LaRM day 126 (Ecstasy of Saint Theresa - Eggs)

The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa were a kind of post-ambient, post-dub, post-shoegaze Czech outfit who made a couple of absolutely lovely records, none better than 1994's Free-D. What on the face of it seems like typical ambient electronica reveals itself to be something much, much more interesting. For the most part live instrumentation is used throughout Free-D as its foundation, cello, violin, chamber instruments used to incredibly subtle effect, and creating a truly beautiful, hazy, languid atmosphere over which the keyboard washes are layered. Every piece is around the 9 minute mark and each slowly unfolds around shifting motifs, and the whole thing is as delicate as lace and as wonderfully fuzzy as an early spring day. It's really very lovely stuff. I never heard anything after Free-D and I don't know but I suspect they went more electronic and less interesting - in any event I can't imagine they could have topped Free-D's gently insistent beauty.

If there's one band I just could never get it's the Eels. Listening to the Meet the Eels (2008) best-of compilation now, I'm still none the wiser. Covering the hits and the misses from 1996-2006, Meet the Eels should surely be the ultimate primer, and yet all I can hear is the half-baked songs of someone who isn't nearly as smart or acid as he thinks he is (the lyrics are often absolutely terrible). There are occasional clever tricks with melody but even they are so clean somehow, so unreal somehow that I just don't buy it. I had a similar feeling with E's autobiography - there has to be something wrong with the telling of a story that you know is true but is told in such a way that you just don't believe any of it. It's the same way with his songs. I know that the songs from Electro-Shock Blues are awful stories of a truly miserable time in his life, but I don't believe any of it, it's all too neatly told. Anyway, all of this would be carping if the songs were any good but they suffer from exactly the same problem, they're too professional somehow while simultaneously being simply not good enough. I musy be wrong, everybody seems to love the band, but I'm left cold every time.

Although Efterklang's Magic Chairs (2010) has been to some degree impaired by opener 'Modern Drift' being used in an advert (being used in an advert is of course the kiss of death for pretty much any song, not because of proving a band to be mercenary shysters, but more importantly because advertising is by definition shit and any song used in advertising is smeared therefore in shit, making in naturally repellant) the album is still a fairly bracing piece of angular and jagged, post-Sufjan Stevens art-rock. The songs are much more clearly defined on Magic Chairs than on their previous records and there's the worrying trace of serious intent in amongst the marching violins and rolling piano lines. But if you can take what seems to be a rather po-faced approach to delivery and construction it's on occasion a genuinely lovely record with some really great musical phrases.

Long albums and a short day means the last for today is the first album by Eggs which is entitled Bruiser (1994). Eggs were one of those ramshackle Teenbeat bands who made really good albums but in the super-lo-fi, under the radar kind of way that Teenbeat and K and Kill Rock Stars specialised in. Bruiser is an eclectic collection of slightly gloomy indie-rock songs and off-kilter instrumentals, but everything is done in a classic guitar, bass, drums set-up. Despite the essential conventionality Eggs did something slightly different though, and the buried, drawled vocals help to underscore the fundamental notion of discomfort and unease in the record, which in many ways is one of the most romantic in the lo-fi canon. There's a whimsical feel to Bruiser which even despite its surface melancholy helps to keep it moving and in the end, although it's artfully graceless, it's genuinely endearing.