LaRM day 56 (Brunettes-Buffalo Springfield)

The third Brunettes album Structure and Cosmetics (2007) is weirdly not as good as it should be. It's a smart bit of boy/girl indiepop, but maybe that's the problem, perhaps it's too smart. There's something not quite engaging about it, a little off putting. It's strange though because it has some great tunes and a great attitude, but it's oddly distanced, maybe even self-satisfied. It's a supremely sophisticated record and it suits a sunny day perfectly and if you can allow yourself to give in to it's cool edginess, it's great. But it feels like it doesn't want you to be its friend.

Next up is Lindsey Buckingham's first solo album, Law and Order (1981). Bearing in mind the miracle that is Fleetwood Mac's Tusk, it's sort of amazing that he followed up with Law and Order. It's an incredibly slight record, produced rather nastily (and bearing in mind the production was a key element of why those Mac albums sound so amazing the fact that Law and Order sounds ropey it's terrible) and the songs, nice though some of them are ('Trouble' is particularly good) feel almost like demo versions of songs that would be knocked into shape later. In fact you can hear that some of these songs would have sounded great once they had been re-recorded and given a serious once over, but instead what's released is kind of half-baked. It's not a terrible album by any stretch (once you get past dismal opener 'Bwana') but it's a crushing comedown from what he'd made just two short years before. Moving on 27 years and innumerable Mac reunions later we have Gift of Screws, another solo album Buckingham released in 2008. Strangely in many ways Gift of Screws sounds more of an appropriate successor to Tusk than Law and Order does. It's a strange record but it shows off much better Buckingham's little-discussed oddities of approach. There are some extremely peculiar vocal arrangements, and some dense over-dubbing with some frankly lunatic guitar work going on, but when you dig beneath the surface of Tusk there's not dissimilar stuff going on there too. It can get a bit overwhelming ('Time Precious Time' is clever but it's basically a mess) but when it works it's oddly impressive.

I've never really got Tim Buckley (and I've certainly never understood the cult of his son. I think those Jeff Buckley records, and yes, I'm including Grace, are awful) and even when the songs are great, or nice, as they often are, they're sort of ruined by a wilful jazzy erraticism. I think that maybe people love the records these days because they're a very shorthand way of getting into the mindset of the time. Happy Sad (1969) is a great case in point, because its boho jazziness is precisely what makes it unique and also crushingly boring. Half of the songs are great, atmospheric bits of avant-jazz pop ('Buzzin' Fly' and 'Dream Letter' are fabulous) and the other half are naval gazing jazz explorations that even the reborn jazz-blues era Spinal Tap wouldn't go near (the 11 and 12 minute 'Love from Room 109 at the Islander' and 'Gypsy Woman'). The ups are way up but the downs make you wonder whether you're ever going to wake up.

Roy Budd's soundtrack to Get Carter (1971) is probably one of the most renowned British soundtracks of all time, and with good reason. It's a blistering mix of late night jazz, Hammond workouts, David Axelrod experimentalism and atmospheric freakery. For someone who was to all intents and purposes a straight down the line jazz man, Budd really pulled out all the stops for Get Carter and produced one of the most scintillatingly eclectic soundtracks ever known. For all its genre hopping it never once breaks mood or theme, and with the requisite snippets of dialogue, it really does create exactly the kind of slightly disconcerted feeling that watching the movie leaves behind too.

Which just leaves the 1973 Buffalo Springfield compilation, drawing together various tracks recorded and released between 1966-1968. I have mixed feelings about Buffalo Springfield in as much as some of my least favourite Neil Young songs were Buffs tunes, and I've always been a bit ambivalent about Stephen Stills. Or at least that's what I thought until listening to this again. It's strange, I guess I must have been on a Neil Young jag when I got the Buffalo Springfield record and thought it didn't match up. It's doubly weird because I'm sufficiently familiar with all of the Buffs tunes but somehow just never thought they were up to scratch. There are some songs that don't work ('Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing' which is a classic bit of early Young to most people, in fact sounds like something that Michael Nesmith would probably have rejected). However, the vast majority of it is superb countrified rock music of the highest order, with a strong emphasis on classic pop melody. Neil occasionally gets to do his fuzzy guitar stuff (most notably on his superb 'Mr Soul') and Stills really gets the melodic stuff bang on. I can't think why I had expected less.

That's it now until after Easter, so it's a six day break, then back to kick off with a Buffalo Tom marathon.