Thursday 31 May 2012

LaRM day 88 (Ry Cooder)

Ry Cooder's Bop Till You Drop (1979) was the first digitally recorded album and it's just another of the ever increasing examples of the idiocy of progress. The compression of the sound leaves it weak, tinny and faintly artificial sounding and it sucks the life out of an otherwise great album. The song choices on Bop Till You Drop are perhaps a bit more obvious than usual for Ry Cooder albums, but it still has some absolute winners. 'Don't Mess Up a Good Thing' is great and the one original song on the album, 'Down in Hollywood' is one of Cooder's best. It's a shame the record sounds so bloodless because it really should have been one of his finest. As it is, it's ended up being something of a middling effort. The follow-up, 1980's Borderline, is one of the most enjoyable Cooder albums, it's simply fun, with some choice soul, R&B and early pop songs played in his inimitably all-encompassing style. Keyboards play a larger role than ever which is a blessing and a curse, because there's nothing that dates albums like keyboards, but in some cases on Borderline it's kind of essential. There's also a strong return for some seriously solid R&B backing vocals throughout Borderline, which really grounds the album as well as providing some of the most enjoyable elements of it. There are great versions of 'The Way We Make a Broken Heart' and 'Why Don't You Try Me' as well as another lone Cooder original in the excellent instrumental title track. While it's not his best and certainly not one of his most comprehensive or diverse, it's certainly one of Cooder's most endearing albums.

Between 1980 and 2000 Cooder only made four studio albums, concentrating instead on soundtrack work (he scored 12 movies during that period). The second of those four studio albums, 1982's The Slide Area, was the first of his studio albums to feature more than one original song (putting aside his soundtrack to The Long Riders), and in a way it's a shame because The Slide Area is in some ways his least successful record. It opens with a completely misplaced 'UFO Has Landed in the Ghetto', which is a kind of funk-rock song which really grates and is totally at variance with everything else on the album. There are some real highlights (the soulful blues-rock deconstruction of 'Blue Suede Shoes' is priceless, and 'Mama, Don't Treat Your Daughter Mean' is great), but most of the song choices are either too left-field or just don't really work. In 1986 Cooder wrote an absolutely brilliant score for not very good movie Crossroads. In some ways it sounds much more like a proper studio album than a soundtrack as most of the numbers are full songs. There is some just great stuff on Crossroads. It's an even match of covers and originals, all with a solid blues bent, as befits the movie, and it's an excuse for Cooder to really show off just how superb his slide guitar playing is, as well as how unique and enlivening his particular style of mangling the blues really is.

Next up is one of the true giants of soundtrack work, Paris, Texas (1988). As experimental as it is moving, as unnerving as it is beautiful, it's a soundtrack that broke new ground in every way and has had a deep influence on a huge variety of musicians in all kinds of fields. It's an exercise in ambience, created almost exclusively through echoing acoustic slide guitar work, the notes are few and far between and it sounds like the desert from which the movie's lead character mysteriously appears at the start of the film. It's spacious in an extreme sense, with occasional rattling noises as percussion and hugely reverbed guitar work which quietly and slowly works it's way along. It's an astonishing record, hugely evocative and deeply emotionally engaging. There are one or two pieces which are slightly out of style, but even they are mood scenes - 'Cancion Mixteca' is the only song, but it's sung in a woozy, quavering fashion by Harry Dean Stanton (in Spanish) in a way that makes it fit in perfectly well amongst the atmospherics. The other is 'I Knew These People' which is a lengthy excerpt of dialogue from the film (and one of the saddest bits of dialogue in movie history) over which Cooder plays the most subtle of backings. The whole album is truly a masterpiece and an astonishing exercise in demonstrating how less can sometimes be so, so much more.

Since 2000 Cooder has returned more full-time to his studio work, and in this appears, at least in part, to have been provoked by a great political engagement. Following his work in Cuba on the Buena Vista Social Club, his return to the US seems to have fired him up to a great degree and all six of his albums since 2005 have been fiery leftist missives and which are also some of the best musical work of his career. 2005's Chavez Ravine is an amazing amalgam of musical styles taking in pretty much everything going, particularly centering on music from the Latin Americas, to tell the exceedingly sordid story of the bulldozing in the 1950's of a part of LA which housed a percentage of its Mexican population to build the Dodgers stadium. Many of the musicians and many of the songs on the album are from the time and area and a feeling of authenticity permeates throughout. The songs are sung by a variety of performers, including Cooder, half in Spanish and half in English and the idea appears to have been to recreate the kind of musical and broader cultural atmosphere that existed in Chavez Ravine and throughout LA at the time. So the feel is old-fashioned, old-time, with rhumbas and bossa rhythms, folk and R&B all mixed in together and it's amazingly successful at creating its atmosphere, while never sounding quaint or anachronistic. It's a really very great album.

I, Flathead (2008) is another politically charged record, although rather more subtly so than Chavez Ravine, and it shares that record's inspiration in music of the 50's, and in some cases even earlier. There is a lot less of the Latinate stuff on I, Flathead and a lot more of Cooder's trademark funked and popped up blues. Nonetheless it still has a strangely melancholy feel to it and despite a few blazing rock songs it has a langourous and heat-hazed air about it. Interestingly, I, Flathead and the preceding album (My Name is Buddy which unfortunately I haven't got) are the first two albums (not including his soundtrack work) that Cooder has actually written entirely himself, and that may go some way to explaining why I, Flathead is so particularly idiosyncratic. It's another very fine album, but it's not up to Chavez Ravine's exceptionally high standard.

Wednesday 30 May 2012

LaRM day 87 (Shawn Colvin-Ry Cooder)

Shawn Colvin is now widely recognised as one of the creative forces behind the late-80's "new folk" revival in the US, acoustic Americana, dressed up in a melodic pop/rock outfit. She was a contemporary of Suzanne Vega who made it big first only through circumstance, but there is a more down home and intimate feel to Colvin's records - they sound more like someone talking to you rather than at you as Vega sometimes seems to be. Colvin's debut, Steady On (1989) is a close and delicate shuffle of an album which does occasionally veer to close to corny classic 80's singer-songwriteriness ('Something To Believe In' and closer 'The Dead of the Night' are near cringers), but most of the album is a quietly breathtaking piece of emotional intimacy with some truly lovely songs ('Shotgun Down the Avalanche', 'Ricochet in Time' and the title track are all now rightly regarded as classics of the new folk movement). For the most part it's just Colvin, her acoustic guitar and some unobtrusive keyboard and rhythm section textures, but it's recorded as if heard through a slight haze, as if they're remembered songs rather than heard and as a result it's an album that seems even more intimate.

Come's Near Life Experience (1996) is something of an indie rock party with members of Tortoise, the Jesus Lizard and Rodan (who made possibly my favourite album) all filling in the rhythm section parts. It doesn't sound like a party though. Not at all. It sounds like Thalia Zedek's usual rasping, grinding blues-based grim indie-rock. The songs are solid, the performances are superb, but there's something not quite right about Near Life Experience. Possibly the problem is that (the wonderful) Tara Jane O'Neil and Kevin Coultas' bass and drums are more coherent and organic than Bundy Brown and Mac McNeilly's, possibly it's just that the tunes don't gel with each other, but whatever the reason, although the songs are good on their own, as an album it just doesn't quite work. After the brilliance of debut 11:11 and follow-up Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Near Life Experience feels disjointed. The slower numbers are too much of a grind ('Weak as the Moon') and sometimes Chris Brokaw's contributions sound surprisingly obviously indebted to Sonic Youth. Overall it's a decent album but not one of the true greats of the late 90's indie renaissance.

Ahhh, Sweden's lovely Concretes - I love the Concretes. I think their casual, crawling way with a classically styled pop song is absolutely fabulous and the fact that Victoria Bergsman's songwriting and vocal style have influenced large swathes of the indie community is testament to just how effective she is. The gently swirling keyboards and delicate little guitar filigrees behind her soft but clear, slightly slurred voice, make for some fantastic pop. The slower numbers are easily as successful as the big show-off numbers and despite the fact that the most famous tune from the eponymous debut studio album (2003) is the urgent pop of 'You Can't Hurry Love', it's the ballad form songs that are the real winners ('Lovin' Kind' is an absolute stand-out) and as indie-pop records go, this really is the real deal. Surprisingly the Concretes followed up the debut with a second compilation LP (their first album being a compilation of their first two EPs). Layourbattleaxedown (2005) is a selection of disperate tracks that had first appeared in a variety of locations, B-sides, compilation albums, etc. As such it's a mixed bag, but on the whole it does show just how high their quality threshold was when potentially throwaway material is this good, and there's a real diversity of stuff, some of which is very bold (the strings on 'Lady December' are amazing). There are some absolute charmers on Layourbattleaxedown ('Sugar' is lovely for instance) and although it's unsurprisingly somewhat uneven, it's a great Sunday listen, rain or shine...

The Concretes finest album was released next, The Concretes In Colour (2006). All of the most pronounced pop song inclinations they had shown come to their fullest fruition on In Colour. These are simply fabulous indie-pop songs, which are alive with a brisk grace. The melancholy edge that had been an essential element of their previous records is almost entirely lacking from In Colour, this is just joyous, ebullient testimony to the huge value of pop music. It opens and closes with grand statements ('On the Radio', 'Song for the Songs') and is littered throughout with perfect examples of the form ('Sunbeams' and 'Grey Days' worthy of particular mention). It's wonderful. Finally, things don't go quite so well for Hey Trouble (2007). After Bergsman left, drummer Lisa Milberg took over vocal duties and the songwriting was duty split, and with Bergsman's departure something of the spirit of the band went with her. It's still a fine album, but the gloom seems to have set in again and doubly so, and there's a something a little leaden about the atmosphere of Hey Trouble. The songs don't bounce or swagger, they mutter and shamble instead, and although it has some great tunes on it, on the whole it's a bit of a downer, and without Bergsman's voice the melancholy doesn't seem to have a real purpose.

Will Oldham and Dave Pajo put their heads together as the Continental Op to make the soundtrack to an experimental film and Slitch Music (2003) was the result. It's a series of instrumental mood pieces essentially, but in a variety of styles, from gentle minimal acoustic works to scuzzy grungy noise pieces, but although the talents of the two are enviable, Slitch Music has something of a treading-water feel to it. It's interesting to the extent that hearing the output of an experimental approach from Oldham and Pajo would always be interesting, but there isn't really anything sufficiently remarkable to mark it out as a singular work.

Quite a lengthy Ry Cooder session now, starting with second album Into the Purple Valley (1972). Cooder is a past master at the bluesy, rootsy Americana and his slide guitar playing is absolutely second to none (in fact he's astonishingly adept at most instruments he turns his hand to). As a musicologist too Cooder has consistently proven himself to be engaged and adaptable and it's this questing spirit that has always infused his records with a sense of consummate musicianship, even when he's effectively just mucking about. Into the Purple Valley is a demonstration of his early fascination with American self-mythologising and concentrates on dustbowl era or dustbowl themed songs and as such also demonstrates a burgeoning leftist political frankness which has become increasingly open and furious as the years have gone by. The choices of songs to cover are perfect, unsurprisingly, with lesser known Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly tunes amongst his expert interpretations. It's an album with a knowing sense of humour simultaneous to its fastidious attention to detail and as a result it's both brilliant and highly entertaining. For some reason I haven't got the next two great Cooder albums so go straight on to fifth album, Chicken Skin Music (1976). Cooder's expertly casual musical multiculturalism is at its finest, and subtlest here, blending mariachi accordion with gospel vocal groups and Hawaiian rhythms with folky Americana, and all of it works because of the evident straightforward certainty on Cooder's part that it simply will. Again there are a couple of Leadbelly songs on Chicken Skin Music together with a selection of other stylistically diverse covers and traditional songs, and it all blends seamlessly into one hugely enjoyable whole.

Tuesday 29 May 2012

LaRM day 86 (Judy Collins-John Coltrane)

Today is mostly composed of Judy Collins' folk efforts. I've always felt that Judy Collins got too many props at the time, she was a decent interpreter, but there's something just too shrill about her voice, too strident about her delivery when it should be subtle. In the end, even when the musical accompaniment is good, it's down to Collins herself to make the records sometimes not especially enjoyable. Fifth Album (1965) has a decent mix of folk standards and Dylan songs (which was the requisite composition for pretty much every folk record made in 1965) and while 'Pack Up Your Sorrows' and 'Early Morning Rain' are nice, there's too little grace to the record as a whole. It's the same problem for 1966's In My Life, but it's a much better record generally, and it ends with a truly lovely interpretation of Lennon & McCartney's 'In My Life', and has a very successful take on Dylan's 'Tom Thumb's Blues' and an extremely delicate go at Randy Newman's 'I Think It's Going To Rain Today'. It's this broadening out of the material that she covers that makes her albums from this point, if not great, then certainly very interesting compared to the stock folk fare of the time. The little flashes of orchestration are brought more to the fore on the next album, Wildflowers (1967). Having introduced Leonard Cohen to the world via her version of 'Suzanne' on In My Life (Cohen had not recorded anything himself at the time), Wildflowers has no less than four Cohen tunes, together with two surprisingly gently rendered Joni Mitchell songs and, for the first time, three original compositions which are easily good enough to take their place with the other material. The orchestration is lush but appropriate and it is interesting to hear how easily a folk artist was able to broaden the canvas without entirely sacrificing the basic intent. In some ways I think Wildflowers is her best album because it's her most relaxed and most placid, and as such doesn't have that shrill urgency that most of her other records suffer from.

If there were any doubts about Collins' purist folk approach they were confirmed once and for all by the release of Who Knows Where the Time Goes (1968), the general style of which is much closer to country than to folk, and features a host of guest musicians, most of whom played country as standard. It also heralded the return of the more strident, harsher end of Collins' range which is a shame, not least because this is where her voice sounded corniest. However, as ever, she is an adept interpreter of other people's songs and her Cohen songs this time out are as bold and impressive as ever. Nobody, but nobody, should ever cover Sandy Denny's songs because nobody, but nobody, can sing like she could, but people insist on doing it and failing, and Collins is no exception. The two things that can be said in favour of Collins' cover of 'Who Knows Where the Time Goes' are that (i) Collins was so in tune with the time, and had such impeccable taste that she had heard Sandy's demo and recorded the song before even Denny herself had recorded it properly, and (ii) it's a much better and truer version than most people have managed. Finally we skip over a few years and a few albums to 1975's Judith. By this point Collins' work had pretty much been reduced to a mushy kind of Julie Covington-y mawkish schmaltz, but even then there are flashes of something truer and clearer. The real problem is the overly dense orchestration and weepy arrangements. The same kind of stylistic turn had been taken by many of her contemporaries so it's hard to blame her really, and people had done a lot worse, but with its MOR arrangements and rather lackadaisical performance Judith isn't much to shout about.

Colourbox were something of an anomoly in terms of the 4AD roster, as they constructed their songs as much out of samples as live instrumentation and as such they were a fairly pioneering act. Their records are abstract synthesised pop songs composed of a dense mass of not only musical samples but occasionally also snippets from adverts and TV shows, and although it sounds faintly quaint now, it was pretty groundbreaking stuff at the time. Underpinning the samples (rather than the other way around) are the guitars and bass which create the essential musical framework, over which the samples are layered. What's remarkable is that rather than just being a mess, the songs on Colourbox (1985) are very distinctly R&B, white soul and dub pieces (Lorita Grahame's vocals are brilliantly aggressively soulful), whole songs which work absolutely in their own right, quite apart from the technological poking around going on. There is still an inexplicable dark, slightly gloomy, edge about the album, which I suppose came from simply being part of the 4AD stable. Nonetheless, you can easily hear how 'Pump Up the Volume' (which Colourbox made under the M/A/R/R/S name) is related to this stuff.

As an easy listen Alice Coltrane's Universal Consciousness (1971) doesn't even register, but as an astonishingly pioneering work of psychedelic free jazz it's peerless. The influence of this album is felt throughout the experimental, and particularly electronic, musical worlds. It is a totally free-ranging and unrestrained exercise in musical self-indulgence but it is also a remarkably self-assured piece of abstract jazz which leaves no room for doubt about the clarity of Coltrane's vision. From low-level drones, to free-form freakouts on ethnic pipes and strings it's all amazing stuff and while it may fall short of its intention of saying something truly universal, it does manage to create an atmosphere of total inclusiveness. It's certainly a challenging work in some ways, but its essence is throughly admirable.

And last up for today it's two of John Coltrane's greatest and most well regarded albums, starting with his only Blue Note lead album Blue Train (1957). Coltrane was erudite and intellectually engaged both as a person and as a performer and one can only wonder what he might have been achieving following Blue Train if he hadn't had such a penchant (like everyone around him) for heroin. Blue Train was conceived and composed specifically for the Blue Note recording session, and with the exception of a lovingly rendered 'I'm Old Fashioned', it's all Coltrane's specific take on the hard bop style. It's fantastically played and beautifully structured with Coltrane's sax sounding both energised and comfortable, there's no shrill parping to be heard on Blue Train, it's all fantastically considered and subtle. Lee Morgan gives some prime backing on trumpet and the rhythm section are singularly respectful. It's all really wonderful stuff and no surprise that it's such an iconic piece of work. Likewise 1965's A Love Supreme. The two records could hardly be more different but they are each towering moments both in Coltrane's career and in jazz history. A Love Supreme is effectively a single four-section piece, a hymn to God (thanking him for helping Coltrane get off the drugs and the booze apart from anything else), the hard bop giving way to the free jazz style that would become more prevalent. There's a seriously experimental edge to A Love Supreme that jars slightly against the more post-trad hard bop style, but it's a fascinating insight into how the one morphed into the other, and the process is encapsulated almost entirely on A Love Supreme. It's a more aggressively challenging listen than Blue Train is, no question, but it pointed out the road ahead for jazz in a way that nobody else had seen quite so clearly, and it's a truly extraordinary piece of work.

Monday 28 May 2012

LaRM day 85 (Cola Boy-Edwyn Collins)

St Etienne's one-off acid house outift Cola Boy released the mighty '7 Ways to Love' single in 1991. It's an awesome clab of old-skool house music, but it's better than most, mainly because its debt to disco is so blatently worn on its sleeve. In truth I cannot stand house music, but there's something about '7 Ways to Love' that really gets me, I think it's great. I'm sure it's the fact that their encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of pop infects the tune and no matter how hard they might have tried to make a clean-cut house track, it still pop's history in its DNA. It's silly, undoubtedly, but it's great.

Next is the single 'Yer So Sweet (Baby Donut)' (1995) by riot grrrl supergroup Cold Cold Hearts. It's lively, it's a mess and it's hard to tell if it's brilliant or awful. I suppose the answer lies on how prepared you to accept the astonishing limitations that the riot grrrl movement set itself. Nobody could play but most of the time that didn't really matter because either the intention or the songs (or both) were good enough to carry the day. In the case of Cold Cold Hearts though unfortunately less really was less.

While Bill Janovitz was mining some angst in Buffalo Tom, his brother Paul was doing the same in Cold Water Flat. There are many similarities between the two bands, but Cold Water Flat lack the subtlety and the various stylistic influences of Buffalo Tom. This is straight down the line angst-rock, but it's really a pretty powerful version, mainly down to Janovitz's great way with a vocal melody. First release was the 'Roll Me Over' 7" (1990) which has two great blustery bits of power-chord rock, both of which appear on debut album Listen (1993). Listen has some great songs, but it's a bit overwhelmed by its own tottering sense of gloom and despite having some superb melodies, the underproduction and muddy feel to the whole thing make it hard to discern one song from another. The self-titled second album was preceded by the 'Magnetic North Pole' single (both 1995), which is a great song. The second album is much cleaner, much better produced and Janovitz's songwriter has improved a lot. Although there's still not much variety on offer, the album is, I think, a masterclass in how to construct introspective angst-rock. These are great, gutsy songs and there's never a hint of pomposity about it despite the fact that it's all pretty humourless. I think there could have been a lot more to come from Cold Water Flat but it wasn't to be.

Ah, Rattlesnakes. What a great album Rattlesnakes is. Lovely, lovely stuff. As debut albums go, Lloyd Cole & the Commotions' Rattlesnakes (1984) is astonishingly bold. It's as if they'd been doing this stuff for years and the sheer confidence, the self-possession and self-assurance of the whole thing is truly remarkable, doubly so bearing in mind that they traded in such unaggressive jangly pop music. The folk and soul shapes that sit behind all of the songs only serve as the sketchy traces that the jangle-pop is built over and it's really fascinating to hear such delicate college rock made from such great references. The music, like the lyrics, is terribly smart and while the whole thing should absolutely reek of pretension and condescension, instead it's one of the warmest, most inviting albums of the 80's. Every song is a charm (although I've never really got to grips with fan favourite 'Forest Fire') and the structure is perfect, with ten songs coming in at 36 minutes, just the way an album should be. The edition I've got is one of those "deluxe edition" things which bloats it out to three times the length with tons of added bits of demos, sessions and live tracks, most of which are merely interesting, but it does add seven sketched songs that didn't make the cut or were released as B-sides, most of which are fantastic.

Next up are a few albums by remarkable French musician/composer Cecile Schott who records under the monikor of Colleen. Debut album Everyone Alive Wants Answers (2003) is a beautifully spectral and minimalist piece of post-ambient electronica. It takes all the cues of preceding ambient and completely remoulds them into a series of of wandering, self-replicating pieces which are sometimes creepily sinister, sometimes heart-stoppingly lovely. It's a really rather extraordinary record, especially considering that it hides its unconventionality well. And full marks to any album that has a piece on it entitled 'Long Live Mice in the Metro'. It's beautiful stuff. Better yet is follow-up, The Golden Morning Breaks (2005). Not relishing the prospect of just playing a laptop in live performances of Everyone Alive, Colleen introduced a raft of real instrumentation into The Golden Morning Breaks, mostly arcane and in some cases completely unused instruments. There are glass harmoniums, musical boxes and all sorts of other wilfully complicated musical instruments, but they are used to create an utterly magical post-ambient, post-electronica sound, heralding a completely new approach to how this kind of music can and should be made. The tunes on The Golden Morning are absolutely lovely, there's little of the creeping menace of Everyone Alive here, it's all trascendant, otherworldy beauty.

The next record is slightly less successful, but only by virtue of having a very specific and limiting framework. Colleen et les Boites a Musique (2006) is, as it suggests, literally composed solely of Colleen playing and manipulating the sounds from musical boxes. It's a magical listen, but it does require some patience from the listener as, although it creates hugely different atmospheres from one track to the next, it doesn't vary greatly in terms of the specific sound. And we all know what musical boxes sound like - a bit plinky plonky, a bit trebly, and there's no difference here. It's a wonderful record though and if you can get your head around that sound being the fundamental constituent of the album, it's a dreamy, ethereal listen. The following year Schott decided to adopt another new approach, learning to play the 15th century cello-like Viola da Gamba. Les Ondes Silencieuses (2007) is essentially based on this instrument but it adds all kinds of other things in as well. It's a brooding, deep record, which demands some patience on the part of the listener, but it's also a magnificent demonstration of the fruits of effort. Schott's multi-instrumentalism is startlingly adept and her left-field approach to instrumentation generally means that she creates singularly unique music which seems to come from another time altogether and is absolutely beautiful for that.

Here's yet another of those Broken Social Scene chaps, Jason Collett with his third solo album, Idols of Exile (2005). If you're after some breezy, 70's singer-songwriterly stuff, this is the gear. It's a lovely records, very much in the style of Josh Rouse's early albums, a light touch of Americana country, a little dash of down home folk, but for the most part songs packed full of melody. It's not a superb album by any stretch but it's a charmer and the fact that it eschews a lot of the grandstanding that members of BSS normally can't help themselves but indulge in really stands in its favour. It's relaxed, easy, comfortable in itself and it's a cosy, sunny day type of thing.

Finally it's the mighty Edwyn Collins and his first post-stroke/MRSA nightmare record, Losing Sleep (2010). And it's a real winner. It's a remarkable thing about the man that he has come back so strong, in so many ways from something which would have put a lesser person down. His graceful, beautifully illustrations of birds (a hobby which he concentrated on to recover the use of his hands) which adorn the sleeve show the degree to which he wouldn't be put down, and the songwriting shows the same determination. These songs are as good as any he's written over the years and stands up quite satisfactorily to the superb Orange Juice albums. He's assisted to a great degree by a large and sympathetic bunch of musicians and producers, but nonetheless this is clearly his record, the songwriting is unmistakeable. That delicate edge of northern soul, the scantiest trace of funk and soul, it's all still there underpinning his simple and effective guitar pop/rock. Lyrically it's a fascinating record too, unflinchingly honest about what it's like to nearly lose everything and then to have to work incredibly hard to get any of it back, and again, it's simple but highly effective. It's a great record.

Friday 25 May 2012

LaRM day 84 (Leonard Cohen)

I've always found laughing boy Lenny Cohen a bit hard to take and have never really got what it is about him that gets people quite so exercised. To be honest I rather subscribe to the stereotypical view that he's a miserable old whinger who could do with actually bothering to write a tune once in a while. I think part of the problem for me is that for a start I don't buy the "poet as songwriter" schtick. I think it's always balls. I'm of the old fashioned opinion that music is expressive, evocative, just as poetry is expressive and evocative and as a result the two are effectively mutually exclusive. That's why the greatest classical composers and the greatest librettists concentrated on story and mood rather than some mysterious poetic rebus - the music did that work. Besides which looking at who gets the poet tag in the rock world simply proves the point - Nick Cave? Good lyrics yes, poetry certainly not. Dylan? Being oblique does not poetry make - good lyrics normally, poetry most decidedly not. Who else? Billy Childish?? Bruce Springsteen for Christ's sake. See? It's not poetry, it's song lyrics, and poor Lenny may have been a great writer, a great poet even, but the minute he starts setting this stuff to music what he's reduced the words to is song lyrics. The day people started suggesting Dylan was a poet was the day we forgot absolutely what poetry is, and entered this bold, moronic new world where saying something out loud makes it true. Got to love the 60's. Anyway, as a result Leonard Cohen's Live Songs (1973), recorded in 1970 and 1972, is for me something of an endurance test. There are great songs on Live Songs, mostly culled from Songs From a Room, but as usual rendered in such sombre colours that I simply find that I haven't been listening after a while. By all accounts Live Songs is a visceral portrait of the artist's journey through hell but all I hear is a gloomy egotist musing rather pointlessly about relationships.

Slightly more fun is Cohen's next studio album, New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974), but not much more fun. There's the usual plodding self-indulgence, but New Skin has a handful of songs that are considerably more interesting - 'Who By Fire' is a brilliantly creepy, odd little pop song, 'Chelsea Hotel No.2' is absolutely lovely and heartbreaking, and 'There Is a War' is a very strange song indeed, and a brilliant one. However, despite the presence of a backing band, a new development for Cohen's studio work, it's still rather frustratingly drab. We skip forward four albums to 1988's I'm Your Man. Often regarded as one of Cohen's finest albums, there is an entirely different problem with I'm Your Man. With only a couple of glaring exceptions, the songs on I'm Your Man are absolutely fantastic, really great. The difficulty is the truly hideous production, arrangement and instrumentation. I've never heard such a great set of songs be made to sound so utterly awful - everything about the sound is dated in the worst possible way, sampled strings, jingling keyboards, wailing backing singers, and everything processed to within an inch of its life - it's hideous. It's such disservice to the songs that it's a difficult album to listen to, and it's clear why other people have been more successful with songs from the album. 'First We Take Manhattan', 'Everybody Know', 'Tower of Song', these are superb songs (the most egregious exception is 'Jazz Police' which may well rank as my most hated song in terms of both the song and how it sounds) and it's a crying shame the album sounds so godawful.
We skip over 1992's The Future and on to the next album, some nine years later, Ten New Songs (2001). It's a laid back affair this one and it's fairly charming (those synth drums could have done with being jettisoned, but oh well) and it's a less strident attempt to appear to be keeping up with the times. As a result it's a much easier listen, and it doesn't have the air of gloom that he fostered so early on, so much as a seasoned melancholy. If anything it's a delicate reflection on and of the aging artist and it's a much more personable record than many he's made. A lot of this may be down to the large role played by collaborator Sharon Robinson, who handles all kinds of technical duties as well as co-songwriting and duetting throughout the album. It's a subtle, unaggressive record and although the tendancy to just stop listening is pretty strong, it's an album that deserves attention while not demanding it. I really prefer Cohen in this mode to any other.

And so, with the necessity of checking out all of the Eurovision songs before tomorrow's nights big final, it's cheerio for the week.

Thursday 24 May 2012

LaRM day 83 (Codeine)

Not much listening today so all we've got are a few records by the undisputed kings of the slowcore scene, Codeine. I really, really loved the Codeine records at the time - they fitted absolutely perfectly into my completely solipsistic worldview and helped considerably to foster that all important "poor me" mentality, it's great stuff. Dense, gruellingly slow-paced and bass heavy, their songs are hymns to self-indulgence and they work beautifully as such. It's grand, spacious stuff which suggests endless everyday misery without being too crass about it. The back cover of first album Frigid Stars (1990) shows a young man lying on a bed with a blanket over his head. Yep, that about sums it up, it's small time depression, not grandstanding misery, but musically it's played out like high drama. The 'Pickup Song'/'3 Angels' 7" that was released a month or two before Frigid Stars set the stall out, being two songs of sluggish, indolent miserablism, but which had killer melodies buried in the gloom. Bearing in mind everything moves at such a snail's pace it's surprising how melodic Codeine's music could be - this stuff bears no relation whatsoever to things like Earth for instance. Codeine play slow because slow is how the songs should be played, not because it affords them particular heaviosity. Still it's pretty testing stuff nonetheless. The mini-LP that followed, Barely Real (1992) is more of the same, and the title is extremely telling because the music almost drags itself to a standstill some of the time, while still wrenching out some semblance of a broken melody. It's sort of a cross between beautiful music and an endurance test. There's none of Low's glacial beauty for instance, or Navigator's reaching-out, it's simply stated and simply rendered personal angst, and it really works very well. It does have one glaring anomoly though in 'W' which is a David Grubbs solo piano piece which doesn't fit with the rest of the material at all and belongs on one of Grubbs' Gastr Del Sol albums.

Second, and final, album The White Birch (1994) was preceded by the 'Tom'/'Something New' single which heralded, if not exactly a change of sound, certainly a more direct relationship with melody. The White Birch has, for the first time, some genuinely lovely songs on it. The pace is the same, the song structures are essentially the same, but the mood has changed from angry angst to resigned angst, and this tweak allows for a more graceful approach to the sedate misery on offer. It's a really good album and if you've the patience to go with it, it's an invitingly personal one.

Wednesday 23 May 2012

LaRM day 82 (Cocteau Twins)

And the monumentally lovely work continued with the stunning Aikea-Guinea EP (1985), which like Treasure, combines the creatively adventurous with the esoterically emotional. Bearing in mind that this was the point at which Fraser had reduced her lyrics to noises rather than words it's astonishing just how moving these songs are. I suppose knowing that on paper there are actual words lends itself to also knowing that she's singing stuff that's personal, too much so in fact to be able to truly articulate. It's a fascinating idea and should be tragically pretentious, but instead it's completely absorbing, and it also means that the songs become the listener's property. Musically the first two songs on Aikea-Guinea (the title track and 'Kookaburra') feel much more upbeat and airy than anything on Treasure and it's thrilling to hear this kind of wilful experimentation sound so joyous. The other two are slightly more sombre, but they're still wonderful things. The next two EPs, Tiny Dynamine and Echoes In a Shallow Bay (both also 1985) are slightly less successful as they rely quite heavily on keyboard textures to create a gently drifting wash of sound which has, unfortunately, become a little dated. That's a great shame because one of the truly remarkable things about the Cocteau Twins records after Peppermint Pig is that, drum machine excepted, they've managed to remain essentially timeless. I think that the band had begun taking cues from Harold Budd (with whom they made an album the following year) and other ambient experimentalists and Tiny Dynamine and Echoes In a Shallow Bay suffer the misfortune of influence. The tunes themselves are still absolutely gorgeous and there are some songs that aren't affected ('Plain Tiger' and 'Sultitan Itan' from Tiny Dynamine, 'Eggs and Their Shells' from Echoes In a Shallow Bay) and there's no getting round the fact that lesser, dated Cocteau Twins records are still head and shoulders above virtually everything else that was being made at the time and certainly a long way ahead in terms of creative thinking.

A compilation album was released for the US market only called The Pink Opaque (1985) the contents of which are cribbed from each of the preceding releases, but it has one previously unreleased song, 'Millimillenary', which is absolutely gorgeous. The next album was 1986's Victorialand which I think was probably their most high profile record. It's very much a mood album, it's gossamer delicate and incredibly subtle, the melodies as fragile and as oblique as the sound. There's a much heavier focus on Guthrie's massively treated acoustic guitar playing and Victorialand as a whole sounds much more distant and gentle than anything they had recorded before. In some ways it's a misty kind of sound, keeping the listener at something of a distance, but that doesn't stop it from being insidiously affecting. It's certainly the closest that the band came to being "precious", it's a rather fey affair, but that's not to say that it isn't stunningly beautiful. I think Victorialand was a make or break album for many fans, some finding it just too insular and frankly, too wet. Not me though, I love it. Then it's easily the best EP that the Cocteau Twins recorded, Love's Easy Tears (1986). The three songs on this record are absolutely sublime, delicate, unaggressively assuming and very moving. Liz Fraser's voice has reached it's peak, a swooping, soaring instrument which achieves the most incredible balance between fragility and stridency. Guthrie's music has less thrown into it and it's the songs themselves that are impressive on these songs. All three are staggering, but 'Those Eyes-That Mouth' and 'Sighs Smell of Farewell' are possibly the two greatest of the band's manifold artistic achievements (the latter has possibly the most extraordinarily effective simple key change I've ever heard).

The collaboration with Harold Budd, The Moon and the Melodies (1986), really continues the Victorialand mood and deals for the most part in slow, languid mood pieces which rely heavily on Fraser's voice for real interest. The piano parts are pretty standard Budd, laden with reverb and there are a few added bits and pieces (a saxophone at one point which surprisingly doesn't completely break the mood, but then it too is soaked in reverb and buried in the mix). It's a beautiful record, no mistake, but I think it is too much of a genre (it really does belong with Budd's other work as a piece of New Age modern classical) and is something of an anomoly (although not a glaring one) in the Cocteau Twins catalogue. The next record, Blue Bell Knoll (1988) is the band's last really wonderful album, sounding relaxed and confident in its eccentricity, and it's a little like the world had begun to catch up with them and what they were doing. It's the first of their albums that sounds like it truly belongs in an indie albums chart. The songs are relatively brief, clean and concisely structured, there's no drifting about on Blue Bell Knoll. The chiming, endlessly treated guitars are the same as ever, Raymonde's bass drive and Fraser's voice the same, but there's a breezy air to Blue Bell Knoll which really suits the band, but it does suggest at the same time that there not be much further for them to go. As songs, some of their best material is on Blue Bell Knoll, it's certainly not their best work, but has their best actual songs. If anything, and this sounds like faint praise but isn't intended to be, it's the first time a record of theirs has been simply charming.

For some reason that I can't work out I haven't got the lovely next album (Heaven or Las Vegas) or the sub-standard follow-up (Four Calendar Cafe) so it's straight on to the inexplicable Snow single (1993). Of all the bands to release a Christmas single the Cocteau Twins would have come at the end of a list I would have thought, yet here it is, covers of 'Winter Wonderland' and 'Frosty the Snowman' done in Cocteaus style. It's terrible. If it's a light-hearted gag it isn't funny, if it's to show that they aren't po-faced it doesn't work and if it's serious then I'm totally mystified. I can only assume that bearing in mind relations between the band members were strained to say the least by this point and apparently Guthrie was deep into a relationship with creativity's enemy heroin, that it was just an ill-advised idea by people whose minds were elsewhere. Just over a year later the last record that they were to make was released. Milk and Kisses (1995) is a relatively half-hearted affair and it's a rather sad end to a truly landmark musical career. There are nice songs on Milk and Kisses, but the problem is that all that groundbreaking stuff ended with simply quite nice songs. I suppose maybe really the truth is that Milk & Kisses sounds relatively unimpressive simply because it isn't adding to what they had already achieved. If it were the first record they released it would be an incredibly good, innovative piece of work, but as it is it's their ninth and they had already done the innovating and Milk and Kisses is retreading their own singular path.

Finally for the Cocteau Twins it's the BBC's double CD collection of all of the sessions that they recorded for BBC radio. Arranged in chronological order it's fascinating to listen to how the band developed and which songs they chose to showcase at any given point in their career. There are also a handful of early songs which never made it to an official release, which adds another level of interest. I can only imagine that it must have been pretty tricky to recreate the layered effects of the records in the BBC studios, but for the most part they pull it off pretty well and as the years went by they clearly grew more adept at it.