LARM day 168 (catch up)

Alright, so obviously, having taken months off there's a bunch of stuff to catch up with, starting with Love This Giant by David Byrne and St Vincent (2012).  I hummed and hah-ed over whether to include album opener 'Who' on the best of the year CD and it just missed out.  It's a fantastic song, unexpected and arch, built around parping horns and fluttering synthesised strings together with a brilliant and archetypal Annie Clark mangled guitar riff.  It sounds very much like a collaboration between Byrne and Clark, with each drawing the best out of the other's approach.  Weirdly though, the rest of the album sounds very much more obviously as if they constructed their parts separately and tried to fuse them together.  With the exception of 'Who', the first couple of times I listened to the album it left me pretty cold and it's fair to say that you need to let it grow on you.  Part of the problem is that after 'Who' is one of Clark's numbers, 'Weekend in the Dust', which might have made a superb St Vincent song, but in this horns and post-Eno production context falls really flat, and actually sounds more than anything like a Deee-Lite album track from 15 years ago.  It's a shame because it puts you on edge about what follows.  Realistically speaking the album really works best when it's clearest that they each had nothing to do with the others songs.  For the most part it's a Byrne solo album and a lot of it is a logical follow-on from his collaboration album with Fatboy Slim (for instance 'The One Who Broke Your Heart' could have easily come from Here Lies Love) and it's really Byrne's show ('Dinner for Two' and 'I Should Watch TV' are fabulous tunes which take the best of the production approach and his essentially melancholic melodic sense), in that he comes out of the whole thing much more successfully.  Clark's songs are hidebound by the style (which apparently she had suggested, but suits Byrne so much better) and 'Ice Age' is another example of her great songwriting turned to disadvantage by the nature of the collaboration.  It is, on the whole, a great record and even when either Byrne or Clark fail they still manage to come up with something interesting, but when it's flat it really feels flat.  Some of its more discreet charms need time to reveal themselves too though and Clark's 'Optimist' is an absolutely gorgeous piece of heartbreak songwriting.

The first Concretes album was a compilation of two EPs (mini-LPs really) released in 1999 and named boyoubetterrunnow (2000).  Unlike the first proper studio album released some three years later, the songs on these EPs were scrappy, loose-limbed pop music which sounds very much like relaxed living room rock-outs among friends.  There's very little trace of the fuzzy Phil Spector keyboard work-outs of the first album, this is all pure charm and while there's nothing too dramatically exciting about it, it's all about the feeling and where the band became careworn and brittle over time, the songs on boyoubetterrunnow are all feeling good.  Victoria Bergsman's trademark laconic drawl is put to sunnier use than usual and although it still has that weary edge, the songs are bright and create a subtle contrast for her voice.  There are some hints towards the deeper and more solidily realised material to come ('The Jeremiad' is a slowie with the requisite Sarah Records cues) but for the most part boyoubetterrunnow is less of a sunny winter day and more a trip to the beach.

One of the hardest lessons a music lover can learn I learnt in November 2010.  When Zoe encouraged me to buy the 19-disc Sandy Denny box-set the day it was released I told her it would be better to wait until the price went down on Amazon (it was about £120).  Within about two weeks it had sold out and has now become one of the most valuable and sought after box-sets in the history of recorded music (copies, when they do sell, which is basically never, costing around £1,000).  Anyway, a condensed version called The Notes and the Words was released in 2012 cutting the 19 discs down to 4 discs of rarities.  For anyone without the taste for Denny's work there's nothing to get thrilled about on The Notes and the Words but for everybody else these are chips from the holy grail, including the earliest known recordings that Denny made (in full on folk mode and with the obligatory air of Dylan worship in effect) which are fascinating and notable for the self-assurance she exhibited from the get-go.  In truth it's the middle period material which, unsurprisingly, is the most thrilling, with demo and alternate versions of songs from her first two studio albums standing out as being truly remarkable, and the stripped down nature of some of these versions reveals the meticulous and exquisite composition of these songs.  The demos of 'Crazy Lady Blues' and 'It'll Take a Long Time' are fantastic and are markedly better than the album versions with their overblown production.  Even the material from the lacklustre and disappointing final Rendezvous album is allowed a chance to show itself as being markedly better than the album (and Trevor Lucas) allowed it to be, with the acoustic version of 'One Way Donkey Ride' being a textbook lesson in how to write a melancholic piece of rock music.  There are 60 or so songs on The Notes and the Words and while there are occasional lulls it is almost all absolute gold, and yet another huge slab of evidence that Denny was not only one of the greatest singers in popular form that the country has ever produced but also one of its most slyly brilliant songwriters.

Sticking with the folk theme, we have the second finest voice in female folk singing, with Cara Dillon's self-titled debut album (2002).  A different proposition entirely vocally speaking (as it were), where Denny is earthy and grounded, a lifetime of experience shot through every note, Dillon is ethereal, other-worldly, winsome perhaps but crystallinely-clear.  Dillon (together with partner Sam Lakeman) takes the traditional Celtic folk style (and songs) and transforms them into something more modern with a finely subtle style.  The backing vocal tracks for 'Craigie Hill' for instance are unlike anything remotely traditional in their arrangement, yet they are perfectly in harmony with the traditional structure of the song.  It's this delicacy in arrangement that really helps to bring out quite how remarkable Dillon's voice really is, and although at first listen it may be too sweet and high for some tastes, it is without a shadow of a doubt a fantastically controlled instrument and it's also effortlessly beautiful.  Like contemporary Kate Rusby, Dillon and Lakeman knew that they needed to cut their teeth (and prove themselves to a notoriously ornery audience) by sticking mainly to traditional material in their early days and so there are only two originals here, but again, showing their understanding of (and desire to update) the traditional material, the originals fit in perfectly well.  It's all lovely stuff and although it may at first seem designed specifically not to upset the folk traditionalists, it's actually some of the most astute interpreting around.

I think people find it hard to really make out what The Dø are up to and it's true that their records are absolutely all over the show stylistically, but I think that's really the point, the audience are less of a consideration than the muse for them and whether we like it, or get it, or not really doesn't matter much to them.  Personally I think second album Both Ways Open Jaws is an absolutely blistering bit of indie-pop experimentation.  I reckon the bottle tops, broken glass and scraps of metal as percussion are not demonstrations of a tiresome wackiness but because it's fun to try things out.  Anyway, whatever you think of the approach, there are some fantastic pop songs in amongst this stuff.  The loping 'The Wicked and the Blind' is a great bit of psychedelica, 'The Calendar' is straight out of the more accessible end of the Fiery Furnaces ouvre, and 'Gonna Be Sick' and the charming 'Too Insistent' sound like a beefier Nouvelle Vague ditching the frippery.  As far as the continual reinvention of Parisian pop goes, The Dø are a brilliant example of quite how fascinating the process is, and how useful it is to sometimes look outside the US and the UK for the more inventive side of the indie scene. 

More catching up tomorrow.