LaRM day 78 (Church-Cinerama)

Back in the days when I would buy anything that was ever referenced in connection in any possible way with REM I picked up a few albums by Australia's greatest post-paisley indie rock outfit, The Church. The first one I picked up was Conception (1988) which is basically a compilation of the best bits of their first two albums from 1981 and 1982. There are some great songs on Conception, including probably the most famous of their tunes, 'The Unguarded Moment'. It's all chiming guitars and slightly fey indie rock songs. There's something slightly off-beat about it all though and I wonder whether it's a cultural thing, Australian acts always seem to me to be specifically distinguishable from UK or US bands (apart from the dismal INXS but then they don't really count as a band, they're too shit) but I can't really put my finger on quite what it is. I can hear why people pretended that there was any relation between the Church's sound and REM's, but it's hugely inaccurate in truth. I think it's just that kind of Rain Parade type of thing that tied any band with a jangly guitar sound together. Apart from Steve Kilbey's faintly irritating vocals it's all pretty great stuff.

As is, to my mind, their best album, 1988's Starfish, which is really lovely. It's pretentious, overblown and possibly a little unintentionally silly, but the tunes really are great and they manage to stay just the right side of turning into a prog act. There's a lot of space in these songs too which is nice, and creates a broad landscape in terms of the sound - it sounds like wide open spaces. Perhaps that's what marks Australian bands out, this sense of dense open environmental spaces - the Triffids records for instance are explicitly about the landscape and it kind of fits. Anyway, Starfish is a big but gentle rock album which is thick with reverb and broadly produced acoustic guitars and chiming Rickenbackers and although, once again, Kilbey's vocals (and portentous lyrics) are sometimes a little grating, on the whole it really is a nice record. More pretentious yet though is follow-up Gold Afternoon Fix (1990) which does move back and forth across the prog line and set out the musical framework that the band would increasingly follow. There are still some great songs on Gold Afternoon Fix ('Fading Away' is nice, and 'Russian Autumn Heart' is a decent rock-pop song) and overall it's a pretty decent album, but when it doesn't work, it really doesn't work. And check out the cover - it's terrible, the band look hilariously po-faced with some of the naffest styling ever seen on an album sleeve.

Cibo Matto's Pom Pom (2007) is a compilation essentially of most of debut album Viva La Woman and a lot of second album Stereo*Type A released between 1996-2000. The stuff from Viva La Woman is great, sample heavy knockabout pop music, a lighthearted version of the kind of stuff Solex started knocking out in the mid-90's. It's basically two Japanese women doing some shouty singing over rolling, funky beats and samples and it's great, great fun. The material from Stereo*Type A is more serious, less focussed on the samples, and with much greater emphasis on songwriting and performing. Yuka Honda's singing voice turns out to be really quite charming and the songs are really strong (despite the fact that by this point Honda's partner Sean Lennon was in the band), with a seriously funky and occasionally jazzy foundation. It's all good stuff and interestingly although when they were released they seemed like very different records, the fact that Pom Pom has them all mixed up makes it clear that it was actually a pretty natural progression from one album to the next. Great record.

Last up today is the first album by David Gedge's Cinerama, Va Va Voom (1998). After the Wedding Present split up Gedge set up Cinerama as an outlet for the more classically structured songs that he had been writing and as such it's a much more stately and grandly elegant affair then the Weddoes ramshackle jangling or their later crunching indie rock. The songs are all threaded through with a peculiar kind of nostalgic feel, a sort of 60's by default type of sound, with politely orchestrated strings and gently rolling songs, yet it's still very much Gedge's rough, untutored northern voice and his trenchant observations of the mundane in life that he had made his own in the Wedding Present. And these are still indie rock records despite the trappings. It's really all pretty clever and more importantly it's all very pretty, they're charming songs and I really have a soft spot for Gedge's rather expansive view of the everyday.