LaRM day 27 (Battles-Beach Boys)

Let's get arhythmical, I want to get arhythmical, let's get into arhythmical. It's the compilation of Battles EPs C & B (both 2004), that we're talking about here, and this is great experimental post-rock larking about. Although not the grandstanding show-off of first album Mirrored, the tunes on these EPs, for the most part, really set out the stall for where the band were going to go. This is properly intellectual math-rock, with a hard edge, and most of it is fascinating, and surprisingly tuneful. With the exception of one or two rather pointless noise experiments (the 12 minute 'BTTLS' for instance) this is enlivening if relatively low-key soundlab stuff. I don't think that the EPs utilise the possibilities of computer manipulation in the same staggering way that Mirrored (2007) does though. Mirrored is an astonishing album, taking the experimental sketches of the EPs and turning them into massive full-blown art-rock workouts that are completely unique, and apart from anything else show off the kind of technical skill both in terms of musicianship and studio and computer expertise that hasn't been seen since the height of prog. Now that in my book is a compliment by the way. In any event, what's amazing about Mirrored is that it doesn't sound simply like prog at all. If anything it sounds like any number of musical styles, metal, rock, jazz, prog, musique concrete, all stripped of their flesh and the bones then strung together in a completely compelling and thrilling way. It single-handedly made the briskly stale idea of post-rock relevant again. In truth, none of it should work, in fact it should sound like a bad joke. Instead it sounds like the future. It isn't, obviously, but while it's on the record player it sounds like it.

Gothus maximus! It's Pete Murphy, his devil's cheekbones and his Bauhaus. Weirdly the only Bauhaus record I ever picked up was the 1983 live album Press the Eject and Give Me the Tape. I dug the goth for a while and where most goth bands I now realise were truly awful, I still have a soft spot for the Bauhaus. I think they were cut from a slightly different cloth and the fact that their first couple of albums were on 4AD makes a lot of sense to me, I think of them as much more a sort of dark art-rock act than goth. Admittedly a pricelessly absurd and overblown dark art-rock act. Press the Eject was originally a limited edition bonus album with early pressings of their second album The Sky's Gone Out, but on its own it's relatively unremarkable as live albums go. It does have the quintessential version of 'Bela Lugosi's Dead' which in the live version is a lot more, if you'll forgive me, full-bloodied than the studio version, and there are also pretty decent outings for 'Kick in the Eye' (always Bauhaus' best song for me) and 'Dark Entries' but on the whole it's a fairly unnecessary album, as is so often the way with live albums.

Next up it's the dismally titled Nico Teen Love (2009) by the French Fratellis, B.B. Brunes. Now, I picked this up from work because there was a cute looking French girl on the cover and it was in a funny shaped sleeve. There is not much else to recommend it. I don't know if B.B. Brunes are big in their home nation, but it's pretty lucklustre and relatively unimpressive layabout rock. There are many, many, many worse records than this around but that is, as we must always remember, not the same as saying that it's good.

And that's it, time to wax down our surfboards because here comes the first of a handful of epic marathons that we'll be doing over the next few months, it's our 27 album Beach Boys session (I'm counting the Pet Sounds Sessions box set as four albums by the way...). So let's begin with the opening duo, Surfin' Safari (1962) and Surfin' USA (1963). For me the Beach Boys didn't really hit their masterful phase until 1965, and there are many albums before then and although there are great tunes on every early album, the whole tend to be less than the sum of the parts. Surfin' Safari has a bunch of Brian's in your face tunes which seem so innocuous today but caused him terrible heartache and mockery at the time, and some of them are great ('Surfin' Safari' itself, obviously, '409') but Gary Usher's involvement I think was probably not helpful because it added an element of strangeness which really jars ('Country Fair's carnival barker, 'Chug-a-Lug', which is not only peculiar but is also rubbish). Usher's work in Sagittarius, amongst other things, is great, but he wasn't helping Brian out much in my opinion. Surfin' Safari set a remarkable template and spawned many imitators, all of whom were worse by far than the Beach Boys, but as an album it's really fairly mediocre. As is follow-up Surfin' USA which although moving the style up a notch is still a way off the dizzying heights they were to reach in just four short years. Again, the formula is much the same and the good tune to bad tune to mediocre tune ratio is also similar. A couple of barnstormers (the title song, 'Shut Down', which is my favourite early BB tune) a couple of absolute stinkers (an ill-advised cover of 'Misirlou', 'Honky Tonk') and a bunch of otherwise OK numbers. It all stays much the same for the next four albums, but the ratio shifts increasingly in favour of the good tunes, as I think we'll find out conclusively tomorrow...