LaRM day 65 (Isobel Campbell-Can)

The next outing for Isabel Campbell and Mark Lanegan, Sunday at Devil Dirt (2008) is better than Ballad of the Broken Seas by some distance. Although it's essentially more of the same Nancy & Lee type stuff the songwriting is much more confident and solid and there are some fantastic songs on it. It also benefits from some upfront string arrangements which lift some of the tunes up immensely. It's a great record and although it feels a little like the formula could start to wear out fairly quickly it certainly hasn't on Sunday at Devil Dirt. I haven't heard the follow-up, Hawk, yet so I don't know if the whole style has run its course yet.

Jesus, this new Blogger format is absolutely dreadful, it's a million times less user friendly than the old one. I assume hardly anything is working or properly viewable. Anyway I'll forge ahead regardless. Next up is Camper Van Beethoven's fifth album, Key Lime Pie (1989). I never really got Camper Van Beethoven back in the day (such a terrible band name for a start), they always seemed to whimsically wilful and whenever it seemed like a song might be quite nice they'd deliberately muck it up or stop, and there never seemed to be any cohesion to their records. Of course it turns out that that's why they're great. Key Lime Pie was the last proper record they made for a long time and although it doesn't sound like a band at the end of their run it does sound like the ideas might have been drying up - there are a number of really lovely songs on Key Lime Pie which is kind of out of keeping with their usual approach for a start. The album is still a total mess stylistically, racing from one piece of Americana to another piece of post-punk in a heartbeat but it's all totally charming (absurd cover of Status Quo's 'Pictures of Matchstick Men' notwithstanding).

Fuck me backwards, this is hideous. I may have to stop writing this thing if I can't revert to the old format, this is completely unworkable! It's gone from being brilliantly easy to use to a total fucking nightmare! Anyway, now we have a lengthy Can session, beginning with Soundtracks (1970). Soundtracks is a great record, showcasing the burgeoning Krautrock sound that Can would be the kings of within a year. It's a more eclectic mix on Soundtracks than other Can albums, as it is indeed composed of pieces of music that were conceived and recorded for specific individual purposes rather than to be collected together on an album. What we get as a result is an overview of the various different directions which Can were trying out in trying to find their specific sound. There are even a couple of songs on Soundtracks ('Don't Turn the Light On, Leave Me Alone', and the terrible country rock of 'She Brings the Rain') but the droning sound that would come to define them is starting to make itself heard on 'Deadlock' and particularly the 15-minute 'Mother Sky', whose hypnotic anti-riff bassline has been ripped off by many people notably Stereolab who have used it for about 75% of their songs.

Next up is the big one, 1971's Tago Mago. This is a sterling example of both Krautrock at its finest and 70's freak-out as a fantastic experiment. Besides the 17-minute freaky sound experiment 'Aumgn' there are some huge driving hypnotic grooves in brilliant opener 'Paperhouse', 'Oh Yeah' and especially the 18-minute mammoth 'Halleluhwah'. The whole album is a masterpiece of experimentation and what's particularly surprising is that, with the exception of 'Aumgn', the whole thing is completely accessible. I suppose it's the particularly acute intelligence of the band that means that it can be joltingly cerebral and instictively enjoyable at the same time.

We then skip over a couple of great albums and a couple of OK ones to arrive at 1979's Can. If making the album title eponymous was a suggestion of a new start for the band then they should have done a better job with the record. It's not disastrously bad or anything but it certainly isn't a patch on their earlier work. While retaining the essentially experimental approach was still reaping rewards, those rewards were diminishing rapidly by this point and to compensate they added more keyboard textures and more electronic rhythms. This does not seem to me to have been a very good idea, half the album sounds like anodysed Tangerine Dream or Eno at his laziest and the other half sounds like bad disco. Nonetheless Can couldn't help but add some of their indefinable magic and the album is nowhere nearly as bad as it really should be (apart from the indescribably appalling version of the 'Can-Can' which has to be heard to be believed). In 1981 Can released an album of some of their earliest recorded work, called Delay 1968. This is an interesting selection of early songs and it marks a contrast with the sub-standard work they were coming up with in the late-70's. It's basically a lot more straightforward than the records they would start to make soon after, with some fairly basic but pretty good rock grooves. There's not a lot of development in the songs and they sound like the band were aiming to be a vaguely out-there rock act rather than a groundbreaking experimental outift.