LaRM day 138 (Esben & the Witch-Even As We Speak)

Goth me up to the max, it's patchouli revivalists Esben and the Witch and their 2011 debut Violet Cries. These are dense, dark songs, that sound a bit like a walk through a wintry twilight forest. See, that's the kind of daft imagery that this stuff is about (or is it just because that's what's on the cover?). It's very serious, it's pretty gloomy and it sounds absolutely like a less wilfully esoteric take on Siouxsie and the Banshees. To be fair, as a kind of post-shoegaze swirling guitar goth revivalism goes it's really pretty good, and where they've been very smart is in keeping the production relatively contemporary, meaning that what could have been a very naff record indeed actually sounds surprisingly fresh. It's no world shaker by any means, but it's a lot better than realistically it should be, and as someone who never found it hard to like goth with female vocals, I think it's a fine album.

Sticking with the creepy, spooky theme, but of a very different kind, it's America's premier freak-folk outfit, Espers. The self-titled debut album was released in 2004 and heralded a whole new aproach to playing folk music which drew from a wide array of interesting sources. The most obvious is the odder end of traditional British folk, but there's stuff from the whole history of American rural music, Scandinavian folk and psychedelia too. It's properly witchy stuff and absolutely superb. The idea that they were involved in creating new music for Eastern European 70's freak-out movie Valerie and Her Week of Wonders makes absolute sense, because Espers records are the aural equivalents - disconcerting, disturbing but truly beautiful pieces of work which challenge categorisation so vigorously that the term freak-folk has pretty much been built up around them. As far as studied, arch and deliberately odd folk music goes, this is as good as it gets. Meg Baird's voice is perfectly pitched for this kind of stuff and she often sounds like something from an imagined history, and indeed much of the music sounds like it has come from an alternate version of the past.

Espers III (2009) is dramatically different to the debut album. It's a much bigger, fuller sound, and the spooked out campfire feel of the first album is replaced by a greater emphasis on the full band psych-folk approach. It's another very fine album and it feels much more confident. In some ways it's a shame that the tremulous creepiness of the debut has gone, but it's best to view the two albums as very different types of records rather than compare them against each other, and the more expansive feel to Espers III is fantastic in its own right. Meg Baird and Greg Weeks' voices complement and oppose each other throughout in a much more sure fashion and the whole band sounds like a collaboration between the United States of America and Pentangle. Now for some people I guess fusion-folk and psych-rock as a combo would be a nightmare come true, but honestly, this stuff is superb. What's particularly interesting is how timeless it sounds though, particularly bearing in mind that its source materials are all of specific times and places.

For a change of mood and style let's dig one of the greatest singles of the 1970's, it's David "bog's like a palace" Essex and the untouchably perfect 'Gonna Make You a Star' (1974). What a song. What a fine, fine song 'Gonna Make You a Star' is. It's brilliant, perfect grimy pop with a surface sheen, it's the kind of thing that nobody would even think of doing these days, and to think that it complements two of the scuzziest Brit movies of the 70's in which Essex stars (That'll Be the Day and Stardust) adds to its brilliance. B-side 'Window', however, is shit.

More 60's revisionism now with Elephant 6 outfit The Essex Green. Like their sister band The Ladybug Transistor, The Essex Green trade in a kind of bucolic, pastoral psych-folk-pop which is always charming if occasionally a little too winsome or whimsical for its own good. The self-titled debut mini-LP, released in 1999 sets out the stall in a somewhat lo-fi and low-key way, with its obvious psych-pop influences worn proudly on its sleeve. The five songs are wistful and calm, and indeed one of The Essex Green's great strengths is their casual charm, never hurried, never forced. The first full-length album, Everything Is Green (1999) is a little more cleanly produced and has some fantastic songs on it, from the Free Design-ish 'Playground', to the swirling Hammond and fuzz guitar workout of 'Tinker', it's all great stuff and the homage to their favourite decade 'Sixties' makes expressly clear just who, where and when they want to be. The fact that the lovely Sasha Bell takes an increasingly prominent role on the albums goes some way to explaining why they become more melodic and poppy and less psych-folk with each release. Her charmingly artless voice makes for a perfect lead for second album The Long Goodbye (2003) and its endearingly sunny 60's pop-folk. I remember when people used to rave about The Beachwood Sparks and listening to The Long Goodbye again today just reminds me how much better The Essex Green were. 'The Late Great Cassiopia' is one of the great lost indie-pop songs of the 2000's but The Long Goodbye has a bunch of other equally loveable tunes.

Good Lord Annie Lennox has made some dreadful records over the years. After the dismal pop-punk of the Tourists she and Dave Stewart (a man so gruseome looking that Zo actually gags when she sees him on the TV) formed the almost as dismal Eurythmics who made some truly gruelling bits of synth-rock spread over the 1980's. However, there is one peculiar anomoly in the Lennox catalogue in my view, and that's the third Eurythmics album, Touch (1983). Touch, while still clearly recognisably a Eurythmics album has such an odd feel to it and such great melodies turned to such unexpected effect that it seems to me to be a genuinely great record. With the sole exception of the hugely irritating synthed steel drum workout 'Right By Your Side', every song on the album has something about it - not that they all work but even the failures are at least interesting and even when the album seems corny there's a strange arrangement or set of funny noises going on. It's a chilly album, deliberately off-putting and haughtily disdainful and again with the exception of 'Right By Your Side', it feels as if it doesn't care whether you don't like it. Maybe that's why I do. The version of the album that I've got has a bunch of B-sides and live stuff all of which are fairly terrible, and an unforgivable cover of Bowie's 'Fame'.

Next we have one of those simultaneously great and terrible proto-Nashville country records by a giant of the pop-country scene. This time it's No Place That Far (1998) by Sara Evans. I have no idea why I sometimes like this kind of horrible pap, but there's no getting round it, it's a fact that I do. No Place That Far actually has buried under its many layers of processed production and right-wing country songwriting a tiny vestige of real country, a sliver of bluegrass styling. Surprisingly, this tiny bit of honesty comes from Evans herself - her first album was a decent post Garth Brooks bit of bluegrass honed country-pop and the inflections in her voice still reveal her history and her initial influences on No Place That Far. By the next album every last trace of real country music and emotional honesty have been efficiently eradicated (and it would appear her, to that point, perfectly normal figure reduced and enlarged in specific places by the surgeon's knife), but there's still the faintest pulse of something real at the heart of No Place That Far if you can bear to try and find it.

And we finish with a blast of Australian sunshine pop courtesy of the short-lived by eternally charming Even As We Speak and their sole album, the appropriately titled Feral Pop Frenzy (1993). A bracing, brisk collection of two minute indie-pop guitar workouts, Feral Pop Frenzy is a brilliant demonstration that you can be straight down the line with a pop melody while being a little experimental with the form. In amongst the pop nuggets are some weird little acoustic numbers and some downright bizarre spoken-word pieces, which make the album more than simply a pop fizz. It's still that though and songs like 'Falling Down the Stairs' and 'Straight as an Arrow' are as pop as you can get in the indie world. It's brilliant fun stuff and although it sounds very much a product of its time, it still sounds great.