Before launching the greatest American indie label and starting my favourite band of, like, ever, Mac McCaughan was in a number of tiny Chapel Hill outfits, including Bricks. Bricks also had in their line-up, on occasion, the delightful Laura Cantrell who we'll meet up with again later. The Bricks tunes were far removed from either Superchunk's power-punk pop music or Cantrell's cool Americana, being totally lo-fi, press play and record type stuff. Living room messing about in other words, but in amongst the tooling around are some great, great little indie rock songs.
The Getting Wet Part 7" has two great songs in 'A History of Lies' and 'Smoking Hooch with the Flume Dude'. Both tunes show how Bricks were the foundation for Mac's solo outift Portastatic (incidentally, we're going to be having a lot of his records under various guises along the way) in that it's scrappily recorded, scrappily performed and utterly charming stuff. In 1992 they released a compilation of pretty much everything they had recorded between 1988-1991, called A Microphone and a Box of Dirt. Both tunes from The Getting Wet Part are on here together with another 16 tunes of varying quality. Stuff like 'You Shouldn't Have Smashed Your Guitar' and 'Spy Kitty' are worth the price of admission alone though.
I love a bit of proper British folk revivalism and Anne Briggs was one of the key figures in the revivalist movement of the 1960's. She only made one record in the 60's though and it wasn't until 1971 that she released her first two albums (one more followed in 1973 and that was the lot). The second album, The Time Has Come, is a truly wonderful bit of folk classicism, despite the fact that Briggs wrote most of the songs herself. She was so well versed in the form though that you would never know that these weren't traditional tunes, she's that good. It's absolutely beautifully performed too and although she herself was apparently always unhappy at the quality of her recorded voice, I can't imagine it could be any better or any more perfect. Her voice is direct, unadorned, occasionally faltering but always absolutely captivating. 'Standing on the Shore' for instance is transfixing, a stunningly beautiful piece, on an album of varied riches.
Now I don't have anything against either youth or ambition per se, but there's something so very, very tiresome about Bright Eyes records. The rather tragic sincerity of youth is writ large across his records, and as he gets older he has less and less excuse for being so terribly earnest it seems to me. Anyway, I think the height of this rather desperate dedication to "truth" really reached its peak on Lifted, or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (2002). In terms of the songs we drift along from one 8 minute dirge to the next. People were keen to see Conor Oberst as some kind of inheritor of Dylan's legacy, but frankly that would be like going into any sixth form common room, picking a spotty boy at random and saying that he's the true inheritor of folk's historical legacy. Because that's what all this essentially is - the heartfelt shouting of a young man who thinks he's so much cleverer than he really is. Not much better is 2997's Cassadaga. It's musically a bit lighter and the band seem brighter, more engaged, but lyrically it's more of the same of that kind of tedious equivalent of Catcher in the Rye set to music. At least the songs don't go forever this time around and you have a chance to dig out some melody in amongst the self-serving angst. But not enough to make it worth the effort. I've a horrible suspicion that Oberst thinks he making radical combinations of Dylan and Gene Clark's No Other. If he does, he couldn't be further from the truth.
And now to something of an entirely different outlook, it's the compilation of singles between 1984-1990 by Bristol's finest, The Brilliant Corners. Creamy Stuff (1991) charts the rapid development of the Brilliant Corners from lo-fi rockabilly to out and out jangly indie pop of the first water. Now, I remember Davey Woodward from our days back in the early 90's working in the Tube, the student nightclub on Frogmore Street in Bristol, and he was a decent chap, would always play a good set. Is the Tube still there? I assume it isn't. And while I'm mentioning the Tube, props to the lovely Joe Salter and his wife Emma. He was one of the most charming and likeable chaps you could ever hope to meet, and he put up with a huge amount of rubbish from the staff with astonising tolerance. Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yes, the Brilliant Corners. 'Brian Rix' was a great tune, in fact they had a way with a good C86 type of indie pop the likes of which are sadly seen all too little of these days. If you're ever of a mood to dig out some old Wolfhounds, Woodentops, Shop Assistants, etc, etc, you would do well to remember to throw in the Brilliant Corners while you're at it.
Now we've got a handful of records by massive Canadian musical collective, Broken Social Scene. I really like the stuff that's come out of this bunch and although there are other bands that have come from the central hub of BSS that I prefer (Stars for one) I rate the Broken Social Scene records quite highly. Second album You Forgot It In People (2002) is particularly fine. I think it sort of acts as a showcase for the various individual talents within the group because there is absolutely no stylistic consistency here at all, but it really doesn't seem to matter as one tune joyously and exuberantly bursts into the next. Even the occasional downbeat tunes seem to glide gracefully into their surroundings and it all motors along really brightly. There are some massive stadium rockers, some experimental workouts, some romantic little quiet numbers, there's all sorts of stuff and it's the lack of predictability that I really love about You Forgot It In People. The later albums have a more strident sense of themselves, but this is the one that charms.
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