The stained bedsitter velvet has been slung out of the window. One of David Hurn’s hands has grabbed a palmful of chicken grease; the other’s holding that classic rock’n’roll cigarette he’s just taken a big drag on. A blue train runs through his music now, threading into the lyrics and sounds of No Love (smoke-puffs, whistles and all), carrying honky-tonk piano and a bucketing Scotty Moore guitar along with it. And David’s voice, which once murmured behind doors and into fringes, now croons with that peculiar blend of pain and relief which you hear in the voices of those who’ve cast away a beloved burden. He sounds positively frisky for someone who’s fallen off the love-boat.
But then, there’s often relief in shucking a responsibility which you knew you never had the stomach for. “A child’s morning prayer couldn’t save my soul / or deliver you the miracle that I know you’re waiting for. / Oh, where is the good in anything, / when there’s no love in your heart any more?” This is less David Hurn Unplugged than David Hurn Unshaven – as if he’s woken up to find that much in the world still sucks, but has met the day with a wry grimace and is simply getting on with it, having learned the protective value of the shrug. Even when delivering a line like “the little piece of hope that I had – well, it just turned bad, / and it’s hiding in my flesh but it’s never coming back”, his lugubrious voice has a shadowed smile to it that it’s never possessed before: even a hint of flirtation.
Despite the soakings of Americana, ‘No Love’ is a change from David’s previous leanings towards the moodiness of American Music Club and Ryan Adams. As is his Elvis tribute in covering ‘Is It So Strange’ – faithful to every nuance of slapback, shake’n’tremble and deep-fried ham, it’s full-fat Presley rendered with unconditional love, rather than the cartoon camp that usually strangles that Memphis hiccup. But the familiar Hurn sadcore isn’t far away: the gorgeous alternative “slow version” of ‘No Love’ (drowning in Low murmur and narcotic steel guitar) could’ve sat proudly on AMC’s ‘Engine’ or ‘United Kingdom’.
Both ‘Books Etc.’ and ‘Ballad for a Lost Cause’ – the latter recorded live at Moriarty’s, with police sirens howling past and bleeding through the walls – are quiet acoustic-driven breaths fogging the cold mirror of hope, struggling with self-determination (“I don’t need to know if anything’s above me, watching me cry my tears. / Don’t need a light showing me my fears,”) and delivering harsh truths (“the lesson is hard only if you’re stupid /and didn’t know what you threw away, / or what you could have saved…”). ‘Ballad for a Lost Cause’ in particular – with its Nick Drake mixture of deceptively soft textures and oblique, meditative lyrics – sees David keeping a firm grip on his lonesome songwriter laurels as he picks apart another story from a mishandled life. “Failure to the end, you didn’t know how to win favours from impossible dreams. / So you should hold something back, but you’ll never see…”
He hasn’t thrown away the key to his bedsit yet, whatever the pull of that train-whistle.
David Hurn: ‘No Love’ Fire Records, PUFF 003
CD/download EP
Released: 24th June 2002
Last year’s self-titled, scheme-solidifying Labradford album saw the Virginian post-rock doyens – as I put it at the time, playing “perfect pop for Prozac people” via “desert guitars drifting into the night.” As I also said, we seemed all set for a slide into Death Valley, Oops. Except we didn’t end up there after all.
Somewhere on the road along the way, Labradford seem to have pulled in at this little deserted Tex-Mex place called ‘Mi Media Naranja’, where they’ve ambled into the cobwebbed bar, dusted off some country band’s abandoned instruments and decided to record another album, just so that the year’s release schedules won’t forget them in a hurry. And suddenly classic rock seems to be on the agenda. Tunes are heard. Mark Nelson’s picked up a slide guitar, Carter Brown adds electric pianos to his armoury, two string players are brought in. To keep up that arty enigmatic quality, songs are given one- or two-letter titles (a strategy only topped by The Aphex Twin’s use of calx symbols a few years ago) to remove any hint of presupposition on our part. And we’re rolling.
And… it’s not the Allman Brothers (well, do surprise me). But this time, although the funereal pace remains a Labradford constant, the music mostly sounds like Ennio Morricone revamping Pink Floyd’s ‘Obscured By Clouds’, under Michael Nyman’s instructions. S being the perfect example – melancholy Pacific twang-guitar, chilly organ, sobre violas in a Rachel’s manner, and the definitive Labradford touch of a coldly beautiful and crystalline short-wave radio whine (off on the edge of hearing and pinking the edge of the ears, insinuating indifferent, mindless, slightly dysfunctional technology into the sound of the human players). Tinny-edged strings duet with a piquant, ever-so-slightly discoordinated accordion, EQ-ed up for subtle discomfort.
If ‘Mi Media Naranja’ could be summed up in one phrase, it’d be “the sound of dust with blues”: inertia melding with the memory of sadness. Spiritualized might be a handy comparison. But then, so’s Fleetwood Mac’s Albatross – that same tragically sad yet detached Peter Green-style slide guitar shows up on G, as a milk-bottle jingle melds with tinkly Gameboy morse-code squirts, lonely and insulated footsteps scuff in the background, and a Spanish guitar plays like a mantric harp. Nelson’s voice (when it makes an appearance) sounds like it’s travelling through half a mile of cupboard fluff. C is more like Angelo Badalamenti under heavy sedation: an excursion of subterranean Rhodes piano, prayer-bell clinking, and papery flutter.
Compared to the unquiet dreamscapes of ‘Labradford’ , there’s something almost domestic about ‘Mi Media Naranja’: something like the drowse of an abandoned family home during a pollen-y summer. A tinny spinning-top rattle rolls hollowly through I’s midground above watery organ and tides of static, as narcotic sleigh bells nod against four-note guitar. There are distant kiddie voices and sterile, fragile electric strings on WR; and guitar dust-bunnies on V, set against the reverberant pulse of a metal bowl while Nelson whispers a trickle of unsurety through the comforting lap of sound. “Too many give… / These insights will see right through your plans. / At the mouth of the highway tunnel, the decision waits for your next command… / Secret candles still can burn: / is it deep enough? / did you make it deep enough?” In the near-hush, Brown’s piano sketches in what remains of the still air.
P finally closes the sojourn with a dose of Harold Budd meets Hank B. Marvin. Low, sweet Rhodes and three- note piano-note, sustained, furry, quivering organ drones in a shimmery haze, with the dislocated thrummmm of bass against the slow rise of a second organ. You start listening to the album in an abandoned bar. You end it back among the coma patients, in the suffocatingly pure-white sheets of a hospital bed.
Compared to the beautiful frozen grimness of ‘97’s eponymous album, Labradford’s work on ‘Mi Media Naranja’ is a pretty fuzzy, lazy business. But, after a while, it becomes something that makes just as much introverted emotional sense as its predecessor. With these two albums Labradford have floated forwards, pinned between miraculous, lucidly speechless visions… and being lost in the cradle of their own inner fog.
(review by Col Ainsley)
Labradford: ‘Mi Media Naranja’ Mute Liberation Technologies/Blast First Records, BFFP 144CD (5 016027 611445)
CD/download album
Released: 19th November 1997
Get it from: (2018 update) CD best obtained second-hand, or download from Bandcamp.
Various riot-on grrls and drama queens, once they’ve tired of punking up girl-group lisping, like to play with those oh so challenging images of junkies and whores. Well, good luck, kids. Play nicely. But while you try on the roles like they’re attention grabbing prom dresses, Carla Bozulich has genuinely Been There, Done That during her own harrowing past. And she’s brought back a mass of bone-breaking songs with her on her voyage back from the brink. And her band, The Geraldine Fibbers, bring them to life the way a flamethrower brightens up, oh, any social gathering where plenty of flammable frills are clustered together. Wake up time, you pretty things.
Oh yes. See them run for cover.
Whoever’s heard the previous Fibbers album, ‘Lost Somewhere Between the Earth and My Home’, will have an idea of what to expect. Except that ‘Butch’ is to its predecessor what ‘Nevermind’ is to ‘Slippery When Wet’. Maybe it’s the recruitment of new guitarist Nels Cline, or maybe it’s just Carla finally diving full into the fray with both feet; but ‘Butch’ is a uninhibited maelstrom of ferocious guitars that lash like electrified hair, bass that booms like an iceberg smacking up the side of the Titanic, spasms of frenetic voodoo drumming and Jessy Greene’s violin flaying the skin off any ear that’s left unflattened.
Oh, and Carla’s voice. Emmylou Harris channeling Diamanda Galas doesn’t come halfway to this. As sharp and as powerful as a swung shoulderblade, as pointed as a knitting needle driven through the brain. The raw power of someone who’s lived through enough not to give a flying fuck about what anybody else thinks.
Of course in Fibberworld the fucks are probably flying. Like fists. Airborne, fast, rolling over; brutal, biting, clawing like rabid eagles. Sex permeates this album like river water in Ophelia’s bridegown, and while there’s a wild exhilaration to it, it’s never far from violence, meted out by Carla herself or by one of the other stark shadowy characters who ripple through her songs like sharks in a blood trail. There’s been nothing like this since that crack of psychic thunder that was the first Throwing Muses album twelve years ago. And if you’ve always missed that original, wantonly possessed Kristin Hersh since she mellowed into first a college rock icon and then an eldritch acoustic housewife, Carla beckons with a sharply bevelled fingernail and a mouthful of mercilessly shredded woman-words.
You think “Muses”, you think “X”; you think “Hole with talent instead of just posturing”; you think “early Velvets on nightmare acid, and with Nico convulsing out of that Teutonic cool for once.” And you also think country music, which soaks the fabric of “Butch” and ferments their Los Angeles punk hearts. But this is no joker’s cowpunk. It’s got black humour in spades, but the Fibbers’ brand of fucked-up country keeps the ravaged heartland heartstrings and sour juice intact.
Folks Like Me’s wooden, honky-tonk four-four has the inevitable slippery lap steel and plaintive weave of fiddle, the queasy bends of guitar and voice. But this is a tale of life off the highways, in the darkest and most twisted woods: Tammy Wynette via ‘Deliverance’ and ‘Angel Heart’. This time, the woman who can’t stand by her man comes of strange and sinister stock (“My heart wants to remain what I’ve become… / There’s no word for this where I come from”) and she knows that the idyll must end before her own blood catches up with her: “Your Lord knows I don’t want to leave here. / I’d like to stay in this little house and provide for you / and if I knew I’d only be risking my own life, / I’d stay until they came and struck me dead, / but I couldn’t stand to see them hurt a hair on your sweet head…”
Pet Angel gives us an American Gothic waltz with lyrics infested by wild wood romance and ‘Twins Peaks’ owls: “You cradle my body in sweetness and warmth, and a sweet wind blows through the trees… / The rain cracks the sky like tears of joy… makes mischief in her hair.” Love and death are inextricably combined (“You are my sunshine, I pull the drapes shut tight. / It’s curtains for you, goodbye. / The cat’s in the bag, the bag’s in the river, / the river makes me cry”), and out here, murder’s as natural as prayer: “To you, to you, straight up to you, / into your charitable hands/ Take care of him, Jesus, I know you’ll do what’s best / Lay his wicked soul to rest.”
Carla’s worldview is nightmarish, constantly under attack, with even the sun joining in with the warfare – on California Tuffy, she announces “a ball of light comes down / to bite me on the ass, the legs, the breasts / I’m falling from my nest.” And the answer is a swipe back with all the claws out, claiming “Yes I am just a tart, a heart on stilts. / Pick the flower and it will wilt, / to die in bliss, for a greedy lover’s kiss” before stinging back with a flail of electric noise and “you will never get my heart.” Toy Box is brutally, near unbearably graphic, a hall of distorting mirrors and wartime dispatches from the sex trade – “My shell on top of your knotty fist / with a speculum shoved up my cunt after hours… / For one lousy minute she felt like a queen. / I stand her naked at attention. Is this my only skill?”
Then there’s the metal hammering of I Killed the Cuckoo, as guitars screech, text goes through the mincer, fate and conflict body-slam in illegible shards. “The clock is dead for once and for all / until the next time I run in with you… / Lay me lower than I prayed for sweety heart… / In the end you crash into a milk truck. / I can see it in the tea leaves: you’re fucked.” In Arrow to My Drunken Eye there’s a flicker of incestuous horror in the warning “don’t be caught with your nightie mussed / and if you are questioned don’t tell them what we’ve discussed.”
Maybe it’s for respite from the rage, but scattered through ‘Butch’ are doorways to elsewhere as the band sink the odd claw into the avant-garde. There’s the drowned fairground ghosting of Heliotrope; or the venomous ambient murk enveloping Claudine’s New Orleans lurch, full of knuckly hideous life, like facehuggers trying to clamber out of a gumbo. And there’s a blood pulsing, amyl nitrate cover of Can’s You Doo Right – enough to scare the gloves off Holger Czukay and have aseptic contemporary Krautrock boys bricking it en masse.
However, it’s always Carla’s songs that snatch the attention; and rightly so. Here’s a reckless and merciless imagination at work, exploring the fragility of an ageing drag queen on the title track (“pushin’ thirty five under an answer blanket”) who’s “always a much prettier bird than any old girl bird… / Shades of light green, deep blue and just a touch of rouge / It’s funny how easy it is to lose / And all you’re left with is chaos and a dirty face.” Or diving into chaos with Seven or In 10 as she explodes around the body of a enemy lover, abandoning control and bringing down a foe with her: “I’ve gotta little trick for you. / I can split in two / or in seven / or in ten / little friends on whom I can depend… / We told you not to get inside our head or in our bed. / You wanna own this dish so you can eat it any time you wish… / Not so fast, fucker!”
But even as Carla delivers a full on primal punk scream of “you might think I hate you!”, she offers us no straight answers. Well, there aren’t any. Part of the impact of ‘Butch’ is that whatever Carla’s had to go through, she’s now so well adapted to it that you can’t imagine her living away from it. The world’s often built on chaos and violence; Carla’s found out more about that than most; and she’s now too much a part of it to ever escape. But if she’s ambiguously intertwined with the hand that beats, she’s also biting it ’til it bleeds.
Roll up the sunroof, mount rocket launchers on the beach buggy and hit Venice Beach with your anger clenched in your fist. Run down any fucker that gets in your way. It’s a sun ripped jungle out there, full of dangerous fruit. California dreaming will never be the same again.
The Geraldine Fibbers: ‘Butch’
Virgin Records America Inc., CDVUS 133 / 7243 8 44629 2 5 (724384462925)
CD-only album
Released: 1st July 1997 Get it from:(2020 update) Best obtained second-hand or streamed. The Geraldine Fibbers online: Additional notes:(2020 update) The Geraldine Fibbers split up after ‘Butch’. Carla Bozulich and Nels Cline went on to form Scarnella; more famously, Nels eventually joined Wilco. Carla now has a solo career as well as working with her band Evangelista.
Can you can imagine a sort of cross between ‘Friends’ and a pre-job-market ‘This Life’, in which all the characters appear to be played by close relatives of those odd, unclassifiable, button nosed mammals (what the hell were they, then? bear/possum crossbreeds? doughboys?) who got perpetually stuck with the supporting roles in Disney Club comics?
If so, then you’ll have a fair (if reductionist) idea of Martin Wagner’s ongoing graphic novel ‘Hepcats’. Along with its darker and more tragic sister strip ‘Snowblind’, this warm, witty, compassionate and beautifully drawn adult strip – set on the campus of the University of Texas – follows the fortunes of a small group of students (Erica, Joey, Gunther, and Arnie) and their perpetual struggle of balancing friendships and growing maturity with an acceptable level of fun and the freedom to make mistakes. Sounds familiar? In Martin’s hands it’s both recognisable and sparkling.
Currently celebrating a new linkup with Antarctic Press and the consequent release from the headaches and pitfalls of self publishing, Martin’s just expanded the “Hepcats” world by releasing the first in a set of companion CDs: not so much a ‘Hepcats’ soundtrack as just a set of, as Martin puts it, “damn good songs that seem right at home with Erica and the gang.” But if you’re expecting another college beerkeg singalong album, think again.
Despite the tendency of the Hepcats cast to engage in animated chat as opposed to holing up in their bedrooms brooding over a Walkman, there’s a strong whiff of dark-toned, filigreed, 4AD style introspection to this compilation. It’s the tendency of the bands involved to spice their music with a little darkness, a little ornateness: and as a result ‘Radio Hepcats’ is generally closer to the sombre and unsettling shades of ‘Snowblind’ than the lively sun-washed tints of ‘Hepcats’ itself. Green Day’s pogo party this ain’t: it’s more like Ivo Watts-Russell’s children coming home to roost.
Explicitly, sometimes. The Curtain Society‘s waltzing Ferris Wheel has that familiar sound of twangling Cocteau Twins bass and grumbling spiky washes of guitar under the melancholic push-and-pull vocals. More of those queasy, giggling, Robin Guthrie-ish guitars show up on Siddal‘s Secrets of the Blind, a two parter that swings unexpectedly from chirpy drunken-fairy pop into one of those Cocteaus alien piano ballads that dislocate you from your own consciousness.
And if you’ve ever wondered what a troubled hermit’s answer to the arresting, barren grandeur of Dead Can Dance might be like, look no further than Soul Whirling Somewhere. Unhittable – utterly isolated and beautiful darkwave – drifts up as if from the bottom of a well: Michael Planter’s ashy, yearning voice floating out from its shrouds of tolling Joy Division bass and dark persuasive ambience, which caress and pull it down like water saturating the clothes of a drowner. It lulls you with sepulchral beauty while draining the warmth out of the room: you can all but see ice forming on the speakers.
But let’s not nit-pick. Even if the 4AD pointers can sometimes be pretty self evident, this is – at the very least – an album of heady, winning underground music. They might have some obvious forebears, but the bands on ‘Radio Hepcats’ also possess persuasive and seductive sounds, which are especially welcome in the current atmosphere of half asleep indie and heritage Britpop. With The Red Dots, An April March plunge down into their own thunderous take on guitar heavy dream pop with enough force to squish any of their British shoegazer ancestors (Chapterhouse, Slowdive). This stuff rides on a natural internal dynamic as much as on any phaser pedal setting, and coasts in on a dark thrum of guitar as impersonal and unstoppable as a typhoon.
Martin’s offered us the odd surprise, too. Visible Shivers have the sort of name to suggest more of the same chilly darkwave as Soul Whirling Somewhere but prove, in fact, to have the same sort of Southern States nerviness as their near brothers in name, Shudder to Think. Lo-fi country-flavoured twelve-string jangle pop, complete with plaintive harmonica and plonky bass, which on After Glory prances closer to the Appalachian chirp of Robbie Robertson, Dr Hook or ‘Fables…’-era REM than to the stonecarved artiness of much of the rest of the ‘Radio Hepcats’ broadcast. Then there’s William McGinney‘s ‘Hepcats’-themed snatch of filmic lo-fi piano and synthwork, halfway between ‘Knotts Landing’ and Angelo Badalamenti. And to silence any remaining doubts, there’s two more bands on here – the shimmeringly lovely Mistle Thrush and the ever-magnificent No-Man – who transcend genrework altogether.
Mistle Thrush open the CD with a soulful seduction, giving us Wake Up (The Sleep Song). First it curls into our hearts like a gorgeously soporific Julee Cruise ballad, and then suddenly expands into a huge cathedralline Bark Psychosis space where Valerie Fargione’s voice strips itself of anxious sugar and powers up into a huge, majestic Patsy Cline alto, as if the lump in our throats has finally gulped them into a place more fit for their bewitching talents. Further on, No-Man provide two wildly different and divergent contributions: the industrial, near incomprehensible clatter pop of Infant Phenomenon (which powers along on a rattling log drum beat, offensively dirty guitars and gasped, abstract lyrics), and the all embracing Steve Reich-ian trance funk of Heaven Taste; a sweetly slumbering twenty plus minute ambient monster with a bellyful of twinkling lights, sky tickling violin, leviathan Mick Karn bass and perhaps a couple of bites of Chartres Cathedral.
Martin Wagner’s not only compiled a beautifully-paced compilation album, he’s also given much deserved space to a clutch of very under-regarded bands. And the latest activity on the ‘Hepcats’ site suggests that an even more captivating follow-up compilation is on the way. The whole ‘Hepcats’ affair, both on and off record, is looking like a series well worth tuning in to. Cool for cats and everyone else.
Various Artists: ‘Radio Hepcats’ Antarctic Press, RHCD1 (no barcode)
CD-only album
Released: November 1996 Get it from:(2020 update) Long out of-print, rare, and best obtained second-hand. Originally came free with deluxe edition of “Hepcats” #0. Hepcats online:
Martin Wagner’s Hepcats blog, and online reprints of the original comic at Comic Genesis. Additional notes:(2020 update) Of the artists on this album, The Curtain Society and No-Man are both still active; Visible Shivers enjoyed a ten year career between 1990 and 2000; Mistle Thrush’s Valerie Forgione was later in Van Elk, while Soul Whirling Somewhere’s Michael Plaster resurfaced in Yttriphie and An April March’s Danella Hocevar later worked as Danellatron. William McGinney has divided his time between film music and academia.
A definite whiff of conservatoire rock tonight. Viola player Billy Currie used to be in Ultravox,: nowadays he looks more like an Irish pub musician, but his music has taken a more interesting turn, as has his choice of collaborators. Former Tuxedomoon violinist and occasional singer Blaine L. Reininger – with his unnerving bespectacled stare, lugubrious ironic drawl, Zappa face-fuzz and impeccable suit – looks like a college professor whom you wouldn’t allow near the children, and draws most of the attention this evening.
This unlikely pair perform a set of serious brow-furrowed John Cale-y string duets with a flavour of compressed folk, using an endearingly cheap sequencer to expand the instrumentation: clave and sweep piano program on Bittersweet, digital string orchestra on Overcast. On The Reach of Memory, sparse piano clumps, drum program and synth bass kicks into Currie and Reininger’s apparent take on Appalachian mountain music. The Thin End of the Wedge sees Reininger on trashy art-rock guitar for a Velvet Underground feel.
Their music has a strange, detachedly astringent feel; a classical dissection of folk, like Irish airs meeting New York minimalism. A sense of towering expression repressed, amplified, by Reininger’s menacing suavity: the set highlight is The Green Door, in which Reininger sings words from a documentary on schizophrenia to a strong melody over sparse drum program and organ. Seems wholly appropriate. I’m impressed, but I feel a little queasy.
In contrast, pedal steel guitarist B.J. Cole is a ridiculously normal-looking guy with a peculiar past. Back in the ’70s he was the leader of Cochise (probably the only prog/psychedelic band based around pedal steel) and subsequently explored psychedelic country music in 1973 on his ‘New Hovering Dog’ album. Over the years since then, he’s been the ubiquitous sideman and sessioneer to everyone who wants an open-minded pedal steel approach, from The Orb to Björk to Procul Harum to Scott Walker, and in particular John Cale. Since 1989 he’s also been leading this occasional band; the Transparent Music Ensemble, an ambient-flavoured chamber music quintet also featuring keyboards, cello, percussion and violin prodigy Bobby Valentino, best known for his London country music stardom.
Cole’s Transparent Music is a sedate, relaxing experience, pleasantly beautiful and unfussy, far too laid-back to be pretentious. Reflective melodic strings tie in with his steel lines, keyboards support gently, percussion shades rather than impels. Some people point out Brian Eno as the inventor of ambient music: others such as Cole know that it goes back to the days of Satie and Debussy, both of whole expressed ambient intentions long before the days of synths and tape loops, wishing to create music that merged with the tinkle of cutlery. Works by both are played tonight, along with a version of Ennio Morricone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, a slow cloudy cover with Cole’s ringing pedal steel dreaming out the tune.
Transparent Music is unselfconsciously universal: if something fits in with that softly lustrous sound, Cole and co. play it and let someone else draw up the distinctions if they’ve got nothing better to do. The original pieces stream neatly into place alongside the classics: Indian Willow’s choppy subterranean strings, Promenade & Arabesque’s pizzicato accents. Throughout, Cole’s steel pines and slides gracefully. That is, when he hasn’t MIDI-processed it into another sound – sad film-noir saxophone on Adagio in Blue to contrast with Valentino’s passionate classical violin, or the fluting electronic sounds on Easter Cool counterpointing the piano and bass drum.
It isn’t exactly music to stir the blood. What it is is very accomplished classy atmosphere music, a beautiful translucent sound whose function is just to exist and to please. That may sound superficial, but if so it’s a refined and civilised pleasure of superficiality. Gentle classics stroked with electricity and with a sense of ambient context, reclaiming the sector where popular instrumental and classical cross, and with no hint of elevator music. Easy listening with a brain. Satie and Debussy would have approved.
Swoon. /swo͞on/ A verb. To be emotionally affected by someone or something that one admires; become ecstatic. Here are some people and things that make me swoon. #swoon #swoonage
Misfit City 