LaRM day 158 (Foo Fighters-Foreigner)

Right, before we begin today, Marcus has reminded me that way, way back, I suppose probably when the Folk Implosion's One Part Lullaby was released, I did some ranting about how the only reason that One Part Lullaby sounded as great as it does was nothing to do with either Davis or Barlow, but was really most likely to have been single-handedly down to indie super-producer Wally Gagel.  Now, obviously, in retrospect that's probably unfair. But only just, and in fact the sheer distance in sound between everything else the band made and One Part Lullaby, suggests that there's a good chance that a substantial amount of the responsibility really was down to Gagel.  The most telling thing about this though is that it proves that I just say whatever happens to be in my head at any given time, with no reference to anything I may have ever said before, which I think probably means that I'm quite simply a perennial bullshitter.  Nevertheless, that's not going to stop me from banging on in whatever ill-informed or half-baked way seems appropriate, so let's continue....

Even more enjoyable and even less memorable than There Is Nothing Left to Lose is the super-slick One By One (2002).  The Foo Fighters had by this point become one of the most well-oiled rock machines on the planet and neither the songs nor the production could be any shinier than they are on One By One.  The result is that, in the listening to it, the album is a great, propulsive, soft-metal workout, churning and grinding away with Grohl's stylised melodies weaving through it all.  But here's the rub, it's all completely forgettable, and it's the funny thing about the way that Grohl writes songs, it's all about the moment, because once the moment's over you wonder whether it really happened.  This stuff won't stick even though it sounds great and while that's fine for the experience of a rock record, it may also explain the band's phenomenal success - with every new release there's the hope that this one will be the one. It never is, it's the same as the last one, but there's comfort even in that I guess, so they can't lose.  Anyway, whatever, One By One has got 'Halo' and 'Overdrive' and a bunch of other great songs that drift into the ether immediately.

After the split of the almighty Slint the various members spent a while tinkering with other projects, but in my opinion it was Brian McMahon who came up with the most interesting.  The For Carnation records are as awkward and impenetrable as the band's name, but they are a few of the most intriguingly creepy ever recorded.  The first mini-LP, Marshmallows (1996) is the most eclectic, moving from short stripped back avant-rock numbers to lengthy mood setting experiments in rhythmic repetition, and there's little that unifies them particularly. It's all fine stuff though, starting with the delicate lullaby of 'On the Swing' (which shares the DNA of every Tortoise tune), with McMahon's oddly sinister sung-spoken delivery (odd because there's nothing immediately creepy about his voice at all, but when combined with what's going on around him, it just becomes peculiarly discomforting).  The urgent, fuzzy 'I Wear the Gold' sounds like running away from an unknown danger, 'Winter Lair' sets out the blueprint for the full-length album to follow- hushed, sepulchral and deeply sinister, McMahon's lyrics worryingly inaudible, and the mini-LP is all rounded out by the most Slint-like piece on the record, the hypnotic, loping, limping instrumental 'Preparing to Receive You'.  Although disjointed, it's a very fine record, exploring parts of rock music that had been little charted before.

But all of the promise of Marshmallows is made good, and in spades, with the deeply creepy eponymous album, released in 2000.  The whole album sounds like the worst part of your psyche rising up through swampy mire, like Martin Sheen appearing from the misty slime to kill Kurtz in Apocolypse Now.  Brushed drums, a glacial pace, a deadened Farfisa drone and a bassline that sounds like a zombie dragging its feet are the basis of opener 'Emp. Man's Blues', with McMahon's intoned, impressionistic lyrics, the words seemingly skimmed from the surface of a barely contained psychotic's mind ("I am the new Gods, you've seen my face around the block, but now I'm here, my time has come"), delivered in a spoken murmur.  See, the thing about the For Carnation album is that it makes you think of pretentious gobbledegook like that.  It's fabulous, massively spooked-out, creeping, crawling stuff.  It's the sound of a bad night alone on streets you aren't familiar with, and it's one of the greatest mood albums ever made.  Second song, 'A Tribute To' seems to be about a man who's done something terrible ("two bullets and a photo of home, damn them that brought me here") and its propulsive driving bassline does nothing to dispel the sense of terrifying unease, which is only magnified by instrumental 'Being Held''s looped distant clanging bells and drones which are broken up halfway through by the introduction of a thudding drum line.  Musically there's little of Slint beyond the repetition and McMahon's vocal delivery.  There's none of the quiet-LOUD dynamic, it's all quiet, unnervingly so, and the fact that it doesn't release at any point merely adds to its eerie tension.  Anyway, the second side is more of the same, but I've talked enough about it now.  Suffice it to say that it's superb.  I could, however, be completely wrong about the mood though, because my colleague Aswiny just came in and said "this sounds nice".

OK, let's all take a very deep breath before we take a dive head-first into the cesspool - it's five albums by Foreigner.  Punk may have been in full swing, but most of the world couldn't care less because there was some soft rock instead.  If it's open-top-cars-and-girls-in-T-shirts FM rock you're after, Foreigner are the right place.  I've never heard any of Foreigner's albums in their entirety before today (I may have taken the 5 album box set from work, but I don't think I ever had any real intention of actually unwrapping it).  And what's most interesting about the eponymous debut album (released in 1977) is how exactly it corresponded to my expectations of it.  Overblown, hideously overproduced, absurd and hugely annoying was what I had in mind and so it is.  We all know about Lou Gramm's having-trouble-taking-a-dump rock voice and Mick Jones' hard rock solo by numbers guitar work, but what I had also anticipated was how utterly anaemic these "rock anthems" are.  Every one of them is a template for how to be tedious and naff.  The naff element really is primarily down to the ghastly keyboard work (it's not worth mentioning the lyrics because of course they're laughable, that's a given).  Where to start with the songs?  Well, I guess the opening minute or so of big hit 'Feels Like the First Time' is surprisingly rocking, but as soon as we get to the disastrous keyboard led middle eight it's all over.  It's followed by one of the band's biggest numbers, 'Cold as Ice' which, despite the success of post-irony, is a pile shit, just like everything else here from bizarre declaration of rockdependence 'At War with the World' to idiotic rocker 'Headknocker' to the utterly laughable space-rock of 'Starrider'.  Honestly it's terrible.  Bearing in mind how much big rock was around by 1977 it's absolutely mystifying to me why Foreigner were so successful.

You know when you're a big rock star but not a total creep and want to treat the female fans with respect? Well, that's not Lou Gramm's way: "I want to know what you're up to after the show". Charming. That pretty much sets the tone for the lyrically creepy 'Hot Blooded' and indeed the whole of second album 'Double Vision' (1978).  Beyond the vacuous, misogynistic hard rock of 'Hot Blooded' and 'Love Has Taken It's Toll', you've also got some utterly ghastly rock ballads (the kind of stuff that would even make Extreme weep in pain) like dismal 'You're All I Am' which sounds like Adam & Joe doing a Take That piss-take.  There's even a bit of keyboard proggery entitled 'Tramontane' which sounds like it came from the soundtrack of Phantom of the Paradise (actually, that makes it sound a million times better than it actually is).  Really, Double Vision is an exercise in showcasing the worst possible elements of the male rock world of the late 70's, and while a lot of FM rock was great both genuinely and in an ironic way, Double Vision, like the rest of Foreigner's work, is just garbage.

And so to finish the day (but sadly not Foreigner) we come to third album, Head Games (1979).  Now, I'm not really prepared to say much about Head Games mainly because, at the risk of sounding like a square, I find the cover so unspeakably offensive that I can scarcely be bothered to be offended by the rubbish songs.  For those who don't know, and you will from the image below anyway, Head Games' cover is one of the handful of blisteringly women-hating album covers that inspired Spinal Tap's Smell the Glove and the "new Duke Flame" album, depicting as it does a young woman in tight clothes looking frightened and cowering at the back of a men's toilet.  Well, what do we infer from that, class?  In the end the most important lesson I guess is that the late 70's, particularly in the US, were an unutterably horrible time, in which some of the most repugnant attitudes known to human history were normalised as simple right-thinking.  No wonder the insanely derided concept of political correctness came about, what else can you do in the face of such moral disengagement than become a bit po-faced?  In any event, Head Games is another 40 minutes of musical excrement.

LaRM day 157 (Folk Implosion-Foo Fighters)

Lou Barlow took the opportunity of being asked by Larry Clark to provide the soundtrack for his new horrible movie Kids to really up his game.  The first fruits of a new approach was the single 'Natural One', which is a marked contrast to the previous Folk Implosion records.  'Natural One' is cleanly produced, features a loping bassline and delicate instrumentation and processed drums and is a million miles away from the scrappy, grating sound they usually came up with.  The only thing that hadn't changed was Barlow's brilliant way with a graceful melody, but this time rather than bury it in scratchy guitars and crappy production, it's in the spotlight.  'Natural One' is a great single, a kind of trip-hop for the indie set and somewhat remarkably and entirely unexpectedly it grazed the lower reaches of the Billboard chart, making Barlow and Davis suddenly musically viable to a wider audience, and even weirder, suddenly enormously rich.

The duo went into the studio with some cash and some great songs in early 1997 and the resultant album, Dare To Be Surprised was kind of an amalgam of their earlier records and 'Natural One'.  It's not all based on loops and beats but it certainly has much higher production values and it sounds really good.  Interestingly, although there are still occasional diversions into abstraction or noise for its own sake, for the vast majority of the record it's all about the tunes and the melodies.  Indeed the album really serves as a calling card for Barlow's songwriting outside of his work in Sebadoh, because it was at about this time that he really started letting the songs show themselves rather than self-consciously hiding them behind noise or breaking them up.  You can't help but wonder whether Barlow's intention had always really been to write delicate, gorgeous tunes but always chose to work with sidekicks who preferred "keeping it real".

And that suspicion really becomes pretty much a fact with the release of the absolutely wonderful One Part Lullaby (1999).  Barlow has described the idea they had was to go into the studio and make an album as if they would never be able to make another, and so create the best they possibly could.  Personally I think Davis had very little to do with either this idea or the results of it - it's all too clearly tied to Barlow's ideas of songwriting and I suspect Davis played a very minimal role in the whole thing.  One Part Lullaby absolutely could not be further from Take a Look Inside, either in terms of production, presentation, arrangement, mood or songwriting, it's absolutely lovely.  Every song is an exercise in balanced and graceful nostalgia or keen melancholy with lyrics that have virtually none of Barlow's previous essential sarcasm or silliness, and he allows his cool but attractive voice to finally really deliver the songs.  There are no real duds on the album and while the instrumental 'Serge' isn't doing much, it's the lowest point on the album, every other song is a charm from the bright teen ambition nostalgia trip 'Free To Go' to the absolutely glistening 'Someone To Love'.  The whole thing bristles with confidence, something which Barlow had never previously shown any signs of and it's uplifting from the opening bars to the last, and was easily one of the best albums of 1999 and one of the greats of the decade.

After One Part Lullaby John Davis quit the Folk Implosion leaving just Barlow to decide whether to carry on with the group name.  He gathered a couple of new collaborators and rechristened the band the New Folk Implosion (recalling one of Spinal Tap's best gags) and they released a self-titled album in 2004.  Another step in a different direction, the New Folk Implosion is a gloomy rock record, with Barlow's tunes turned into big rock ballads (in a strictly indie sense obviously, this isn't exactly Meat Loaf).  Some of it works, some of it doesn't but it's telling that the best tune on the album ('Brand of Skin') is also the one that sounds closest to the material on One Part Lullaby.  The jagged guitar solos and sense of a band playing hard simply don't fit with either Barlow's songs or our collective idea of him as a personality and it jars a bit.  There's a lovely lower key number in 'Pearl', but when the blues-boogie guitarism of 'End of Henley' starts you know there's something quite wrong.  There was no more Folk Implosion of any kind after the New Folk Implosion was released.

The international representative of modern Brazilian samba and bossa nova, Celso Fonseca, released his breakthrough album, Natural, in 2003.  I say breakthrough but that may be a bit of an overstatement because nobody bought anything he released afterwards anywhere outside Brazil.  Nevertheless, Natural is a superb exercise in traditionally structured samba and bossa with a gentle sprinkle of modernity.  It's beautifully produced, with lots of space and the whole album is very airy.  The obvious touchstones of Baden Powell and Gilberto Gil are expressly clear throughout the record but that's not to say that it's a slavish apeing of old styles.  It's exceptionally smooth, delicate and hints at the greats of the form while retaining a subtly persuasive character of its own.  It's a tired old cliche to refer to samba as being great for a summer day, but Natural probably is as close to the perfect soundtrack for a relaxed sunny day as you can get.

Freaky French chanteuse Brigitte Fontaine's career got off to a flying start with the amazing and challenging Brigitte Fontaine Est... album, released in 1968.  It's a complete sideshow of styles, from bouncy jazz-funk on 'Comme Rimbaud' to lushly aorchestrated balladeering on 'Dommage Que Tu Sois Mort' (which incidentally is a fabulous showcase for Jean-Claude Vannier's arranging skills, as amply demonstrated three years later on Serge Gainsbourg's Melody Nelson album).  There's jumpy pop, there's cabaret, there's angular rock, all delivered with Fontaine's wobbly, declarative voice.  It's all great stuff and although her work would get more difficult to like, and certainly more jazzy, Brigitte Fontaine Est... is one of the great lost odd albums of the late 60's.

And to round out the day it's the third album by Dave Grohl and his Foo Fighters, 1999's There Is Nothing Left to Lose.  As far as totally rad rockin' pop music goes, Grohl has got the whole thing down, melding really strident melodies with crunching rock.  The only difficulty is that as a template it's not very flexible and too often you find that you're wondering whether you've already heard the song you're on earlier in the album; because the songs are, truth to be told often quite samey.  But there again, if it's lively rock with a jaunty pop edge, why not - it's not as if anything much is going on but feeling the breeze through the passenger-side window.  There are some big numbers on There Is Nothing Left to Lose, and unsurprisingly the biggest are those that were single releases ('Breakout', 'Learn to Fly', 'Stacked Actors', etc) but there are still plenty of other great tunes.  The thing that really works about the Foo Fighters is that they act like it's still the 1970's in terms of the way they treat the music business - if you want to be known, you tour and you dig the audience, rather than seeing touring as the necessary slog to get the big money.  Grohl always comes across as a decent bloke and there's something rather charming about the way that the band clearly enjoy each other's company.  I remember a joint review of the docco DVD's of the Foo Fighters and L'il Wayne (which were released on the same day) which drew stark contrasts between the Foo Fighters enjoyment of each other and their music, and their openness about their self-determination and their good fortune, and L'il Wayne's dead-inside existence, being pushed this way and that between promoters, execs and anybody else who wants to get something from him, and scarcely able to articulate a sentence.  Anyway, it's all an aside to the fact that, like all Foo Fighters albums, There Is Nothing Left to Lose is a great album, full of great tunes, which you'll be hard pressed to have any memory of as soon as the record's over.

LaRM day 156 (Foghat-Folk Implosion)

Let's get our Foghat on again starting with third album Energized (1974).  The problems with the band by this point are exemplified by the truly abysmal cover of Buddy Holly's 'That'll Be the Day', which is sluggish, lazy, contrived and so aware of its failings that it tried to cover them with some terrible gospel style backing vocals.  The fun of the blues boogie of the debut has been reduced to corny tired old blues-riff workouts ('Fly By Night') and terrible hoary old sexism (the "she made love like a wildcat" line in 'Wild Cherry' is symptomatic of just how poor this stuff is.  The worst thing of all about it though is that despite its determination to be a "good time" it's more like the last old man standing at the wedding party trying to get the girls back out on the dancefloor after everybody else has had enough. A lot of the problems stem from the attempt by the band to become closer to the US models that they're emulating and they probably would have fared much better by emphasising their Englishness instead.  Energized is truly a misnomer and listening to it is really a rather gloomy and dispiriting affair.  The six minute closer 'Nothing I Won't Do' has a little bit more bite to it despite being another tired old bit of standard blues riffing, but at least it highlighted the kind of four to the floor, one note bass workout that early heavy metal bands would turn into something special.

Foghat's fifth album, Fool for the City (1975) is probably their best, although it does suffer from a stitled production that is clearly trying to keep pace with the times.  The title track is a case in point, the song is OK but it sounds pretty terrible.  Nevertheless there are only two words required to sum up Fool for the City, and those two words are 'Slow Ride'.  As one-time WWF wrestler Stone-Cold Steve Austin once said, "if you don't like Slow Ride you must be dead".  'Slow Ride' is one of the great (Led Zep rip off) rock songs of the 1970's and that's an end to it, so even though there's nothing else on Fool for the City that comes close, it's an excusable album whatever.

To celebrate 100 years on the road, Foghat's seventh album was a live one, a six-song showcase of just why anybody took them seriously.  If listening to the studio albums leaves you mystified as to why Foghat were one of the biggest selling acts of the 70's then 1977's Foghat Live answers the question - they were a phenomenal live proposition.  In terms of playing straight ahead, heads-down blues rock they were among the best and Foghat Live proves it.  There were many live rock albums in that particular decade and although Foghat have kind of been forgotten, Foghat Live remains one of the best selling live albums of all time and it's really no surprise.

Finally for the 'Hat, we have 1980's thoroughly humiliating pop-rock outing Tight Shoes.  This is proof that advances in recording technology have usually been absolutely disastrous for most bands, none more so than the leaps in technology in the late 1970's.  So many rock acts were left completely at the mercy of record companies and producers who insisted that their acts move with the times, and in almost every case the resultant records are a crippling embarassment.  Tight Shoes is no exception, and where ZZ Top managed to make the demands of the new age into a brilliant joke, poor old Foghat didn't have the gumption to realise that there were being turned into the Cars.  Tight Shoes is like a blues meets new wave car crash and in that sense alone its really quite fascinating.  Terrible, truly terrible, but fascinating.  The production is, of course, like every other record of the time, processed, tinny, lifeless and now thoroughly corny.  For the old timers it really took serious control and an innate understanding to make the best of these awful changes (Donald Fagen got it, for instance) and those were not in the hands of people like Foghat, because it was only the new-wavers and chart pop makers who were able to use this technology to their advantage, everybody else got left behind or turned into a farce.  Anyway, Tight Shoes is awful.  And here endeth the Foghat.

Just taking a break to listen to check a couple of compilations I've made for my brother's birthday are working - will resume thereafter, but this will diminish the amount of stuff we'll be able to get through today. Hang on.

Right, I'm back and it's on with Ben Folds' solo album, Songs for Silverman (2005). After the diminshing returns of the Ben Folds Five and the not so great Rockin' the Suburbs, I guess it's no surprise that Songs for Silverman is fairly subdued.  It's a ballad heavy outing, with the piano motifs being either low-key or repetitive, allowing the vocal melodies to take the centre stage.  Sometimes this works really well ('Jesusland' is one of his best tunes in my opinion), in others it's a little drab (closer 'Prison Food' is something of a drag), but even when the tunes or arrangements aren't spot on, his lyrics are better than ever.  Pretty much absent are the frustrating almost novelty bouncy tunes and the often irritating wordplay and all-too-unconvincing vitriol and instead lyrical concerns, while still pretty gloomy, are much more clear and (dare I say it as an upside??) honestly middle-aged.  After all there's no point in pretending to be a hip kid if you really aren't, or indeed, as in Folds' case, never were.  Overall too much of the album drags but the songs that are good really are great and the duds are never worse than a little dull.

Less successful by far is the cloying, over-elaborate yet clumsy collaboration with Nick Hornby, Lonely Avenue (2010).  The biggest problems for the album really are Hornby's abysmal lyrics.  They truly are dreadful.  But Folds' tunes don't work either and the whole thing too often comes across like the work of two smug, smart-arse sixth-formers who are a long, long way from being as clever as they think they are.  There are nice touches here and there (the understated orchestration on 'Levi Johnston's Blues' is nice, even though everything else about it is pretty sub-standard) but overall it's an album that feels like it's just asking for a kicking.  Really it's a shame because where it looked like Folds might be growing up into a serious songwriter, Lonely Avenue makes him look like the guy who regresses whenever he meets up with his less clever but more domineering mates from the old days.

Just time for a few of Lou Barlow and John Davis' Folk Implosion records, starting with the 1994 7" Electric Idiot.  Where almost all of the early Folk Implosion material is frustratingly hyperactive and provocatively scrappy and lo-fi to the absolute max, the first song on Electric Idiot ('Opening Day') is uncharacteristically tuneful. Normal service is immediately resumed thereafter with the messy, scraggy title track.  Part of the point of this stuff is that it sounds like it's been recorded on an old press-play-and-record tape machine and while in the early 1990's it was charmingly out of step with broader expectations of the indie world, now it's hard not to see as being just wilfully contrary.  Like much of Barlow's output in the late 90's and early 90's, most of the songs on Electric Idiot would have been well served by being better recorded, but considering the outsider figure that he considered himself to be at the time, it's not surprising that he and Davis would choose to be off-putting in the presentation of their material.  So I guess it's both a shame and absolutely right that these songs sound like such a mess.

More of the same comes on second album (the first being a cassette only release), Take a Look Inside (1995).  There's not a lot to add to what I've said above in terms of discussing either the band or their material at this point.  It's scrappy, ragged stuff, involving as much shouting and shrieking as singing, as much random noise as melody and as poorly recorded as possible, with every one of its fourteen tunes lasting between 1 and 2 minutes.  Again, in amongst the fuzz, the mess and the deliberate obscurity are some lovely little potential tunes, but Barlow and Davis' basic remit was to mangle everything that could be perceived as traditional or appealing into jagged shards of mixed-up noise and melody and while the pretence at naive messing about can occasionally charm (opener 'Blossom', and the excellent 'Had To Find Out' for instance) for the most part they succeed in their aim of being heartily frustrating.

Finally for today it's the 1996 7" 'Palm of My Hand' which is another of Barlow's many odes to the joys and despairs of onanism (I'm not sure if anybody else has been so prolific in terms of their, er, output on the subject) and it's a good tune, but it still suffers from the same issues as the previous records, as does B-side 'Mood Swing'.

LaRM day 155 (Johnny Flynn-Foghat)

Man there are five Foghat albums to get through later.  That's going to be a trial (except for the mighty 'Slow Ride' of course), but more of that when the time comes because first we have the Mumford/Marling/Noah also-ran Johnny Flynn and his second album Been Listening (2010).  Interestingly Been Listening is a much more impressive and diverse album than its first cousin Mumford & Sons' Sigh No More, with which it shares a substantial number of similarities.  Indeed its genetic make-up is pretty much identical to Sigh No More, but Been Listening wins out hands-down by being much less determined to get you all singing along and as such allows itself space to develop its songs, to let them work themselves out rather than springing fully formed at you and leaping about in raggle-taggle waistcoats and neckerchiefs.  In some ways I suspect that the greater level of complexity, and the less desperate need to show off in Been Listening is due in part to Flynn having other outlets to show off by (as a successful stage actor, appearing at the Globe opposite Mark Rylance just this summer).  It's certainly on the same essential pretend-traditional folk tip as Mumford & Sons (ie, it doesn't resemble Laura Marling's superb reinvention or Noah & the Whale's pop re-read) and although there is something a little contrived about the Flynn/Mumford sound it's still a perfectly fine way of rewriting music history, but when it comes down to it although it certainly isn't as instantly gratifying, I think Been Listening is a much more charming and creatively interesting record than Sigh No More.

Will Young's favourite "indie" band of 2008, Foals of Brighton town released their debut album Antidotes that year and were an immediate hit.  I can see why, it's kind of a bass-heavy nu-rave meets angular old school art-punk thing and although you can almost feel the band physically straining for credibility it's a decent and immediately engaging first outing.  Massively irritating single 'Cassius' is easily tempered by the far superior 'Red Sox Pugie' which follows it and in some ways that's the album all over - one song is a pain in the backside the next is a really great bit of distracted pop-rock.  It's jittery and anxious but it's not disjointed and if anything the greatest success of Antidotes is the clear suggestion that they can and will do better.

And better they did with 2010's much more focussed and impressive Total Life Forever.  A lot of the nu-rave elements have come out and the more obvious Wire/early XTC rip-offs have been smoothed out into something more original.  There's a less urgent feel about the album which makes the whole thing seem much more considered and worked-through.  I think that's also why there's a considerably lesser number of simply annoying tunes on it too.  One downside of the more precise approach is that some of the songs aren't particularly engaging, but the ones that work do so brilliantly and 'This Orient' really was one of the best tunes of the year.  It's all pretty clever stuff and there's a strong sense that they can only either fade away entirely now or continue getting stronger.  The edition I've got has a second disc of some little deconstructions of some of the album's songs which are passably interesting but the world can get by without.

Let's get some totally Dutch prog action underway, with the mighty Focus and their sprawling double-album musical chops showcase Focus 3 (1972).  Focus 3 has got the lot, from Thijs van Leer's dreamy wistful flute solo extravaganza 'Love Remembered' to Jan Akkerman's superlative guitar filigrees on international smash hit 'Sylvia', from the 3 minutes of medieval whimsy ('Elspeth of Nottingham'. Honestly, I'm not joking, 'Elspeth of Nottingham') to the 27 minute mega-prog blowout of 'Anonymus Two'.  Now the big thing about Focus was of course that in terms of instrumental prowess they were about as good as you can get, I should imagine members of Yes would have dreamt of being as skilful, but Focus never went so far as to have themes and concept albums and all that priceless guff, so what you get with Focus is clearly defined tunes whose sole purpose is to show off the technical work.  That does mean that it's all terribly tricksy and occasionally silly, and you can sometimes get lost in it all, but again, unlike most prog acts, they left a lot of space in their music so you never get overwhelmed by idiotic showiness. And it ends with the superb Jethro Tull-esque 'House of the King', which will be familiar to all Saxondale viewers.  I could certainly do without the bouncy bass-led jazz of 'Carnival Fugue' though.  The only other Focus I've got is a cheapo compilation album that was released in 1974 covering their work to that date, a lot of which is culled from Focus 3.  Of the stuff that isn't on Focus 3 we have, of course, the band's biggest hit and greatest tune, the yodel-heavy 'Hocus Pocus', along with the initially sappy, Gary Moore inspiring 'Focus (Instrumental)' (it rocks out by the end) and a couple of other minor hits.

 

And so we finally come to Foghat.  The mighty Foghat.  Strangely, at the quiz a couple of weeks ago one question was which Dutch prog act had a hit with Sylvia, and one team brilliantly put Foghat as the answer.  It made me laugh. I suppose nobody else in the world would have found it funny but it tickled me.  Anyway, if you want one quaintly British rock band desperately pretending to be American and failing to convince, then it has to be Foghat (their lead singer called himself "Lonesome" Dave Peverett).  Foghat were the southern fried US blues-rock band that it surprised nobody to discover were actually from London.  The first self-titled album, released in 1972 kicks off with a blues-boogie reading of 'I Just Want to Make Love To You', which sets out their stall from the off.  This is Creedence-riffing, Allmans-apeing, Skynyrd-ripping blues-rock played to the max, in that weirdly un-to the max way that only Brits can really manage.  In truth there isn't anything particularly wrong with Foghat apart from the fact that you can just hear their lack of authenticity.  In terms of the actual songs, they're really not bad on the whole and although you would be hard pressed to say that you'd rather listen to Foghat than the Allman Brothers and really mean it, the Foghat album is really pretty decent.

By the way, I should explain this is another one of those five album box sets that I got from work back in the day - we haven't had one for a while but we've got another coming up in the next few days and it horrifies me to say that it's the first five albums by Foreigner.  Still we'll jump through that burning ring in a room full of wasps and barbed wire when the time comes.  For now we're still digging the Foghat and it's third album, 1974's Energized next, but that thrill will have to wait until tomorrow.

LaRM day 154 (Flower-Flying Saucer Attack)

What should start the day off is the great bit of murky indie rock Hologram Sky (1991) by Flower.  However, yet again we have the old problem of vinyl/internet incompatability so despite being able to find one tune (the decent but not best on the album 'Torch Song') we'll have to move straight on to the 2007 compilation of songs by the great Eddie Floyd, called the Platinum Collection covering tracks from 1966-1968.  You'll have noticed a number of Platinum Collections already, and that's because it's the generic title that Warner gave to their comps of old stuff a few years back, of which I got hold of copies of the lot.  Anyway, Eddie Floyd made some grand records for Stax and unsurprisingly the collection starts with the biggest and greatest of the lot, 'Knock on Wood', which as everybody in the whole world knows is a hell of a song.  But the earthy brilliance of Floyd and more specifically the Stax songwriters is writ large across every one of these 20 tunes, from the blistering call-and-response blues-rock of 'Big Bird' to the brassy soul of 'I Don't Want to Cry', there's not a wasted moment, absolutely not a one, and while the vast majority of Stax's output was gold, the same applies to Floyd's recordings for them, it's pretty much all fantastic.  The rolling, fluid performance on 'Don't Rock the Boat' by the exceptional Stax house band coupled with Floyd's charmingly unshowy vocals provide the perfect summation of just how great this stuff is.  As far as 60's rocking R&B and soul goes, this is the real deal.

Next it's some pre-emo punk-pop from never-were's Fluf, starting with the 1993 7", which is a cover of PJ Harvey's 'Sheela-Na-Gig' and Overwhelming Colorfast's great 'Song in D'.  The best thing about it really is the fact that Fluf were aware of and liked PJ Harvey and wanted to big up the sadly under-rated Overwhelming Colorfast, beyond that these are fairly uninteresting punked up cover versions.  Fluf were always really going to be cursed by being a more competent but less engaging version of J Church who cornered the market for this kind of emotionally charged, whip-smart punk-pop single-handedly and as a result although Fluf made some decent records they've faded from sight pretty much entirely.  Next should have been Fluf's penultimate album, Waikiki (1997) but there's only a couple of songs on Youtube (the great punk-pop frenzy 'Pushin' Back Days' and the more sedate pop gem 'Chocolate' but two songs do not an album make so we move straight on to the last Fluf album, Road Rage (1998) which surprisingly is on Spotify.  In a very loose sort of way I think that Fluf pre-empted the Hold Steady in that not only is Otis Barthoulameu's gravel voice not a million miles away from Craig Finn's but Fluf also held that delicate balance between playing straight ahead punk and pulling classic rock poses.  Road Rage is probably the most coherent record that they made, fusing the classic and the uproarious in a pretty effective way and there are some great songs ('If I Could Feel Good' is not only a great bit of pop songwriting, it also has a brilliant little guitar solo which should have been unimaginable for a punk-pop album like this, and again presages the Hold Steady's approach).  There are some real duds ('Wake Up' is absolutely awful for instance) but that's only to be expected with an album like this, and when it's good, it's really great.

Now we have the first two 7"'s by the abysmal all-girl punk rock outfit Fluffy.  Fluffy were a bunch of young posh girls who seemed to think that snarling and dying your hair was the same as being challengingly feminist.  First single 'Hypersonic' (1995) is awful and B-side 'Crossdresser' is dreadful.  Worse yet is the follow-up 'Husband' (1996) and thankfully I can't find the B-side 'Deny Everything' on the internet and I haven't listened to it in years so I can't say anything about it. I can guess what it's like though.

Next is the 7" single by that bedroom 8-track maestro, the bloke who used to work in Revolver Records on Park Street in Bristol (probably still does for all I know) recording as Flying Saucer Attack and covering Wire's 'Outdoor Miner' (1995).  It's a typically fuzzy bit of lo-fi psychedelia, exactly like everything else that he recorded (is he called Dave Broom? It's something like that) and although it often works well for his own material I'm mystified as to why he bothered messing up someone's superb song.  I can't find the B-side, 'Psychic Driving' on the internet and, again, I can't remember whether it's any good.

LaRM day 153 (Fleetwood Mac)

I've always considered myself to be pretty much the ultimate indie boy and I've never had any intention of growing up, but doing this idiotic project has revealed the terrible truth: I've got old and so has my taste.  When it really comes down to it I've finally reached that age where, when faced with the choice, I'll probably pick "classic rock" over indie-schmindie every time.  How did that happen? When did that happen? Is it really just inevitable? In any event, it's absolutely proven by the fact that I'm delighted to have finally reached the three largest, most glittering jewels in the "classic rock" crown: Fleetwood Mac's California cocaine trilogy.  Now these three albums have iconic status anyway with the silly old duffers of this world, but gradually it's reached the point where people under 50 are allowed to admit that these are three of the finest rock records ever made.  After all the quaint English blues jams and ineffectual messing around, it took a couple of headstrong (if coke addled) and viciously ambitious Americans joining the band to make it a rock powerhouse.  The first album after Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined and immediately took control of the band was 1975's Fleetwood Mac, which, although certainly the weakest of the three albums,  is nevertheless a fantastic statement of intent.  Entirely gone are those blues riffs, entirely gone is the delicate experimentalism, and in their place is the most grandstandingly showy and shiny rock-pop, produced to the nth degree with absolutely clinical precision and performed as if under threat of physical violence, the whole thing is beyond pristine.  The songs are, with a couple of exceptions, as cast-iron as the production, there are no chinks in this stuff, it's almost as if written by machine.  And that's precisely why the whole thing works so beautifully, because it's only in the making of the records that the band functioned pefectly - in every other aspect of their lives they were entirely dysfunctional, and it's that complete incapability of handling life outside the studio that gives these otherwise chilly, smooth songs their life and their warmth. Performed with precision, written with precision and produced with precision, the band nevertheless couldn't help but let all of the mess of their spectacularly screwy lives into the records too.  In terms of the songs on Fleetwood Mac, most of them are great, from the simple pop of 'Monday Morning' to the gloomy Nicks-led 'Rhiannon' and 'Sugar Daddy', from Christine McVie's sentimental beauties 'Warm Ways' and 'Say You Love Me' to Buckingham's angry 'World Turning', it's pretty much all gold.  The only low points are an excessively mawkish 'Crystal' and strangely lifeless 'I'm So Afraid'.  Of course the high point is the Buckingham-Nicks showcase 'Landslide' which really is a remarkably fine song, borne aloft by Nicks' affectingly fragile vocals.

What is there to say about Rumours that hasn't been said a thousand times before?  It's a mammoth record in terms of its stature, its reputation and its sales figures and although in truth the songs aren't quite as watertight as they at first seem, it is without doubt one of the most self-assured and dumbfoundingly perfectly executed records in existence.  No matter how many attempts there have been to ruin it (The Corrs, Eva Cassidy, Bill Clinton, they've all had a good go) it's completely indestructible.  I suppose that one of the reasons is that the poisonously unpleasant dynamics within the band at that point are write large throughout and even in its most sedate moments (the truly sublime 'Songbird', which has been ruinously and mawkishly covered by so many people that you'd think we'd finally get that nobody but Christine McVie can actually sing it) the uncomfortable truth of five people's disappointments, disgust and hatred of each other is palpable. The songs themselves are all great, if a little pat on occasion, and from the opening bars of 'Second Hand News' the whole thing is immediately familiar and comforting.  The first side is just one blistering hit after another: 'Dreams', 'Never Going Back Again', 'Don't Stop', 'Go Your Own Way', it's all chart bothering gold.  More interesting though is side 2, which starts off with the surprisingly experimental 'The Chain'.  In some ways 'The Chain' probably resembles most closely what Buckingham had in mind in terms of the direction he wanted to push the band, odd fractured little riffs and rhythms with an over-arching structure and a somewhat darker mood.  It's the only real instance of this approach on Rumours but it presage the absolutely superb stuff to come on the next album.  The rest of the side is interestingly uneven, from Christine McVie's wonderful mix of jaunty pop song and melancholic melody ('You Make Loving Fun') to bleak miserabilism ('Oh Daddy') and a pay-off with one of Nicks' most witchy bits of spooky pop-mysticism, 'Gold Dust Woman'.  The reissue I've got places out-take and B-side 'Silver Springs' in its originally scheduled place in the album but it's clear why it was taken off because it just doesn't quite fit the overall tone of the rest of the record, but it's also something of a shame because it's a really strong song.  The reissue also has a second CD of demos, alternate versions (including a spectacular earlier version of 'You Make Loving Fun' with fabulous understated harmonies by Stevie Nicks, which aren't on the album version) and, most interestingly of all, a few rough drafts of songs that didn't make it to the album. 

After the insanely huge sales figures for Rumours the band had more money than God and by the time they went back into the studio in 1978 not only had the two couples in the band split up with the bitterest of acrimony but they were all to differing degrees apparently snorting enough cocaine to keep every drugs cartel in Latin America going for years.  And so the resultant album, Tusk (1979) is a bizarrely unpredictable collection of plunges into the paranoid psyches of some unbelievably talented and unbelievably paranoid people.  Bearing in mind how weird the album is it actually sounds pretty straightforward for long stretches and that's due to Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie continuing to write emotionally direct and musically languid songs (languid but fascinatingly complex yet instantly engaging) among which the luminous 'Sara' and 'Storms' are the obvious examples.  It's the cracking mentality of Buckingham, whose megalomania must surely have peaked at this point, which provides the intense production values of the album and its more frenetic and peculiar moments.  The biting frustration of 'What Makes You Think You're the One', and 'Not That Funny', the cocaine frying of 'The Ledge' and 'That's All for Everyone' and the strung-out pre-comedown of 'Walk a Thin Line' are simultaneously exercises in how to screw up a pop song and the most perfect pop songs you'll ever hear.  Everything about Tusk should be an unmitigated disaster yet through astonishing talent, idiosyncracy and luck it's actually one of the very best albums of the 1970's and in truth one of the best records ever made.

LaRM day 152 (Flaming Lips-Fleet Foxes)

Possibly the lowest point of the Flaming Lips career so far has been their collaboration with various mates to remake Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety, released in 2010.  Now, if a self-indulgent, smug, self-satisfied indie band is going to cover a record then they might as well cover the most self-indulgent, smuggest and most self-satisfied record ever made.  And yet, the Flaming Lips and Stardeath with the White Dwarfs (I mean, really...) manage to come up with what I can only describe as the most hapless, tedious, and incompetent attempt at cover versions I've ever heard.  I have no problem with taking the record apart, no problem with making something totally different (that's really the secret to the best covers after all), but what I do have a problem with is making it clear that you think that you're the spiritual successors to something that you can't even begin to approach actually being able to do yourself.  In amongst the cack-handed performances (and again, I can't help but think that the point at which Mercury Rev realised it might be worth learning to play as the point at which the two bands parted ways forever) and utterly imagination-free rewrites are some hints of something better, but they're only hints.  It's a waste of time, it's the final proof that the Flaming Lips are truly an empty vessel, yet the album's biggest crime by far is in making the original Dark Side of the Moon seem like a work of stunning genius because it's a hundred million times better than this awful doped-up student joke.

A slight improvement, if only because of its enforced diversity, is this year's Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends (godawful title though, no?).  Essentially an album designed for guest appearances (it's actually a compilation of collaborative EP tracks), it still carries all the irritating hyperactivity of other Flaming Lips albums but bearing in mind that you end up listening to it in light of who guests on which song, it isn't just another trip into the surprisingly uninteresting mind of Wayne Coyne.  There are one or tunes that hark back to the time when the Flaming Lips weren't such an indie cabaret act (the Tame Impala guester 'Children of the Moon' is really pretty good for instance).  The majority of it is OK at best, dreadful at worst (sludgy noisefest opener '2012 (You Must Be Upgraded)' with Kesha is pretty abhorent) but overall, by the Flaming Lips recent standards, Heady Fwends really isn't that awful a record.  The biggest problem lies often with the guest star - for instance, the fuzzy, swampy Nick Cave starring 'You, Man? Human???' really only serves to remind you how much better Cave's Grinderman albums are than this.  But in any event, there's enough on the album to be optimistic about, and as the band's excessive marketing ploys (EPs released in real human skulls, vinyl pressed with guest stars blood samples, etc) get more absurd, so too does their critical stock plummet and it may be that when strapped for cash and attention they may get back to bothering to write a song or two once in a while.

What can you say about the Fleet Foxes? It's all very pleasant? A bit Americana, a bit of the Band in there, a bit ironic 70's style classic songwriting-y? A bit pastoral? Crafted? Autumnal? Nostalgic? Wistful? Heavily bearded?  All of those, and that's about the size of it. Debut EP Sun Giant (2008) is the weakest demonstration of all those qualities that define the band, but it does have gently persuasive mainstay 'Mykonos' on it.  It's telling that the songs on Sun Giant were recorded after the songs that were contained on the debut self-titled album which was released later the same year, because it implies diminishing returns because the album is much better.  Again, that sound of serious young men with fixations on the American musical past and growing massive beards is in full force (and has really become something of a stereotype now. Someone could usefully remove a substantial number of them and nobody would notice. You could start with that talent vacuum Justin Vernon) but the album really is very charming and although if in the wrong mood you might need matchsticks to keep your eyes open, in the right mood it's a deeply involving, warm record with some songs that sound like they've come directly from the past.  The seasonal beauty of 'White Winter Hymnal' is an obvious highpoint, but the album is full of precious bits of antique songwriting and delivery and the whole thing feels like it's been expertly hewn out of solid wood.

Less instinctively easy to love, but actually considerably better is follow-up Helplessness Blues (2011).  The arcane references in Robin Pecknold's lyrics are more obscure than ever, but his rustic vocals are more endearing.  The production is clearer, which means that the record sounds less warm, but the songs themselves are much denser and involved.  In fact there's some fabulous stuff on Helplessness Blues (not least the rather awkward but very successfully instrumental experimentation of 'Bedouin Dress'), and although some tunes may not work their way directly into your skull in the listening to them they are really special.  It's a complicated album, stuck in some ways between various posts, not least a seemingly conflicting desire to stay steadfastly traditional and to use modern recording tricks at odds with the approach.  There are low moments but nothing as dud as 'Oliver James' from the debut album and the quality really is high throughout.  Again, if you're not in the mood you'll happily turn it off, but as an exercise in crafted retrospection (the cover is like any number of psych-folk albums from the late 60's) it really is pretty much without parallel.