Monday 21 January 2013

LaRM day 169 (catch-up)

Final bit of catching up to do, starting with the dramatically over-rated second album by Sweden's finest sister act First Aid Kit, last year's The Lion's Roar.  Interestingly, it's always the first not very good album that becomes the monster smash, and The Lion's Roar is no exception.  After The Big Black and the Blue I had expected them to develop the spookier, more arch and quietly experimental side of their music, but instead they decided to make a fairly pointless second rate Neko Case album.  While I know that country and western music is huge in Scandinavia (at work we used to get CDs by the bucket load of groups of weird old Norwegians and Swedes doing covers of Kenny Rogers songs), there's something strangely disappointing about the idea that interesting indie kids in the Nordics have essentially a cool version of the same rather low ambition.  That's not to say that it isn't a lovely album of post-Fleet Foxes Americana, it certainly is, and there are some really fine songs on it, but when it really comes down to it I'm a lot more likely to listen to what feels like the real thing rather than a peculiarly forced pastiche.  It's really no different to listening to Scotland's Camera Obscura trying to pretend to be the Concretes and there's no reason why I should be more forgiving of one than the other.  Oh, and, as we all have learned in painful fashion, any appearance by Conor Oberst is an appearance too many.












Well, what do you know, it's another appearance by the mighty Serge Gainsbourg, surely however the last.  This is a miracle of sourcing by Zoe who tracked down a copy of the elusive follow-up to Melody Nelson, 1973's tribute to passing wind, Vu de l'exterieur.  Obviously this isn't simply a lyrical examination of the joys and miseries of constipation, defecation and flatulence, it's also one of Serge's lushest and most musically intricate, and intimate (natch) records.  Obviously part of the man's great genius is to make a joke as rounded as possible, and to listen to Vu de l'exterieur without having any idea of what he's singing about is to listen to a collection of delicate, romantic and highly crafted pop ballads and chansons, which move between acoustic charm and piano-led rollers, all with Serge crooning in his most approachable style.  It's a really lovely album to listen to, relaxing and uncharacteristically charming throughout, and a really smooth and worthy follow-up to Melody Nelson's astonishing brilliance.  As long as you don't know that he's singing about ruining a one-night stand by constantly farting or a woman's incontinence resulting from extended bouts of a certain style of, er, intimacy.












Next up we have Lou Barlow's 2009 album Goodnight Unknown.  While I really rated his previous solo album Emoh, I have a bit of a problem with Goodnight Unknown.  Although Barlow's whole schtick is unpredictability, a certain grasshopper mind approach to record making, Emoh had implied something of a more settled and comfortable relationship to his own work, and although it was unchallenging, it was homely and warm.  That sense of settled ease is pretty much gone with Goodnight Unknown and the restless urgency is back, taking with it the gentle songcraft that Barlow had seemingly settled into.  There are some great rock songs, some lovely ballads and the pieces are all right, but the whole just doesn't gel, and while there's more life in the album there's weirdly not much more energy.  Opener 'Sharing' sounds like something of a throwaway off-cut from the Dinosaur Jr reunions and the whole thing sounds too close to a compilation of the less obviously brilliant bits of the Sebadoh albums for comfort.  Unsurprisingly it's when Barlow takes his foot off the pedal that things work best, with the unsettlingly melancholic 'Too Much Freedom' and 'The One I Call' taking the heat out of the previous tunes. But again, there's a strange harking back to days gone by with the four string strum out of 'Gravitate' sounding like it should have come from Weed Forestin'.  There are great tunes in here, but the album is too disjointed, too uncertain to really work.  It's a shame because it's exactly this unwillingness to make the pieces fit that used to make Barlow such a vital songwriter, but these days I think he should just accept that we've all got older.












And finally, it's silly old CSS and their 2011 release, La Liberacion.  Now unlike the hipsters I wasn't disappointed by Donkey.  I thought it was a great rock record and the fact that they had given up trying to impress with their cooler than cool cultural referencing by only their second album suggested to me that they were only playing in the first place and really the joke was on the kind of people who genuinely thought that Death from Above 1979 were the greatest band of 2003.  So, Donkey was more of a statement of intent and it had some really fine nasty, sharp bits of aggro pop on it that worked well.  La Liberacion is a step in another direction, but I'm not sure where it thinks it's going.  On the face of it, it sounds like an attempt to undermine the kind of dancefloor garbage that Lady Gaga and so on churn out but the trouble is that the tunes aren't nearly good enough to compete.  The whole thing is somewhat lacklustre, it feels cheap but not in a fun, trashy way.  But Lovefoxxx was cool enough to sustain a few rough records so if they don't disappear forever they may come up with the goods again sometime in the next few years...


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