LaRM day 77 (Alex Chilton-Chris & Carla)

Well, what can you say about Alex Chilton's High Priest (1987)? I mean, it's Alex Chilton, you can't slag off Alex Chilton can you? As good-time knockabout rock and roll records go it's a perfectly good time. If anything, if you're having a nice summer afternoon in the garden with chums round it'll be a great soundtrack. As a record to sit down and listen to, well, there are better records around. I suspect the intention was that it be nothing more than a booze sodden good time and as such it does its work fairly admirably; the mood is up, the songs are old-fashioned and despite the feeling of imminent collapse throughout, it doesn't suffer from a lot of Chilton's other later solo work's curse of a milignant sense of misanthropy. It's just some blokes playing some good old tunes with some old equipment and that's pretty much that.

It never made much sense to me why more people didn't try and rip off Scrawl. I think Scrawl may be one of the truly great lost bands. Their Velvet Hammer album is a truly extraordinary piece of psychological evisceration, a despairing howl from one abused gender to another and it's a work of unbelievably subtle power. Anyway, one of the few bands that did try to replicate them was San Diego's Chinchilla who made one album, 101 Italian Hits (1996) and as an effort to be someone else it's surprisingly successful. You can hear how hard it must be to make this sound, and I guess that's why Scrawl were amazing, they made it sound effortless. Anyway, 101 Italian Hits is a grinding piece of indie-rock with the requisite surprising time changes (there are hints of math-rock and Sleater-Kinney in here too), the clashing female vocals, and the sense of fighting against something oppressive is palpable throughout. It's a great record and it's a shame that there wasn't more from them.

Next is Chris & Carla from the Walkabouts side project and their second album Swinger 500 (1998). This is an extremely subdued piece of subtle Americana, whose wintery cover gives an accurate impression of the sound. It's a stately, graceful and extremely understated record, which takes real attention to get to grips with. The songs are beautifully arranged and they take their time to reveal themselves and while sometimes it seems like not much is happening, the structures of the songs are working themselves out extremely cleverly. It's lovely stuff to listen to, and their voices are in fine, spectral form. There's less of the wilful eclecticism of the Walkabouts here, it's all about mood and it's a lovely mood at that.

And what with stuff going on in the afternoon, that's the lot for the day.