LaRM day 68 (Cardigans-Caitlin Cary)

The last Cardigans album was 2005's Super Extra Gravity. This is closer in tone to Long Gone Before Daylight than any of their other records, but it's even more of a straight rock album. There are big songs here and it's a determinedly mid-tempo bit of grandstanding. It's maybe slightly too long to hold the concentration throughout and it's not as good on the whole as its predecessor but it's still a great collection of songs and I don't think it's a bad way for the story to have ended by any means. I suppose the only thing that does seem slightly sad is that, in listening to all the records in order, you can hear the tonal shift from such lively upbeat tunes to this beautifully written but still fairly plodding end with real clarity. I think Super Extra Gravity is a genuinely good record (it's still leagues ahead of Gran Turismo) but there's still maybe something missing.

John Carpenter didn't only make fantastic movies in the late 70's/early 80's, he also wrote fantastic scores for them. The soundtrack for Escape from New York (1982) is absolutely superb, an ice cold slab of minimal electronica which makes a lot of stuff that gets made today seem utterly redundant. It does sound very much of its time, but I suspect that that is as much to do with the success of the movies that Carpenter scored as the actual sound being dated. If anything, if somebody made this stuff today it wouldn't be questioned. It's really great stuff, spacious yet claustrophobic, clinically electronic yet jarringly atmospheric, and both naff and supremely cool simultaneously, it's truly ace. Incidentally, this is the first of a number of soundtracks I've got that were reissued on the untouchable Italian label Dagored, whose beautiful reissues put most other labels to shame.

Now here's one to divide opinion. Caroline is the younger sister of J-Pop also-ran Olivia Lufkin and where Olivia has made all kinds of records (presumably at her various management companies suggestions) Caroline has only made two albums in the last six years, which are fairly interchangeable. Caroline's stuff is icy electronica with exceedingly whispy, girly vocals. It should be appalling. It isn't though, it's absolutely lovely. I'm not sure what it is that works, I guess it's because the vocals that should be grating are so unaffected as to be utterly charming, the music that should be a kind of Vespertine-era Bjork rip-off is less abstract and so more immediately relateable, and there is something wholly enagaging about the wintery air of melancholy that pervades the entire record. There's only song in which the chorus skates dangerously close to the kind of meaningless whimsy that sits so neatly in a lot of the sentimental end of J-Pop ('I'll Leave My Heart Behind'), but otherwise it sounds like a romantic young indie girl's notion of delicate electronica and it works really beautifully.

Vikki Carr may have had more success in her career since starting to sing exclusively in Spanish for the Latin American market since 1980, but her earlier career had occasional high spots and Nashville By Carr (1970) is a charming bit of corny vocal belting. Her records for the most part are rightly regarded as fairly sub-standard pop and country grandstanding and she isn't exactly one of the big names for good reason. However, there are loads of perfectly good workmanlike artists throughout pop history and the 60's and 70's parts of Carr's recording history are, I suspect, due a little bit of a critical reinvention. Nashville By Carr has some big old songs banged out in a healthful style; there are great little versions of 'Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head' and 'Everybody's Talkin'' as well as some decent other bits and pieces done in a solid late-country style. It's interesting to note that during the 60's and 70's the lower tier US performers were soooo much better than the lower tier UK performers (better than most top billers in truth).

And so on to something awesomely stupid, it's Ric Ocasek's mammoth pop machine, the Cars. Now, this is another example of the five-album boxset that I got from work which explains how I come to have five Cars albums. The eponymous first album from 1978 is, of course, totally brilliant. It's the ultimate example of the "open top cars and girls in T-shirts" school of pop-hit record-making, cheap, light, trashy pop music with guitars and synths working out their jagged battle for rhythmic supremacy. It's idiotic, sleazy, and second only to the Knack's albums for mind-blowing pointlessness. It's truly, truly brilliant. There are a couple of non-songs here but that goes with the territory and the big songs more than make up for it ('My Best Friend's Girl', 'You're All I've Got Tonight' and particularly 'Just What I Needed' (every time the missed beat happens my heart skips with it, it's genius) are all superb bits of gigantic pop fluff).

Ocasek's ingenious idea of stripping out any intellectual element from New Wave and putting some base pop smarts in instead continues to reap rewards on second album Candy-O (1979). The songs do seem a little bit more laboured than on the debut and there is a slightly more plodding pace, but there are still some blistering bits of vacuous guitar-pop here. 'Let's Go', 'Candy-O', 'Got a Lot On My Head' are all great catchy pop songs, but it's the subtler tunes that are better in some ways ('Double Life' is a brilliant song that prefigures the gentler approach that a lot of successful guitar-pop would adopt in the 80's for instance). It's not the ridiculous barn-storming show-off of the first album but it's still a great, stupid bit of supreme pop nous. Third album Panorama (1980) shows signs of difficulties in the Cars camp. It's a confused record which I fear resulted from a desire by Ocasek to appear to be a serious musician and song-writer. He should have been satisfied with being a genius at idiocy. Although there isn't a massive stylistic leap, Panorama just isn't any fun. There are some decent tunes, but nothing grabs you by the throat and there's something clearly meant to be intense or serious about the songs but they just sound lacklustre instead.

Both better and worse is fourth album Shake It Up (1981). The frothy pop songs are much better than anything on Panorama (the title track is great) but it's also got worrying signs of an intention to build on the weaker elements too. Slowie 'I'm Not the One' is absolutely atrocious for instance and worryingly it really feels as if Ocasek is trying to prove his chops as a great songwriter in the classic mould. He isn't, he's a brilliant pop song writer and half of Shake It Up proves how adept he is at one thing and how incompetent at the other. Finally, fifth album Heartbeat City (1984) is built around one monstrous piece of maudlin songwriting which has become ubiquitous thanks to the black hole of Live Aid, said song being 'Drive'. The whole album seems to be striving for a mature rock sound and I don't think it works at all. Even the big pop songs sound dry and the whole thing is basically a bit tedious. There's plenty of big guitar solos, lots of classic synth noises but it all adds up to very little sadly. Weirdly many years later Ocasek would produce an album for Guided By Voices, an unpredictable but strangely appropriate match.

Legendary backing singer Valerie Carter made a few solo albums while doing her studio day jobs and the first of these, Just a Stone's Throw Away (1977) is a brilliant piece of session musician wizardry. Her vocals are the kind of thing that American Idol contestants dream of being able to do and her voice is unsurprisingly quite a versatile thing. Her rendition of 'Ooh Child' which opens the album has become the definitive version of the song, and for good reason. For the most part the album is a smooth California Sound type of deal, but that's no real surprise when you consider the musicians backing her up. We've got almost all of Little Feat, James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, John Sebastian, Jackson Browne and Jeff Porcaro giving their time here, and the mixture of southern soul and LA folk-rock is a real winner. Just a Stone's Throw Away is one of those albums that's always there on the peripheries of conversations about great lost albums and it never gets its full due.

Finally for today it's Ryan Adams' old mucker in Whiskeytown, the delightful Caitlin Cary. Her second solo album, I'm Staying Out (2003) goes a long way in showing just how important she was in creating and carrying Whiskeytown's sound. There are some absolutely lovely gentle country rockers ('Beauty Fades Away' and 'I Want To Learn To Waltz with You' are stunners) and some solid rock songs with a sharp Americana edge ('Cello Girl' and 'Lorraine Today') and all in all it's a great record, perhaps a little to considered, too mature, but still full of special moments.

LaRM day 67 (Caravan-Cardigans)

So we kick off today with some serious(ly terrible) Canterbury sound prog in the shape of Caravan's For Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night (1973). Now this album did the double in that it managed to fit into two record quests that Patrick and I undertook, the first being that we had to hunt down as much quality 70's prog as possible, and secondly that we had to buy every album that we came across that was released in the year that we were born. I've got some terrible records as a result of that mission, but this is I think the first so for on this odyssey. Anyway, Caravan were pretty terrible, and they insisted on having rather juvenile suggestive song and album titles ('Derek's Long Thing', 'He Who Smelt It, Dealt It') which doesn't really give any indication of the absurdly overblown ambition of most of the music. The 10 minute album closer for instance is a dramatic piece, made of reimagined bits of folk tunes strewn throughout with prog synths and a full orchestra. It's ridiculous and although I have to admit to sneakily loving this stuff, it's also total shit. As is the rest of the album which is a mixture of little prog pop songs and stupidly complicated prog blowouts ('Cthlu Thlu' is mind-bendingly daft) but as I say I can't help but dig this abject nonsense.

I really, really loved the Cardigans way back when and listening to Emmerdale again for the first time in ages I'm reminded why. It's a thoroughly charming record which manages to marry a relentlessly bleak outlook with some of the most endearingly cheerful tunes. Every song is an absolute winner and it's that mix of lyrical miserablism with upbeat melody that creates such an unexpectedly wonderufl record. 'Rise & Shine', 'Sick & Tired' and 'After All...' are all fabulous pop songs and indeed even the slower, slightly less bright songs ('Over the Water', 'In the Afternoon') are real stunners (in some ways I prefer the slower songs because they reflect the overall gloom of the record more precisely). A couple of singles were released to promote Emmerdale and it's another sign of the quality of the Cardigans songwriting that their B-sides are always decent. 'Plain Parade' is a great song that is easily good enough to have fitted on the album, and it ends with a classy tribute to their beloved Black Sabbath. Indeed the B-side to the first single from the second album, 'Carnival' is a priceless cover of Sabbath's 'Mr Crowley'.

Second album, Life (1995) was the first offical release outside Sweden and as a result it's a mix of new songs and choice bits from Emmerdale (which like an idiot I spent £25 on in 1995, not realising that it would get an official UK release the following year). The decision seems to have been to sell the band as a kind of retro-kitsch act and therefore all but one of the gloomier songs from Emmerdale make no appearance on Life and the new songs are all super-upbeat and although lyrically Nina Persson is still pretty down, the songs on the surface are pretty light, airy and indeed a touch kitsch. It's sort of a false impression that the album gives of what the band are really like and I think for many people the super-gloomy elements of the next album came as something of a surprise. Anyway, Life is a lovely record and if you're prepared for the more over the top popiness of it ('Gordon's Garden Party'!) then it's another charmer. The B-sides to the 'Rise & Shine' single are a bit silly ('Pikebubbles' is a cutesy song but 'Cocktail Party, Bloody Cocktail Party' is a 16 minute bit of knockabout daftness in which a selection of Cardigans tunes are reinterpreted on lounge piano).

The big smash hit for the band came with the first single from the third album. I've always found 'Lovefool' to be a faintly unsatisfying song outside the context of the album and as a stand-alone song it becomes surprisingly hollow. No wonder it was such a huge success. Anyway, the B-sides are OK, 'Nasty Sunny Beam' is fairly typical Cardigans fare and there's a demo version of another Sabbath cover. 'Lovefool' works much better in the context of the album First Band on the Moon (1996) which is far and away their best record as far as I'm concerned. All of the winkingly twee arrangements have been effectively jettisoned and the overall tone and feel of the album is long, long way away from that of Life. It's a relentlessly grim album tonally and topically and although there's still a little joie de vivre in the sound, for the most part the tunes match the sentiment. It's a very grown-up record and a very unhappy one which absolutely revels in the opportunity to revisit the darker moments of Emmerdale. It's a really fabulous album and certainly one of the best indie pop records of the 90's, it's really, really great. Another single from the album was 'Been It' (a much better song than 'Lovefool' for a single I think) and the B-sides are a jaunty demo of an album track, and great new tune, 'Blah Blah Blah'.
And so from their best album to their worst. Gran Turismo (1998) is more gloom lyrically but it's also gloom musically and the incorporation of some electronic instrumentation and processed drums make something of a mockery of their previous records and do the band no good service as a result. Instead of First Band on the Moon's hugely delicate and hugely successful balancing act, Gran Turismo is simply turgid. It's not a bad album but it's simply not a good one either. It's really just a fairly boring rock record. The only songs to really have any life in them are the two biggest singles ('My Favourite Game' and 'Erase/Rewind') but even these two are disappointing by the Cardigans standards. Taking a bit of a break allowed the band to rethink and 2003's Long Gone Before Daylight is a great return to form. Persson's association with Nathan Larson and Sparklehorse's Mark Linkous seems to have inspired the band to incorporate a little bit of laid back Americana into their Nordic indie-pop and the result is a langorous and surprisingly mature record which is a joy to listen to. It's a kind of late night slow-burner and in direct contrast to Gran Turismo's clinical, processed chilliness Long Gone Before Daylight is a smoky, warm record. The songs are bigger, denser but much more interesting. There are some lovely rock songs ('You're the Storm' is great) and the whole thing sounds much more relaxed and confident than anything on Gran Turismo.

LaRM day 66 (Can-Captain Beefheart)

Can reunited in 1989, a decade after their previous album, to record and release Rite Time. They probably shouldn't have bothered, the majority of it is absolutely terrible ('Hoolah Hoolah' is abysmal, despite having some pretty electrifying guitar work from Michael Karoli). There are a couple of tunes that still show the old Can magic ('Like a New Child', 'In the Distance Lies the Future') and there's an interesting attempt at creating an unusual kind of abstract groove on 'Give the Drummer Some' but on the whole Rite Time is a pretty poor record. I've also got a sort of promo sampler which has one tune from each of Can's main albums and some solo work from Karoli, Holgar Czukay, Jaki Liebzeit and Irmin Schmidt, but none of this is really essential stuff (apart from filling in the inexcusable gaps left by the absence of the Ege Bamyasi and Future Days albums - 'Moonshake' from Future Days is one of the best tunes they ever recorded).

Candypants only made one album but it's a great one. Candypants (2000) is a fun bit of knockabout twee power-pop, with a nice nerdy, retro vibe to it. It's all lively, slightly sarky, pop music which is sort of akin to the lighter end of April March's type of songwriting. There's more silliness here though and it's all done with tongue in cheek and while some of the songs aren't particularly brilliantly written, the ones that are make up for it. It's basic stuff but completely loveable and there are one or two absolutely top flight examples of the genre on here ('Dishy' is particularly ace).

As the Broken Social Scene's popularity increased, so attention started gathering for the various other bands and solo projects that its members were involved in. Founder members Brendan Canning and Kevin Drew each took the opportunity to make solo albums, but using various members of the BSS as support. Brendan Canning's Something For All Of Us (2008) is probably the slightly weaker of the two but it's still a decent addition to the vast BSS catalogue. Canning seems to be more interested in the textures rather than the structure of songs and as a result the tunes on his album are denser, have more stuff going on in them but aren't as immediately appealing. There are some charmers ('Antique Bull' is lovely) and it's generally a really decent record but it takes a while for its finer points to reveal themselves. If anything it sounds like a laid-back version of the standard BSS albums.

Laura Cantrell, like Neko Case, moved away from a burgeoning little indie rock career by developing an interest in country songwriting of the Emmylou Harris school. Where Case has retained a somewhat edgy, unpredictable nature in her records, Cantrell has immersed herself wholesale in the style and her first album, Not the Tremblin' Kind (2000) is brilliant evidence that this faintly old-fashioned style of country music is nowhere nearly run dry. It's an absolutely lovely record, and its faithful devotion to its sources is both a testament to Cantrell's love of the music and her pure understanding of how it works. There isn't a scent of pastiche about Cantrell's records and while at first listen you wonder whether this is a one-trick approach it quickly proves itself to be nothing other than a beautifully honest revival of a genre which seemed to have quietly died out. Second album, When the Roses Bloom Again (2002) is unsurprisingly more of the same, and is similarly a mix of mostly covers and a few originals, but this time round Cantrell's songwriting has come on in leaps and bounds and her songs stand up perfectly well next to the superbly chosen covers. Where Not the Tremblin' Kind could occasionally feel like she was trying out the style, When the Roses Bloom Again proves that she had learned it inside out and was able to write songs to rival the greats of the genre. 'Broken Again' for instance could have been written at any time in the last 60 years, and if that isn't a compliment to this kind of songwriting then nothing is. It's absolutely wonderful.

Third album Humming By the Flowered Vine (2005) is once again a mix of perfectly selected covers (Cantrell's taste is notoriously expansive and her knowledge of music history apparently equally so) and originals. There is a slightly different tone to this album though - there are songs that veer dangerously close to being country-pop and while in anybody else's hands that would be a horrifying development, for Cantrell it's just another opportunity to demonstrate just how adept she is. To be fair, the pop element is as muted as it possibly can be, this is no Garth Brooks album, but it is jauntier, bolder and has more of a sway in its hips than the first two albums. Once again, Cantrell's own songs are fantastic and easily stand up to the great covers, and if Humming By the Flowered Vine isn't Cantrell's best album, it's certainly the most enjoyable. I don't know what she was doing in the meantime but it was six years until her next album, 2011's Kitty Wells Dresses: Songs of the Queen of Country Music. Apart from the opening title track all of the songs are cover versions, either of songs that Wells had hits with back in the 1950's or songs that are in some way about or relevent to her. It's an odd concept and it really shouldn't work, but once again, with a depth of knowledge and understanding of the likes of Cantrell's there's no way that it could really fail. The whole album is a charm and although it takes more work to get to the true rewards than the previous immediately accessible albums, it is a great piece of work. There's no sense of diminishing returns in Cantrell's albums and whether that's because she's working so accurately in a timeless genre or because of her uncommon skill at recreating it, only time will tell I suppose.

Canyon's second album, Empty Rooms (2002), is a blustery bit of derivative rock which wears its various influences so proudly on its sleeve that it's difficult to get a handle on just what it is that it wants to be. Suffice it to say that their Neil Young urge is so severe that they even had the audacity to call one of the songs on Empty Rooms 'Mansion on the Mountain'. We've got a lot of spaced out atmospheric rockers here (most criminally of all occasionally sounding like something from the first Verve album) and we've got a carbon copy of 'Wish You Were Here', ever studied cliche in the rock canon is presented for inspection on Empty Rooms. However, it would be unfair to call it a classroom show and tell session because despite having absolutely zero originality they do manage to turn their blatant aping to their advantage here and there, and a couple of songs are genuinely affecting ('Lights of Town' and 'Ten Good Eyes' are pretty nice for instance).

Captain Beefheart's freak-out reputation is somewhat undermined by the content of his debut album, Safe As Milk (1967). Although it isn't exactly a straight blues-rock album, the peculiar touches that it does contain and fairly discreet. There are some unusual time signatures and Beefheart's lyrics (and unpredictable delivery) were abstract to say the least from the very beginning, but on the whole Safe As Milk is a scuzzy, scruffy blues rock album that fits pretty neatly into the crop of records that were appearing throughout the late 60's that took electrified blues boogie to a new, fuzzy level. It's certainly approaching the more extreme end of that output, but that's not to say that it is in any way inaccessible and it gives very little sign of the complicated stuff he would start putting out within a couple of years. If anything, Safe As Milk is a simply a fabulous piece of late 60's rock; it's even got a straight doo-wop based bit of swaying R&B in 'I'm Glad'. For all the deliberately antagonistic stuff that was to come from the Captain, Safe As Milk is simple charm. (PS, the Buddha CD reissue has a load of demos for the projected next album which never happened. This stuff gives a much clearer sign of where things were headed...)

LaRM day 65 (Isobel Campbell-Can)

The next outing for Isabel Campbell and Mark Lanegan, Sunday at Devil Dirt (2008) is better than Ballad of the Broken Seas by some distance. Although it's essentially more of the same Nancy & Lee type stuff the songwriting is much more confident and solid and there are some fantastic songs on it. It also benefits from some upfront string arrangements which lift some of the tunes up immensely. It's a great record and although it feels a little like the formula could start to wear out fairly quickly it certainly hasn't on Sunday at Devil Dirt. I haven't heard the follow-up, Hawk, yet so I don't know if the whole style has run its course yet.

Jesus, this new Blogger format is absolutely dreadful, it's a million times less user friendly than the old one. I assume hardly anything is working or properly viewable. Anyway I'll forge ahead regardless. Next up is Camper Van Beethoven's fifth album, Key Lime Pie (1989). I never really got Camper Van Beethoven back in the day (such a terrible band name for a start), they always seemed to whimsically wilful and whenever it seemed like a song might be quite nice they'd deliberately muck it up or stop, and there never seemed to be any cohesion to their records. Of course it turns out that that's why they're great. Key Lime Pie was the last proper record they made for a long time and although it doesn't sound like a band at the end of their run it does sound like the ideas might have been drying up - there are a number of really lovely songs on Key Lime Pie which is kind of out of keeping with their usual approach for a start. The album is still a total mess stylistically, racing from one piece of Americana to another piece of post-punk in a heartbeat but it's all totally charming (absurd cover of Status Quo's 'Pictures of Matchstick Men' notwithstanding).

Fuck me backwards, this is hideous. I may have to stop writing this thing if I can't revert to the old format, this is completely unworkable! It's gone from being brilliantly easy to use to a total fucking nightmare! Anyway, now we have a lengthy Can session, beginning with Soundtracks (1970). Soundtracks is a great record, showcasing the burgeoning Krautrock sound that Can would be the kings of within a year. It's a more eclectic mix on Soundtracks than other Can albums, as it is indeed composed of pieces of music that were conceived and recorded for specific individual purposes rather than to be collected together on an album. What we get as a result is an overview of the various different directions which Can were trying out in trying to find their specific sound. There are even a couple of songs on Soundtracks ('Don't Turn the Light On, Leave Me Alone', and the terrible country rock of 'She Brings the Rain') but the droning sound that would come to define them is starting to make itself heard on 'Deadlock' and particularly the 15-minute 'Mother Sky', whose hypnotic anti-riff bassline has been ripped off by many people notably Stereolab who have used it for about 75% of their songs.

Next up is the big one, 1971's Tago Mago. This is a sterling example of both Krautrock at its finest and 70's freak-out as a fantastic experiment. Besides the 17-minute freaky sound experiment 'Aumgn' there are some huge driving hypnotic grooves in brilliant opener 'Paperhouse', 'Oh Yeah' and especially the 18-minute mammoth 'Halleluhwah'. The whole album is a masterpiece of experimentation and what's particularly surprising is that, with the exception of 'Aumgn', the whole thing is completely accessible. I suppose it's the particularly acute intelligence of the band that means that it can be joltingly cerebral and instictively enjoyable at the same time.

We then skip over a couple of great albums and a couple of OK ones to arrive at 1979's Can. If making the album title eponymous was a suggestion of a new start for the band then they should have done a better job with the record. It's not disastrously bad or anything but it certainly isn't a patch on their earlier work. While retaining the essentially experimental approach was still reaping rewards, those rewards were diminishing rapidly by this point and to compensate they added more keyboard textures and more electronic rhythms. This does not seem to me to have been a very good idea, half the album sounds like anodysed Tangerine Dream or Eno at his laziest and the other half sounds like bad disco. Nonetheless Can couldn't help but add some of their indefinable magic and the album is nowhere nearly as bad as it really should be (apart from the indescribably appalling version of the 'Can-Can' which has to be heard to be believed). In 1981 Can released an album of some of their earliest recorded work, called Delay 1968. This is an interesting selection of early songs and it marks a contrast with the sub-standard work they were coming up with in the late-70's. It's basically a lot more straightforward than the records they would start to make soon after, with some fairly basic but pretty good rock grooves. There's not a lot of development in the songs and they sound like the band were aiming to be a vaguely out-there rock act rather than a groundbreaking experimental outift.

LaRM day 64 (Calexico-Isobel Campbell)

Calexico's next album, Feast of Wire (2003) expanded their palette still further, introducing some electronic sounds and beefing up the atmospheric interludes so that they play a much more cohesive role in the whole sound of the album. In fact, Feast of Wire is probably a more enjoyable listen than Hot Rail, if not as interesting as a whole. There are some really top flight songs on Feast of Wire and unlike other Calexico records it doesn't drag for any of its running time. The Latinate feel of the record is placed squarely at the front this time round, and if anything 'The Crystal Frontier' set out the band's stall for this album much more than it acted as a coda for Hot Rail. We skip over Garden Ruin which I haven't got, to 2008's Carried To Dust. The formula that they cracked with 'The Crystal Frontier' again informs the majority of the content of Carried To Dust and although it's starting to sound perhaps a little gimmicky by this point, it's still essentially fantastic stuff. The songwriting is as strong as ever and the brisk border music that they've pretty much made their own (and in some ways made up) is again the main focus. The instrumental scene setters are very few and far between and Carried To Dust is probably the most specifically song based album they've made to date.

Now we have the first two albums by Warp's glitch-hop queen, Mira Calix. Debut One On One is a skittering, jittery collection of disconcerting pieces, all broken time signatures and arhythmic beats. It's all pretty lo-fi and low-key but it certainly creates a mood. Unfortunately some of the longer pieces seem to drag and the whole thing has rather a sterile intellectual air which makes it hard to enjoy on a more visceral level. Much better is the follow-up, Skimskitta (2003) which is a warmer and more engaging record, which, despite using the same basic framework as One On One, has a much more inviting feel. I think this is partly down to the use of ambient washes as backgrounds for the twitchy glitch which grounds the music much more clearly and creates an atmosphere that is as musically engaging as it is brainy.

After those doses of icy cerebral theory we move on to something considerably more earthy. Terry Callier's What Color Is Love (1973) is another example of just how extraordinary the 70's were for music. While the 60's were all about showing off in a kind of juvenile way, it was during the 70's that rock music really started to grow up. What Color Is Love is a quite fantastic demonstration that with some intelligence, some skill and an open mind, rock music could be anything you wanted it to be. Everything is in this record, folk, blues, jazz, funk, even touches of psychedelia, but it's all treated with such an astonishingly deft touch that every element complements the other absolutely perfectly. It's the kind of record that I think Tim Buckley thought he was making and failing dismally to actually make. It's a towering musical achievement and one that is mystifyingly underappreciated generally. What Color Is Love is the best of three fantastic albums that Callier released between 1972-1974, and although the quality of his records dropped off fairly dramatically thereafter, What Color Is Love is another great 70's highlight.

And so on to something kitsch, it's Rita Calypso (she's really called Ana Laan but for the purposes of the alphabet let's pretend her name really is Rita Calypso) and her two albums Apocalypso (2002) and Sicalyptico (2004) (which I'll talk about together bearing in mind that they're pretty much the same thing done twice). I'm not sure that these superb bits of hyper-ironic bossa nova need any more describing than to say that they feature a choice sample of a David Niven interview and cover versions of songs by Astrid Gilberto and Nancy Sinatra. It's all high camp, deeply kitsch, but crucially it's not nastily self-aware and as a result if you can give yourself in to pastiche, it's absolutely charming. I suppose the essential difference is whether you can listen to this kind of stuff as if it were the real article. Normally the smug self-satisfaction of doing this kind of thing makes it unlistenable but in this case (and in the general case of Spanish label Siesta, who specialise in this cutesy 60's revisionism) it's done with such a finely attuned ear to the specifics of the style that although it's clearly pastiche it never comes across as parody and can be listened to with genuine enjoyment. She also recorded the best cover version of 'To Sir with Love' that I've ever heard so full marks for that alone.

Camera Obscura's fourth album, My Maudlin Career (2009) is further evidence of their peculiarly fervent worshipping of the Concretes sixties influenced, echoey pop. In truth it's a lovely record, with lots of delicately turned phrases, both musical and lyrical, and a deft touch with a retro sound. The best songs open and close the album ('French Navy' and 'Honey in the Sun') but in between are some charmingly open songs. The only problem that I have with the album generally is that it so clearly reeks of the influence of someone else. This is not the sound of first album Underachievers Please Try Harder, and the fact that Tracyanne Campbell even tries to emulate the vocal stylings of Victoria Bergsman just reminds me of the indie-schmindie scene-worshipping that I used to see in sickening close-up in Brighton. It's a shame because I think if they would be more honest with themselves the records would be even better than they already are.

While Isobel Campbell was becoming increasingly disenchanted with the Belle & Sebastian experience, she started putting together some songs to record on her own and these were released under the name The Gentle Waves. They are really pretty weak records, and we'll come on to those when appropriate. However, after the relative disppointment of those records she seems to have taken a step back to refocus and the first tentative steps forward were released on the 'Time Is Just the Same' EP. The hideous insipid qualities of the Gentle Waves records are brilliantly negated on these songs, partly through the judicious choice of male vocalists to work against. The title track with Eugene Kelly is a really lovely song and sets the tone. The biggest success is the introduction of Mark Lanegan's growling, brooding vocal to complement Campbell's high wispy delivery. It's brilliant in two ways, firstly because it's a great natural contrast, and secondly because it almost feels like a deliberate message to Stuart Murdoch, whose indie vocals were those of the school weed compared to Lanegan's local thug. There are still a couple of mis-steps here (weedy Morricone cover 'Argomenti' is particularly egregious) but on the whole it's a sign that Campbell was finally trying to step out of Murdoch and B&S's shadow.

The success of the collaboration between Campbell and Lanegan had obviously struck them both and they reunited to record the album Ballad of the Broken Seas. What's particularly striking is that the two of them clearly have a common interest in the musical settings of these songs, which are designed to reflect a kind of gloomy Nancy & Lee, and that the real driving force behind the whole enterprise is Campbell. She produced the album and wrote most of the material (there are a couple of covers and one song by Lanegan) and it shows a songwriting skill that was evidently waiting for a style to suit it because the material is leagues ahead of her Gentle Waves work. It's a dark, sultry album and although it does have some excessively languid moments, for the most part it's great. They clearly thought so because they made two further albums together afterwards.

LaRM day 63 (JJ Cale-Calexico)

Cale's next album, Shades (1981) is a further development of his hyper relaxed style, but there's more going on here than on 5. Opener 'Carry On' sounds like a sort of bluesy cross between mid-era Dylan and late Leonard Cohen, but this is followed by a rollicking bar-blues rumbler, 'Deep Dark Dungeon'. Shades is an album of its time, but throughout it's a great reminder that in the right hands music that doesn't challenge any particular convention can still be fantastic stuff. Cale's easy, drawling voice is better than ever and the introduction of female backing singers works really well and adds more depth to the songs. The cover was always regarded as a nice bit of design, being a kind of pastiche of the Gitanes cigarette packet, an appropriate image for Cale's sound in many ways. Incidentally Beach Boys minutiae fans, the mighty Carol Kaye provides some fabulous rumbling bass work on Shades. Moving on nearly 30 years we come to his most recent album, Roll On (2010). In many ways it's as if nothing has changed in the world, as you can play Roll On next to any of his other albums and the only difference you'll really notice is that the production is cleaner. The songs are cast from exactly the same mould as ever and weirdly it sounds great, demonstrating I suppose that what's he's doing is essentially pretty timeless.

After John Cale left the Velvert Underground I doubt anybody expected his first solo album to be a piece of sophisticated and lushly arranged pop music. Vintage Violence (1970) is a great record which shows almost no signs of any of his previous work either in the world of avant-garde classical composition or with the Velvet Underground. Instead it's a clean break and a brilliant declaration of Cale's casual skill with music in any form. It almost feels like he's saying that it's all just so easy to do, yet there's nothing off-putting about Vintage Violence, it's simply a great pop album with some charming songs and an enticingly casual atmosphere. Unlike on his later albums, there are no challenging elements, every song is a charm, and although his lyrics are as cryptic as they would ever be, even the interpretation-defying nature of most of the songs is in no way a problem. It's a really lovely record and one that I think desreves a bit of a reassessment to rank it with the later Paris 1919 and Fear. The year before the release of Vintage Violence Cale had collaborated with fellow avant-garde composer Terry Riley and recorded Church of Anthrax in 1971. When listening to Cale's work one should really do Church of Anthrax first having been written and recorded before Vintage Violence - but that's the nature of a chronological discography, got to listen in release order... Church of Anthrax is an interesting record, very different to the rest of Cale's catalogue and easily the closest to his training in the avant-garde. Three lengthy pieces dominate the record, the first title piece involving a pulsing bassline and discordant woodwind which is a fascinating piece and in some ways pre-empts a lot of modern classical's future collision with rock structures. The second, 'The Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles', is a more restrained, and longer, piece and is in nature interestingly similar to a lot of New Age type of stuff that Wyndham Hill would start putting out a few years later, although possibly slightly more discordant than the Wyndham Hill taste would allow. There are two less successful shorter pieces (one with vocals which is a terrible mis-step) and another 12-minute job which is great. The whole record needs to be listened to outside of any rock or pop expectations and as a piece of modern classical and, as such, it's pretty effective.

I haven't got the next couple of albums so move directly to the big one, Paris 1919 (1973). This is deservedly recognised as Cale's high point, it's an extraordinary rock album, filled with great pop hooks and straightforward fundaments of rock music, but it's also possibly the most esoteric straight rock album ever made. It's lyrically cryptic and allusive and the whole thing exudes an air of the most off-hand braininess, which doesn't in any way interrupt the pop smarts that frame it all. Quite apart from being awfully smart, it also has some of the best songs Cale has ever written, from the gentle ('Hanky Panky Nohow') to the genteel ('Graham Greene') to the rockin' ('Macbeth'). The title track for instance is an object lesson in how if you're smart enough you can bring the most awkward influences to bear on pop music. The Reichian piano stabs that merge into string stabs underpin a minimalist bit of horn arrangement, while Cale sings a typically impenetrable lyric, yet the whole thing sounds like a pop song. It's quite, quite brilliant, as is the rest of the album. It's one of the true greats of the 1970's - I had it as the 15th best of the 70's in a list I did a while back (for the record, we've also already the 14th (the Beach Boys Holland) and the 2nd (Bowie's Low).

Cale didn't retain the services of most of Little Feat, who done such a great job on Paris 1919, for the follow up, 1974's Fear. Instead he used Eno and Phil Manzanara of Roxy Music (and on one song, the almighty Richard Thompson) to beef up the sound, and as a result Fear has a much less nostalgic or romantic feel about it than Paris 1919. Instead, the rock element is worked to the fore this time around, together with some mild signs of Cale's developing taste to add a little psychosis to his albums. The opening track, 'Fear is a Man's Best Friend' for instance starts off as a gentle piano led pop song but by the end it's basically a bass being pummelled and Cale screeching the title over and over. It's great, but unexpected, and when it's followed by another gentle piano led song (the lovely 'Buffalo Ballet') you're already on edge about where each song might go. Really though, it's only 'Fear Is a Man's Best Friend' and the opener of side 2, 'Gun', on which Cale and his band lets rip. The rest of the album is composed of really great gentler rock songs, 'Ship of Fools', 'Emily' and 'You Know More Than I Know' being particular stand-outs. It's a fantastic album, only slightly behind Paris 1919 in quality. Next was Slow Dazzle (1975), and this is where it's clear that Cale has peaked and is beginning to come back down. It's not a bad record by any means, in fact it's really very fine, but it's uneasy and there are songs that just don't really work. In some ways it feels a bit like a work in progress, a bit too rock 'n' roll focussed, not delicate enough somehow. It does contain possibly the bleakest ever cover version in Cale's absolute emotional evisceration of 'Heartbreak Hotel', which is impressive not only in its brilliance of execution and daring but also in its depth of jet-black misery. Bearing in mind this is the album Cale made after finding Kevin Ayers having it off with his wife (the song 'Guts' opens with the line "The bugger in the short sleeves fucked my wife") it's no surprise that it's both a little haphazard and relatively grim.

Calexico's first album, Spoke (1997) is a charming collection of low-key dustbowl vignettes. There's little of the strident mariachi or indie rock meets dustbowl blues confidence of their later albums. Spoke has more clearly come out of Joey Burns and John Convertino's tenure backing Howe Gelb in Giant Sand and the affinities between Gelb's albums at the time and Spoke are very clear. It's really lovely stuff, all fractured Americana and mid-western folk but it doesn't demand your attention and because the varied songs and instrumental pieces all feel like they exist in something of a vacuum I never really have the strong sense that Spoke is an album as such rather than a collection of really nicely understated mood pieces.

I think the band really found their identity with second album The Black Light (1998). This is a much more strident record, fuller, and more solidly written and performed. There are still plenty of short mood pieces but they punctuate much more fleshed out songs, and the instrumentation is fuller. Stylistically the whole record is much more cohesive, with the martial drumming and mariachi accordion playing key roles throughout, and the idea that the band's very name evokes is more explicit in the songs and instrumental pieces. People have often mis-used Ennio Morricone as a reference point (the insistence on using Morricone's four or five Western soundtracks as shorthand really bugs me. Morricone has written over 400 scores of a breathtaking variety of styles so why he should be saddled with a specific reputation because of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly mystifies me) but I think its much more useful to look at Calexico's records as being an indie filtered fusion of light mariachi and modern Americana. Better than The Black Light by some way is, to my mind, the best record they've made to date, Hot Rail (2000). It's similar in theme and style to The Black Light, but there are less atmosphere setting pieces, it's much more song based, and the songs themselves are much more confident and striking. Where The Black Light tends to meander, Hot Rail keeps moving. Some of these are really great songs too. It all feels bigger, more solid and assured and it's a compelling listen. Finally for today is the double 7" that they released in 2001, 'The Crystal Frontier', which is a great tune, better than everything on any of the albums up to this point, all parping horns, and propulsive mariachi guitar, and there's a nice cover of American Music Club's 'Chanel No.5', together with two equally decent new songs.