Friday 11 January 2013

LaRM day 167 (Serge Gainsbourg-Galaxie 500)

Whoo-hoo, let's do this thing! Yeah! *punches the air* Actually, I'm just going to pick up where I left off (mid-flow as it were) as if nothing has happened and therefore we continue with......

I was really, really excited to find a vinyl copy of the double live album Le Zenith de Gainsbourg (1989) in a charity shop in Clapham, but was disappointed twice over - firstly because only the second of the two albums was in the sleeve, and secondly because it's absolutely appalling.  A disengaged Serge shouts and mutters over a hideous, slick, funk rock backing band, and honestly it's ghastly.  Unless the first album is radically different, it's all terrible.  If anything, the band sound like Madonna's horrible backing band of the same era, all crack snare drums, fretless bass and "soul" backing vocals and the fact that this anoydyne crap then has a drunken old Serge ranting over it is all a bit depressing, and a really rather sad way to say goodbye to our time in Serge's company.  Still we can always watch the clip of Serge surprising Whitney Houston over and over again to remind ourselves of the man's greatness in his drunken dotage.











Hero worship is all very well but sometimes it can go a bit far, and Galaxie 500's veneration of the Velvet Underground can get a bit hard to take.  As one of the leading lights of the "slowcore" movement, Galaxie 500 really did go the extra mile to sound out of time and out of place, but their languid, lava-lamp way of approaching music was pretty unique and did lead to some really great records.  A lot of the credit for the sound has to go to Kramer, whose penchant for psychedelia led to his insistence on layering a gauzy haziness over everything he produced and loading vocals with reverb. Debut album Today (1988) has some lovely delicate songs on it, not least the charming 'Oblivious' and 'Tugboat'.  Naomi Yang's untutored bass-playing is surprisingly fluid and takes the lead musically for the most part, only giving way to Dean Wareham's raggedly strummed guitar when he breaks into one of his occasional fragmented solos.  A lot is revealed by the inclusion of a cover of Jonathan Richman's 'Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste', making it clear exactly what kind of record collection Wareham had at the time.











The best of the three Galaxie 500 albums is certainly the second, On Fire (1989), which has some superb songs.  Much of them are like full fledged pop songs which have been stripped down to some essentials and then bolstered up with scrappily performed parts.  'Blue' Thunder', 'Strange', 'Plastic Bird', they're all great songs with lovely vocal melodies (something which had been less impressive on Today) which are delivered in Wareham's odd, high, uncertain voice, and the overalll woozy atmosphere that the band and Kramer created has been crafted to perfection on On Fire.  'Snowstorm' is an apt title for possibly their most demonstrative song, which brings out the force of their performances without ever rising above the gentle swirl that they create, sounding for all the world like the simultaneous lightness and weight of a heavy snowfall.  Yang's basslines are more calmly insistent this time out and her tottery vocal accompaniments are more prominent too, and the fact that the whole thing sounds as if it's barely able to stay upright is testament to just how tight this whole operation really was.  It's a truly lovely record, occasionally dark, but for the most part simply gently commanding.  There are a couple of extras on the reissue, including a telling cover of New Order's 'Ceremony'.











And so, at last, we come to the third and final Galaxie 500 studio album, This Is Our Music (1990).  It's more of the same, but lead-off track, the spindly but upbeat 'Fourth of July' provides a clue that things were going slightly awry in the band.  The most obvious problem is that it sounds relatively cheerful, something that Galaxie 500 were not exactly about previously and although on the face of it the lyrics are suitably gloomy, there's still the "I feel alright when you smile" refrain.  The continued references to the possible need to "change my style" are something of a giveaway too.  It is in truth a really lovely pop song but it does seem something of an anomoly in the band's catalogue.  Kramer's usual woozy haze is layered over everything on the album in his traditional style and ostensibly all is business as usual and with the exception of 'Fourth of July' the album has all the band's glacial trademarks.  Pretty much normal service is resumed with 'Hearing Voices', but even this has an acoustic delicacy usually lacking in their spooked out atmospherics, and rather than the winter chill the band usually evoke there's something of a spring mist about it.  I suppose the centrepiece of the album, and certainly the track that everybody talked about on its release, is the 8 minute cover of Yoko Ono's 'Listen the Snow is Falling'.  As an exercise in both restraint and oblique artsiness it's certainly successful but there's something just too arch, too knowing about it for me and the adaptation of one quirky sensibility by another is too cheap a shot (it's much more fun to hear Galaxie 500 take on The Rutles, which we'll come to).  The other songs on the album are genetically identical to those on the other two albums, but with maybe just a touch more confidence and a little more clarity in construction, but it made no real difference, Wareham had other fish to fry and, ironically, broke up the band just prior to the release of This is Our Music.  The reissue also has an extra which is, finally, a Velvet Underground cover ('Here She Comes Now').











And to finish off the 500, we have the Uncollected album (1996), containing various B-sides and rarities spanning their brief career. There's some great stuff in amongst these tunes, not least evidence that the band had some sort of a sense of humour - the cover of 'Cheese and Onions' is done in a kind of mock-respectful way which is priceless.  There are other interesting diversions, such as the version of 'Blue Thunder' with a saxophone playing the breaks, which doesn't work but gives a hint of the idea that the band had tried to develop in certain directions, and a beautifully delicate live version of the Beatles' 'Rain' which many an indie act has had a go at (Bongwater's version being the ace though).  Of the original tunes there's only a slight step down from the quality of the material on the studio albums and although really what's here is not exactly essential, anybody who likes the band's other work would have no complaints about it.












Right, from tomorrow I'm going to do a little bit of catching up on the stuff I've picked up in the last few months before moving on to the transcendentally wonderful France Gall.

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