LaRM day 156 (Foghat-Folk Implosion)

Let's get our Foghat on again starting with third album Energized (1974).  The problems with the band by this point are exemplified by the truly abysmal cover of Buddy Holly's 'That'll Be the Day', which is sluggish, lazy, contrived and so aware of its failings that it tried to cover them with some terrible gospel style backing vocals.  The fun of the blues boogie of the debut has been reduced to corny tired old blues-riff workouts ('Fly By Night') and terrible hoary old sexism (the "she made love like a wildcat" line in 'Wild Cherry' is symptomatic of just how poor this stuff is.  The worst thing of all about it though is that despite its determination to be a "good time" it's more like the last old man standing at the wedding party trying to get the girls back out on the dancefloor after everybody else has had enough. A lot of the problems stem from the attempt by the band to become closer to the US models that they're emulating and they probably would have fared much better by emphasising their Englishness instead.  Energized is truly a misnomer and listening to it is really a rather gloomy and dispiriting affair.  The six minute closer 'Nothing I Won't Do' has a little bit more bite to it despite being another tired old bit of standard blues riffing, but at least it highlighted the kind of four to the floor, one note bass workout that early heavy metal bands would turn into something special.

Foghat's fifth album, Fool for the City (1975) is probably their best, although it does suffer from a stitled production that is clearly trying to keep pace with the times.  The title track is a case in point, the song is OK but it sounds pretty terrible.  Nevertheless there are only two words required to sum up Fool for the City, and those two words are 'Slow Ride'.  As one-time WWF wrestler Stone-Cold Steve Austin once said, "if you don't like Slow Ride you must be dead".  'Slow Ride' is one of the great (Led Zep rip off) rock songs of the 1970's and that's an end to it, so even though there's nothing else on Fool for the City that comes close, it's an excusable album whatever.

To celebrate 100 years on the road, Foghat's seventh album was a live one, a six-song showcase of just why anybody took them seriously.  If listening to the studio albums leaves you mystified as to why Foghat were one of the biggest selling acts of the 70's then 1977's Foghat Live answers the question - they were a phenomenal live proposition.  In terms of playing straight ahead, heads-down blues rock they were among the best and Foghat Live proves it.  There were many live rock albums in that particular decade and although Foghat have kind of been forgotten, Foghat Live remains one of the best selling live albums of all time and it's really no surprise.

Finally for the 'Hat, we have 1980's thoroughly humiliating pop-rock outing Tight Shoes.  This is proof that advances in recording technology have usually been absolutely disastrous for most bands, none more so than the leaps in technology in the late 1970's.  So many rock acts were left completely at the mercy of record companies and producers who insisted that their acts move with the times, and in almost every case the resultant records are a crippling embarassment.  Tight Shoes is no exception, and where ZZ Top managed to make the demands of the new age into a brilliant joke, poor old Foghat didn't have the gumption to realise that there were being turned into the Cars.  Tight Shoes is like a blues meets new wave car crash and in that sense alone its really quite fascinating.  Terrible, truly terrible, but fascinating.  The production is, of course, like every other record of the time, processed, tinny, lifeless and now thoroughly corny.  For the old timers it really took serious control and an innate understanding to make the best of these awful changes (Donald Fagen got it, for instance) and those were not in the hands of people like Foghat, because it was only the new-wavers and chart pop makers who were able to use this technology to their advantage, everybody else got left behind or turned into a farce.  Anyway, Tight Shoes is awful.  And here endeth the Foghat.

Just taking a break to listen to check a couple of compilations I've made for my brother's birthday are working - will resume thereafter, but this will diminish the amount of stuff we'll be able to get through today. Hang on.

Right, I'm back and it's on with Ben Folds' solo album, Songs for Silverman (2005). After the diminshing returns of the Ben Folds Five and the not so great Rockin' the Suburbs, I guess it's no surprise that Songs for Silverman is fairly subdued.  It's a ballad heavy outing, with the piano motifs being either low-key or repetitive, allowing the vocal melodies to take the centre stage.  Sometimes this works really well ('Jesusland' is one of his best tunes in my opinion), in others it's a little drab (closer 'Prison Food' is something of a drag), but even when the tunes or arrangements aren't spot on, his lyrics are better than ever.  Pretty much absent are the frustrating almost novelty bouncy tunes and the often irritating wordplay and all-too-unconvincing vitriol and instead lyrical concerns, while still pretty gloomy, are much more clear and (dare I say it as an upside??) honestly middle-aged.  After all there's no point in pretending to be a hip kid if you really aren't, or indeed, as in Folds' case, never were.  Overall too much of the album drags but the songs that are good really are great and the duds are never worse than a little dull.

Less successful by far is the cloying, over-elaborate yet clumsy collaboration with Nick Hornby, Lonely Avenue (2010).  The biggest problems for the album really are Hornby's abysmal lyrics.  They truly are dreadful.  But Folds' tunes don't work either and the whole thing too often comes across like the work of two smug, smart-arse sixth-formers who are a long, long way from being as clever as they think they are.  There are nice touches here and there (the understated orchestration on 'Levi Johnston's Blues' is nice, even though everything else about it is pretty sub-standard) but overall it's an album that feels like it's just asking for a kicking.  Really it's a shame because where it looked like Folds might be growing up into a serious songwriter, Lonely Avenue makes him look like the guy who regresses whenever he meets up with his less clever but more domineering mates from the old days.

Just time for a few of Lou Barlow and John Davis' Folk Implosion records, starting with the 1994 7" Electric Idiot.  Where almost all of the early Folk Implosion material is frustratingly hyperactive and provocatively scrappy and lo-fi to the absolute max, the first song on Electric Idiot ('Opening Day') is uncharacteristically tuneful. Normal service is immediately resumed thereafter with the messy, scraggy title track.  Part of the point of this stuff is that it sounds like it's been recorded on an old press-play-and-record tape machine and while in the early 1990's it was charmingly out of step with broader expectations of the indie world, now it's hard not to see as being just wilfully contrary.  Like much of Barlow's output in the late 90's and early 90's, most of the songs on Electric Idiot would have been well served by being better recorded, but considering the outsider figure that he considered himself to be at the time, it's not surprising that he and Davis would choose to be off-putting in the presentation of their material.  So I guess it's both a shame and absolutely right that these songs sound like such a mess.

More of the same comes on second album (the first being a cassette only release), Take a Look Inside (1995).  There's not a lot to add to what I've said above in terms of discussing either the band or their material at this point.  It's scrappy, ragged stuff, involving as much shouting and shrieking as singing, as much random noise as melody and as poorly recorded as possible, with every one of its fourteen tunes lasting between 1 and 2 minutes.  Again, in amongst the fuzz, the mess and the deliberate obscurity are some lovely little potential tunes, but Barlow and Davis' basic remit was to mangle everything that could be perceived as traditional or appealing into jagged shards of mixed-up noise and melody and while the pretence at naive messing about can occasionally charm (opener 'Blossom', and the excellent 'Had To Find Out' for instance) for the most part they succeed in their aim of being heartily frustrating.

Finally for today it's the 1996 7" 'Palm of My Hand' which is another of Barlow's many odes to the joys and despairs of onanism (I'm not sure if anybody else has been so prolific in terms of their, er, output on the subject) and it's a good tune, but it still suffers from the same issues as the previous records, as does B-side 'Mood Swing'.