very wrong about Babybird but I've never been able to put my finger on what it is. It all feels sort of nasty, cheap, like the records should smell slightly mouldy or something. Anyway, because I never put them on my ipod the only way to listen to this at work is one song at a time on Youtube and there's no way I'm doing that so we have to skip straight on to the mighty (arise Sir) Bachman Turner OBEverdrive and their second album, the imaginatively titled Bachman Turner Overdrive II (1973). Let there be Canadian 70's rock. We all know 'You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet' from the first album and of course everything they did is pretty much a variation on that (although II's marimba rock shuffle 'Welcome Home' is a surprise) and if you like to rock in a classic stylee you can never go wrong with the BTO.

That's it for now. I'm on holiday so this mutha will be back up and running next Thursday. Laters!