LaRM day 12 (American Music Club-Timothy Andres)

Man, I have been in a terrible mood today (people make me SO angry) so it was only right and proper that we began the day by finishing off the American Music Club extravaganza - after ten years of solo albums and side projects, Eitzel reconvened AMC for what was supposed to be one last go round and they released one of the many anti-George Bush albums of the 2000's, Love Songs for Patriots (2004). It's a good album, working from the best parts of San Francisco and adding an unexpected layer of righteous anger, which I wouldn't really have imagined Eitzel to be able to pull off but which actually seems to have made his songwriting punchier and more direct. There's still time for some slower, gloomier numbers ('Another Morning' is lovely, but it's back to his old obsession with the death of a close friend), and there isn't really any particular change of approach, such that it sounds like simply another AMC album, but that still puts it head and shoulders above most other bands who try this sort of thematic stuff (once again, I'm looking at you The National). Despite efforts on the part of Eitzel and co-founder Vudi to continue to work together under a new band name, no record label would release anything or let them tour unless they kept the AMC name, so for (really this time) one last time the band came together in 2008 to make The Golden Age. The cover of this album is terrible, but the songs are some of the best Eitzel has written since Mercury. It's a more restrained affair than Love Songs for Patriots and it benefits all the more for it. It's the quiet version of AMC and in many ways the songs are more similar to those from Eitzel's solo albums, and if anything The Golden Age proves how much of a collaborative creation AMC always were, rather than Eitzel's backing band. There are some truly lovely songs here and the album marks a much more apt end to a fabulous band than the close that seemed to happen back in 1994.

Now, on to something very different. I don't really know how to talk about the next record, partly because I think I'm going to elicit blasts of derision from everybody I know. It's Tori Amos' Boys for Pele (1996). Obviously this is a truly terrible record. I mean absolutely terrible. However, I think it has an invaluable role because I think Boys for Pele has as much of an influence on Joanna Newsom's last two albums as Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush. In fact I don't think the world would have been nearly as ready to accept Ys and Have One On Me if Boys for Pele had never been made. Honestly, it's all here - the songs that seem formless and then grow almost out of themselves, the lyrical obfuscation, the ceaseless riffing off Kate Bush, even some of the melodic phrasing that Newsom uses is set out here. The key difference is that when Amos does this stuff it comes out sounding awful and when Newsom does it, it comes out sounding utterly sublime.

On to more lively things with the sole album by Kim Deal's Breeders-hiatus band The Amps called Pacer (1995). After the Breeders call it quits following the success of Last Splash, Deal formed the Amps to fill in time while sister Kelley got through the heroin cold turkey, and to be honest, as many people would agree, she works better without Kelley hanging around. Pacer is a great album, lo-fi indie rock, that sounds unmistakably like the work of its writer. There's a lot more life and sense of fun to Pacer than Last Splash and the whole album sounds like a weight has been lifted off her shoulders. It's brisk and spiky, and doesn't hang around. Then we've got the 'Tipp City' single, which has a great B-side in 75-second 'Just Like a Briar'.

Next up should be Les Filles Compliquees (1991) by French singer Elisabeth Anais. I bought the tape of this when I was on holiday with my mum and dad and thought that she looked super-cute (Elisabeth Anais, not my mum). I haven't heard it for some years and it has no internet visibility so we'll have to skip it.

Now on to something extremely serious. Well, if not entirely serious then certainly intellectually weighty. It's a couple of albums from each end of Laurie Anderson's career, starting with Big Science (1982). Apparently the New York art community were aghast at Anderson, an established visual artist, releasing a pop record. In retrospect this seems fairly extraordinary bearing in mind how little it would surprise or upset anybody these days. I mean when Turner Prize winner Steve McQueen is making movies about sex addicts for a major film studio, there's not much left to be aghast by in the art world is there? Anyway, it really only serves to prove how ahead of her time Anderson has always been. Big Science is about as far away from a pop record that a pop record could ever get. It is instead a kind of musical treatise on how not to live our lives, a deeply satirical and laconic report from a sort of psychic distance. There is something peculiarly separate about Anderson's records, as if she can see straight through the world and people and their behaviour, but she's reporting what she sees from behind a thick pane of glass. It's even more the case with her last album, Homeland (2010), which is a quite spectacular record, unnerving, disturbing, laugh-out-loud funny and musically quite unbelievable. Again, it seems as if unravelling the world is all too easy, the difficulty is how to report it back. There are many references, some overt, some coded, to the immense stupidity of people and their relationship to the world, but she is never pompous or arrogant, smug or sanctimonious, she clearly includes herself in her analyses. She shouldn't, she's much smarter than the rest of us.

Finally for today it's a bit of modern classical with Timothy Andres' Shy & Mighty (2010). It's a terrible name and it's got a terrible cover (with the pianist himself looking like a failed catalogue ad model trying to look "laid back"). But the record is very different to what one would expect from the outside. It's a relatively generic take on dissonant solo piano, but the fact that it doesn't have the strength of its own conviction to really give it large John Cage style is absolutely to its benefit, because in amongst the tumbling notes and the unpredictable volume shifts are some really lovely melodic lines. There's not much here that to be honest even someone like Rachel Grimes hasn't done before and better, but it does have enough to keep me listening.

And so ends yet another day. Yet another exactly the same day. See you on the other side for another one. Exactly the same. But with a slightly different soundtrack. SEE YA!