LaRM day 173 (Genesis)

Come and touch me, why don't you touch me?  Well, one look at Peter Gabriel in his creepy old man mask would answer the question, but there's no denying the theatrically absurd brilliance of much of Genesis' breakout album, their third, Nursery Cryme (1971).  Nursery Cryme is absolute and unadulterated proggus maximus.  Prog may have got cracking in the late 1960's and Yes may have churned out some extremely complicated prog workouts, but Nursery Cryme was the point at which everything proggish coalesced into a completely hermetically sealed, and quite specifically English, context. Not only is the music ridiculously complex, but thematically Gabriel had introduced linking stories and ideas between the songs to create, not a concept album, but a pastorally quaint concept entire, and as a result Nursery Cryme sounds like a song cycle.  There is a skewed version of subtlety at work as well.  Where Yes were making laughably overblown records, Nursery Cryme is strangely intimate, and despite it's convoluted song structures, has time for some genuine melody and even a low-key pop sensibility shows up from time to time.  That's doesn't stop 10 minute opener 'The Musical Box' from being a grandstander, flitting about all over the show.  It's a fantastic piece of work, and shows off new Genesis recruit Phil Collins' hugely important impact on the band.  Similarly over the top is 'Return of the Giant Hogweed', a rolling, thundering slice of multi-movement prog in which Tony Banks tries to outdo Keith Emerson for idiotically dramatic keyboard work.  It's great stuff, but to be honest 'The Musical Box', 'Return of the Giant Hogweed' and album closer 'The Fountain of Salmacis' (which has lovely little flashes of charming vocal melody from Gabriel) are the real highlights of the album, the other five shorter songs are pretty forgettable (or, in the case of 'Harold the Barrel', terrible).  'Seven Stones' is OK but relies too heavily on Banks' cod-classical keyboard fugues and has an uneasily sloppy chorus, 'For Absent Friends' is alright too, but suggests that they shouldn't have let Collins start writing songs so early after joining the band, and 'Harlequin' too crassly betrays the band's debts to Pink Floyd.  There are problems with Nursery Cryme, but nevertheless it really was the definitive starting point for a totally unified sense of what British prog was and could be.

Fourth album Foxtrot (1972) is often cited as the band's best, mainly because of the 23-minute opus 'Supper's Ready'.  The album gets off to a flying start with the rocking 'Watcher of the Skies' which is built on a brilliant Mellotron noise and juddering keyboard and guitar thuds, and a brilliant lyric and vocal line from Gabriel.  Things get a bit sappier with the much less convincing 'Time Table', which strangely foreshadows the easier fare that Genesis would serve up later in their post-Gabriel career.  It's a shame because the dark but lively 'Watcher of the Skies' sets you up for much more entertaining stuff than 'Time Table'.  Things get back on track with the churning prog of 'Get Em Out By Friday', which is another multi-movement 8-minute workout, but even so, it's not the greatest or most cohesive of Genesis' big, multi-part songs.  'Can-Utility and the Coastliners' is a fairly charming acoustic guitar based song, and 'Horizons' is a decent classical cribbing bit of prog frippery (as usual, when prog musicians want a bit of classical to riff on, Genesis turned to Bach).  But, with the exception of 'Watcher of the Skies', these songs are just a padding exercise, the throwaway prelude to the main act, side two's monumental (and monumentally ridiculous) 'Supper's Ready'.  'Supper's Ready' is huge in every sense.  It has six framing movements, but loads within those six and it's a patchwork quilt of ideas, both musical and lyrical, making one flowing, rolling piece of melodramatic prog, covering every conceivable theme, from childhood terrors to the formation of the world, from medieval life to ancient mythology, and although it's unspeakably daft, it's still bizarrely thrilling.  Perhaps the most surprising thing about it is that it isn't ever a chore to listen to, despite being full of showy bits of soloing and unlimited excess, mainly because it never loses sight of melody and even when it's at it's most absurd, it still remembers to entertain rather than simply show off.

1973's Selling England by the Pound is a better album yet, despite having even more silly cultural allusions to a jarringly quaint Englishness.  Opener 'Dancing with the Moonlit Knight' starts off with medieval guitar filigrees and ends up a blisteringly over the top rock song, complete with synthesised choir and overdriven electric guitar work from Steve Hackett which is truly daft.  But once again, Gabriel's strong melodic sense runs through the song and saves it from being simply stupid prog (although Banks' squelchy keyboard solo is pretty stupid).  It kind of sets the tone for the whole album too, in that thematically it appears to be reflecting on the common topic of the transition from rural English pastoralism to cultural co-option (unstatedly the US) in an urban context, and the 12-minute 'The Battle of Epping Forest', the grandiose 'Firth of Fifth' and album closer 'The Cinema Show/Aisle of Plenty' revolve around the same theme.  There's a pop song (and chart "hit") in the superb 'I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)', which really demonstrates just how closely Genesis were able to tie prog to pop (it's far from being a standard pop song, but the chorus is pure pop hook), and also led to Gabriel's infamous impersonation of a lawn mower in the band's live shows.  The album has generally been under-appreciated, with reviews tending to focus on the obliqueness or showy silliness of the lyrics, while ignoring the tension and discomfort that lies beneath that silliness.  Musically the album is less dense than the preceding albums, and although still crazily convoluted, it's really pretty accessible.  There are down moments, particularly Collins' mawkish and forgettable 'More Fool Me' which is fairly ghastly, and Steve Hackett's 'After the Ordeal' is pretty pointless, but otherwise Selling England by the Pound is a great album, and a worthy precursor to the absolutely blistering slab of solid prog mayhem that was to follow.

The material on 1975's sprawling double-album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is musically much more precise and more direct than anything Genesis had recorded before, yet it's the densest, most impenetrable and easily the best record they ever made.  It's dark, jagged, mysterious, urban, a world away from the gently satirical English pastoralism of their previous work.  The whole exercise was undertaken in an atmosphere of increasing conflict, particularly between Peter Gabriel and Tony Banks and, as is so often the way, it was this antagonism that seems to have led directly to the band making their best work.  But, the fallout was to be that after one tour of the album Gabriel would leave the band in fury and under a cloud, with the rest of Genesis loudly and publicly expressing their irritation at the idea that the frontman's theatricality detracted from the music, and Gabriel retorting that they wouldn't amount to much without him.  In any event, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is a prog record through and through, yet only three of its twenty-three songs break the 6-minute mark, it's a heads-down rock album but with spectacularly complex musical structures, and it's a pop record with no concessions made to popular taste whatsoever.  As a concept album it's one of the least narratively understandable, with a tale seemingly about a Puerto Rican street punk called Rael trying to stay alive in New York, but that's pretty much all you can really get from it, because Gabriel tells his story in such pointedly oblique terms that there's little point in trying to make sense of it all.  If anything, that obliqueness just makes the album all the more fascinating, and together the myriad classical references, the musical conflations and thematic numinousness makes for a really quite spectacular record.  For the first time, the slower numbers sound like really great and thematically appropriate instead of the jarringly pat mis-steps they had been previously and 'The Lamia' and particularly the wonderful 'Carpet Crawlers' are superb.  The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is difficult, absurd, insanely overblown, antagonistically brainy, and, if you're prepared to accept that it's Genesis that you're listening to, it's absolutely brilliant.  Now, there are many people who aren't prepared to accept that Genesis are anything other than total shit (I live with one for a start), but the thing is, sometimes you have to put your prejudices to one side and accept that you're wrong.  Because The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway really is absolutely brilliant.

After Gabriel's departure there wasn't really anywhere for the band to go but backwards, and they did just that, retreating to the gentler, more obviously prog style that they had been refining prior to The Lamb.  A Trick of the Tail is a decent enough prog album, but there isn't enough that really stands out, and after the previous album's outstanding bluster, A Trick of the Tail sounds like a band in retreat, and it's all a bit forgettable.  There are some good outings: 'Squonk' is pretty decent winding prog, opener 'Dance on a Volcano' is pretty beefy and the title track is nice.  But there are also worrying signs of what's to come with the lacklustre and silly 'Robbery, Assault and Battery' which manages to combine by-numbers prog with a second rate pop melody in its chorus. It's OK, and as a wounds-licking exercise it's absolutely fine, but it is an album that suggests that if the band wanted to keep moving forward they would need to start developing other ideas than the prog workouts they had relied on in the past.

LaRM day 172 (Rebecca Gates-Howe Gelb)

After the Spinanes sadly split up Rebecca Gates has made only the most sporadic of appearances and pretty much her last recording was 2001's mini-LP, Ruby Series.  The seven songs on Ruby Series are a delicate combination of Gates' smoky, mournful voice and Tortoise's John McEntire's subtle musical experimentalism.  Opener 'The Seldom Scene' is a lovely little song, with twinkling keyboards, reverbed glockenspiel and muted drums and Gates' haunting, untrained voice, gliding through the song, like a somebody drifting through an empty house.  It's a beautiful, mood-setting piece, the rest of the songs on Ruby Series match the tone, and the feeling throughout the majority of the album.  A cheap drum machine and wobbly guitar underpin the otherwordly glockenspiel melody on the quietly stunning 'Lure and Cast', and the spectral 'Move' relies almost solely on a melancholy occasional guitar strum, Gates' late-night voice and some indefinable electronic noises buried deep in the mix.  Both songs are really quite beautiful and reflective in the least self-indulgent way possible.  The centepiece of the album is probably the weakest moment, and the one in which McEntire takes over the show too obviously.  Even the title, 'In a Star Orbit' doesn't really sound like Gates and the jaunty kiddie-rhythm drum machine and Gates' processed vocals don't fit the mood of the rest of the record very well.  That's not to say it isn't great, it just sticks out somewhat and breaks the flow of the record.  The last three songs revert to the mood of the first half though and the whole thing plays out with the lovely 'I Received a Levitation', which is a ringing, treble vocal-tracked piece of elegaic beauty and a fitting epitaph for an understated but creatively charmingly career.  (Although having written that I've just read that Gates has just released a new album, 12 years after Ruby Series so not an epitaph after all, just a lovely record.)

Next up is one of the most notorious stories in pop music.  The background to the release, and particularly to the title, of Marvin Gaye's 1978 album Here My Dear is uncommonly odd and unpleasant.  For some years before the recording of the album the relationship between Gaye and his wife Anna Gordy had been deteriorating badly, with both accusing the other regularly of infidelity and irresponsibility and in 1975 Gordy finally filed for divorce.  Gaye had been busy with his cash buying copious numbers of cars and mountains of cocaine and consequently didn't have anything like enough left to pay his alimony and child support.  The answer?  Agree to give Gordy half the royalties from his next album, which Gaye went into the studio to start recording in 1976 with the specific intention of making it as crap (or, in his own words, "lazy") as possible.  Things didn't go according to plan and once recording started Gaye found himself pouring out all kinds of confessional stuff about the situation with the lyrics veering wildly between astonishingly vicious hatred and sentimental nostalgia, and the tunes accordingly found themselves being worked on with more and more attention to detail.  The resulting album, whose title refers to the fact that pretty much any money it made was going to be given to Anna, was absolutely panned on its release but, as is so often the way, has had a monumental critical re-evaluation since, and rightly so.  It's a fantastic record.  It's certainly wilful, difficult, irritating, incoherent, but as a soul album, it's absolutely laced with odd, jazzy inflections, really funky breaks, and contains some of the most fascinatingly, explicitly, personal lyrics ever set out in music.  When it's calm it rivals any of Gaye's other work for soulful introspection and when its dander is up it's furiously uncomfortable.  'When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You' and 'Everybody Needs Love' are fantastic examples of Gaye's real artistry, his ability to transcend the limitations of R&B and turn it into something quite other.  There are hard to take moments (the 8 minutes of 'Funky Space Reincarnation' didn't absolutely need to be included) but on the whole, in its deeply personal nature, its unpredictability and its self-determined unwillingness to abide by any preordained structure, Here My Dear as is close to art as R&B is ever going to get.

After leaving The Softies for the first time, the queen of twee Rose Melberg formed Gaze with some like-minded chums.  First album Mitsumeru (1998) is another twee-pop gem, scarcely any different to any other (and certainly closer to Melberg's work in Tiger Trap than the Softies).  It's got some up songs, it's got some slow songs, but they're all of the artless, clumsy, thoroughly charming librarian pop school that was all the rage for the Olympia kids in the mid to late 1990's.  There are songs about jelly beans, songs with names like 'Preppy Villain' and the whole ramshackle pop fun of the exercise is infectiously endearing.  As with all of Melberg's work it flirts shamelessly with being annoying but always manages to stay the right side of the line.  Melberg did let down Zoe quite badly once by being something of an arse, but that's a different matter, and her records are always speccy charm personified.

Whilst overseeing the endless production line of Giant Sand albums, the ludicrously prolific Howe Gelb also finds the time to make copious albums under variations of his own name, one of which is next on the list.  The Listener (2003) is one of Gelb's more accessible excursions into the oblique and focusses more heavily on his instrumental work and occasional Lou Reed impressions than the abstract desert rock and Americana that he tends to centre his records on.  There are some surprisingly low-key and graceful piano tracks and piano led songs on The Listener and although it can veer directly into wanting to be Berlin (second track 'Felonious' is a prime example, even stating that it's a Lou steal) it's a delicate Sunday afternoon of an album.  There are great jazzy trumpet solos and babbling bass over the indie-blues of the piano work, but this isn't rubbish like Eels bizarrely misconceived notion of how indie bands play the blues, this is the work of someone who has worked hard to really get it, to really understand how different musical forms work and why it's worth using some and discarding others.  The Listener is a surprising album for Gelb partly because his work, while always shot through with a mordant sense of humour, can be furious and ragged and instead The Listener is calm, subtle, smart and smarmy, sarky and cool, it's a record that knows it should be playing in the corner of a run-down bar on a hot day, a hyper-ironic take on Ry Cooder's Texico swing.

Pretty brief today but tomorrow is going be one almighty Gabriel fest - it's a whole day of prime Genesis. PROG ON.

LaRM day 171 (Gang of Four-Gastr Del Sol)

There are few rock records that have aged as well as Gang of Four's debut, Entertainment! (1979).  A punk record that is infinitely more interesting than punk, a dub and funk record with anxious jagged guitars instead of easy rhythm, a rock record entirely at odds with the philosophy of rock, it's an album of astonishing inventiveness, surprising agility and effortless cool.  Composed only of those essentials of rock, guitar, bass, drums and vocals, it mines sources entirely without acting subserviently to them and its influence is more all-encompassing now than it was at the time of its release.  And to cap it all, it's one of the few genuinely successful records lyrically premised on a truly leftist agenda.  Although song lyrics necessarily lead to a kind of simplistic reduction, for a rock record the level of ideological engagement on Entertainment! is astonishingly deep.  And besides being dense, thoughtful, smart (and always on the side of the angels), it's got some just great tunes on it.  The spiky guitar and fluid bass are what really drive the music and contrast superbly, most notably I suppose on 'Damaged Goods', 'Natural's Not In It', the truly spectacular 'I Found That Essence Rare', but highlighting anything on Entertainment! is fairly pointless, the whole album is one of the truly great records to come out of the punk/post-punk era and its brilliance remains entirely undiminished 34 years later (strange to think that we're further away from the punk era than the punk era was from the Second World War...).

Next is the 'Is It Love?' 7" from 1983.  By this point Gang of Four had changed their style fairly dramatically, incoporating elements of white-soul and pop into the sound and although it was an interesting idea at the time, it hasn't aged nearly as well.  Indeed the band were in the firing line as sell-outs, charlatans and the album Hard was pretty much panned on its release in any case and its reputation has only grown because it couldn't have got much worse.  'Is It Love?' is a hyper-ironic pop love song but it really isn't a great song and its sound does make you yearn for the spit and fury of their earlier work.  B-side, 'A Man with a Good Car' is more of the same.

Finally, the first four album spanning compilation A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, released in 1990 and covering the years 1979-1983, is a fantastic overview, charting their perfect emergence and gradual stylistic smoothing out.  The first half is unsurprisingly by far the better, containing glistening, glittering material from Entertainment! and second album Solid Gold ('Cheeseburger' and 'To Hell with Poverty' are just fabulous), and although the later material lacks bite and sounds too audience friendly there are still some amazing songs. Third album, Songs of the Free, had set out a change of style, adding a slicker sheen to the sound and folding in a kind of dance friendly rhythmic style, and it was pretty successful, songs like 'Call Me Up' and 'The History of the World' setting out a blueprint for a moodier kind of pop music that many other bands picked up on.  Probably the band's best non-punk song came from this period and 'We Live as We Dream, Alone' is a truly, truly great song.  Only the last few songs, from Hard, don't come up to scratch, but it's a little enough failure for a band who had set out new ways of looking at rock music with the simplest of resources.

Unfortunately next we have a few records by the awful Garbage, who for some reason I think I really liked back in the day, starting with their third single, 'Only Happy When It Rains' (1995).  Everything about Garbage was like a ready-made parody of themselves and this single proves the point.  It's goth-lite, it's silly, it's absurd in its mock-seriousness and it really is mystifying as to what people heard in it.  As an absurdist counterpoint to the cheery idiocy of Oasis and the sunny smart-arsery of Blur I suppose it struck a chord but really the bottom line is that it just isn't any good.  B-sides 'Girl Don't Come' and 'Sleep' are respectively a terrible dark rock song and a dismal attempt at doing what the Cranes were achieving much more succesfully and the two songs are even less interesting in their attempt to provide a dark pop flipside to the Britpop wave than the A-side.

The self-titled debut album released in 1995 is really still surprisingly bad.  It's biggest crime is its total redundancy.  There is truly no need for this album ever to have been made and the fact that it was a smash is a damning demonstration of just how polarized the indie scene had become and consequently just how vapid the more commercial side of it had ended up.  We can all thank Nevermind for basically breaking fifteen years of astonishing creativity in the indie community, but we'll come on to that later... Anyway, the Garbage album is a lot of hot air blown into a vacuum and it doesn't really warrant any particular attention beyond the fact that something worked for a mass audience.  Amazing to think that Curve were much, much better.  That's how bad this stuff is.  None of the tunes really stick and each one of them may seem to be a powerhouse of production but when it comes down to it this is poorly conceived pop music with uninteresting melodies and a somewhat lacklustre sense of structure and as a result the fact that it's hideously overproduced just leaves it a gluey mass of tiresome noise.

The 'Queer' 7" (1995) A-side is meant to be a creepy, loping gloom-pop song but it's just another tedious dirge masquerading as menace.  The B-side is a stereotypical Adrian Sherwood remix which couldn't sound more exactly of its time if it tried (like absolutely everything that Sherwood has ever touched).  Likewise with the 'Stupid Girl' 7" (1996).  The A-side is at least a half-hearted attempt at a big rock song and the B-side another yawnsome remix of another track from the album, in this case a remix by the band themselves of the bland 'Dog New Tricks'.  Similarly we have the 'Milk' 7" (1996) which is not the album version but instead has two boring remixes of the slurringly dull song, this time one by the band and the other by 1996's favourite Bristolian, Tricky.

To be completely honest, the main reason that I bought any of these records was because I got them in their super-limited editions, either entirely encased in plastic, or in cloth covers, or whatever and I thought they'd be worth a ton of money.  They never were.  Anyway, by the time I had picked up second album, Version 2.0 (1998) I realised that both the band and a rich future were a hopelessly lost cause.  Version 2.0 at least has the grace to be unapologetic about its money-grabbing pop ideology and it comes across as more honest (if more essentially unpleasant) as a result.  It's a generally easier listen too, although also in fact an even worse record.  The pop smarts are more finely tuned and the egregious bludgeoning of the production is more smartly incorporated into the overall structure of the record.  The problem is that it's still rubbish.  Shirley Manson's gothic self-flagellation is transparently fallacious and the whole thing absolutely reeks of opportunism.  And her lyrics, dear lord, are truly appalling.  Once again, even the song titles are a parody of themselves: 'I Think I'm Paranoid', 'Medication', 'Wicked Ways', it's all like a joke that wasn't particularly funny to begin with still being told with enthusiasm by a dying comedian. Between Nevermind and The Downward Spiral the truth of "major label indies" was becoming sickeningly clear and although the NME weren't prepared to accept it, Garbage really forced the choice to either give up trying or to dig much, much deeper to find the fertile seeds.

And last for today we have the blessed relief of some challenging avant-composition with Jim O'Rourke and David Grubbs' collaborative Gastr Del Sol and their debut album, The Serpentine Similar (1993).  Now this is composition for a modern age, never mind cruddy pop music, if you want to know where should and could be heading, this is the real deal.  Difficult, uncomfortable and never prepared to either settle or relax, Gastr Del Sol's sole remit was to experiment, to use every possible resource for manipulation and to create a musical context in which all things are translatable.  First tune, the 9-minute piano and vocal workout of 'A Watery Kentucky' shows off O'Rourke and Grubbs' avant tricks pretty adeptly, snakily winding it's way around a central motif which changes only subtly but transforms completely as a result.  Essentially that's the trick for all these pieces, from the superb juddering guitar thud of 'Ursus Arctos Wonderfilis' to the staggering piano on 'Eye Street', a central core around which themes wind and unwind with the occasional vocal embellishment (which basically tends to constitute of O'Rourke mumbling about something or other).  'For Soren Mueller' is similar in some ways to the work of June of '44, with rattling drums and jittery, spindly guitar lines which suddenly and unpredictably briefly break out into frenzied spattering rhythm and noise.  It's all closest in spirit to post-rock, if you want to classify it, but it really most appropriately sits in a modern classical composition framework than a rock one and it sets out a wealth of possibilities for exploration and innovation while being quite comfortable to exist in its own isolated context.

LaRM day 170 (France Gall)

And so we come to the greatest pop singer of all time (although I'm referring here to only five years of her lengthy career). OF ALL TIME. It's the immortal and untouchable France Gall.  Being untouchable is, I suppose, an ironic comment in light of the fact that, unbeknowst to her, one of her biggest hits was about fellatio.  And so we return, as all roads seem to, to Serge Gainsbourg, who wrote a handful of songs for Gall, including the aformentioned 'Les Sucettes'.  There's some amazing footage of Gall and Gainsbourg discussing 'Les Sucettes'.  The 18 year old Gall is asked what she thinks the song is about and replies that it's clearly about a girl who enjoys lollipops.  Her face when Gainsbourg enlightens her is a picture of mortification and Gall notoriously barracked herself in her flat for some weeks afterwards.  In many ways it's a real shame either that Gall didn't know what was going on or that it happened at all because the 'Les Sucettes' affair was the end of the songwriting partnership between the pair, which had by that time produced some of the finest pop music ever comitted to vinyl.  The debut album, named Les Sucettes also after the success of the single, and released in 1965, is a superb demonstration of the art of throwaway pop, containing twelve of the purest examples of the form.  Gall's high, uncertain, girlish voice is the perfect vehicle for this stuff and absolutely makes it come alive.  It's also all unmistakeably French, with a dedication to an uneasy balance between the childish and the mature (at the risk of soundy a bit creepy, the cultural as well as musical precedents for rubbish like Joe le Taxi are all in Gall's work, if you follow my meaning) and Gall's personality is demonstrative of that uncomfortable imperative, which works so perfectly for pop music.  The songs on Les Sucettes are all fairly straightforward pop with no unnecessary frills, no experimentalism, no messing about.  We have pop-ballads ('Il Neige', the yearning 'Bonsoir John-John'), thudding dansefloor pop ('Tu n'as pas le Droit') silly, childish singalongs ('Oh! Quelle Famille', 'J'ai Retrouve Mon Chien') and more controlled contemporary pop (the brilliant and jazzy 'L'Echo', the superbly structured 'La Rose des Vents', 'Quand on est Ensemble').  It's all absolute gold, with not a wasted note, not a wasted moment, and it's an object lesson in why the French were the true masters of this stuff in the 1960's.

The hyper-pop side of Gall was played up on 1966's Baby Pop LP (as expressive an album title as you can get I guess).  It's super-jaunty, lively, bop-about stuff, but with a distinctly nasty undercurrent running through it (courtesy of Gainsbourg's typically vicious approach to songwriting - most of the songs on Baby Pop were recorded at the same time as those on Les Sucettes) subtly railing against French sentimentality, American imperialism and all kinds of other stuff which apparently Gall didn't understand at all.  It's easy to just enjoy the pop though, and it really is pop to the max on Baby Pop.  'L'Amerique' is a fantastically daft yahoo of a song, the title track is a pounding slab of aggro-pop and almost certainly the finest song of Gall's career, the pristinely melodic organ swirl of 'Cet Air La', is on the album, making it worth the price of admission alone.  There are moments of respite from the pop onslaught, the gently insistent 'C'est Pas Facile d'etre une Fille' and the shuffling ramble of 'On se Ressemble Toi et Moi' for instance, but for the most part this is blisteringly propulsive pop music of the absolutely highest order.

In 1967 Gall stepped boldly into the psychedelic era by making the 1968 album.  As freak-out albums go it's pretty straight, but as pop records go it's a bold attempt at being "out there" with some groovy ragga rhythms ('Avant la Bagarre'), a woozy sitar weird-out ('Chanson Indienne') and an album sleeve to absolutely die for.  It's got a couple of dud tunes on it ('Chanson Pour Que Tu M'aimes un Peu' is a bit of a bore), but when it's good, my word it's good.  In some ways the best pop songs on 1968 are the best pop songs she ever made.  Opener 'Toi Que Je Veux' is a charming bit of fluttering balladry, Gainsbourg's only reclaimed song on the album, 'Nefertiti', is a priceless exercise in Asiatic poor taste made glorious by Gall's brilliantly cheerful interpretation, and album closer 'Made in France' is a barnstorming bit of culturally aggressive super-pop. It's a fantastic (in all senses) album and although it really marked the end of Gall's most glorious period, it really is a remarkably fine piece of Gallic pop-art.

Next up we're shifting chronology a bit by doing the compilation Poupee de Cire, Poupee de Son (2001) which covers Gall's career from 1963-1968 only.  Most of the songs on here that aren't on the three albums above are absolutely superb, especially the earliest stuff, most of which was Gainsbourg's work.  There's the Eurovision entry (the title song) which is a mind-blowing piece of pop music, the truly astonishing 'Laisser Tomber les Filles' and 'N'ecoute pas les Idoles', both of which show off Gainsbourg's gift for effortlessly combining pop musicality with aggressively snide lyrical themes.  There are some trying moments (the self-explanatory 'Jazz-a-Go-Go' and similar 'Pense a Moi' are a bit much and 'Dis a ton Capitaine' is a little annoying) but any failures are dramatically outweighed by brilliance.  The indescribably charming 'Christiansen' is just lovely, as is 'Ne dis pas aux Copains', and there's cherry pop in 'Polichinelle' and the children's tune 'Sacre Charlemagne'.  In truth even when the tunes aren't utterly brilliant, Gall's wonderfully artless delivery and wide-eyed personality always are.

One of the ultimate proofs of just how pristine this pop is, is the fact that of the 50 songs we've just worked through only one breaks the 3 minute mark.  Although she kept releasing singles throughout the 1970's, her career had foundered and label and management changes didn't help.  She didn't release any albums between 1967 and 1976 when she put out a weak self-titled album, followed the next year by the disastrous Dancing Disco LP.  In 1980 she had a sudden and unexpected rennaissance when she released the album Paris, France, which is the next one on our list.  It's unsurprisingly a very different kind of record to those she was releasing in the 60's.  This is smooth, adult-pop with fretless bass, heavy synths and a somewhat overwrought production.  The single 'Il Jouait du Piano Debout' (the 7" of which would have been next, but the B-side is also on the album so we'll skip it) was a smash hit in France and effectively allowed Gall to remain in the business to this day.  It's an inoffensive bit of jazzy sophisti-pop in a very 80's French style (ie, corny even by general 80's pop standards - what happened to French pop? It was the best in the world and became pretty much the worst by the late 70's) and there were worse records released pretty much everywhere that year, but you can't help but think back to the glory years.  Anyway, the album as a whole is an overblown affair with Gall's thin voice now simply thin rather than charming (mainly because she's actually trying to sing properly) and it's all fairly bland, with the occasional light spot ('Plus Haut' is quite nice, but it's helped by the fact that it comes after the abysmal 'Parler Parler').  It's not a disaster by any stretch and showed that Dancing Disco was an uncomfortable aberration, and bearing in mind Gall was no longer the teen-pop sensation it's not an inappropriate development, it just isn't a particularly good one.

It's more of the same for 1981's Tout Pour la Musique which continues this theme of the mature songwriting, and to be honest it's overall a better album with stronger songs ('Diego Libre dans sa Tete' is pretty decent) and the whole thing has a peculiar air of being a French straight version of early Kate Bush.  Gall's voice is tretched to its limited utmost and she trills and quivers in a peculiar but fairly interesting way and there are choppy workouts (closer 'Ceux Qui Aiment') but it's still all just too Europop to be taken really seriously.  It's a shame because you can hear some genuinely decent stuff in here but it's just presented as too corny a package to really be enjoyable. There is, unsurprisingly, some truly terrible stuff here too but taken in the context of its time and its history it could be much worse.

Worse is presented right now, with 1984's dismal Debranche.  The awful, desperate cover tells the story really.  This is glossy, shiny, cruddy Francopop at its most anodyne.  The synths are just terrible, the production has mullet-headed engineers all over it and the tunes aren't throwaway in a fun sense they just should have been thrown away.  Again though, there's some undeniable structure in some of this stuff and the odd fun key change makes a big difference.  But Gall's voice is so nondescript as to be scarcely noticeable and the whole exercise sounds like something that would have been rejected from the Who's That Girl soundtrack.

More of the same disappointing sludge composes most of 1987's Babacar, but at least this time around the cover doesn't look like a Club 18-30 promo poster.  There's nothing much to really say about Babacar that I haven't covered in the previous two albums, other than that it's a little bit worse again.

And so we leave France Gall with the dismal 1996 album, France, which is some new material and re-recordings of some songs from the grim second half of her career.  It's such a shame that we've had to devote as much time to the shoddy second half of her career as to the glorious, golden, glittering first half.  But there we are, that's the thing about being a survivor in the music world, it's rare indeed that you're ever going to be able to make decent records later in your career.  I'm not going to say much about the smooth soul grooves of France, except that you can hear so clearly what was intended and maybe, just maybe, there was a Sade album in here (although personally I would consider that little enough), but it's been so obscured by clumsy production and half-hearted performances that all we're left with is a flimsy bit of cod-soul, cheesy rare groove and pop music with two left feet.  To my mind though it really doesn't matter what France Gall did after 1968, nor what she may do in the future, all is both forgiven and forgiveable because of 5 years of the greatest chart pop ever produced.

LaRM day 169 (catch-up)

Final bit of catching up to do, starting with the dramatically over-rated second album by Sweden's finest sister act First Aid Kit, last year's The Lion's Roar.  Interestingly, it's always the first not very good album that becomes the monster smash, and The Lion's Roar is no exception.  After The Big Black and the Blue I had expected them to develop the spookier, more arch and quietly experimental side of their music, but instead they decided to make a fairly pointless second rate Neko Case album.  While I know that country and western music is huge in Scandinavia (at work we used to get CDs by the bucket load of groups of weird old Norwegians and Swedes doing covers of Kenny Rogers songs), there's something strangely disappointing about the idea that interesting indie kids in the Nordics have essentially a cool version of the same rather low ambition.  That's not to say that it isn't a lovely album of post-Fleet Foxes Americana, it certainly is, and there are some really fine songs on it, but when it really comes down to it I'm a lot more likely to listen to what feels like the real thing rather than a peculiarly forced pastiche.  It's really no different to listening to Scotland's Camera Obscura trying to pretend to be the Concretes and there's no reason why I should be more forgiving of one than the other.  Oh, and, as we all have learned in painful fashion, any appearance by Conor Oberst is an appearance too many.

Well, what do you know, it's another appearance by the mighty Serge Gainsbourg, surely however the last.  This is a miracle of sourcing by Zoe who tracked down a copy of the elusive follow-up to Melody Nelson, 1973's tribute to passing wind, Vu de l'exterieur.  Obviously this isn't simply a lyrical examination of the joys and miseries of constipation, defecation and flatulence, it's also one of Serge's lushest and most musically intricate, and intimate (natch) records.  Obviously part of the man's great genius is to make a joke as rounded as possible, and to listen to Vu de l'exterieur without having any idea of what he's singing about is to listen to a collection of delicate, romantic and highly crafted pop ballads and chansons, which move between acoustic charm and piano-led rollers, all with Serge crooning in his most approachable style.  It's a really lovely album to listen to, relaxing and uncharacteristically charming throughout, and a really smooth and worthy follow-up to Melody Nelson's astonishing brilliance.  As long as you don't know that he's singing about ruining a one-night stand by constantly farting or a woman's incontinence resulting from extended bouts of a certain style of, er, intimacy.

Next up we have Lou Barlow's 2009 album Goodnight Unknown.  While I really rated his previous solo album Emoh, I have a bit of a problem with Goodnight Unknown.  Although Barlow's whole schtick is unpredictability, a certain grasshopper mind approach to record making, Emoh had implied something of a more settled and comfortable relationship to his own work, and although it was unchallenging, it was homely and warm.  That sense of settled ease is pretty much gone with Goodnight Unknown and the restless urgency is back, taking with it the gentle songcraft that Barlow had seemingly settled into.  There are some great rock songs, some lovely ballads and the pieces are all right, but the whole just doesn't gel, and while there's more life in the album there's weirdly not much more energy.  Opener 'Sharing' sounds like something of a throwaway off-cut from the Dinosaur Jr reunions and the whole thing sounds too close to a compilation of the less obviously brilliant bits of the Sebadoh albums for comfort.  Unsurprisingly it's when Barlow takes his foot off the pedal that things work best, with the unsettlingly melancholic 'Too Much Freedom' and 'The One I Call' taking the heat out of the previous tunes. But again, there's a strange harking back to days gone by with the four string strum out of 'Gravitate' sounding like it should have come from Weed Forestin'.  There are great tunes in here, but the album is too disjointed, too uncertain to really work.  It's a shame because it's exactly this unwillingness to make the pieces fit that used to make Barlow such a vital songwriter, but these days I think he should just accept that we've all got older.

And finally, it's silly old CSS and their 2011 release, La Liberacion.  Now unlike the hipsters I wasn't disappointed by Donkey.  I thought it was a great rock record and the fact that they had given up trying to impress with their cooler than cool cultural referencing by only their second album suggested to me that they were only playing in the first place and really the joke was on the kind of people who genuinely thought that Death from Above 1979 were the greatest band of 2003.  So, Donkey was more of a statement of intent and it had some really fine nasty, sharp bits of aggro pop on it that worked well.  La Liberacion is a step in another direction, but I'm not sure where it thinks it's going.  On the face of it, it sounds like an attempt to undermine the kind of dancefloor garbage that Lady Gaga and so on churn out but the trouble is that the tunes aren't nearly good enough to compete.  The whole thing is somewhat lacklustre, it feels cheap but not in a fun, trashy way.  But Lovefoxxx was cool enough to sustain a few rough records so if they don't disappear forever they may come up with the goods again sometime in the next few years...

LARM day 168 (catch up)

Alright, so obviously, having taken months off there's a bunch of stuff to catch up with, starting with Love This Giant by David Byrne and St Vincent (2012).  I hummed and hah-ed over whether to include album opener 'Who' on the best of the year CD and it just missed out.  It's a fantastic song, unexpected and arch, built around parping horns and fluttering synthesised strings together with a brilliant and archetypal Annie Clark mangled guitar riff.  It sounds very much like a collaboration between Byrne and Clark, with each drawing the best out of the other's approach.  Weirdly though, the rest of the album sounds very much more obviously as if they constructed their parts separately and tried to fuse them together.  With the exception of 'Who', the first couple of times I listened to the album it left me pretty cold and it's fair to say that you need to let it grow on you.  Part of the problem is that after 'Who' is one of Clark's numbers, 'Weekend in the Dust', which might have made a superb St Vincent song, but in this horns and post-Eno production context falls really flat, and actually sounds more than anything like a Deee-Lite album track from 15 years ago.  It's a shame because it puts you on edge about what follows.  Realistically speaking the album really works best when it's clearest that they each had nothing to do with the others songs.  For the most part it's a Byrne solo album and a lot of it is a logical follow-on from his collaboration album with Fatboy Slim (for instance 'The One Who Broke Your Heart' could have easily come from Here Lies Love) and it's really Byrne's show ('Dinner for Two' and 'I Should Watch TV' are fabulous tunes which take the best of the production approach and his essentially melancholic melodic sense), in that he comes out of the whole thing much more successfully.  Clark's songs are hidebound by the style (which apparently she had suggested, but suits Byrne so much better) and 'Ice Age' is another example of her great songwriting turned to disadvantage by the nature of the collaboration.  It is, on the whole, a great record and even when either Byrne or Clark fail they still manage to come up with something interesting, but when it's flat it really feels flat.  Some of its more discreet charms need time to reveal themselves too though and Clark's 'Optimist' is an absolutely gorgeous piece of heartbreak songwriting.

The first Concretes album was a compilation of two EPs (mini-LPs really) released in 1999 and named boyoubetterrunnow (2000).  Unlike the first proper studio album released some three years later, the songs on these EPs were scrappy, loose-limbed pop music which sounds very much like relaxed living room rock-outs among friends.  There's very little trace of the fuzzy Phil Spector keyboard work-outs of the first album, this is all pure charm and while there's nothing too dramatically exciting about it, it's all about the feeling and where the band became careworn and brittle over time, the songs on boyoubetterrunnow are all feeling good.  Victoria Bergsman's trademark laconic drawl is put to sunnier use than usual and although it still has that weary edge, the songs are bright and create a subtle contrast for her voice.  There are some hints towards the deeper and more solidily realised material to come ('The Jeremiad' is a slowie with the requisite Sarah Records cues) but for the most part boyoubetterrunnow is less of a sunny winter day and more a trip to the beach.

One of the hardest lessons a music lover can learn I learnt in November 2010.  When Zoe encouraged me to buy the 19-disc Sandy Denny box-set the day it was released I told her it would be better to wait until the price went down on Amazon (it was about £120).  Within about two weeks it had sold out and has now become one of the most valuable and sought after box-sets in the history of recorded music (copies, when they do sell, which is basically never, costing around £1,000).  Anyway, a condensed version called The Notes and the Words was released in 2012 cutting the 19 discs down to 4 discs of rarities.  For anyone without the taste for Denny's work there's nothing to get thrilled about on The Notes and the Words but for everybody else these are chips from the holy grail, including the earliest known recordings that Denny made (in full on folk mode and with the obligatory air of Dylan worship in effect) which are fascinating and notable for the self-assurance she exhibited from the get-go.  In truth it's the middle period material which, unsurprisingly, is the most thrilling, with demo and alternate versions of songs from her first two studio albums standing out as being truly remarkable, and the stripped down nature of some of these versions reveals the meticulous and exquisite composition of these songs.  The demos of 'Crazy Lady Blues' and 'It'll Take a Long Time' are fantastic and are markedly better than the album versions with their overblown production.  Even the material from the lacklustre and disappointing final Rendezvous album is allowed a chance to show itself as being markedly better than the album (and Trevor Lucas) allowed it to be, with the acoustic version of 'One Way Donkey Ride' being a textbook lesson in how to write a melancholic piece of rock music.  There are 60 or so songs on The Notes and the Words and while there are occasional lulls it is almost all absolute gold, and yet another huge slab of evidence that Denny was not only one of the greatest singers in popular form that the country has ever produced but also one of its most slyly brilliant songwriters.

Sticking with the folk theme, we have the second finest voice in female folk singing, with Cara Dillon's self-titled debut album (2002).  A different proposition entirely vocally speaking (as it were), where Denny is earthy and grounded, a lifetime of experience shot through every note, Dillon is ethereal, other-worldly, winsome perhaps but crystallinely-clear.  Dillon (together with partner Sam Lakeman) takes the traditional Celtic folk style (and songs) and transforms them into something more modern with a finely subtle style.  The backing vocal tracks for 'Craigie Hill' for instance are unlike anything remotely traditional in their arrangement, yet they are perfectly in harmony with the traditional structure of the song.  It's this delicacy in arrangement that really helps to bring out quite how remarkable Dillon's voice really is, and although at first listen it may be too sweet and high for some tastes, it is without a shadow of a doubt a fantastically controlled instrument and it's also effortlessly beautiful.  Like contemporary Kate Rusby, Dillon and Lakeman knew that they needed to cut their teeth (and prove themselves to a notoriously ornery audience) by sticking mainly to traditional material in their early days and so there are only two originals here, but again, showing their understanding of (and desire to update) the traditional material, the originals fit in perfectly well.  It's all lovely stuff and although it may at first seem designed specifically not to upset the folk traditionalists, it's actually some of the most astute interpreting around.

I think people find it hard to really make out what The Dø are up to and it's true that their records are absolutely all over the show stylistically, but I think that's really the point, the audience are less of a consideration than the muse for them and whether we like it, or get it, or not really doesn't matter much to them.  Personally I think second album Both Ways Open Jaws is an absolutely blistering bit of indie-pop experimentation.  I reckon the bottle tops, broken glass and scraps of metal as percussion are not demonstrations of a tiresome wackiness but because it's fun to try things out.  Anyway, whatever you think of the approach, there are some fantastic pop songs in amongst this stuff.  The loping 'The Wicked and the Blind' is a great bit of psychedelica, 'The Calendar' is straight out of the more accessible end of the Fiery Furnaces ouvre, and 'Gonna Be Sick' and the charming 'Too Insistent' sound like a beefier Nouvelle Vague ditching the frippery.  As far as the continual reinvention of Parisian pop goes, The Dø are a brilliant example of quite how fascinating the process is, and how useful it is to sometimes look outside the US and the UK for the more inventive side of the indie scene. 

More catching up tomorrow. 

LaRM day 167 (Serge Gainsbourg-Galaxie 500)

Whoo-hoo, let's do this thing! Yeah! *punches the air* Actually, I'm just going to pick up where I left off (mid-flow as it were) as if nothing has happened and therefore we continue with......

I was really, really excited to find a vinyl copy of the double live album Le Zenith de Gainsbourg (1989) in a charity shop in Clapham, but was disappointed twice over - firstly because only the second of the two albums was in the sleeve, and secondly because it's absolutely appalling.  A disengaged Serge shouts and mutters over a hideous, slick, funk rock backing band, and honestly it's ghastly.  Unless the first album is radically different, it's all terrible.  If anything, the band sound like Madonna's horrible backing band of the same era, all crack snare drums, fretless bass and "soul" backing vocals and the fact that this anoydyne crap then has a drunken old Serge ranting over it is all a bit depressing, and a really rather sad way to say goodbye to our time in Serge's company.  Still we can always watch the clip of Serge surprising Whitney Houston over and over again to remind ourselves of the man's greatness in his drunken dotage.

Hero worship is all very well but sometimes it can go a bit far, and Galaxie 500's veneration of the Velvet Underground can get a bit hard to take.  As one of the leading lights of the "slowcore" movement, Galaxie 500 really did go the extra mile to sound out of time and out of place, but their languid, lava-lamp way of approaching music was pretty unique and did lead to some really great records.  A lot of the credit for the sound has to go to Kramer, whose penchant for psychedelia led to his insistence on layering a gauzy haziness over everything he produced and loading vocals with reverb. Debut album Today (1988) has some lovely delicate songs on it, not least the charming 'Oblivious' and 'Tugboat'.  Naomi Yang's untutored bass-playing is surprisingly fluid and takes the lead musically for the most part, only giving way to Dean Wareham's raggedly strummed guitar when he breaks into one of his occasional fragmented solos.  A lot is revealed by the inclusion of a cover of Jonathan Richman's 'Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste', making it clear exactly what kind of record collection Wareham had at the time.

The best of the three Galaxie 500 albums is certainly the second, On Fire (1989), which has some superb songs.  Much of them are like full fledged pop songs which have been stripped down to some essentials and then bolstered up with scrappily performed parts.  'Blue' Thunder', 'Strange', 'Plastic Bird', they're all great songs with lovely vocal melodies (something which had been less impressive on Today) which are delivered in Wareham's odd, high, uncertain voice, and the overalll woozy atmosphere that the band and Kramer created has been crafted to perfection on On Fire.  'Snowstorm' is an apt title for possibly their most demonstrative song, which brings out the force of their performances without ever rising above the gentle swirl that they create, sounding for all the world like the simultaneous lightness and weight of a heavy snowfall.  Yang's basslines are more calmly insistent this time out and her tottery vocal accompaniments are more prominent too, and the fact that the whole thing sounds as if it's barely able to stay upright is testament to just how tight this whole operation really was.  It's a truly lovely record, occasionally dark, but for the most part simply gently commanding.  There are a couple of extras on the reissue, including a telling cover of New Order's 'Ceremony'.

And so, at last, we come to the third and final Galaxie 500 studio album, This Is Our Music (1990).  It's more of the same, but lead-off track, the spindly but upbeat 'Fourth of July' provides a clue that things were going slightly awry in the band.  The most obvious problem is that it sounds relatively cheerful, something that Galaxie 500 were not exactly about previously and although on the face of it the lyrics are suitably gloomy, there's still the "I feel alright when you smile" refrain.  The continued references to the possible need to "change my style" are something of a giveaway too.  It is in truth a really lovely pop song but it does seem something of an anomoly in the band's catalogue.  Kramer's usual woozy haze is layered over everything on the album in his traditional style and ostensibly all is business as usual and with the exception of 'Fourth of July' the album has all the band's glacial trademarks.  Pretty much normal service is resumed with 'Hearing Voices', but even this has an acoustic delicacy usually lacking in their spooked out atmospherics, and rather than the winter chill the band usually evoke there's something of a spring mist about it.  I suppose the centrepiece of the album, and certainly the track that everybody talked about on its release, is the 8 minute cover of Yoko Ono's 'Listen the Snow is Falling'.  As an exercise in both restraint and oblique artsiness it's certainly successful but there's something just too arch, too knowing about it for me and the adaptation of one quirky sensibility by another is too cheap a shot (it's much more fun to hear Galaxie 500 take on The Rutles, which we'll come to).  The other songs on the album are genetically identical to those on the other two albums, but with maybe just a touch more confidence and a little more clarity in construction, but it made no real difference, Wareham had other fish to fry and, ironically, broke up the band just prior to the release of This is Our Music.  The reissue also has an extra which is, finally, a Velvet Underground cover ('Here She Comes Now').

And to finish off the 500, we have the Uncollected album (1996), containing various B-sides and rarities spanning their brief career. There's some great stuff in amongst these tunes, not least evidence that the band had some sort of a sense of humour - the cover of 'Cheese and Onions' is done in a kind of mock-respectful way which is priceless.  There are other interesting diversions, such as the version of 'Blue Thunder' with a saxophone playing the breaks, which doesn't work but gives a hint of the idea that the band had tried to develop in certain directions, and a beautifully delicate live version of the Beatles' 'Rain' which many an indie act has had a go at (Bongwater's version being the ace though).  Of the original tunes there's only a slight step down from the quality of the material on the studio albums and although really what's here is not exactly essential, anybody who likes the band's other work would have no complaints about it.

Right, from tomorrow I'm going to do a little bit of catching up on the stuff I've picked up in the last few months before moving on to the transcendentally wonderful France Gall.