LaRM day 177 (Dana Gilllespie-Glass Candy)

Alright, so it's the late-1960's, you're the daughter of an ennobled eminent Austrian scientist and you're living in the UK, so what do you do with your time? What kind of career do you want? To follow in the family footsteps and make great strides in the advancement of human understanding? Or how about hanging out with stupid hippies, taking your clothes off for low-rent movies and making drippy records?  The latter? If you're Dana Gillespie, you've got it.  Dana Gillespie (or to give her the name her family knew her by, Richenda Antoinette de Winterstein Gillespie) released her second album, Box of Surprises, in 1969 and it's exactly the kind of watercolour psychedelia you'd expect from a singer with so little engagement, but that's not to say that it isn't great.  Like its predecessor Foolish Seasons, and as its cover depicting Gillespie surrounded by various stuffed animals suggests, it's a near perfect snapshot of the good, the bad and everything in between that the British and American pop scenes were concentrating on at the time.  There are bouncy Dusty Springfield take-offs ('Describing You', 'You're Heartbreak Man') and there are folkie west coast workouts ('For David, the Next Day', 'Foolish Seasons'), there's low-level psychedelia ('Like I'm a Clown', 'Taffy') and delicate balladry ('When Darkness Fell', 'By Chasing Dreams').  It's all really fantastic stuff, less because it's particularly brilliant in itself but because it's a superb summation of so much of what was going on at the time and it's a whole load of fun.

Speaking of folkie freakery here's the soundtrack to possibly the UK's greatest horror film, The Wicker Man (1973) (the only rival to The Wicker Man for the UK horror crown is the awesome Blood on Satan's Claw which mines similar material).  The Wicker Man soundtrack was overseen by New Yorker Paul Giovanni, but is really mostly the work of obscure UK folk outfit Magnet, and is suitably unnerving, off-beat and spooky.  I don't think it was ever given an official release as such and was put out by indie labels many years after the film's release, and the vinyl issue that I've got breaks the material into two distinct sides, the first being the fuller songs and the second being the incidental music.  It's all proto freak-folk of the highest order throughout and you can hear where pretty much all of the 2000's freak-folk scene got their ideas.  While Espers have tried hard to make out that it was Lubos Fiser's work on Valerie and Her Week of Wonders that inspired them, that's clearly nonsense as their records are nothing like Fiser's and are too genetically identical to The Wicker Man for it to be ignored.  In any event the songs on the first side have spooky reed instruments winding their wobbly way through the acoustic guitar and vocal pieces, with the over-riding sexual impetus of the lyrics matching the same theme of the film perfectly.  It all sounds suitably pagan and disconcerting, it's all entirely appropriate and you can easily imagine this stuff being played while nutty heathen rites are being performed.  We've got the frightening children's round of 'Maypole', the blisteringly erotic yearning of 'Willow's Song', the bar-room filth of 'Landlord's Daughter', all of which bring the scenes in the film vividly back to mind.  The incidental music on the second side is in some ways more interesting, because it really brings out the essential spookiness of this stuff, most of it being traditional music adapted for the film.  There's a really deeply unsettling feel to a lot of it which chimes absolutely with the film's theme of the distance between cultures over time and although it seems silly to think about paganism as something potentially horrifying, The Wicker Man and its soundtrack demonstrate that our innate fears about collective behaviour are exercised through our fear of the past.

Here comes one that I would slate without mercy were it not for my own past.  I remember being in Arles in the south of France in the blistering summer of 1988, about a month after the release of the Gipsy Kings' breakthrough single 'Bamboleo'.  In the centre of Arles is a spectacular Roman amphitheatre and one night we were in town and heard, clear as day, the Gipsy Kings performing inside.  It was truly an amazing evening, incredibly romantic, with the townsfolk all gathered in and around the amphitheatre going mad for the Gipsy Kings, the town beautifully lit up on a sweltering night, scorpions and foxes darting around and this faux-traditional music.  It really was great.  Obviously the Gipsy Kings debut album (and 7" 'Djobi Djoba' which I also bought) is pretty daft and a little silly sounding now, and the idea that it caught on so wildly with the proto Womad crowd shows, I suppose, that it wasn't any good, but I'm not going to slag it off, so there.

Girls Against Boys were making their finest work at the same time as the Afghan Whigs and although the Whigs were and have always been markedly better, there was a shared sense of urgency, a similarly misanthropic take on relationships and a musical brittleness in common.  Listening to House of Girls Against Boys (1996) now it's surprising both how good the songs are and how dated the sound of it is.  The whole thing starts with some brilliant, vicious bit of slicing guitar work on 'Super-Fire' and the jolting 'Click Click', and these two set the tone for the juddering, halting structures of the songs.  The entire album is a close, claustrophobic rock record which, although never quite getting to the psychic depths that Greg Dulli can reach, is a bleak, black exercise in rock dynamics.  Even when it slows down, it does so only in order to become even more dark and laden with foreboding (the grim 'Life in Pink' for instance), and the jagged rock songs are if anything a respite from the grim atmospherics.  There's a kind of evil lounge rock on 'TheKindaMzkYouLike', which goes to pains to recreate the Afghan Whigs style, with an added pop backbeat, and 'Cash Machine' is a grinding, less violent kind of Big Black number.  It's a really good album and although its production style means that you could probably guess which year it was made in without any difficulty, it's got some superb songs and an impressive attitude.

You know how Vampire Weekend weren't actually any good?  If you can imagine what they might sound like if they were in fact really great, then you've imagined Givers.  Their song 'Up Up Up' became a minor thing thanks to being included on the soundtrack to some stupid football computer game, (and horrifyingly was also used in an episode of Glee I believe) but forget the computer game (and particularly forget about Glee), focus on the tune, it's a quite brilliant explosion of bright, frantic pop music at its absolute finest, a rainbow of jittery "afro" guitar riffs, percussive drive and jaunty dual vocals.  It's a brilliant song and although it's the most immediate on their album In Light (2011), it's still demonstrative of their style throughout.   I saw them play at last year's Field Day and they were really great, energetic in the best possible way, really exciting.  Where Vampire Weekend seemed to think that there was something quite amazing about being white and playing guitar riffs that sound a little bit like African riffing, Givers use the same techniques but blend them into a much bigger and way, way more impressive tapestry of sounds and styles (and don't feel the need to refer to it in interviews and their own lyrics).  Givers are also much more technically interesting, forming songs from the ground up and letting them grow outwards, often ending up in very different places to where they started.  'Meantime' is a great, multi-part pop song with fantastically propulsive percussion and typically charming and enlivening vocal interplay between Tiffany Lamson (whose percussion playing is a joy to watch) and Taylor Guarisco, and 'Saw You First' is a beautifully laid-back ramble through melody, and the album is full of songs of the same calibre.  There are some tunes that don't quite work (the restless 'Ripe' is a bit forgettable) but on the whole the album is a great, uplifting first outing.

Finally it's the glam racket of Glass Candy's debut Love Love Love (2003).  I think that we're all supposed to love Glass Candy now but the only thing to recommend Love Love Love is the excellent gatefold sleeve.  Personally I think it's a terrible record, lazy, boring and self-indulgent without the good grace to be over the top.  It's an attempt at being louche in a kind of Bowie by Can kind of way and it's such an inept failure that I'm absolutely mystified as to what it is that we're supposed to be pretending to see in it.  Behind the ghastly shrieking vocals (which, according to allmusic, are "scary yet sexy") are some of the most-cackhanded attempts at rock posturing yet committed to vinyl.  It's really bad, I promise.