Friday 29 June 2012

LaRM day 105 (Sandy Denny-Depeche Mode)

The overproduction and rock over folk aspects are pushed still further on Like An Old Fashioned Waltz (1973). Yet again though Sandy's voice and songs put up a good battle. In fact I'm not sure her voice was ever better than on Like An Old Fashioned Waltz, it's imbued with the deepest sadness through its crystalline perfection. The opener 'Solo' is, like the opener to Sandy before it, a hugely overdone heartbreaker which veers dangerously close to power ballad. But as ever, if you listen to the song rather than the grotesque production you can hear how it should have sounded, what a wounded and melancholy and thoroughly beautiful song it is. Likewise the title track which is truly gorgeous and Trevor Lucas' determination to ruin it can't win out. Incidentally by this point it had apparently become clear that the fragile Denny was asked to accept that Lucas not only wanted control of the production and artistic direction of her songs and her records but that he also wanted to have an open marriage, which I suspect was truly the beginning of the end for Sandy. Honestly, he really is quite the villain of the British folk-rock story. Anyway, there are some other lovely songs on Like An Old Fashioned Waltz ('Carnival', 'Dark the Night' and the devastating 'No End'), but the inexplicable presence of a cover of 'Whispering Grass' and Lucas' ghastly production really do mar the album. The reissue has evidence of what this record could have been by including the original piano and voice only versions of 'Like An Old Fashioned Waltz' and 'No End' which are heart-stoppingly beautiful.

Sandy rejoined the reuinted Fairport Convention for an album and tour which seemed to go well enough (and her three songs on the Fairport album, which we'll get two in a couple of months, are some of the best she ever wrote) but the last two straws for Sandy seemed to have been the commercial failure of her next album, Rendezvous (1977), and the discovery that she was pregnant. Rendezvous is truly a curate's egg, opening with a surprisingly effective rocked-up cover of Richard & Linda Thompson's 'I Wish I Was a Fool For You Again' (a song choice which I suspect spoke volumes about the state of Denny and Lucas' relationship at that point), but then follows up with a ghastly rock with sax and anaemic raggae guitar number ('Gold Dust') then, no joke, a cover of 'Candle in the Wind'. It's horrible, absolutely horrible and very little here suits Sandy's unique voice (which itself was suffering from years of heavy smoking and almost unimaginable levels of drinking). It's just all wrong. Decent songs are few and far between ('All Our Days' and especially album closer 'No More Sad Refrains') and the majority of the album is a bloated pop-rock effort that leaves one despairing for an astonishing talent who lost faith in herself and so gave herself over to someone who seemingly didn't understand and couldn't or wouldn't respect her or her work. There's no way of knowing whether she would have given up, carried on making increasingly disappointing records or found herself again and made more astonishing albums. After the birth of her daughter she was drinking more than ever and living what to all intents and purposes seems to have been a deliberately self-destructive lifestyle. Less than a year after giving birth she fell downstairs at her parents home. A couple of weeks later Lucas, possibly understandably, took their daughter and flew to Australia. A couple of weeks after that Sandy fell into a coma and died of a brain haemorrhage sustained in the fall.

Finally for Sandy Denny we have her final performance in 1977, recorded and released as Gold Dust in 1998. It's sad to hear how her voice had been changed by experience and neglect but what is interesting about Gold Dust is that, although it's not exactly a world-shattering performance, the songs that are taken from the last two albums sound much less overblown and absurd than their studio versions and there's a glimpse of how much better those records could certainly have been. But it's all of no consequence, they weren't better and Gold Dust is a slightly disspiriting end to a career. Maybe it's how it was all meant to be though. A tragedy that someone so seemingly full of life but also so full of an unfathomable melancholy should have been gifted with such talent because it could have all ended perhaps no other way.

From the sublime to the faintly ridiculous, it's the Singles (1981-1985) Depeche Mode compilation album released in 1985. Now, I have a lot of time for Depeche Mode but mainly because it's so unlikely that a bunch of spods from Basildon playing keyboards scarcely better than Casio VLTones would have become one of the biggest bands on the planet, churning out slabs of miserabilist screed and trying to commit suicide. It's just so odd, I find it vaguely charming. Anyway, the early Vince Clarke led singles are pretty rubbish ('Dreaming of Me', 'New Life', 'Just Can't Get Enough' - the NME review I think it was for 'Just Can't Get Enough' said it best: "I can - you will") but the early singles after Clarke left are abysmal synth-pop at its weediest, most tuneless and most insipid ('See You', 'Leave In Silence'). It's awful. Things improve a bit and I can't help admit to a sneaky guilty liking for 'Everything Counts', 'Master and Servant' and particularly 'Blasphemous Rumours'. But it is all really pretty daft nonsense at best and total rubbish at worst.

Wednesday 27 June 2012

LaRM day 104 (Delgados-Sandy Denny)

Disappointingly I can't find anything from the Delgados 1996 7" 'Sucrose' (apart from the lead track, and that's on the first album which we'll come to) on the internet. It's a shame because their cover of the New Bad Things 'The Dirge' is absolutely superb. So it's straight on to the first album, Domestiques (1996). What a fine record Domestiques is. It may wear it's US lo-fi ramshackle indie influences all too proudly but it's stuffed full of fine little gems of off-kilter indie rock. It comes flying out of the traps with 'Under Canvas Under Wraps' which is frantic, urgent and immediately presents the strengths of the whole band (but particularly the wonderful Emma Pollock). It's Butterglory through and through, as is the whole album, but who cares, Domestiques is a superb facsimile of a great band, so full marks for plagiarising something unexpected and impressive. There are just loads of great songs on Domestiques and it's clear how much work they were putting into the build up for it when you listen to the BBC Sessions (1997) album that come out shortly afterwards. The material on BBC Sessions is taken from a selection of different BBC radio sessions from 1995/1996 with the last being broadcast a week before Domestiques was released, so you can trace their brisk development fairly easily. The earliest songs are great ('Primary Alternative', 'Lazerwalker') but they're a little colourless, a little to deliberately quirky, and it's when you reach the songs they wrote for the album that you can here a sudden and remarkable change from little indie act to super-confident quirky rock act. It's brilliant stuff all round and apart from it's artfulness and confident angularity, it's also loads of fun.

1998's Peloton shows a further rapid development, and it's a much more laid-back, restrained record, with the focus much more solidly on the songwriting. There's some lovely gentle stuff on Peloton and I think it's a fine record. I suspect some people were disappointed that the Delgados didn't carry on the fizzing US indie path, but to my mind Peloton is where they developed a sound of their own. 'Don't Stop', for example is a wonderful, swooning tune which has a beautiful flute part holding down the angry guitars in the middle eight. There is one absolute disaster on Peloton, namely the scratching and sampling experiment of 'Blackpool', which is little short of an embarassment and sticks out like a sore thumb, but otherwise everything else on the album is really good.

Perhaps the most consistent of the Delgados records was the next, The Great Eastern (2000). I think this is a wonderful album. It's stately, it's controlled and it's superbly written. The songs, particularly Pollock's, are absolutely lovely. In fact her development as a songwriter beggars belief, because her stuff by this point is poignant, wistful, incredibly tight and deftly complex and just four years before you wouldn't believe these were the sorts of songs that the band would be writing at all. Pollock and Alun Woodward take turns on most of The Great Eastern, and it's an idea that works extremely well as each songwriter contrasts back and forth across the record. Woodward's songs are generally more straightforward both musically and lyrically and are more immediate but less compelling on repeated listens. There's charm, there's grace and there's a profound sense of expressing something valuable about The Great Eastern. There's certainly none of Domestiques' lacklustre, heads-down approach, but The Great Eastern more than makes up for its lack with songs that are smart and moving. It's complicated stuff to pull off, and I think the Delgados managed it with apparent ease.

2002's Hate album is another fabulous piece of work, extending the range of The Great Eastern. Hate has some truly excellent songs on it but it feels less cohesive, more like a collection of songs. Where the previous album sounded as if Woodward and Pollock were exchanging ideas through their songs, on Hate it sounds as if each was working in isolation and simply brought their songs to the table. Nonetheless, Hate is a superb album with some cracking, big, rolling, rumbling songs. The thing is, even amongst the increasingly complicated arrangements, the lilting melodies remain central to all the songs. It's very clever and very effective. Once again though, it's down to Pollock to provide the most arresting and the most melodically engaging stuff.

Sadly things didn't really work out for the self-described "pop" album Universal Audio (2004). The idea I guess was to make a record that sold as well as got good reviews. It was an oversight not to consider that what might happen was that you still didn't sell but got bad reviews. In any event, expectations were fairly high following Hate and the idea of a relatively light high melody album wasn't what anybody expected or wanted. In truth Universal Audio just sounds like the other Delgados albums, but stripped of the big ideas and the grand ambition. As an album in its own right, listening to it now it's surprisingly enjoyable. It's certainly not a patch on any of the others but it's absolutely not the disaster that it seemed at the time. The shame isn't so much the lightness of Universal Audio but that this was where the story ended.

Next up is the one-off collaboration between lo-fi idiots Deluxx and Lou Barlow's Folk Implosion. A 5-song 7" released in 1996, ostensibly to coincide with the soundtrack to Larry Clark's despairing Kids movie, it's a mega lo-fi mess, but weirdly the songs are really good. 'Daddy Never Understood' gets two outings and the soundtrack version has a fantastic sampled string section covering the middle eight. 'Oven Mitt' is a good bit of ramshackle crap and 'Liquid Bread' is a total waste of time, but it sounds cool. You couldn't put up with a lot more of this self-satisfied arsing around, but seven minutes of smart alecks pretending to be stupid is OK.

And so on to something so perfect it's heartbreaking. After Sandy Denny left Fairport Convention she busied herself helping out other folk acts here and there and made an album with that dolt husband of hers, Trevor Lucas, and some other mates as Fotheringay. But it wasn't until she released her first proper solo album, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens (1971), that she fufilled everything that her already utterly exceptional work in Fairport had promised. There aren't many albums that create such a warm and compassionate atmosphere of melancholy as this. Denny's songwriting is in itself something to stand in awe of, it's absolutely unique. Nobody else has been able to take traditional English folk as a template and create something that sounds not modern, not ancient, not cool, not corny, but simply timeless. It's astonishing. And then, of course, we have to mention the voice. The purest, clearest, most honest and open English singing voice in the history of popular music. There's no question about it. It's possessed entirely of the singular personality of its owner, a rough, amusingly crude woman with the deepest and most profound sense of emotional discomfort, yet it sounds like a glass bell. There are some minor problems with The North Star Grassman but I think they stem from an uncertainty about maintaining the tone of melancholy throughout, so it's leavened by the presence of rollicking knockabout versions of Dylan's 'Down in the Flood' and Brenda Lee's 'Let's Jump the Broomstick' (they are placed exactly at thirds in the tracklisting). To me, these don't really work and break the flow of an otherwise faultless album. Richard Thompson's guitar work is flawless, as ever, and he and Denny clearly had an uncommon rapport. Denny's songs are simply lovely, 'Late November', 'The Sea Captain' and 'Crazy Lady Blues' particularly so, and there's a beautiful version of the traditional 'Blackwaterside' which frees it entirely from its "finger-in-the-ear" folk history.

It would seem that it was a disappointment to Sandy and particularly to her husband Trevor Lucas that she wasn't making the charts and as a result, from this point on, Sandy's albums suffered from an awful tendency to be blousily overblown in terms of their production. The rock element is played up and the folk toned down and as a result there is an uneven and somewhat naff feel to them which really is tragic because Sandy's songwriting and voice are scarcely less than perfect. Not even the attempts of Lucas and various unsympathetic engineers can ruin these glorious records though. Sandy (1972) features some of her finest and most moving songs ('It'll Take a Long Time' is a truly stunning, but turned into something of a blaster by the production, and 'Sweet Rosemary' is quite beautiful). The first side does have a couple of low moments (another inappropriate Dylan cover - a countrified 'Tomorrow Is a Long Time' for instance) but the second side is glorious throughout and ends with a stunning three song run in 'Bushes and Briars', 'It Suits Me Well' and 'The Music Weaver'. Most people regard Sandy as her best solo album but I prefer The North Star Grassman and despite the presence of a handful of terrible songs, the next one, Like An Old Fashioned Waltz, which we'll do tomorrow.

Tuesday 26 June 2012

LaRM day 103 (Deerhoof-De La Soul)

Experimental art-rock freakout merchants Deerhoof are something of an acquired taste, but I really like their daffy records. 2004's Milk Man is a great bit of lo-fi experimentation, all spazzed rhythms and tinny angular guitars. It's a spooky record, off-kilter and disorientating but it's also surprisingly melodic, with some great little pop hooks buried in amongst the freakiness. Eighth album Offend Maggie (2008) is even more conventional in its song structures (but that's not saying a great deal, it's still pretty much all over the place) and is a better album on the whole. It's a pretty charming affair with its scattershot approach to both style and rhythm being presented in a more restrained way than usual. There are references to all kinds of stuff, from folk to musique concrete and it's a broad canvas that the band use. It's a lovely record in many ways and it's surprising to find that besides being enjoyably unpredictable, it's also beautifully presented.

When I was a teenager doing my metal phase I loved Def Leppard. There's no explaining it beyond age. Listening to Vault: Greatest Hits 1980-1995 (1995) now I'm struck by various things (besides the fact that it's unbelievably shit, obviously). For a start the production on this stuff is immense, the drums are so deep that they're absolutely thunderous, it's utterly absurd. Everything is so incredibly clean and shiny and polished to the absolute max - this stuff is pristine. I guess it was all the rage for hair-metal to be recorded in this ridiculously clinical way, but the Leppard records pushed it to its limit. If memory serves this is partly because that dolt Mutt Lange was behind the desk. Anyway, the songs are appallingly bad of course, from 'Pour Some Sugar On Me' to 'Armaggedon It', it's all garbage. But the thing is, I can't possibly listen to anything from On Through the Night, High and Dry or Pyromania without loving it. Bloody teenage years have left me with a whole raft of terrible records that I really love. This means that listening to Vault evokes mixed emotions because one minute there's some tosh from a later album and I'm thinking "God this is awful", but the next there's 'Photograph' or 'Animal' and I'm thinking "God this is awful. It's brilliant'.

OK, so next up is something truly abysmal. I have my good friend Patrick to thank for the double CD compilation of the best of Holland's premier comedy rap act Def Rhymz which is called De Allergoeiste. There's one particular video that Def Rhymz made in which he's a security guard at a museum who can't stop some crazy kids having a party and so joins in and the sight of Def getting down a grandma is top quality stuff. Anyway, his dancehall-lite comedy hip hop is absolutely appalling and Def himself seems to represent a remarkably offensive stereotype of a leering, eye-rolling black man. I don't know if supposed to be highly ironic or something but it's utterly bizarre that this stuff exists. Still at least he's better than Holland's other top class rap act, the hugely inappropriately monikered Brainpower.

Death metal merchants Deicide have made a bunch of half decent thrash albums but they're all basically exactly the same so all anyone needs is the Best Of Deicide: 1990-2001 (2003). Twenty tracks of pummelling, blistering death metal which, bearing in mind they're American, is surprisingly good. The difficulty is the astonishing lack of variety, and as one song passes into the next you feel a bit like you're listening to a single 60-minute work. The whole record is a load of nonsense of course but that goes with the territory when you're talking about death metal (frontman Glen Benton has an upside-down cross literally branded on his forehead) so it's not really a problem. The thing is it's all pretty convincing and it's easy to be a bit lily-livered making these kind of records and Deicide go all out.

De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising (1989) really is a great album isn't it? It really is. Everybody loves it and with good reason - it's ace. Everybody knows it by heart so I'm not going to say anything else about it.

Monday 25 June 2012

LaRM day 102 (Death Cab for Cutie-Deep Purple)

It took me a while to come round to Death Cab for Cutie, because I always felt that it was all a bit too "revenge of the nerds". Although I like indie-dweebs records, I have a natural aversion to the actual indie-dweebs themselves. I think it's something to do with the time I lived in Brighton, which was the capital of the indie-dweeb kingdom then. Anyway, having decided to give up assuming that the weedy little records that Death Cab for Cutie put out weren't worth bothering about, I had a proper listen to a late album, Narrow Stairs (2008) and realised that despite half of the songs being pretty wet, there's some brutal stuff on it and really it's just Ben Gibbard's nasal whine of a voice that causes the problem - the actual songs are great. Narrow Stairs has an engaging bleakness to it and although it does have that indie-band-on-major-label type of feel, particularly to the production it's still a bold and pretty unashamed rock album. There are a few dud moments but overall it's pretty decent stuff. The following year's The Open Door EP is a mixed bag, but it does have a couple of really fine songs ('My Mirror Speaks' and 'I Was Once a Loyal Lover').

Death in Vegas' The Contino Sessions (1999) caused quite a stir when it came out. Listening to it now it's hard to see quite what all the fuss was about. It's certainly a decent record with a dramatically dark atmosphere but it's not a masterpiece and it sort of outstays its welcome. As far as gloomy, dank electronica goes it's really successful but it's really very much of its time and the passage of only 13 years has left it sounding stranded in the past. All the songs work indivually and Iggy Pop's turn on 'Aisha' is entertaining but you do find yourself questioning whether this stuff was really going anywhere. It's a surprisingly enjoyably nostalgic listen but it doesn't make me want to listen to any of their other records.

Another band it took me a while to admit to liking is the Decemberists. The arch theatricality of it all put me off and it all struck me as being a little bit too Danielson Familie like for my taste. I was surely wrong about that though, because the Decemberists albums are a much more intricate and involved proposition. There's a proggish determination to them which I really like. I guess Colin Meloy's affected vocals (and equally affected songwriting) can be tough to take on, but I think it's all great stuff. Third album, Picaresque (2005) demonstrates just how dear to Meloy's heart the British folk-rock movement of the late 1960's is. If anything, it's the faintly corny edge of Pentangle that really informs Meloy's songwriting, but he imbues it all with a kind of indie-rock credibility, which he simultaneously undermines with a prog-rock approach to song structure. It's a fascinating and unusual approach to being an indie rock band and it really works well. Picaresque is a collection of great songs written in that style, and although the extended indie-prog workouts are scarcely evident, you can hear what was coming.

The super-ambition starts to really make itself clear on 2006's The Crane Wife. It has the usual faintly supernatural medievalism to the lyrics (all clearer and clearer evidence of the completeness of the British folk foundations on which this stuff is all built), but it also has a massive dose of seriously prog inspired elements. The Keith Emerson style keyboard work on 12-minute workout 'The Island' is a total giveaway, it's a direct lift of Emerson's work. And there again is another key to the success of the Decemberists - they aren't afraid of appearing desperately naff, and it's the confidence with which they affect this carelessness that I think makes it all work so well. The Crane Wife is perhaps a lift heavy and a little overloaded, and possibly a bit disjointed, but it's a supremely good album which accepts its appeal will be limited and plays arrogantly to its crowd.

2009's The Hazards of Love finally goes to the dread place threatened by the Decemberists previous records - the concept album. Now, as has been clear throughout the last 102 days, I have no problem whatsoever with either a) the concept album, or (b) prog. Therefore, contrary to most of the outraged indie kids, I think that The Hazards of Love is a truly fantastic record. It's florid, excessive, overblown, pretentious, absurd, grandstanding, grotesque, self-important, whimsically enigmatic, and it's precisely for all those reasons that it's absolutely superb, and it's the ultimate demonstration that Meloy is creating this stuff entirely on his own terms, without reference to anyone but his influences. The rest of the world's opinion is their own and they're entitled to it, but it doesn't seem to have any relevance to his own view of what kind of records he could and should make, and it's this unshakeable confidence in the rightness of what he's doing that makes it all so successful. There's Deep Purple, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, Pentangle, Emerson Lake & Palmer, King Crimson, Fairport Convention, even Meat Loaf and Steeleye Span in here but incredibly it's still a thoroughly modern indie rock album. It's a spectacular display of singularity of vision and it's enormously impressive.

Last up is the massive rock machine that is Deep Purple's Fireball (1971). What a great slab of 70's heaviosity Fireball is. It's a rollicking, bluesy roll of an album, packed with smoking riffs and stoned out rhythm. It's a really dumb album but good lord it's superb. In some ways it's the quintessential heavy rock album (more so than Machine Head I would say) because it encapsulates so perfectly just how broad the rock scope was in the 1970's, all based on those old blues riffs certainly, but reaching out all over the place. It's tight and it's humourless while being absurd, and it's little more than brilliant fun.

Friday 22 June 2012

LaRM day 101 (Dead Can Dance-Death By Chocolate)

Dead Can Dance expanded their sound throughout the 1980's, to incorporate not only more arcane instrumentation but also broader cultural influences. There is a strong Middle Eastern foundation to much of their work by the release of the live album, Toward the Within (1994). It's a fantastic demonstration of the remarkable depth of both their understanding of composition but also of their musical proficiency. Lisa Gerrard's voice is on particularly fine, otherwordly form and Brendan Perry's multi-instrumentalism is absolutely breathtaking. There's no getting away from the fact that it is still all terribly earnest, po-faced and, as a result, a little bit daft. Nonetheless if you can accept the gothy undertones and the sepulchral atmosphere then there's a huge amount to take both intellectually and musically from Toward the Within.

The Dead Kennedys were one of the bands that my brother introduced me to when I was really young that got me intrested in music at all. I still really love the idea that while in the UK punk bands were talking about nothing much, in the US they were going hell for leather to engage personally and politically with the world. Of course listening to it now it all seems a bit tame, but at the time I reckon it must have been thrilling. The Dead Kennedys first album, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (1980) remains one of the finest examples of how punk rock could be used for specific ideological ends as well as being one of the records that launched and defined the hardcore scene. Every song on it is not only a blistering piece of excoriatingly sarcastic leftist political analysis but also a brilliant tune. Although not everything on it is of the superb quality of 'Holiday in Cambodia', every song plays a specific and brilliant part of the whole. Jello Biafra's high, slightly camp vocals sit angrily atop a great ramshackle structure of tinny guitar and rumbling bass. Part of the brilliance of this stuff is that it sounds like it's made of sticks but is actually a supremely solid structure. Final album, Bedtime for Democracy (1986) on the other hand sounds like a band at the end of the line. It's a tired version of a hardcore punk record and although the political will is still brutally and majestically present, musically it all sounds like the band felt that the game was up. It's not a bad record at all, it just feels jaded and weirdly out of time.

Well, what to say about the Dead Weather and their second album Sea of Cowards (2010)? Apart from anything else Jon Spencer is presumably furious that all his work has been reduced to this irritatingly pale imitation. Sea of Cowards is an essentially redundant bunch of rip-offs of, alternately, Blues Explosion and Boss Hog songs. The really frustrating thing about it is that it proves that we were all pretty dim to fall for Jack White's schtick. I remember seeing the White Stripes at their first UK gig in a pub in Tufnell Park and thinking it was incredibly exciting, but in retrospect I wonder if the second-rate artifice was already there for all to see, we just weren't looking. In any event, the songs on Sea of Cowards that White sings are the most annoying and when Alison Mosshart (of the rubbish Kills, and disappointingly, formerly of the brilliant Discount) gets the vocals they are slightly better, but it's all pretty dismal.

The Dears are a band that I tried to get but don't. I had No Cities Left and gave it away and then picked up Missiles (2008). But I'm going to give it away. It's not a bad record but, so much worse, it's just a record that it wouldn't make any difference if it simply didn't exist. In the post-Interpol world this kind of stuff is ten-a-penny and it takes something pretty special to make a mid-brow, mid-tempo, "confessional" miserablist album stand out. And there's nothing on Missiles that makes it stand out. I'm sure it's all terribly heartfelt and deeply affecting to the band members but it means virtually nothing to me.

Finally for the week we have Death By Chocolate's second album, Zap the World (2002). As an exercise in hyper-ironic postmodern kitsch, Zap the World can't be beaten. We have lo-fi, hyper-stylized sixties style guitar, bass, drums while singer Angie half sings, half narrates her quirky, kooky little abstract poems about cultural ephemera (they have a song called 'John Steed Sword Stick' for instance, and a brief number about Bridget Riley and how her paintings can "make your eyes go pop"). It's cutesy, incredibly self-aware, very silly, and tons of fun.

Thursday 21 June 2012

LaRM day 100 (Miles Davis-Dead Can Dance)

TA-DAAH! 100 days in. Unbelievable, I never thought I'd stick it out, but here we are. And we've only made it to DA. The May 2014 end date may have been a bit optimistic. Anyway, day 100 brings us a Miles Davis festival, beginning with 1958's Milestones. Now, as I think we've already seen, I don't really know anything about, or particularly understand jazz, so I can only respond in terms of whether I instinctively like something or not. Miles Davis clearly was a genius, everybody says so. I don't know, but I do like most of the records. His hard bop period is easily the most enjoyable but Milestones, as the first experiment in modal jazz (essentially using scales rather than chords as the backing for solos) has some fabulous stuff on it. The infamous title track for instance is fluid, delicate and absolutely lovely to listen to and features some of Davis' most accessible playing. The fact that modal jazz would launch some fairly unlistenable stuff is irrelevant to these early experiments because the whole of Milestones is a treat and an absolute joy from start to finish and it's impossible not to find something in it even if you can't stand jazz. I suppose that's the proof of the consummate musician.

George and Ira Gershwin were well served by Davis and arranger Gil Evans when they recorded a version of Porgy & Bess (1958). It's a phenomenal record, lyrical, melodic and truly profound, it's also a demonstration of how jazz can fit perfectly into another musical frame. The string, flute solos, brass and woodwind which would usually perform the Gershwin's jazz inspired musical here serve as backing for Davis' astonishingly respectful post-hard bop trumpet and his current quartet (which included the masterful Cannonball Adderley). It's all wonderful stuff and, as with Milestones (and perhaps even more so), the fact that this was challenging orthodoxy in the most bold way is so brilliant that you don't even know it was happening when you listen to it - what you hear is simply some truly superb music played by astonishing talents.

Things are a bit more complex, and slightly less easy on the ear on 1965's ESP. Davis uses modal jazz as his template throughout and the improvisatory nature of the recording means that the meandering can leave me feeling a bit bewildered. Put simply there's too much shrill running up and down on Davis' trumpet. The band on ESP however are electrifying, particularly the mighty Herbie Hancock on piano. It's all pretty interesting and in it's sedate moments is absolutely lovely. in many ways I think set the basic framework for pretty much all modern jazz thereafter, but there is just a bit too much frantic experimentation for me to find it especially fun to listen to. In a Silent Way (1969) is another Davis album regarded as a masterpiece. One of his first electric albums, it has John McLaughlin on guitar and Chick Corea playing some slight but lovely Fender Rhodes, as well as Hancock's deft piano. It's a great record for sure, a delicate and fantastically structured album, with two lengthy pieces that work themselves out sinuously and smoothly. The whole record has a smoky, late night feel and it occasionally works itself into quite a funky groove. Yes, I said "funky groove". But it's true, honest. Again, it's one that people who can't dig jazz might even like.

Unlike Tutu (1986) which is terrible. Davis himself is on fine form but good lord the 1980's were a disaster in so many ways. Everything about Tutu apart from Davis' own playing is appalling. Horrible synth drums, terrible keyboards, nasty production and second rate tunes. It's absolutely dreadful. It would be great to hear what it would sound like if everything apart from the trumpet were removed but that's wishful thinking because this record is the way it is and that's a terrible shame.

Dawn of the Replicants were a band that my brother really liked for a while and he gave me their I Smell Voodoo EP (1998). I haven't listened to it in ages and can't really remember it, and the only song I can find on the internet from it is the lead song 'Mary Louise'. It's a nice, abstract little acoustic number with some slowly developing martial drumming and very Beach Boys background vocal phrasing and it all has a gentle angularity to it. It's very charming but it doesn't really knock me out.

4AD darlings Dead Can Dance had been a gloomy, gothy outfit who based their sound on an arty miserabilism, until the release of third album, Spleen and Ideal (1985). The sound on Spleen and Ideal is still self-consciously arty and dark but there's a whole raft of new ideas going on here. The band came to be identified with a sort of medievalism which is fair enough to an extent, there are a lot of chants and choirs and bells and so on. But there's also some remarkable cinematic arrangements and a minute attention to detail that means that the sort of religiosity of the sound is tempered by a thoroughly modern approach. It's all possibly a little silly in its po-faced earnestness but it is nonetheless quite an extraordinary listen and Dead Can Dance remain a unique proposition. In terms of creating an atmosphere of a kind of sullen dread, they were the past masters and you can almost imagine this stuff blasting out of corrupted cathedrals in the midst of the plague. See, that's the kind of nonsensical purple prose that the record evokes.

Wednesday 20 June 2012

LaRM day 99 (Karen Dalton-John Davis)

OK, here we go then, starting with Karen Dalton's It's So Hard To Tell Who's Going To Love You the Best (1969). This is a startlingly beautiful folk album, of an almost brittle delicacy, with tunes of such restrained grace that you sometimes wonder if you're listening in to someone playing in private. Much is made of Dalton's unique voice (and it's one of those classic examples of a voice it's all too easy to dislike), sounding like a rougher, tougher version of Billie Holiday, and if you can't get round it then the album will never work. If you can take the singular vocals, you have an album of unremitting clarity and an ideological commitment to the folk ethic, while never musically adhering strictly to it, which makes the work of many more successful folk artists of the time seem juvenile.

After Galaxie 500 split, Dean Wareham formed Luna and the other two went off and made albums under their Christian names, Damon & Naomi. The first Damon & Naomi album, More Sad Hits (1992) is interesting in that although it essentially attempts to retain Galaxie 500's post-Velvets drone ramble, it proves that it was really Dean Wareham who had the songs. More Sad Hits is a nice trip through the Shimmy-Disc sound, but that's the source of another complication - without Wareham's punctilious attitude, Kramer has been allowed to have his way entirely and produce the album entirely in his own image. In many ways More Sad Hits sounds like a Kramer album with different singers and the honest truth is that although More Sad Hits is a lovely record it sounds like it's the product of someone who wasn't even involved in the band and the producer rather than the two people whose names are on the album.

Now, I would never have bought any records by the Queen it's OK to hate, the Darkness. But what can I tell you, once again they were free. To be totally honest I really like the Darkness. I don't know if that's just because I'm contrary by nature and the orthodoxy is to say that they're shit, but whatever the reason, I can really get behind the Darkness' inspired idiocy. I think it takes a lot of smarts to be that moronic and while the world gets excited by the insipid irony-free version of rock's retarded past with rubbish like Rock of Ages, the Darkness seem to me to have been both a step ahead and a whole lot cleverer, making records with abandon, to sound exactly like the best tribute act you've ever seen, while recognising that that's exactly what they sound like. And that's the key, they so clearly knew what they were doing. Anyway, first album Permission To Land (2003) is great, rubbish and stupid. So it's great. 'I Believe In a Thing Called Love' may well have been the biggest hit but there's loads of good nonsense. Second album One Way Ticket to Hell...And Back (2005) is worse, and lays on the obvious Queen cues too thick but there are still some pretty gold moments. It's all nonsense of course and as I say, I would never buy it but I still think there's a place for this kind of smart-arsed idiocy.

Ah, the lovely Darling Buds. There were a few of these buzzsaw guitars and 60's influenced female vocal acts around in the late 80's (the Primitives the most successful I guess) but I always like the Darling Buds the most. Pop Said is a great album. But I haven't got it. I have got the 'Hit the Ground' 12" (1988) and it's got three great little fizzy guitar pop numbers. 'Hit the Ground' itself is great, but the best of them is the most obviously 60's indebted 'Pretty Girl'.
Che Records put out some great stuff while they were around and one of the many totally unsuccessful bands they released records by was Dart. I think the Dart records are really ace, gloomy miserable, but with a real spirit, a real bite. They were kind of the mid-way point between American Music Club's fiery pessimism and Red House Painters mordant miserabilism. The 2 tracks from the 'Doggie' 7" (1995) I can't find on the net, but the next 7" (also 1995) is on Youtube. 'Bugger' is a decent showcase of Dart's style, brisk and noisy, brash, impassioned but careful not to give too much away. It's a great song, and one that I think demonstrates Dart's better grasp of the relevance of melody and pace to gloominess than Mark Kozelek has ever managed. B-side 'Protection' is a typically downbeat (and not entirely successful) cover of the Massive Attack number. First and only album 36 Cents An Hour (1995) is sadly also not accessible via the internet, which is a big shame because I think it's a fabulous album.

But anyway, moving right along then, to Ray Davies' 2007 solo album (and Times newspaper freebie giveaway!) Working Man's Cafe. By all rights Davies' career as an edgy, interesting songwriter should have been long over, and the last few Kinks albums suggested as such pretty clearly. However, Working Man's Cafe and its predecessor, Other People's Lives prove that Davies is as vital as he has been for many years. Working Man's Cafe is an appropriately scrappy, punchy album with performances that sound as if they were played pretty much live in the studio and it has an immediacy which is nearly as thrilling as they were back in the Kinks heyday. Lyrically Davies is bang up to date on Working Man's Cafe (which may prove to date the album in time) and although he's clearly pretty hacked off, he clothes his frustrations in cynical irony, as ever, and there's no fist-banging here. But then, Davies has always been the anti-ideologue so it's no surprise that his observations are not much more than simply that - the viewpoint of an ironically detached middle-aged man raising an eyebrow at the world's choices.

Eccentric songwriter and erstwhile musical partner of Lou Barlow, John Davis' solo albums are exercises in patience testing, but Blue Mountains (1997) is one of his more charming efforts. His childish and light vocals which are usually somewhat grating fit with the faux-naive musical setting on Blue Mountains more easily than usual, and while on the whole the album still feels faintly irritating, there is more than enough charm to draw on. The acoustic songs work best when augmented by other elements (the cruddy Casiotone on 'I'll Burn' for instance is lovely) and although there's some trying stuff going on it's for the most part a genuinely warm piece of work.