Brief pause

Hello everybody / anybody - Things are a bit hectic at work so there's a necessary hiatus on listening to Fanny, Jay Farrar and Father Abraham's 'Smurf Song'.  Back in action next week hopefully, but I definitely haven't stopped this nonsense for good.  Thanks every(any)body!

LaRM day 146 (The Fall)

Only one thing today and that's the 7 hours of the Fall's Complete Peel Sessions 1978-2004 box-set (released in 2005).  What a lot of stuff there is here, 6 CDs of wildly varying quality, but some of it is absolutely sterling.  It's fascinating to be able to briskly chart the development of the Fall's style, from the avant-poet's ramshackle backing act to a full-blown art rock/pop outfit and back again.  The first CD covers 1978-1981 and has some great versions of Live at the Witch Trials material, with blistering versions of 'No Xmas for John Quays' and a truly vitriolic reading of 'New Face in Hell'.  It's all pretty abstract and tottering stuff, as if it's constructed of flimsy sticks and Smith is at his most youthfully nasty.  CD 2 is 1981-1983 and shows some signs of a slightly more clear design in song construction, particularly by the last session which heralded the arrival of Brix Smith and her pop melodic sensibilities.  Earlier on the disc though Marc Riley's often overlooked guitar work is at its best on 'Look, Know' and an uncharacteristically lovely version of 'Winter'.  The third disc covers the sessions the band did when they were truly at their creative and musical peak, from 1985-1987 and there are versions of songs from This Nation's Saving Grace and The Frenz Experiment which occasionally surpass the studio versions.  There are superb takes of 'Gut of the Quantifier', 'Cruiser's Creek', 'The Man Whose Head Expanded', 'Athlete Cured' and a supremely vicious 'Australians in Europe'.  In fact the levity and humour with which Mark E Smith had started to introduce into his bilious outbursts really elevate these songs, even more so in the session takes than the studio album versions.  CD 4 (1988-1992) is still pretty top quality stuff, but it's by this point that a sense of pop melody had really taken hold and there's a grounding of the keyboards and electronica ideas that had started to shape the Fall's sound.  There's still a lot of good material here, particularly 'The War Against Intelligence' and 'The Mixer' but it's not as immediate or creatively inspired as the previous couple of year's worth of stuff.  The big pop and the complete takeover of the keyboards is the main thrust of the fifth disc, covering 1993-1996.  It's a mixed-bag by this point with some spirited pop music (mainly thanks to the brief return of Brix) and some hilariously knockabout covers ('Hark the Herald Angels Sing' and 'Jingle Bell Rock', reduced to rubble), a great 'Spinetrak' and the ever enjoyable baiting of 'Hey! Student', but there's a lot of fairly nondescript stuff too.  Interestingly disc 6 (1998-2004) still has the keyboards, but has them playing the role of jittery noise, just like the other instruments, and it means that the Fall sound strangely similar to band they were some twenty years before - it all sounds on the point of collapse again.  The songs aren't really up to much by this point but it's fascinating to hear the whole thing come full circle.  All in all the whole box-set is a superb demonstration of the endless invention of a man who does the same thing over and over again.  It's inexplicable, but it's brilliant.

LaRM day 145 (The Fall)

Righto, we've got days of the Fall to get through now, starting with first album Live at the Witch Trials (1979).  I've got a lot of time for the Fall (possibly not 15 hours, which is what is in prospect, but that can't be helped) and I particularly like Live at the Witch Trials.  It's one of those rare records that remind you that there's always something new to be done with the old rock and roll formula.  As an exercise in a contrary esoteric style nobody can touch the Fall.  It's all angular, repetitious and scarcely competent, but that's precisely the point.  Mark E Smith's lyrics are as densely obscure as the music and the whole package that he came up with, while being deceptively simple, was really unlike anything else anybody had done before.  In many ways it's really because of Smith's nasty-minded determination to prove that he wasn't like anybody else that meant that the records came out the way they did I guess.  Live at the Witch Trials sets out the formula perfectly, balancing a traditional sense of melody with a Krautrock style of tinny, rolling musical motifs, while Smith tunelessly ranted his avant-poetry over the top.  'Rebellious Jukebox' for instance is a superb pop song, while still being bloody-mindedly un-pop music, and makes the prime demonstration of the Fall's strengths at this early point.  There are plenty of other great tunes ('Industrial Estate' and the 8 minute closer, the vicious 'Music Scene' are particularly good), and although there were better albums to come, Live at the Witch Trials was a singular and impressive opening statement.  The reissue I've got has tons of extra stuff, from the fantastic early singles ('Bingo Master's Break-Out' is one of the early highlights) and a bunch of bootleg versions to a whole live show from 1979 which is uneven to say the least.

1982's Hex Enduction Hour was going to be the Fall's last but it was unexpectedly moderately commercially successful so Smith changed his mind.  Hex Enduction Hour is a great album, in many ways probably the Fall's most influential - there would be far fewer US art-rock acts and certainly no Pavement without it.  It's a tricky album, with some extended circular workouts that don't really go anywhere except into your brain in a maddening way, but there again is Smith's intention played out to its utmost.  It gets off to a phenomenal start with 'The Classical' which is probably one of the band's most endearing tunes, despite it's deliberately obtuse and provocative lyrics, but there's a lot of stuff which can test the patience on Hex Enduction Hour.  The great triumph of the album though is that if you can give yourself up to it, it's enormously rewarding, while simultaneously trying to irritate you.  The repetition that Smith relies on so heavily is given a proper set-up to make itself play a fundamental role in the songs on Hex Enduction Hour by having two drummers pounding this stuff out, and it really makes the looping rhythms the most prominent part of the sound, with the clattering guitars a secondary consideration and Smith's increasingly misanthropic lyrics and vocals a kind of window dressing.

The 1985 compilation album Hip Priest and Kamerads covers the handful of releases the Fall put out on the Kamera label and it's all gold.  In some ways, although scrappy, Hip Priest and Kamerads works as one of the Fall's most enjoyable albums, mainly because it focusses on singles and compilation tracks so they're all relatively melodic and propulsive.  In any event there are some fantastic songs ('The Classical' and 'Hip Priest' make re-recorded appearances, as well as other awesome single tracks 'Look, Know' and 'Room to Live') and the lesser known stuff is just as good - 'Fantastic Life' is one of their best songs.  I've got the original vinyl pressing so don't have the live tracks that were strapped on to the CD reissue, but I gather that's just as well...

Next up is my favourite Fall album, and I think one of the great albums of the 1980's, This Nation's Saving Grace (1985).  Everything about the album works, from the loud and blustery 'Bombast' and 'Barmy' to the lo-fi sound collage of 'Paintwork' and the Can tribute 'I Am Damo Suzuki'.  In fact 'I Am Damo Suzuki' explains a lot about the Fall, not just by making explicit the clearest influences on Smith, but also in showing just how adept the band actually were at that time at utilising sources and adapting them in very clever ways - a large number of Can's melodic lines are melded in the song in a completely coherent way, and it demonstrates that the Fall's ramshackle sound was actually meticulously constructed (at least in the mid-80's when they had a line-up who could really play).  There are some genuinely great songs too, 'Spoilt Victorian Child' being one of those key indie-rock numbers that defined the time. Many Fall purists resented the addition of Smith's then wife Brix Smith to the band because she brought a strong sense of pop melody to the cacophony, but personally I think it lifted the band and made them airier, easier to digest and also meant that the songs had more space, and could breathe a bit more easily.

By 1988 things had grown even more pop, more produced, cleaner, and The Frenz Experiment has Smith's ranting much clearer (but no less easy to decipher lyrically speaking) and some of the band's power is sapped by this studio savvy approach.  Nonetheless there are still great songs, and it's probably the Fall album that the casual listener would find easiest to deal with.  It's quite a processed sound with the drum kit pristinely high in the mix, keyboards and very evenly spaced instrumentation.  'Athlete Cured' and 'In These Times' could almost count as genuine pop songs, but there's still just too much focus on repeated lines to really work as straight pop, and the relentless ten minutes of 'Bremen Nacht' would put off the casual listener.  Even so, it's a relatively easy listen and I think it's a really decent album with some great moments. Contrary to popular opinion though I could do without the cover of the Kinks' 'Victoria'.

Lastly today it's the Fall's peculiar collaboration with Michael Clark's avant-ballet company, I Am Kurious Oranj (1988).  As the title is an allusion both to William and Mary as well as the Swedish erotic groundbreaker I Am Curious Yellow, it is another demonstration of Smith's determination to be at once grimly amusing and wilfully antagonistic, and the music is no less a demonstration of the same impulse.  Half of it is upbeat enough but for the most part it's pretty mocking (the song 'Kurious Oranj' is a kind of snide reggae take-off) and it's one of the band's least charming efforts.  Nevertheless in amongst the time-wasting (a very off-hand molesting of Blake's 'Jerusalem' for instance) is some great stuff and you can't help but love 'Cab It Up!'s silly pastiched cheerfulness.

LaRM day 144 (Fairport Convention-Faith No More)

Ugh, this awful Blogger site is just horrible to use again.  Anyway, we move into the last stage of our Fairport session with 1975's Rising for the Moon.  This was the one Fairport studio album on which Sandy appeared again after she originally left the band in 1970.  Her solo career hadn't been the success she had anticipated and she pinned her hopes on a Fairport success.  A vain hope one would have thought she'd know at the time, but I think she was getting desperate and couldn't really see the wood for the trees at this point (besides which, as discussed previously, her personal life was pretty much in freefall by this point).  Rising for the Moon is a strange album, it has a lot of the Simon Nicol/Dave Pegg/Swarb folky nonsense, but as before Sandy brought a rigour and a determination to stay contemporary in sound if not in style and as such it's easily their best album since Full House.  This is due, unsurprisingly, almost solely to Sandy's songwriting contributions to the album which, although on occasion rather cloyingly instrumented, are some of the best she ever wrote ('Stranger To Himself' is simply an astonishing piece of songwriting).  It's not a great album, but it's a good one and it's really Fairport's last gasp as a credible act rather than a revivalist throwback act.











Finally it's the Best of the BBC Recordings album, which cherrypicks from a box-set, covering session recordings between 1968-1974 and released in 2008.  Unsurprisingly, the choices focus pretty heavily on Sandy's contributions and there are some interesting versions of some big numbers of here ('Reynardine' and 'Tam Lin' get nice workouts) and there are some surprising late inclusions, such as the brooding 'John the Gun'.  It's not essential but it's all pretty informative.

Now, can anybody explain to me how it came to pass that Marianne Faithfull was ever given a record contract?  I suspect that it's because back in the day middle class execs in the music biz would go to the equivalent of Fortnum & Mason to find their mediocre talents to flog (whereas these days of course the self-same middle class execs go to the equivalent of the bins round the back of Aldi to find their mediocre talent).  Anyway, Faithfull released her first two albums simultaneously and the folk one, Come My Way (1965), is the one that I've got, and it sounds exactly like what it is: the pointlessly sub-standard work of an over-privileged young woman who was offered the opportunity to make records and couldn't be bothered to think of something else to do instead.  Dismal cover of 'Blowin' in the Wind'? Check.  Horrible over-emoted reading of 'Jabberwocky'? Check. The ultimate reveal of an absence of imagination, a version of 'House of the Rising Sun'? Check.  Honestly, it's really rather a ghastly little record, and when she starts singing a French revolutionary folk job (in French, of course), all patience with Faithfull is exhausted.  It really doesn't help to know that this nonsense was made at the same time as she was justifying cuckolding her husband with Jagger by saying basically "it was like a really heavy trip, because people should just be free, and he wouldn't let me be free, I mean he wouldn't even buy me a pony". Come My Way is a truckload of nothing and although it's got genuine curiosity value, culturally speaking, as a record it's so thin that it's transparent.

Next up we have what may well be the worst single ever released, which is why I've got it.  It's Dani Behr's pre-TV career girl band Faith, Hope & Charity and their 7" 'Battle of the Sexes'.  I have nothing else to say about this, just click on the cover and experience the full song/video horror for yourself.  It's like being in a nightmare.

The last act up today is the ultimate metal-funk-soul-rock outift, Faith No More.  I always hated the Red Hot Chili Peppers and always liked Faith No More.  I think it's partly because Faith No More seemed like a mixture of really nice blokes and properly horrible nutcases, whereas the Chili Peppers just seem like a bunch of LA tossers, but mainly because Faith No More's records have some intent, some drive and don't sound like half-arsed, self-satisfied crap.  Anyway, to my mind the best decision that FNM made was to ditch the defunct faux-rap element that they started out with and the high point of their career was the release of Angel Dust (1992).  There's too much of Angel Dust and some of it falls pretty flat (the screamathon of 'Malpractice' doesn't really go anywhere), but when the album works it's a fantastic bit of bile-spewing metal-pop.  Unsurprisingly I guess it's the singles that are the obvious highlights and 'Midlife Crisis', 'A Small Victory' and especially 'Everything's Ruined' are great.  But there's plenty of other grandstanding massive rock on Angel Dust and although there are certainly longeurs on the whole it's a brilliant album of smart-arse frustrated metal.

The 2009 compilation album The Very Best Definitive Ultimate Greatest Hits Collection is a chronological overview of Faith No More's career, over one disc of album tracks and one of rarities and B-sides.  Unsurprisingly but disappointingly almost half of the first disc is culled from Angel Dust and the rest of the material is OK (there's 'Epic' of course, and 'The Real Thing', together with some later tunes and their unnerving cover of the Commodores 'Easy') but on the whole it doesn't really hang together as an overview, being too scrappy and unfocussed.  The rarities disc is certainly interesting but is so often the way most of the material is rare for a reason....

Deep breath because most of next week will involve nothing but The Fall....

LaRM day 143 (Fairport Convention)

Crapping hell, Blogger has gone back to this appalling layout thing.  Well, from this point on all of my posts will look like shite again.  Oh well, if that's what they want.

So we start our Fairport odyssey with the debut self-titled album (1968), which is something of an anomoly in their back catalogue.  Instead of the groundbreaking fusion of traditional English folk and modern rock, it is instead a fairly straightforward bit of California rock-worshipping and although Judy Dyble's vocals have a light folkish tone, it really does sound like an album made in Los Angeles by way of Cricklewood.  Some of the original songs are pretty good, but there's very little sign of Richard Thompson's acute, miserabilist songwriting and the whole thing has the feel of a Byrds by way of Loggins & Messina rip-off project.  The real giveaway is the rockish reading of Joni Mitchell's 'Chelsea Morning'.  When the album works it's good fun ('I Don't Know Where I Stand' and 'Time Will Show the Wiser' are great album openers) but it's got some awful stuff too (instrumental 'The Lobster' is a dreadful waste of time).  The reissue I've got has some interesting out-takes including revealing covers of songs by Tim Buckley and Leonard Cohen.

Completely inexplicably I haven't got the all-important second album on which both Sandy Denny and the folk-rock for which the band are so acclaimed make their first appearances, so we move straight on to third album Unhalfbricking (1969).  One of the cornerstones of the folk-rock movement, Unhalfbricking is a fantastic demonstration of what you can do with time-worn material, superb daring and bold imagination.  Dave Swarbrick's fiddle work comes fully to the fore on the album and his interplay with Thompson's endlessly inventive electric guitar work is always thrilling.  The sense of Denny's control of the material and the band's approach is clear throughout (as the band have said when she came to audition, she ended up auditioning the band not the other way around), and her introduction of traditional folk material was completely game-changing.  Although the US influence is still painfully evident (in the silly Dylan covers 'Si Tu Dois Partir' and 'Million Dollar Bash'), the strength of the adaptations of the traditional material ('A Sailor's Life' is one of the crowning glories of both the band's career and of the entire folk-rock genre, showcasing the Swarb/Thompson partnership at its most vital and blisteringly competitive) and the original material (Sandy's 'Who Knows Where the Time Goes' is one of the greatest songs ever written and the Unhalfbricking version is the ultimate one) easily eclipses any shortcomings that the album may have.



Next is the ultimate statement by Fairport and one of the most remarkable albums of the 1960's, 1969's third and final Fairport release, Liege and Lief.  It's true that the world wasn't really paying all that much attention at the time, but the influence of Liege and Lief and its reputation as one of the most innovative British rock records ever made grow larger and larger with each passing year.  After the release of Unhalfbricking the band went on a fateful tour, during which their van was in a collision with a lorry, killing drummer Martin Lamble and Thompson's then girlfriend.  After much deliberation the band decided to continue but without any expectations of the outcome of their work.  They decamped to the country and set out briskly recording Liege and Lief, little thinking that they were redefining two genres of popular music in the process.  Liege and Lief takes Sandy's beloved traditional folk and transplants it wholesale and untampered with into a framework of straight ahead rock music, and what could and should have been absurd instead reveals itself to be truly inspired.  As a fusion of the past and the (then) present musically and, specifically, British, it is a celebration of both in the clearest and most innovatively joyful way.  The rock-outs that end 'Matty Groves' and the notorious folk standard 'Tam Lin' are fantastic showcases for Swarb and Thompson, while the painfully delicate 'Farewell, Farewell' and 'Reynardine' are two of the greatest outings for Denny's untouchably perfect voice.  It's a miracle of intent, style and of execution and one of the greatest records to come out of pain ever made.

After the abandoned nature of experimentation that was so successful on Liege and Lief some of the band went through some soul-searching, and Sandy left in search of a solo career and an escape from 'Matty Groves' and Ashley Hutchings' delayed reaction to the coach crash meant he quit too.  As a result it was down to Thompson and Swarb to properly take the reins and it's at this point that things start to go a little awry.  The determination to give the folk and the rock equal status meant a balance too delicate to maintain and 1970's Full House shows the first clear signs that Swarb particuarly was giving the folk side the lion's share of the attention.  Full House is still a great album with some fantastic interplay between the two lead musicians, but the big problem is that nobody left in the band had Hutchings and Denny's authoritative knowledge and genuine inquisitiveness about the more esoteric side of traditional folk and as a result Swarb happily alighted on more obvious, and frankly, much cornier, standards to bring the rock reading too, and Full House shows the beginnings of serious flaws in the approach (the mandolin and drums combo 'Flatback Caper' is particularly cringeworthy).  There are some superb performances and a couple of good readings of solid old tunes ('Poor Will and the Jolly Hangman' works brilliantly well) and there's a career highlight in the brooding 10 minute Thompson showcase 'Sloth', so as an album it just about hangs on to the credibitility built up by the preceding three albums.

That credibility pretty much vanished after Full House with the departure of Thompson from the band leaving only Simon Nicol from the original line-up to carry the torch.  As demonstrated by the 1972 career overview, The History of Fairport Convention, the flame had pretty much gone out with the releases of Angel Delight and Babbacombe Lee.  The History has some wonderful choices from the first five albums (second single 'Meet On the Ledge' remains one of Thompson's finest songs), but by the fourth side the extraordinary innovation and daring is pretty much reduced to playing some rather naff old folk tunes in a pretty naff way on some rock instruments, or in the case of the songs from Babbacombe Lee, playing some original songs that are specifically designed to sound like rather naff old folk tunes in a pretty naff way on some rock instruments.

Finally for today's Fairport trip it's the 1974 Live Convention album.  Inexplicably Sandy Denny rejoined the band in late 1973 and embarked on a world tour with them.  By this point she was despairing of achieving any popular success as a solo artist and pinned her last desperate hopes on Fairport upping their profile.  Her voice was going and listening to Live Convention is as tragic as it is thrilling.  To hear Swarb in such fiery form is really great but Sandy's wandering and disinterested vocals are a great disappointment and it's sad to think that she must have known that this wasn't the answer to her hopes.  Live Convention is a strange thing then, in that when the band are in full flight it's great, even when they're playing fairly naff old tunes, but when they slow things down it all falls apart.

LaRM day 142 (Faces-Donald Fagen)

Possibly the ultimate British knockabout rock and roll band, the Faces were the acceptable face of being entirely disreputable. I mean, everybody loves old Rod don't they? Don't they? To be fair, although the Faces' determination to seem like a bunch of rascals could be extremely grating, the best-of compilation Good Boys...When They're Asleep (which covers their output between 1970-1974 and was released in 1999) demonstrates just how uncommonly adept they were at making roister-doistering rock which demands that you get some beers and have a good time. Rod, Ronnie Wood, Ronnie Lane and Ian McLagen were probably the last word in how to make pub rock not just exciting but absolutely thrilling, making a sloppy, messy splat of fell-good rock and roll, mixed with the occasional slow-number, that didn't muck about with mythologising anything but the everyday occupations of getting mightily pissed and chasing women about. In many ways it's the pretence to honesty, both in the lyrics and the melodies and the general idea of the band that makes it all so endearing, but whatever it is there really are some fantastic songs on Good Boys, and the whole thing is a great reminder of the brilliance of the sadly departed Ronnie Lane and that Rod wasn't always a wrinkly, hopeless twot prostituting himself and Tom Waits songs to US housewives.

Ah now, we're talking - it's time for some insanely musically and technically skilful cynicism couched in the guise of smooth pop. After Steely Dan split Donald Fagen immediately got to work on a solo album, and, unusually for Fagen he didn't spend years perfecting it. The Nightfly (1982) is a superb piece of nostalgic jazz-pop of a proficiency that makes most pop records sound like a bad joke. It's smooth, certainly, jazzy for sure, but this is such pitch perfect songwriting that whatever the style, it would always be great. In some ways it's a personal record, apparently reflecting Fagen's own anticipations of the future when he was a teen in the 50's and 60's, but whatever the motivations and the lyrical diversions (which are far more direct than anything he wrote for Steely Dan) it's an album of almost impossible keenness and it's easy listening in the best of senses. Stylistically it's the next step on from Steely Dan's increasingly smoothed out jazziness, but The Nightfly takes out a lot of the biting cynicism and leaves just a healthy enough dose to make sure that the album doesn't become anodyne.

Over ten years later it's more of the same, but with an even more absurdly tehnically precise production, with 1993's Kamakiriad (or, as one bloke interviewed in Mojo brilliantly said, when asked what his album of the year was, "That new Donald Fagen one, what's it called? Caramac, that's it"). The jazzy arrangements on Kamakiriad are more ornate and madly ambitious than ever before and the technology available to Fagen meant that he could also make a cleaner, shinier, more clinically exact record than ever. That's not to do it down though, it's another startlingly smart set of pristine jazz-pop songs that feel more brittle than anything he's recorded and in many ways it's closer in spirit to the last two Steely Dan albums than The Nightfly. These are beautifully constructed songs and Fagen's waery voice drips cynicism more clearly than it has for a long time, even when singing what seem to be some of his smoothest, least threatening tunes. It's clearly not up to the standard of The Nightfly but Fagen's quality control is uniformly high so Kamakiriad is hardly a failure by not being as good as its predecessor.

Another 13 years pass before the next Fagen album, Morph the Cat (2006), which sees him return to a more direct lyrical approach, probably the most interpretable he's ever been in fact. It's no surprise therefore to find that most of the songs, lyrically at least, are pretty morbid, being preoccupied with mortality pretty much throughout. However, that's not to say that the songs aren't the usual jaunty, jazzy, snarky, sarky stuff that he always comes up with, and the album is easily better than the Steely Dan reunion albums released in the 1990's and 2000's. It's the best thing that Fagen has worked on since The Nightfly in fact, and although stylistically he's never going to come up with anything surprisingly different or new, it's amazing that he can still get such top-flight material from his jazz-pop template. A box set with the "trilogy" of albums was released that contained a bonus disc of B-sides, live and rare material relating to the recording of the three albums and although there's nothing to write home about on it, it's a pretty interesting document, revealing just how Fagen's choices of what makes the cut are made.

From tomorrow it's business as usual, less hassle, and, oh yes, a whole lot of Fairport...

LaRM day 141 (catch up)

So back in action after a few days ill and it's the three hours plus of Can's trip down memory lane, The Lost Tapes: 1968-1975 (2012). Bearing in mind all of this previously unreleased material was recorded during Can's glory years it's not only a fascinating insight into the musical thought processes of the band, but it's also chock full of great tunes. It's sometimes a little esoteric, sometimes a little unlistenable, but that's Can for you. There's all sorts of stuff here, from extended freak-outs to low-key soundscaping, from jazz mess to funk shakedowns. Some of it is ghastly but the vast majority is Can at their best. The handful of live recordings are interesting and the sense that a lot of this is half worked out is barely noticeable, it's all so very smart. That said there's nothing here that's going to particularly sway a Can doubter or sell them to a Can novice, because when push really comes to shove you're still going to listen to Tago Mago rather than The Lost Tapes, but whatever, because it's rare that a band can put out hours of old scrapped material and it turn out to be first rate stuff.

The other band besides Everything Everything that everybody raved about for their jittery avant-rock are Django Django, whose self-titled debut was released at the beginning of the year, are a slightly less electronically driven outfit, but whose angular take on skittering rock music is not a million miles away from Everything Everything. It's a nice try at doing something a bit different, with some of those western movie soundtrack ideas drifting in amongst the post-XTC hyperactive pop. On the whole I don't find the album completely captivating and some of the ideas fall a bit flat, but it's a really good go and I suspect whatever comes next will be better yet.

You can trust Elbow to take the idea of the single B-side relatively seriously, and the recently released compilation, Dead in the Boot, proves it pretty admirably. Although the fact that it almost hangs together as an Elbow album proper does it a disfavour, making it sound like the worst (or least good I should say) album they've made, it does go to prove just what high quality the tunes they consign to the B-side bin actually are. There are one or two failed experiments but there's a high level of totally expected loveliness too, and it's interesting to note that in terms of production the band have always been sufficiently inventive to overcome any cash or expertise shortcomings.

LaRM day 140 (Explosions in the Sky + catch up)

If there's one person who is overlooked in Explosions in the Sky it's their drummer. In most of the pieces the majority of the burden of the tunes is carried by him alone, and interestingly it's his extremely subtle rises and falls and martial rills that allow the emotive nature of the rest of the music to be fully realised. Hard to imagine "emotive drums" I know, but there it is. All Of a Sudden I Miss Everyone (2007) is more of the same kind of manipulative emo-post-rock that they had already perfected on The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place, but there are subtler tones added in this time around. The piano is a nice touch for a start, particularly the pretty little riffs in album closer 'So Long, Lonesome'. There's no denying that it's essentially a formula that the band alighted on and have stuck to, but it's a surprisingly adaptable and rich one considering that there's not much genuine variation in the fundamental nature of the music they write. The build-ups and crescendos are as gently constructed as ever and, again, it's nice when mainstream post-rockers don't feel the need to suddenly and without warning become very LOUD or to have something like pretend recorded voicemails or "overheard conversations" in the background. For some reason I don't feel that next album Take Care, Take Care, Take Care (2011) works as well. I'm not sure if there's some kind of natural entropy in this style of music or whether it's just that it starts losing its interest in concentrated doses, but something's missing from Take Care that means that unless you really focus on it, which is a tough ask for stretches of its running time, it's hard to really engage with it at all. It's in no way a bad record and it's certainly another decent example of the genre, but it's not of the same calibre as their previous two albums. It has got a nicely over the top fold out CD sleeve though.

God, I'm feeling really ill so I'm going to race through these next few alphabet catch-up albums. The Alabama Shakes album that the middle-age man music mags were raving about (Boys and Girls (2012)) is a decent bit of 70's soul done as Joplin-esque rock, and although it stinks of a kind of fabricated retro it's a load of fun while you're listening to it. There's no denying she's got a great delivery and as southern rock-soul goes it may all be like something from Mark Ellen's wet dream but it's pretty good nonetheless. Next is this year's Beach House album, Bloom. As usual it's taken me a while to get to grips with this but everybody was right all along, it's superb. It may hide it's grace with a subtly coy indieness, but it's a charmer through and through. There's a slightly more convincing upbeat poppiness to it that has been lacking in their previous rather studied records and pulling less sulky thousand yard stare faces works wonders for them I reckon. Then we have Boy's album from this year (Mutual Friends) which is either charmingly fey indie-folk or the kind of offensively inoffensive garbage that graces the soundtrack to Grey's Anatomy type TV shows, depending on your point of view. I could certainly understand the latter view but personally I can't help but be charmed by its pretence at a guileless "autumnal" pop feel and I really like it. The cues are all pretty obvious and this stuff has been done to death, but if you can wring a little bit more whimsical melancholic pop out of the well-worn template then fair play to you I say. And finally before I crawl off to bed it's the thoroughly surprising album this year from the Blue Nile's Paul Buchanan, called Mid-Air. Unless of a particularly romantic turn of mind, nobody in their 20's is going to listen to and enjoy Mid-Air. For those of us rather older however, it's a true masterpiece, a revelation of the glory of the songwriting process and the limitless power of well-used phrases both musical and lyrical. Like sketches for Blue Nile songs, none breaks the 3 minute mark and has only Buchanan's voice and piano and very occasional almost inaudible strings, yet each is a perfect universe in itself, completely whole and completely realised, and it's not only one of the most delicate records I've heard in many years, it's also one of the most astonishingly moving. I suppose when you get to a certain age that's the thing about telling the truth about small things, it means much, much more than pretending to tell the truth about big things.

LaRM day 139 (Everly Brothers-Explosions in the Sky)

An excellent morning in the company of the untouchably brilliant Everly Brothers, starting with 1960's third album, It's Everly Time. Everybody knows that the Everly's harmonies were as good as harmonies can get, but it's not so often discussed what superb songwriting skills they had themselves from very early on, nor what impeccable taste they had when it came to using other songwriters work. It's Everly Time has not one dud in its running time, every song is a two minute slice of pop perfection, the absolute definition of why pop music was so much more than Elvis' nonsensical grandstanding. These songs are alternately funny, sappy, heartfelt, emotional, but they are always faultlessly written, absolutely cast-iron, unchallengeably perfect. A Date With the Everly Brothers (1961) is not up to the standard of It's Everly Time, but nothing really could be. A Date With has some great stuff on it nonetheless. There's the fantastic 'Cathy's Clown', the heartbreaking 'Always It's You', the superior pre-Orbison version of 'Love Hurts'. Any album with these three on can only be described as superb even if the rest was cack. It isn't though, the rest is almost but not quite as good. Don and Phil's voices are, if anything, in even better form, but perhaps the real reason that A Date With doesn't stand up to It's Everly Time is because it's rather more earnestly produced.

Rock'n Soul (1965) is a fairly uninspired set of cover versions of old hits and as far as the Everly's go it's a fairly uninteresting offering. There is a weird slow, brilliant arrangement of 'Love Hurts' though. Things improve dramatically with the superb Two Yanks in England (1966). There's virtually no original material on the album, and most of the songs were actually written by members of the Hollies. But what's great about the record is that these are much, much better versions of the songs than the Hollies themselves would or could record, and it goes to show just how superb the Everly's were at interpreting other people's work. The songs are elevated from second rate 60's Brit-pop to first rate singer-songwriter pop by the Everly's superlative delivery. There's a much heavier emphasis on the guitar and the musical arrangements than usual, but it's not inappropriate and certainly doesn't overwhelm Don and Phil's fantastic vocal harmonies.

The Everly Brothers went back through their earliest recollections, together with their home recorded tapes with their mum and dad for 1968's Roots. A collection of mostly covers of old country songs that their parents brought them up with, it's not only an affection exercise in nostalgia, it's also a superb demonstration of interpretive skill. This is not so much a country song covers album as one of the first Americana works, utilising traditional country within a more contemporary rock framework. It's a fabulous album and it also proved that the Everly's were unusually capable of adapting with the times - there's no sense that this is a desperate attempt to remain contemporary, it's so casually and artfully up to date, and their performances are alternately brilliantly bright and nostalgically weary. Finally for the Evs it's a sprawling 3CD cheapo compilation, The Works 1960-1973 (2007). Much of the five albums so far covered are largely represented but there's plenty of other stuff from the multitude of other Everly's albums released in that period. The early stuff is all gold, the middle period an uneasy mix, the last lot is eclectic to say the least, but there's great stuff even there - the countryish string driven sound collage of 'Lord of the Manor' is awesome.

Everything Everything were voted band most likely to a few years back which of course means that they were immediately then slagged off by everybody. Who cares about that kind of horsecrap though? Man Alive (2010) in my opinion is one of the brilliant bits of fidgetty hyperactive indie pop yet made, drawing its all too oft used XTC and Talking Heads influences together but blending them with Beach Boys falsetto harmonies, shifty nu-rave rhythms and, least discussed of all, Volcano I'm Still Excited's 80's Casio revisionism. The result is an album full of zesty and angular pop songs which won't be pinned down stylistically or rhythmically as they lurch about from here to there, vocal lines suddenly heading off down entirely different paths to the ones they seemed to going down. It's a fine record and the idiocy of being feted meaning being panned seems to have been highlighted to a great degree by Man Alive. It's a lovely album cover too.

New York skronk artists the Ex-Models second album Zoo Psychology (2003) is a concentrated 20 minute blast of various bits of unpleasant noise, calculated to create the impression that if you don't get it you're the least cool person in the world. From scratchy guitar noise to thudding drum tracks with nothing else going on, these 30 second to 2 minute bits of vicious antagonism are artfully put together and brilliantly performed for maximum effect. It's brilliant and I get it, therefore I am cool.

Next up would be the sole record by one of the great David Mitchell's bands, the Exploding Budgies. The Grotesque Singers (1984) however only has two of its five songs on the internet and my copy is on vinyl. The songs I can find are, 'Kenneth Anger' and 'Hank Marvin' which are both decent bits of typical Mitchell songwriting. That indie Aussie off-key wooziness to the whole thing is present and correct, with the perfect spooky pop melody of the type that he's so adept at, but of the two 'Hank Marvin' points much more clearly to the type of great stuff he would come up with in the 3D's.

Last thing for the day is the second proper studio album by post-rock heart-string tuggers Explosions in the Sky, called The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place (2003). Very firmly in the tradition of the post-Slint Mogwai school of instrumental rock dynamics, I have rather more time for Explosions In the Sky, because they don't rely exclusively on the quiet, quiet, LOUD principle which I find a bit cheap. Instead things are allowed to build up much more gradually and with a much more stately kind of grace and when things do finally erupt it's the natural consequence of the build-up of tension, and their songs are just as likely not to break out but instead to reach a peak from which the tunes then climb down from just as gradually. It's nice stuff and although it's clearly designed to be a kind of emo-math-rock, it's not so showy as to be irritating and not so self-satisfied as to be frustrating. Instead it's just wholesome smart-arsery given a loose rein and there's nothing wrong with that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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