The duo went into the studio with some cash and some great songs in early 1997 and the resultant album, Dare To Be Surprised was kind of an amalgam of their earlier records and 'Natural One'. It's not all based on loops and beats but it certainly has much higher production values and it sounds really good. Interestingly, although there are still occasional diversions into abstraction or noise for its own sake, for the vast majority of the record it's all about the tunes and the melodies. Indeed the album really serves as a calling card for Barlow's songwriting outside of his work in Sebadoh, because it was at about this time that he really started letting the songs show themselves rather than self-consciously hiding them behind noise or breaking them up. You can't help but wonder whether Barlow's intention had always really been to write delicate, gorgeous tunes but always chose to work with sidekicks who preferred "keeping it real".
And that suspicion really becomes pretty much a fact with the release of the absolutely wonderful One Part Lullaby (1999). Barlow has described the idea they had was to go into the studio and make an album as if they would never be able to make another, and so create the best they possibly could. Personally I think Davis had very little to do with either this idea or the results of it - it's all too clearly tied to Barlow's ideas of songwriting and I suspect Davis played a very minimal role in the whole thing. One Part Lullaby absolutely could not be further from Take a Look Inside, either in terms of production, presentation, arrangement, mood or songwriting, it's absolutely lovely. Every song is an exercise in balanced and graceful nostalgia or keen melancholy with lyrics that have virtually none of Barlow's previous essential sarcasm or silliness, and he allows his cool but attractive voice to finally really deliver the songs. There are no real duds on the album and while the instrumental 'Serge' isn't doing much, it's the lowest point on the album, every other song is a charm from the bright teen ambition nostalgia trip 'Free To Go' to the absolutely glistening 'Someone To Love'. The whole thing bristles with confidence, something which Barlow had never previously shown any signs of and it's uplifting from the opening bars to the last, and was easily one of the best albums of 1999 and one of the greats of the decade.
After One Part Lullaby John Davis quit the Folk Implosion leaving just Barlow to decide whether to carry on with the group name. He gathered a couple of new collaborators and rechristened the band the New Folk Implosion (recalling one of Spinal Tap's best gags) and they released a self-titled album in 2004. Another step in a different direction, the New Folk Implosion is a gloomy rock record, with Barlow's tunes turned into big rock ballads (in a strictly indie sense obviously, this isn't exactly Meat Loaf). Some of it works, some of it doesn't but it's telling that the best tune on the album ('Brand of Skin') is also the one that sounds closest to the material on One Part Lullaby. The jagged guitar solos and sense of a band playing hard simply don't fit with either Barlow's songs or our collective idea of him as a personality and it jars a bit. There's a lovely lower key number in 'Pearl', but when the blues-boogie guitarism of 'End of Henley' starts you know there's something quite wrong. There was no more Folk Implosion of any kind after the New Folk Implosion was released.
The international representative of modern Brazilian samba and bossa nova, Celso Fonseca, released his breakthrough album, Natural, in 2003. I say breakthrough but that may be a bit of an overstatement because nobody bought anything he released afterwards anywhere outside Brazil. Nevertheless, Natural is a superb exercise in traditionally structured samba and bossa with a gentle sprinkle of modernity. It's beautifully produced, with lots of space and the whole album is very airy. The obvious touchstones of Baden Powell and Gilberto Gil are expressly clear throughout the record but that's not to say that it's a slavish apeing of old styles. It's exceptionally smooth, delicate and hints at the greats of the form while retaining a subtly persuasive character of its own. It's a tired old cliche to refer to samba as being great for a summer day, but Natural probably is as close to the perfect soundtrack for a relaxed sunny day as you can get.
Freaky French chanteuse Brigitte Fontaine's career got off to a flying start with the amazing and challenging Brigitte Fontaine Est... album, released in 1968. It's a complete sideshow of styles, from bouncy jazz-funk on 'Comme Rimbaud' to lushly aorchestrated balladeering on 'Dommage Que Tu Sois Mort' (which incidentally is a fabulous showcase for Jean-Claude Vannier's arranging skills, as amply demonstrated three years later on Serge Gainsbourg's Melody Nelson album). There's jumpy pop, there's cabaret, there's angular rock, all delivered with Fontaine's wobbly, declarative voice. It's all great stuff and although her work would get more difficult to like, and certainly more jazzy, Brigitte Fontaine Est... is one of the great lost odd albums of the late 60's.
And to round out the day it's the third album by Dave Grohl and his Foo Fighters, 1999's There Is Nothing Left to Lose. As far as totally rad rockin' pop music goes, Grohl has got the whole thing down, melding really strident melodies with crunching rock. The only difficulty is that as a template it's not very flexible and too often you find that you're wondering whether you've already heard the song you're on earlier in the album; because the songs are, truth to be told often quite samey. But there again, if it's lively rock with a jaunty pop edge, why not - it's not as if anything much is going on but feeling the breeze through the passenger-side window. There are some big numbers on There Is Nothing Left to Lose, and unsurprisingly the biggest are those that were single releases ('Breakout', 'Learn to Fly', 'Stacked Actors', etc) but there are still plenty of other great tunes. The thing that really works about the Foo Fighters is that they act like it's still the 1970's in terms of the way they treat the music business - if you want to be known, you tour and you dig the audience, rather than seeing touring as the necessary slog to get the big money. Grohl always comes across as a decent bloke and there's something rather charming about the way that the band clearly enjoy each other's company. I remember a joint review of the docco DVD's of the Foo Fighters and L'il Wayne (which were released on the same day) which drew stark contrasts between the Foo Fighters enjoyment of each other and their music, and their openness about their self-determination and their good fortune, and L'il Wayne's dead-inside existence, being pushed this way and that between promoters, execs and anybody else who wants to get something from him, and scarcely able to articulate a sentence. Anyway, it's all an aside to the fact that, like all Foo Fighters albums, There Is Nothing Left to Lose is a great album, full of great tunes, which you'll be hard pressed to have any memory of as soon as the record's over.
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