Should I name a shrub? Probably a blackberry bush on this occasion. Convoluted, stubborn, furnished with tricky little thorns so that you have to be careful how you approach it… but also blessed with tangy little knots of piquant fruit which make the effort and the odd scratch worthwhile.
The Shrubbies are yet another branch of the Cardiacs family tree. Here, Sharron Saddington and Craig Fortnam (both of whom have done time in Lake of Puppies, William D. Drake‘s genteel “acoustiCardiacs” band) are joined by two bona fide ex-Cardiacs, Dominic Luckman and Sarah Smith. Unsurprisingly, the influence of Cardiacs (or their original acoustic Sea Nymphs alter-ego) has left its mark on the music. Here are four complex and leaping songs, swinging through an adventure playground of sophisticated eccentric harmony based around Craig’s dextrous gut-strung acoustic guitars and Sharron’s fluffy chirrup – although it’s Sarah’s sax and keyboard riffs, as fat and jolly as laughing Buddhas, that you tend to remember.
But Cardiacs music is clenched, neurotic, compulsively driven. Listening to the Shrubbies is much more of a relaxing activity: more like bouncing up and down on a deep springy pile of autumn leaves. This is sort of like The Sundays might sound if Kevin Ayers was in the driving seat: innocent but wise as a tuned-in child listening to the wind, with a dollop of Caravan/Canterbury breeziness stirred in alongside a seasoning of Early Music and kitchen-folk singalong. It reminds me of nothing so much, though, as great lost London hopes The Wise Wound, some of whose visionary acoustic/psychedelic outlook they share.
Excepting the surreal, Barrett-ised Sabled Fur, these songs tap directly into nature, caught up in the passage of seasons (Carefree Clothes) while mainlining jumpy sap for hormones, and fascinated by the moment (Perfect Present, with its mariachi keyboards and sax). Most of all, they’re driven by the sheer animal spark of life, in particular on the intricate spiny Body Cried Alive with its dark stretchy Mellotron riffs and epiphany of survival: “spiral down to the ground / like a seed that flies through the air / and affix myself to the ground / crying I am alive! alive!”
Small and marvellous; like the delicious shudder in the daylight when the sun and the clouds do their dance-of-the-seven-veils thing.
The Shrubbies: ‘The Shrubbies’ Merlin Audio, MER97028CD (no barcode)
CD-only EP
Released: 20th September 1997 Get it from: (2020 update – original EP is best picked up second-hand; all tracks reappeared on The Shrubbies’ lone 1999 album ‘Memphis in Texas’, from which all of the soundclips here are taken and which you can still download or order from Bandcamp). The Shrubbies online:
Tony Harn used to be in Spacematic, a Warrington duo who – had they survived – might’ve carved out a niche for themselves as music history’s only cross between Morrissey and Jeff Beck. Their 1996 demo was an odd and edgy marriage between Dave Harrison’s bleak bedsit lyrics and mournful vocals and Harn’s fluently melodic guitars (which mingled hard-rock directness with intricate layering). Imagine what their gigs might have been like. Two guys onstage in the throes of song and lost to the world – oblivious to the panicky expressions on the faces of their audience, as the tribal reps for the indie depressives and the rock hogs were forced to eye each other nervously across the clubroom floor, clutching their snakebites and beers for support. Ah, social awkwardness rattles its cage. Fine times. And – if they ever existed – gone times.
Parted from Harrison, Harn spent a year left to his own devices and ‘From The Inside’ is the result – an self-released instrumental guitar album which allows him to explore spaces of playing and composing which Spacematic could never have accommodated. Usually, rock guitar solo records are unparalleled opportunities for musical showing-off. While Harn’s got the necessary technical skill (and enough classic rock in his playing) to go for total guitar-hero blowout, ‘From The Inside’ is remarkably modest, and its musicality is expressed with unusual restraint. For instance, the title track’s Brian May explosion of passionate electric pomp and romance, lasts barely over a minute and fades out in a subdued loop of Vini Reilly arpeggios. Harn’s experiments in five- and seven-time are lilting, accessible and lovingly melodic: his lead lines are concise, memorable and authoritative. Acting as his own support musician, his crisp drum programming and sturdy work on bass and keyboards (as integrated as his guitar playing) lend the album a homely sound.
One of the best things about Harn’s playing is that, for all the skill of his fingers, not one note is superfluous or wasted. He’s more likely to sit comfortably on top of a bold tune than to play stuntman; he knows when to let exploration stop, and when to let silence stand. In a musical zone stuffed with supremely accomplished fret-wankers suffering from fingerboard diarrhoea, that’s a rare and cherishable talent. As far as obvious influences go, the above-mentioned Jeff Beck gets a look in (something in the attack, the indisputably British rock stylings); there’s a little of the ’80s Alex Lifeson in the hard-rock digital jangle; and sweet lyrical solos like Mike Oldfield or even Prince. Harn also has a strong touch of Joe Satriani’s out-and-out lyrical tone and way with a melody (most obviously on the sunny rush of Playsafe and Pseudoseven, or the echoing Room One which recalls Satriani’s Circles).
But what ‘From The Inside’ reminds me of most is the pair of albums Andy Summers and Robert Fripp recorded in the mid-80s – ‘I Advance Masked’ and ‘Bewitched’. Harn’s playing has neither Fripp’s intensity nor his academic sternness. Nor does it have Summers’ taste for textures on the guitar synth. But his fondness for the spangly echoes of the delay pedal, his exuberantly climbing note patterns and ear for counter-arranged, bell-toned rhythm-picking lines comes directly from their legacy. In Turning Time, guitars dodge and somersault cheerfully over the rising drones and evolving multiple rhythms. The cycling riff in Pseudopool recalls Talking Heads and I Zimbra: its long sweet smudge of a solo hearken back to Fripp’s New York years.
‘From The Inside’ does have its flaws, the most obvious one being that it carries the predictable symptoms of a guitarist’s showcase. Some pieces show this more blatantly than others (Beat The Bad, for example – a pretty superfluous bit of guitar-rock reggae style). You could also quibble about some slightly cheesy keyboard tones and parts, which pull some compositions a little too far towards travel-show soundtracks. Yet at least they err on the side of cuteness rather than flabbiness, and are essentially there to support the guitar work. Harn can be forgiven these lapses given that plenty of rock guitar soloists choose sixteen minutes of assorted widdly-widdly as a showcase, while his own offering is a well-worked-out album of tunes and interplaying.
In spite of Harn’s knack for those solid tuneful elements, many of the high points of the album come when he slows down and makes shapes. The eerie scrapings and siren wails which set the scene for the title track, for instance. Or Coloursound, in which ringing slow-swelling chords mingle gorgeously with the whispered sample on the voiceover: “Particularly at night, I have this incredible feeling of intense blackness… I mean, I’ve never experienced such darkness…” It could’ve sat comfortably on David Sylvian’s ‘Gone To Earth’, as could its drowsy vapour-trail of a melody.
I’d really love to hear Tony Harn working in a fuller band situation, or with collaborators who’d really bring out the best in him – but this’ll do for now. One of Britain’s finest undiscovered rock guitarists has left his calling-card, and I’d advise you to get in touch.
Tony Harn: ‘From The Inside’
Tony Harn, THCD1 (no barcode)
CD-only album
Released: 1997
Buy it from:
Limited availability – contact Tony Harn for information.
Cut‑ups are wonderful things. TV samples. Answering machines. Category‑defying noises. Harsh vocals. Scattershot free associations. Beautiful vocals. Hazy guitars. Clattering electro‑rhythms. A sense of the surreal. A sense of the melodic. Glorious eclecticism. The perfect post‑modern pop group.
Hallelujah! R.O.C. are back.
And against the odds, too. The debut album of this transatlantic trio (Fred Browning, Karen Sheridan and Patrick Nicholson, with roots in American, Ireland and Britain) welded pop music with a wilfully obscure grab‑bag of eclectic styles. Spookily emerging out of nowhere, it was critically hailed as the pinnacle of the ’90s zeitgeist, but the record‑buying public remained resolutely silent. Yet, here are R.O.C. ‑ back! ‑ on a new major record label deal (Good on you, Virgin, I take back everything I’ve ever said about the majors… well, almost…)
Dada opens the album with a statement of intent akin to the surreal art movement of the same name. Grasshoppers and various indecipherable speech samples give way to pounding, discordant and (very definitely) tuneless harsh electronica, accompanied by sinister laughter. Jeez, they’re such awkward people that you almost get the feeling that this is the spirit of ROC laughing at you for not understanding it, not getting it. Not very welcoming, either musically or emotionally. Thus, not for nothing does the oh‑so‑English conversation (too formal, too well‑accented to call rap) of the next track (Dis)Count Us In begin with the question “Are you still with me?” before Fred Browning relates a tale of watching a woman across a crowded room, to a backing of post‑modern electro‑pop.
All change. Mountain is R.O.C. as a slightly less comatose Mazzy Star performing to acoustic guitar and warm This Mortal Coil‑style atmospherics. Karen’s lyrics detail her observations ‑ highly emotional but somehow dispassionate ‑ of someone whose life has no direction and is spinning out of their control ‑ “Here we go again, / You’re going to take another rollercoaster ride through hell” ‑ in a beautifully recorded wash of womb‑like electronics.
Cheryl is a pop Suicide for the ’90s, an almost cheesy pop melody set to gleaming pulsating electronics and interludes of demolition percussion. Karen sings (Cheryl’s?) lyrics of a big fuck‑off to a man (antiquated sexist attitudes, thinks he’s God’s gift) and states her own terms for independence; “If it’s all the same / I think I’ll move on up… / I’m gonna get myself some dedication.”
Ever Since Yesterday starts as an acoustic‑guitar based lament to the departure of Fred Browning’s lover before all manner of randomly‑emitting Disco Inferno‑ish sampledelia and phased electronica makes its presence felt, distorting the whole sonic collage and moving it out into the realms of post‑rock. Instead of fading out, it collapses in on itself as the tape mangles. Gorgeous.
25 Reasons To Leave Me features Browning returning to his husky Shaun Ryder vocal style, set to a loping laid‑back musical backing not unlike a more uptight Happy Mondays; whilst K.C is a dry disconcerting, upfront recording, led by a simple and affecting sequence of organ chords, later joined by a soloing trumpet and brass accompanying a vocal of more third‑person observation from Sheridan. It’s no criticism to say that this track resembles late‑night bedsit pop at its best. Kind of a meeting between Prefab Sprout and The Cure, if you will.
Cold Chill Just Lately details the crossed wires, cross‑currents, accusations and arguments of a relationship break‑up. This rather harrowing subject is carried by the track’s broken, exhausted vocals. He’s not happy, but there is a certain black humour typical of R.O.C.: “But I guess it’s just a fucked‑up world we’re living in, / and you know it couldn’t get much worse. / But then it turns you over and fucks you in the ass… / She only cares about herself / She never cared about me.” Such bile is performed to an incongruous accompaniment of smoothly enveloping, ebbing waves of sound, a lurching rhythm, and throbbing strings adding a chamber‑pop element.
The final track, Ocean And England, opens with the sound of thunder and rain, and a bare strummed guitar‑‑the poignant musical lead is then swapped to a ringing electric piano and harpsichord before a huge sampled orchestra swoons in. Like many bravely experimental acts, ROC always remember that, sometimes, all one needs is a song and an affecting melody. “Ocean And England” is just that, and even includes a lovelorn lyric: “Hey you, / the ocean and England are so far away. / Won’t you consider coming home / to be with me again?”
Ultimately, though, this album lacks a little of the debut album’s magical Wonderland atmosphere ‑ swapping the feeling that anything could happen within the space of the next track for the feeling that yes, plenty will happen, but it will be more regimented and organised. Yet how many bands would have the sense of vision to travel, in one album, from the surreal and experimental to pure pop and simple emotion?
R.O.C. Still utterly beguiling.
R.O.C.: ‘Virgin’ Virgin Records, CDV 2829 (7 24384 29472 4)
CD-only album
Released: 8th September 1997
Get it from: (2018 update) quite a rare release these days, best obtained second-hand.
Ramshackle‘s second album amply displays the fact that they’re stars in waiting. Or straining at the starting gate, perhaps; as ‘Chin On the Kerb’ feels like someone pacing in anticipation, winding up in order to lash out, someone containing so much but unsure of their moment.
Steve Roberts, Johnson Somerset and Ben Chapman make up Ramshackle. With their previous album ‘Depthology’ they sent admiring ripples through the midground of the blues and soul scene, yet so far they’ve eclipsed by the Bristol superstars on one hand and the steamroller marketing of American R&B on the other. A pity – because the longer you listen to this album the more impressive Ramshackle sound. Compare it to the successive waves of smug, self-satisfied vocal stars that carpet-bomb our soul shelves. It’s like the difference between listening to the shouts of a bandstanding actor and eavesdropping on an intense conversation in the corner of a bar. This band are smooth, but they never sound like they’re big-E Entertainment paste.
The central axis is Roberts’ British/Caribbean voice, bowled in somewhere between the edgy sweetness of Horace Andy, Austin Howard’s lushly muscular prowl and the testifying tenor roar of Doug Pinnick. And Ramshackle seem to have their initial foundations on whatever boundary lines there may be between Massive Attack, On-U Sound and Ellis, Beggs & Howard, but let themselves roam a good deal further. The ranked and sussed electro-acoustic instrumentation touches on trip-hop, on U2 Big Music rock and on techno, on soul and R&B, on church singing, Jamaica dub-juice and slow funk shakedown. Ramshackle are letting it all come to them, nourished by the convergence of those rich streams similar to the all-embracing muse of their Brit-soul contemporary Lewis Taylor, or – in intent, if not manner – to the Prince of The Cross or Symbol.
Certainly they’ve sheathed their black-pop instincts in richly crafted clothing. From My Mind emerges from cloudy electronic shapes to a sweet spartan R&B groove and tiny, intent piano kisses. Works of Devotion lounges on the dubbier ingredient of padded bass, high echoing Jericho trumpet flickers and bouncy toasting; Roberts blazes with quiet righteousness, balancing out the snaky threat of the industrial synth that slides through the song like the worm in the apple. And they’ve got a knack with uplifting ballad pop. The acoustic strum and sweet-rocking sway of Don’t Turn Me Away; the bluesy plaint of (What About) Tomorrow with its hip-hop beats and train-whistle wastelands; the joyous, sunny gospel sighs and carnival brass that ripple through the blissed-out single, Freshly Rained-On Grass; or Eden’s gospelly piano’n’beats, laden with dangling glittery sounds like harmonica memories and a family of chorus vocals.
But ‘Chin On the Kerb’ is shadowed by palpable alarm – “Let me tell you / I smell blood in the water.” Even when they’re taking the air and laughing into the sunlight on Freshly Rained-On Grass, there’s a sense of Ramshackle rocking and poised on the balls of their heels, preparing to take the blow and meet the challenge whenever it snakes out of nowhere to catch them. Granted, it’s no ‘Mezzanine’ – it lacks the spookiness, the seductive alienation, the naked rage Massive Attack are allowing themselves. And what darkness exists in this album happens to Roberts’ protagonists, it’s not of them. But there’s a religious sense of right and wrong driving this, which sets up a particular tension in Ramshackle’s tales of life on the rough edge. Just as Roberts can flick lightly between street-sly patois and preacher pomp, Ramshackle’s moods are volatile beneath the smoothness.
If there’s anything you take away from the album, it’s the impression of a hot-headed and contrary man paying a loyal personal tribute to the resilience of the beleaguered black experience. The pomp-rock-tinged Temple – piano and bass from house music meeting a Tackhead-style forcefulness, Roberts’ voice fracturing into sweet choruses and torn-up foreboding roars – warns of hostile worlds outside the church doors. No Touchi”s tales of a crime-ridden community on the last scraps of its pride (“I see less clearly in these advancing years.. / No touchi’ rock, combat bad intentions”) touch on Gaye’s Inner City Blues, ragga inflections dodging the drilling whine of synth and the discreet knife-play of scratching.
Though the above is mild compared to the vengeful slash at brotherhood betrayed on Broken Soul. Or to the vipers-nest atmosphere of the album’s loping title track, where the guitars clot and loom like hangovers, and the synths gleam like yellowed morning-after teeth: “The Judas kiss / of cold glass to my lips / tells me I’m gonna keep doing this all of the time.” Roberts sounds as if he’s washed up against a pissed-on wall, torn pants fouled and down round bruised thighs, surfacing into one of those horrible moments of absolute truth when there’s nothing between you and the raddled wound that you called your soul before you got lost on the dirty side.
Still, even while lying in the gutter, the old line about looking at the stars still applies. In the end, it’s about the determination of faith-under-fire, as in the hymnal, luscious-as-tears Let Em Go and in the way the devotional vision in Lament bears as much witness to the devastation of black communities by alcoholism and self-hating violence as it does to the landscape of promised redemption; Roberts’ voice embracing all of this.
The closer, Safe (with its unexpected crest of sumptuous weeping violas), is a soldier’s song. Fraternal and distressing as a lost harmonica left on a torn battlefield, and acknowledging the brutalisation of young boys into fighting men – “and when I met the enemy / it was just a boy’s eyes, cold and distant. / Such savagery / coming from a man like me.” But when the last words come, they aren’t just a plea for support, but a resolution to find one’s way back to truth: “I wish to be safe in the arms of the Lord / I want to be faithful in deeds and words.”
They might believe that love will triumph over rage, but they don’t treat that rage lightly. Ramshackle? Anything but. Rich and rewarding.
Ramshackle: ‘Chin On the Kerb’
Edel UK Records/Whatever… Records, EDEL 098602WHE (4009880986028)
CD-only album
Released: 18th April 1997 Get it from:(2020 update) Best obtained second-hand. Ramshackle online:
Still clearing out the accumulated tapes of an inexplicably neglected career, Graham Peter Hall is continuing to come up with the goods. He’s been through thirty years of uneasy development on that rocky, unrewarding terrain between the simple sureties of the rock and roots instrumentalist and the often complacent indulgences of the full-on avant-garde blower. Marginalisation and bad luck might have ensured that he’s received little financial reward – nor has he gained the kind of brittle, precious reputation that marks out the darlings of the art-music intelligentsia – but it has resulted in a stock of lovely, emotive music in its own right.
Certainly Hall has managed to remain one of Britain’s most individual and complete guitarists over that time. Mastering a variety of styles from flamenco to rock to folk and blues, he’s also immersed himself in experimentation via technology – multiple speakers and pedal processors; vast, slow delay loops. Additionally, he draws on a repertoire of bizarre playing techniques and plectrum substitutes (involving battery fans, tiny psaltery bows, electric razors, toy cars and velcro, among others) which reflects the reinvention of guitar function explored by Fred Frith or Keith Rowe. With these methods in place, he’s explored sound through the textural suggestions of his “industrial sound sculptures”. Light industry, that is – Hall’s mimicry is closer to handsaws and governor motors rather than, say, Trent Reznor’s car-crushers and stamping presses.
Yet in amongst this, Hall has somehow never lost the ability to embrace expressive tunes; or to weave a handrail of familiarity into his sonic constructions. Perhaps that’s why ‘Wire’ types don’t seem to go for him; why he doesn’t have the kudos that the likes of Rowe, Frith, Eugene Chadbourne or Glenn Branca enjoy. He can get in your face – or wander off the usual path – with the best of them, but it’s generally in order to touch your sympathies. Ironically, in choosing to express his conservative and traditional side as equally important to (and entwined with) his avant-garde side, he’s gone too far for some.
‘Mar-Del-Plata’ is by far the most accessible and diverse of the compiled albums which Hall has been assembling this decade from deleted vinyl and assorted unreleased tapes. It’s a tour across a loose, but affecting, composing and performing imagination which ranges with restless compassion across a wide field. Sometimes you’re listening to a skittering, wilful flamenco performance. Sometimes it sounds like Cocteau Twins doing home improvements in the Mediterranean. Sometimes it’s the sort of individual, humanistic free improv/New Music result which you’d expect from Frith at his more lighthearted and relaxed, or from Simon H. Fell.
But though the record is full of experimentalism, Hall’s sense of melody is at the forefront – and the predominant voice on ‘Mar-Del-Plata’ is his masterfully expressive Spanish guitar playing. This can usually be found angling over long aching stretches of choral electronic humming, plangent violin and eerie ambient sounds called up from the industrial processors. In some ways it’s like a semi-unplugged take on a Robert Fripp Soundscape, in which guitar textures span out into infinity.
At other times, it takes on the simple directness of a folk tune: a dance of sparkling acoustic lights on Ionian Water, or the staccato accented Latin melodies of Mar-Del-Plata itself, underpinned by a geological murmur of bass. On the final hot gusting of Sierra Morena Dust Storm, the gut strings spit and scatter in rich melody, reaching new heights of sinewy passion. Here, Hall also bows some winnowing textures in his electric guitar accompaniment, using serrated steel bars from his box of implements.
Where technology plays a more direct role, Hall’s humanity doesn’t falter or go under. The hymnal swells of billowing electric warmth on Spirit Sky Montana (somewhere between Bill Frisell’s cinematic romance and David Torn’s eccentric string-warps) are the most beautiful and enveloping sound on the record, tapping deeply into church music and Romantic classical composing. The trickle of wind chimes, langorous piano, and enveloping sighs of Humidity Despair provide a gusting, luxurious impression of a sultry night: it’s lush enough to lean right back into.
Some tracks, fleshed out by Hall’s sound-loops and D.I.Y. treatments, are detailed, impressionistic oil-paintings in music and tone. Deep Blue sounds like someone chainsawing up a frozen Alpine lake, its jangling piano chords and thumping bass a mass of irregularities. The smear of bright spring-loaded colourflow on Charmouth Beach rings beautiful alarm bells. The menacing bass growl of Enigmatic is like a cave-bear thumping around in your dreams: squeaks and rattles from fingerboard and autoharp move around in slow disquiet, enclosed by knocking metal.
Plutonium Alert (in which Hall abandons guitar altogether in favour of soprano sax and the ring of auto-harps) treads similar territory to the ominous King Crimson improvisations from the mid-’70s. It goes for an all-out sensory mix of apocalyptic aftertones: angular bell-sounds and aggressive Grappelli violins entangling themselves with a spasmodically awkward funk rhythm. Weirdest (and most satisfying) of all is Fahrenheit 451 – juddering guitar, saw sounds, the shriek of a whistling kettle, and treble scratching all mix like toxic vapours under heavy pressure, pushing your head back against your rising hackles. Horribly enjoyable.
The scattered effects of the attempt to capture all of Hall’s ideas across a single CD does mean that ‘Mar-Del- Plata’ misses out on the cohesion which would render it excellent, but it’s a close-run thing. The centrepiece – a long-form creation called The Estates – pulls all the elements of the album together. A version of a 1975 long-form composition, it blends the chiming, restless clatter of its improv ensemble with Hall’s own quiveringly angry solo acoustic guitar. The brooding theme of The Estates is the crappiness and autocracy of post-war British urban programming. In thrall to modernism without being able to master it, its utopian vision (heartily botched and compromised) laid down a blight on communities, their architecture and their cohesion wrecked by the same tower blocks and support links designed to improve them.
Hall and co. express the disillusion and neurosis which resulted, with pulses of frustration and alienation hurl themselves against the confines of the music. Dulcimers, clarinets, and a huge array of percussion all seethe and pant over twenty-five minutes of desperate musical invocation; all overhung by the forbidding scrapes and alarm-clangs of two adapted metal piano frames (played like harps with assorted chains, wires, and implements). Hall’s panic-stricken guitar playing conjures the nightmare of a new, fatally-flawed sprawl of roads and buildings: swarming locust-like, unchecked and unconsidered, over beloved landscapes.
Incidentally, in the sleevenotes Hall gives a blood’n’guts description of the struggle it took to assemble and perform The Estates. Apparently, some of the manufactured instruments continue to drift through the art world with a life of their own. The piano frames – still counter-invading the architecture – were last seen as part of a “fire sculpture”. Meanwhile, the piece itself has an additional afterlife as a reflection on Hall’s own love/hate relationship with modernism; his own playing and arrangements echoing and championing the sounds of the traditional past even as they break them up in performance and execution.
As a body of work ‘Mar-Del-Plata’ has its faults – yet judged on its parts (and at its undisciplined best), it’s a touching, passionate and diverse album. Throughout, we get the sort of peek at Hall’s open heart (warts, gooey patches and all) which most experimental musicians, hard-wired into intellectual dryness, would never risk expressing.
G.P. Hall: ‘Mar-Del-Plata’ Future Music Records, FMR CD46-V0997 (7 86497 26442 1)
CD-only album
Released: 12 April 1997
When he’s not fronting the infamously shambolic noise merchants Archers of Loaf, Eric Bachmann is apparently found holed up in the practise rooms at North Carolina School of the Arts claiming he’s actually someone else. If ‘Tragic Animal Stories’ is anything to go by he is, in fact, several other people. But if they all want to call themselves “Barry Black” to save time, that’s fine by me. Hi, Barry. What’s in that box you’re clutching, then?
Originally just a collection of soundboard experiments – the sort of thing that’s invariably going to sprout up if you leave a couple of musicians in a room with a new toy – Barry Black has evolved into an after-hours mess-about-with-intent which has previously been graced by such wilful eccentrics as Ben Folds (another guy who thinks he’s three different people) or the Clodfelter brothers from Geezer Lake. For this second album, though, Eric Bachman’s instrumentation and samples are augmented by the enthusiastic mess of Chris Waibach’s drums and tuned percussion, and by Sebadoh producer Bob Weston’s guitar, trumpet and engineering.
Half of ‘Tragic Animal Stories’ is shambling takes on dark loungecore soundtrack cheese, with the other half a collection of sound-puzzles that seem to have been extracted from the gaps between instruments. Eric’s music leans as precariously like a tumbledown shack – as ramshackle and oddly comforting as the spattered bloops of Morse code keyboard that usher in and wave out the album – and floats in a kind of fluid dusky haze, in which movement in any direction is possible as long as you’re not hung up about how fast you get there.
It doesn’t take long for the cheerful schizophrenia of ‘Tragic Animal Stories’ to make itself felt. The Horrible Truth About Plankton goes from being hypnotic and enwebbed in the suffocating, shuddering dust of an organ straight out of a Czech horror film to being relieved by falling-apart slacker-jazz drums and sweet shambling melodies carried on Waibach’s cheerful vibes, and ends up as easy listening on a slight O.D of random tranquillisers. Chimps sounds like Startled Insects in gigglesome mood: mechanical pings and stringy high life guitar jostling with a cabaret wind band (brass and kazoo) and pushing it into ‘Threepenny Opera’ land, complete with wild skinny tremors of Jamie Muir-style xylophone.
The lovely, brave little tune of Slow Loris Lament clambers out of a shambling toybox orchestration, like a lo-fi Rick Wakeman among the Playpeople. A stylophone plays a fanfare over a radio whine. There are barking noises, ticklish steel drums and a bassoon. Don’t waste any time waiting for a hot guitar solo: Slash couldn’t make the session (and there’s a rumour that they’ve still got Joe Satriani locked up in a cupboard off the control room from the time when they opted to wipe off his lines in favour of a triangle track).
As expected, there’s a definite fuck-around element to all this, but thankfully without that wacky “nothing’s serious” sloppy buffoonery that hangs around many lo-fi groups like the gang joker’s B.O. It sounds as if Eric’s involved in a more serious game of his own, playing off an all-American goofiness against a frowning European sternness, arty soundtrack pretensions against musical jokes, flake against pose.
Duelling Elephants comes out like a darker sketch from ‘Carnival of the Animals’ that refused to take itself too seriously, and made a beeline for a cartoon Munich beerhall, dragging the remains of its menace behind it. The oompah bassline and trembling treble of the piano, mingled with close brass and bassoons has the sadistic comedy of Nickelodeon animation, but it also ripples as ominously as disturbed water. Drowning Spider emerges through an antique shellac crackle: walloped piano like Fats Waller having a nervous breakdown and careening off the edge of the recording reel. Iditarod Sleigh Dogs – a scratched rhythm from detuned banjos and tinkly, twitchy, plonky kiddie piano lines – sounds like Eric composed it with his head on upside-down. Cute.
Even with the playfulness, ‘Tragic Animal Stories’ always has its serious side. On When Sharks Smell Blood, dazed front-crawl piano swims and sways to shore, while rakes of ravenous solo and duo cellos wind around it and a deathly creak (a leaning rocking chair? a wind swing door? a murderer’s step on the verandah?) infiltrates the background. For the big picture, there’s the David Torn spaghetti western of Derelict Vultures, starting life with a harsh guitar scratch and limping Morricone melodies from a splitting, tortured, midrange electric guitar and a filtered swoosh of background, until harsh Russian horns take over the melody and pull it off the badlands onto the steppes.
Tropical Fish Revival sounds like Death approaching a lean-to in a Kingston shantytown. Eric’s mournful, indistinguishable sung words (his only vocal performance on the whole album) flutter above his clang of funereal piano, a shabby, heavy-footed drum loop and a fluting, buzzy keyboard flutter. A shimmer of vibrating steel pan reverbs off into the distance, and the light fades with it.
Snail Trail of Tears closes the album with the lullaby sound of a music-box vibraphone and an overdriven guitar drone melody like a stretchy harmonium. It sounds like Pram or Labradford revamping King Crimson‘s Starless on a heavy summer evening. The bass grumbles like a cello. An out-of-phase air extractor noise adds a layer of feathery sound like a heavenly choir, and then it drops away into those Morse bloops again. Over and out.
Small music from another place. I want to go there.
Barry Black: ‘Tragic Animal Stories’
Alias Records, A122 (0 93716 01222 1)
CD/vinyl album
Released: 29th July 1997 Get it from:Alias Records Barry Black (Eric Bachmann) online:
The voice on the telephone chuckles. “Sure, it all made sense to me. You just burn it out, past the pain. / Sure it’s all toxin: you just work it out of your system.” Somewhere between a Berklee College education, an Olympia punk statement and the world of woodshed ravings you’ll find this – rolling down a quiet highway like a fatal fog-wall.
For their fourth album, the alliance of drummer/sample mangler Evan Schiller and bassist/spoken-word freak Paul Hinklin has convulsed yet again to install a new Sadhappy lineup. Out goes eccentric Critters Buggin/Tuatara sax player Skerik. In comes Michael Manring, ’90s bass guitar genius, for a very different approach to the power trio. Two basses might sound like a recipe for disaster – ‘Jazz Odyssey’ doubled up, or cheesy slap-funk duels. Sadhappy get around this by realising the implicit power in the timbre of the bass guitar: the added resonance, the volcanic rumble it’s impossible to ignore, the sheer booty-shaking body. And they go for it full-bloodedly. In the resulting low-end carnage, saxes and guitars are not missed.
A lot of this is to do with Manring, who’s rivalled only by Tony Levin, Victor Wooten and Doug Wimbish as a contemporary redefiner of bass guitar. Not content with just a jaw-droppingly dextrous technique (whether grooving fingerstyle, slapping, tapping, or picking), he’s as liable to mutate melodies by abrading them with an EBow and/or in-flight retuning. And, as you’d expect, ‘Good Day Bad Dream’ is a treasure box of bass sounds – the levitational noises on Lost in Bass; the chainsaw punk rumble on Maintenance Pissed and Chronic Subsonic Tonic; the multitracked interplay of worming harmonics, chunky strums, and wolf-wails on The Kitchen Sink. But it’s no mere technique-fest.
Yes, for the most part it’s instrumental. And at its most basic (Home Lobotomy Kit, Honeymoon Deathbed) it tugs us through a darker edged and more credible fusion revamp via Hinklin’s brutally precise twanging, growling basslines, Schiller’s clattering, tight as a mantrap drums, and Manring’s distorted, storming, articulate leads. And there’s a strong element of the roaring hybrid of thrash, fusion and left field virtuosics that fuelled Manring’s last album ‘Thonk’, recorded as an attempt to escape his inconvenient reputation as a jazz-leaning New Age muso. But in meeting the streetwise intelligence of Schiller’s drumming and Hinklin’s sardonic New Music/punk’n’sarcasm influences, Manring’s restless and complex musicality has completed its journey away from the New Age racks.
‘Good Day Bad Dream’ emerges from this as an album blending multiple strands of modern electric music with surprising success. It’s an overlapping low end approach of eerie smoggy textures, wrapping up art punk, weird funk, jazz, dark ambience, sampledelia, progressive rock, sound massage, and a dash of psychological sewage. The trio nod to Mingus, the smouldering dark star of modern jazz, with a strutting and dextrous cover of his sarcastic II b.s. With the fifteen minutes of deathly textures and world-swallowing bass oceanics on The Death of Webern, they’ve got that scary isolationist-ambient game sown up too.
Evan Schiller’s light touch throughout ensures that the band are never bogged down. Within The Kitchen Sink’s light-fingered ostinatos, King Crimson riff choirs and E bow calls, his precise percussion approach rings, swooshes, crashes and drops out to leave perilous canyons in the texture of the music. On SBD, he shines with an array of sparse metallic taps and lethally timed buzz-rolls under a lowering cloud of bass, a dark canopy of wails and murmurs through which Manring winds skeletal insect-trails of overdriven bass, twisting and skirling like cyborg bagpipes.
……………………………………..
But the key to Sadhappy’s success in reaching out beyond the fusion ghetto is Paul Hinklin’s acidic humour, which lurks somewhere in the triangle between Tom Waits, Frank Zappa and Bill Hicks. In the recurring, repulsive figure of Oscar (a forty-nine-year-old backwoods Beavis with a voice like a plastics bonfire), he gives Sadhappy their own all-American idiot guide, a lottery sweepstake winner with “money comin’ out of his ass” swaggering over a racket of bellowing grunge-garage art rock riffs. His new rich man’s horizons lead him only as far as the porn racks at the general store, or to the bar; a coarsened American Dreamer content to do nothing more than wallow in his own filth and boast about it (“Yeah, you gotta work for the rest of your life: I own the streets I piss in!”).
On False Information – a sort of post-Laswell take on a ‘Remain in Light’ groove, burrowing through post-rock and hip hop en route – Hinkler offers us a lighter look at the aches and absurdities of the modern human condition. “All the guilt, all the shames, all the blames, / all the payments that you pay for crimes you never even committed, / never even thought of – what’s up with that?”. Schiller’s pin-sharp sample-heavy beats jab and dodge like a lethal flyweight boxer as Hinklin’s sardonic voice chuckles at enlightenment: “You see past everything and you say, this is just me plus garbage. Hell, if I couldn’t see the garbage, then I would be the garbage. Thank God I can tell I’m not the garbage. “‘Scuse me, honey. I have to take myself out to the trash. What is truly me will come back to dinner. It’ll just be me minus garbage.””
Sometimes though, the humour goes darker. In the harsh fable of Hammering Man, the townsfolk turn out to watch the unveiling of a statue: “a testament to the nameless brave, to the unselfish, the holy slaves. The ones who gave their bodies and minds to the army, the ones that gave themselves to the might of the all powerful industrial machine. The ones that had made America strong, the ones that had made America beautiful. The ones that, through no fault of their own, had turned it into a wasteland.” Small wonder that the statue crumbles, toppling to pin the spectators to the earth.
In the brooding dusky groovescape of Oscar Gets Laid, we get to see a younger Oscar, callow and innocent, rubbing up for the first time against the world that’s going to corrupt him. Manring’s mixture of rattling ominous echoes and scritching, coppery industrial harmonics send a shiver down the spine, as Hinklin’s murmured vocals explore paranoia and fascination down the back alleyways of the mean streets – malevolent shadows, and the breath of heroin ghosting out of the skins of hookers. At last: a contemporary progressive group that’s unafraid to mingle technique, horror, street-smarts and a mordant, lethal wit.
It’s also one that’s firmly rooted in the present, soaking up the lessons of grunge, dance, and sampler culture, while still playing the arse off all comers. Even if ‘Good Day Bad Dream’ sometimes strains the limits of its excellence by being just a little too diffuse, too dependent on fusion fallback, Sadhappy move through their music with assurance, imagination, presence and a brutal vigour. And that’s an all too rare combination.
The smile on the face of a charming, constructive killer.
Sadhappy: ‘Good Day Bad Dream’
Periscope Recordings, PERISCOPE RECORDINGS CD04 (7 96873 00042 0)
CD/download album
Released: 2nd July 1997 Get it from: (2020 update) Original CD printed in a run of 1,000 – CD and download best obtained from Bandcamp. Sadhappy online:
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.
Culled and scraped up from Mark Eitzel‘s demo drawer in order to finance touring, ‘Lovers’ Leap USA’ is not exactly the album we’re hoping the former American Music Club frontman will make. In fact, most of it is apparently outtakes from Eitzel’s actual forthcoming album (which rejoices in the catchy, cheery title of ‘Caught in a Trap and I Can’t Back Out ‘Cause I Love You Too Much, Baby‘) plus what sounds like his final San Francisco demos (with AMC’s multi-instrumentalist Bruce Kaphan fleshing out the sound). Not always to Eitzel’s satisfaction, as he’s urged us to skip the first two “really awful” tracks. Well, he’s always been his own best publicist.
In spite of Eitzel’s deprecations and the album’s unpolished, occasionally sullen state (effectively, it’s a scrappy bootleg), ‘Lovers Leap USA’ contains some of Eitzel’s best songs and some previously unseen directions for his art, making it something of a half-baked masterpiece. Some songs – What Good is Love, The Big House, Have No Words – are little more than straight acoustic skeletons, on which Eitzel’s singing is either mesmeric or painfully flat and jumbled. Some (such as Leave Her Alone) sound more like exhausted Arab Strap trudges, with a drawerful of industrial grind muddying the atmosphere. In others, Eitzel drifts off into trip-hop atmospherics – easy- listening string loops, opiated piano touches, giant slow shadowy drums. And on the expansive feel of Lost and Lonely, Eitzel’s whispers sound uncannily like Chris Isaak, floating above the swish of passing cars and birdsong like a dawn haze.
‘Lovers Leap USA’ also shows that Eitzel remains in touch with the majestic tunes that floated or roared through American Music Club’s angst. How Will You Face Yourself in Sleep takes us back to the delicate traceries of fear that graced Gratitude Walks or Laughingstock. Red velvet curtains haunt the lyrics and the sounds of a song set in a hotel full of unspecified performers and travellers, restless “under a thin blanket, ’cause when you’re on the move you don’t need to be warm – / you pull another dark flood over your hidden form.” These people are worn down enough to see the machinery (“you can see through every plot, you know how they end… / Always said you would quit before you got fired. / Now you’re treading water, forgotten and tired…”) and trudge through their roles, only consoled by knowing which strings will pull on them.
Dream in Your Heart, with its dark burning fuzz of angry guitars, could’ve been one of AMC’s more aggressive moments, replete with classic Eitzel runaway metaphors (“the bitterness wears me like a chain, since I’m too Mark Eitzel vain for the Man of Steel I’ve become”) and the choruses which clasp frantically at elusive hopes (“I saw a dream in your heart / for a beauty beyond your eyes”). If people still sung protest songs at the enemy, you’d imagine a phalanx of indignant American feminists roaring Leave Her Alone at Pat Robertson. As it is, here we have a battle-scarred Eitzel limping defiantly across a bloodied drag of guitar and churned-up trash-noise to stick pins into a bigot. “You’re God’s little soldier, making sure his thunderbolts get thrown… / I just want to bang nails in your cross, I want to drive those nails home.” He’s never sung out with such positive pride before – “My sister never got credit for anything; / her life was just a constant second-guessing. / She doesn’t need your holy undressing, / and most of all, she doesn’t need your blessing.”
Two suspicious meditations on fame, The Big House and Nice Nice Nice, might have sprung from the bitter backwash of AMC’s brief encounter with the big time. The first, in cranky acoustic cynicism, strips the glitz from the glittering bubble at the top of the pile (“antique paintings from across the pond, chandeliers and porcelain figurines / an island in the calm of the storm, scattered meaningless shouted words and bored security guards,”), and sees Eitzel as spectator in a backstage zone “as hollow as King Tut’s womb”, munching cheerlessly on bar snacks and watching “this treadmill… moving the river of green, / …freedom slipping through the cracks.” It’s someone else in the spotlight this time, atop a fortress of speaker stacks, kidding himself he’s empowered; but Eitzel’s disgust is the scorn of a man who’s been close enough to get stained himself. “Let ’em weigh you and judge you, let ’em use you as their tool. / You give it away, you fool, you fool, you fool.”
Even more cuttingly, Nice Nice Nice deals with the artistic failure-turned-self-promoter – “This is the wall you broke your head on, / the one you’ve lied about so many times. / And now you’ll display a marvel for the ages, / a masterpiece of grace and design / with a meaning that no-one really finds.” Here mass acceptance comes with the price of knowing “you’re just like them, deep down”, but it’s impossible to know which side the alienated but notoriously anti-precious Eitzel’s really on.
There are some glimpses of a starker personal honesty. The spindly blues of What Good is Love (in which Eitzel’s clacking metronome sounds as if it’s snipping strips from his life) is an agnostic’s sleepless night, dismantling the articles of faith one by one and feeling the emptiness grow. “All my chicken-bone dreams left on a windowsill too long, / so easy to pull them apart… / And if it won’t set us free, and there’s nothing above, / then what good are we, and what good is love?”
Steve I Always Knew is Eitzel’s first open acknowledgement in song of his own bisexuality. But that’s less of a revelation than the way in which he strips himself bare in it. In the upfront world of gay pickups, he’s hard-put to swagger: “I guess all this means we’re going to sleep together – / outside I’m hard as a brick, inside I’m like a feather… / I guess in bed I was kind of a sweet nothing – / and for your money, you could’ve done much better.” Although Eitzel’s the one who’s first dumped, then denied (“You moved to New York to clean up, and came back married to a cop. / And when I saw you on the street, I could tell you didn’t want to stop,”) he ends up the strong one, able to face what his erstwhile lover recognises but can’t deal with. “You said the only way through fear is to give in, / and you were right, you were right.”
The most fascinating songs here are the ones where the borders of the problem are lost to view. In Lost and Lonely, Eitzel’s walking from dawn ’til dusk “like the ghost of a man… beyond the blessing of women and the shadow of doubt”, under “cruel summer starlight on a dark street.” The song unravels in murmuring drunken thought, a fumbling of fleeting images (“measure the life in miles forgotten”; “why hold a seance? I know you won’t call”; “who would chain the stars too heavy to walk?”) and a repeating mumble of “thought you were lonely as me.” Towards the end, Eitzel mutters a barely audible “thank you”, like a sleepwalking Fat Elvis.
It’s that particular Elvis who seems to haunt the remaining pieces, which are Eitzel’s hypnotically dissolving forays into trip hop. Like the narcotic but impenetrable lushness of Your Glass Jaw, in which strings, vibes and congas seem to be buoying up a deadweight singer “high in a bright light” who only sloughs off more of those cryptic, disconnected mumbles – “dissolve bright eyes”; “mosquito hunger, the blood of saints.” It might be the collapse of a champion, the same pulverised resistance that Scott Walker evoked on ‘Tilt’.
Pay It Back loops satellite chatter and rumbling gongs around Eitzel’s skinny strums, an irretrievably distant and uncaring brushoff from a frozen heart. “Do I owe you my soul for your heartbeat to inhabit? / Well you can have it… / Buried alive, better off dead. /… Whatever it is I owe you, I’ll pay you back.” And in Lost My Humor, Eitzel returns to double-bass’n’piano torch-song sounds, but submerges them in an obscuring post-rock drone. Likewise, his voice is a half- buried baritone whisper like gutter-trodden velvet, repeating “I lost my humor” as a cynical mantra, trailing it with clinchers from the self-mockingly spiteful (“I was bored to death by your song, and the rest of popular culture”) to the philosophical (“it means I give up any claim to being a voice for tomorrow”), to the cold (“don’t assume that they see you, don’t assume that they like you”) through to post-modern fatalism – “I’m doomed to live without – negotiate your sorrow.”
So far, so Zombie-David Byrne, the Prisoner of Vegas. But what gives this its frightening depth is the way in which, by the end, he’s trying to rouse himself. The chant has become “I lost my spirit”, and he’s casting around trying to make sense of it again “like the mirror I smashed, trying to fit it back together,” and realising what’s been lost: “I lost my spirit – someone put it in your pocket… / I lost my spirit…”
In the end, wherever Mark Eitzel goes, he’s lost. But no-one sends letters from the wilderness like he can.
Mark Eitzel: ‘Lovers Leap USA’
self-released, ME 1001 (no barcode)
CD-only album
Released: May 1997 Get it from:(2004 update) Extremely rare and best obtained second-hand. ‘Lover’s Leap USA’ was sold exclusively by Mark Eitzel himself during his 1997 touring – only 500 copies were made and it has never been reissued. Mark Eitzel online:
Oh, it’s good to find a record company with a sense of humour! A couple of years after Bark Psychosis disappear in a puff of defeated resignation at never having pushed their unique and challenging musical vision sufficiently to the public, 3rd Stone release the second compilation of singles, B‑sides and versions from a band who only ever released one album. ‘Game Over’ contains a substantial amount of material that appeared on ‘Independency’ (a previous collection of early tracks) and offers merely two rare pieces ‑ one a dispensable, Robbie The Robot‑style cover of Wire’s Three Girl Rhumba ‑ thus fleecing the decidedly underground (i.e., small) fanbase that is utterly devoted to the band’s memory.
But seeing as it is the miraculous Bark Psychosis, and any memorial is welcome… rant over.
During their brief career, Bark Psychosis elicited some comparison with Talk Talk. The latter, having begun as a semi‑manufactured New Romantic band, increasingly became wilfully experimental and their music sounded as if it was becoming more and more harrowing and emotionally exhausting to produce. The difference is… Bark Psychosis’ music started out sounding as if it was an emotional and intellectual purge that was driving its players to collapse. Not being star names, the rumoured tales of exhaustion, near‑nervous breakdowns, walk‑outs and splits that accompanied the recording of their only album, ‘Hex’, remain, perhaps thankfully, little known. Truly, this was sadly meant to be a band that shone brightly but burned out quickly.
Significantly, then, this compilation opens with virtually the only Bark Psychosis material that followed ‘Hex’ ‑ the single Blue. As a final milestone, not to mention headstone, it is unsatisfactory. An exercise in New Order balladry, gleaming electronics and Hooky‑style guitar in place, the only traces of BP’s supreme weirdness and atmosphere exist in the overwhelming blasts of data‑noise/DJ scratching in the breaks between verses. But it does provide a great opportunity to read between the lines. Was this an attempt to get airplay? A last sigh of exhausted resignation? An attempt to lighten the mood of a band in its death throes? A pointer towards Graham Sutton’s new drum’n’bass persona of Boymerang? Wonderfully cynical speculation, but who knows? Blue is poignant, but nothing more.
Apart from an unsatisfying, muted live take of Pendulum Man ‑ which, instead of burning ominously like the album version, appears to have been recorded under a thick layer of cotton wool ‑ A Street Scene is the only track on ‘Game Over’ to have been taken from ‘Hex’. As such, echoing that album’s minimal‑jazz late‑night Talk Talk feel, it doesn’t really fit here: otherwise, it’s as remarkable a mood‑song as ever. The heavy motoring bass drives the track through dark, deserted streets, as brass and oboe reflect the rushing orange blurs of streetlamps overhead. The romance of the city, in music ‑ it’s an urban thing, you understand.
What ‘Game Over’ arguably does well, from the viewpoint of a Bark Psychosis novice, is introduce crude “types” into the wide range of their material. I Know is one of their rare, perfect acoustic numbers that always succeed in standing on the edge of falling apart. Even with the aching whalesong that drifts in and out of the echoes of voice and acoustic guitar, this is perfect walking‑home‑through‑the‑city‑at‑4:30‑a.m. music. Graham Sutton even gives a tired little sigh at the end. Aaah. Sob.
On the more ethereal side of things, Bloodrush is a slow‑burning, hesitant track, like a school of luminous deep‑sea jellyfish heading for home. Every time the translucent guitar or Sutton’s hushed multi‑tracked voice finally breathe life into aching melodies, all of the elements evaporate into the air again, too overcome and exhausted to continue. Finally the band find it within themselves to build an impossibly lovely, tearstruck flicker of melody, with shimmering waves of percussion as a mournful lyric repeats: “You never stop, never learn…”
BP were also a very rhythmic bunch, but they toyed with the beat and weaved in and out of it. Manman, though, is the most metronomic it gets. Deep vocals, pulsating electronics, sturm‑und‑drang guitars. A little (whisper it) Goth‑like. An urban nightmare ‑ a midnight ride on an out‑of‑control tube train…
It’s Murder City out there. Where did all the haze and hush go? To show how adaptable they could be, the beast of BP unleash a nine‑minute thrash with minimalist pauses. The unhuman thing is how precise it is. Unlike thrash, it is almost emotionless (no criticism) and glacial. Every moment of guitar clang, distortion and drum thud seems mathematically programmed ‑ in this sense, the closest comparison is the precision rock of the similarly late, lamented God Machine. Murder City is rage and frustration, but utterly and terrifyingly controlled. (We can, therefore, forgive the fact that the track ends with something quite close to a drum solo).
However, Scum is the masterpiece, as well as the major occasion on which Bark Psychosis finally managed to bring forth superlatives from the music press, not least at the audacity of releasing a twenty‑one minute single featuring four distinct “movements” (this was 1992, before post‑rock and the return of experimentation. Before Tortoise’s Djed. Just think about that). The first few minutes rely on minimal atmospherics. Silence plays the lead instrument. Then a simple, welling guitar chord. A distinctly loose, jazzy drum pattern. Sutton’s hushed vocal. You feel relaxed, familiar with the surroundings. But then a disturbing, incredible drone grows, mingling with a thousand voices all talking at once. You are almost physically pushed away from the centre of the music. Stop. The reassuring anchor of the original music returns. Then it all happens again. Drone. Voices. Drone. Voices. Sound upon Sound upon Sound. Help.
That’s just the first thirteen minutes. The last eight offer a relatively relaxing atmosphere. Thanks.
We have to be honest, I suppose. What boundaries remained for Bark Psychosis to break? If we find BP’s music so emotionally overwhelming to listen to ‑ no, scrap that, to take part in ‑ can we really expect them to have gone on pushing ever further? My cruel reply is “yes” ‑ there’s no‑one else following their lead.
Game Over. Game? You call that a game?
(review by Vaughan Simons)
Bark Psychosis: ‘Game Over’ 3rd Stone Ltd., STONE 031CD (5 023693 003122)
CD-only compilation album
Released: 26th May 1997
Get it from: (updated 2018)Adasam, or second-hand.
Ragga & The Jack Magic Orchestra: ‘Ragga & The Jack Magic Orchestra’
Do I have to do all the usual obvious journalistic crap about Iceland? Do I? Oh, if I must. They eat puffins, or something. They drink tons of cheap alcohol. It’s bloody cold there. It’s dark all winter, light all summer, or something. Magnus Magnússon. Mad elfin pixie Bjork… blah blah blah. Will this do?
Oh, and I have to act surprised that Iceland can produce such great music, and be really patronising about that in particular. Because we British love looking down on small nations, don’t we?
All that gone through, just because two-thirds of Ragga & The Jack Magic Orchestra are Icelandic. Ragga sang You Don’t on Tricky’s ‘Maxinquaye’ album – a track full of filmic strings, soloing flutes and slow shuffling beats -which casts some light on this album. Previously, Ragga and keyboardist Jakob Magnússon were in a successful Icelandic band together; when they ended up in London, Magnússon worked as Icelandic cultural attache while Ragga attended drama school. Later, they formed Ragga & The Jack Magic Orchestra with English sampling wizard Mark Davies from Voices Of Kwahn. With this debut, they bring all these diverse strands of experience together to produce a magical experience. Huge, colourful swathes of sound; music for Disney cartoon castles in the sky.
So – Fairy Godmother opens on a feather-bed of lapping sea, boat-horns, celeste chimes and toybox orchestra that scream “Disney”, before the trip-hop beats are introduced. But the JMO is always very natural, organic-sounding – no harsh electronica scraping here. And Ragga’s voice is a magical thing – Kate Bush in a lower register, with some of Bjork’s expressive stylings. Like Bjork, her lyrics tell strange stories, but she introduces Shot almost matter-of-factly: “I got shot in the head by a man / who had been aiming at me / for many days… / At the moment I got / the paper from my doorstep.” To an almost easy-listening palette of relaxing hues, jazzy woodwind and flutes, she philosophically concludes that “love can hurt…” Well, it would, wouldn’t it?
Daringly, styles keep shifting, track by track: somehow in keeping with the fairy-tale transformations of the lyrics and samples. Passion For Life has a soulful belted-out chorus (Ragga does brazen Broadway as easily as schmaltzy Hollywood), a slow, loping early-hours atmosphere of spooky keyboards and bone-rattles for beats, and brilliantly lifts an evocative passage from Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio For Strings’ (the music from “Platoon”, if your imagination’s still settled in the cinema after those Disney references). In Where Are They Now? – to surging orchestral strings, keyboard arpeggios and sparse but powerful metallic percussion – Ragga sings a torch-song elegy to the lost children of wars. Even when no lyrics intrude, Ragga’s evocative harmonies over a battalion of drums and stabbing strings are just as emotional.
The mix of folky guitars and flutes, East European violin and pleasantly shuffling beats on Turn It Off remind one of Beth Orton’s marriage of bedsit folk and electronica. Deep Down also has a deceptively simple sound: alternately hushed and passionate vocals over shifting sands of decaying electronics and a barrage of junkshop percussion. It hits a groove and stays there – perfectly. With the fairy-tale assertion that “sometimes I can breathe underwater / Sometimes I can fly around the sky”, Underwater features more Disney-like wonderment: reverberating drones, slippery strings lilting through the melody and expert percussion care of a Steve Jansen/Rain Tree Crow sample fluidly weaving in and around the programmed beats.
Despite its title and distorted electro-beats, Beatbox Controller isn’t some ’90s ode to the DJ/mixer in the manner of Last Night A DJ Saved My Life. The “beatbox” referred to is the heart – “you are my beatbox controller / A telepathic mixer of emotion…” Ragga’s vocals are almost helium-light and, musically, the track sounds like twenty-first century reggae-lite. In an extended coda where he duets with Jacob Magnússon’s improvising keyboards, Mark Davies makes beautiful music out of sampled percussion – this man’s going to be a figure to watch in the world of electronica, to rank alongside DJ Shadow or Howie B.
Indeed, Two Kisses is built on a disconcerting, clattering rhythm track of samples of god-knows-what. Buzzes, radio waves, ghostly fluttering flutes and Eastern pipes are all jammed into the mix. Ragga sings a multi-tracked ethereal chorus and her voice is, at one point, treated to sound – well, er – exactly like a Smurf, to be honest. Weird, peculiar – Laurie Anderson jamming with The Art Of Noise produced by Tricky is about the closest comparison. Close, but nowhere near. So, yes, if weirdness to the point of absurdity overtakes them every so often (Man In The Moon overdoes the lyrics on the wrong side of Kate Bush kooky pop, and the overblown melody reminds one of… Christ! The Thompson Twins!) it’s a price worth paying for the trio’s musical vision.
Music for your fairy-tale nightmares. A perfect accompaniment to drifting away while watching “Fantasia” for the hundredth time, safe in the knowledge that the good witch now works her magic with a sampler.
Touched by the wand of the sorcerer’s apprentice.
(review by Vaughan Simons)
Ragga & The Jack Magic Orchestra: ‘Ragga & The Jack Magic Orchestra’
EMI Records Ltd., CDEMD 1107 (7243 8 56728 2 8)
CD/cassette album
Released: 19th May 1997
Get it from: (updated 2018) buy original CD second-hand, or get the reissued download from Amazon or iTunes.
With guitarist Robert Fripp as the only constant factor (he once memorably described himself as not so much the leader as “a kind of glue”), King Crimson have negotiated the peaks and troughs of a three-decade career in rock music and at least six distinct and differing incarnations. In the process, they’ve become one of those bands carrying a distinctly hazy reputation.
Where to place them? Not with the evergreen Beatles, Stones or Byrds; or with the narcotic, perversely cynical tradition of the Velvet Underground. Not in punk’s vigorous righteousness, or New Wave’s beat-smarts; or in the ever-credible European avant-rock field. Not even in old-school retro-rock (you won’t find Oasis ripping off one of their riffs). Outside of the healthy Crimson cult, the 1994 description in an LA newssheet (“prog-rock pond scum, set to bum you out”) seems to sum up the rough consensus. To many, King Crimson are and always will be one of the dinosaurs, if not the rotten egg that spawned the whole prog-rock movement. They’re pretentious, ludicrous, and sexless Mellotron fondlers; or they’re just a little too damn strange and perverse, winning your friendship only to kick you in the shins the next moment. Or they just don’t fit onto your party tape. Whatever.
‘Epitaph’ spearheads the series of archive live recordings which are just starting to sluice down the conduit of Fripp’s self-propelled record company (Discipline Global Mobile), each accompanied by the oft-prickly but ever-passionate guitarist’s commentary on the time, place and ethics of Crimson activity. Fripp’s hopes are obviously set on a fairer deal from history, or at least on providing a chance to reassess King Crimson in all of its painfully evolving forms.
His rogue-academic sleevenotes – witty and painstaking, pedantic and enlightening – might play a big part in reinstating this hidden legacy; but the superb “digital necromancy” of DGM engineer David Singleton is equally vital. On ‘Epitaph’, entrusted with the oldest and most variable Crimson live recordings, Singleton has spliced incomplete recording reels together to recreate concerts; wrestled listenable (even impressive) live sound from crumbling BBC master reels; and coaxed atmosphere and clarity from second-generation sound-desk recordings, unwanted overdubs, even crappy home recordings from interference-dogged radio broadcast.
But beyond the Frippertations, and even with the static and the eccentric degrees of muffling, ‘Epitaph’ is a welcome display of the power of the very first King Crimson. This is the band which bowled over Jimi Hendrix, who once approached Fripp saying “shake my left hand, man: it’s closer to my heart.” This is also the group who recorded 1969’s pivotal ‘In the Court of the Crimson King’, then gouged a magnificent trail of dates across Britain and America before fissioning at the end of the year. A band which original frontman Greg Lake still describes as being “without fear.” Perhaps it was the briefly-potent whiff of Faerie which fluttered around English psychedelia at the time, but King Crimson felt itself pervaded by something extraordinary and supernatural (which the members jokingly referred to as “the good fairy”). Of the five original Crims, only Fripp has subsequently regained the same artistic heights which he did here. Yet even he considers this version of the band to be particularly special, embodying a time when “music leant over and took us into its confidence.”
It’s certainly true that on ‘Epitaph’ King Crimson seems to be drawing from something beyond its members. Those mousy young English boys making shyly urbane stage announcements are also those inspired, demonic note-hammerers who are deforming your speakers by brute force. Racking rock’s power up several notches beyond any previous record, King Crimson swarmed like warrior ants through careering unison choruses and stabbing staccato assaults. Here you’ll hear pastoral flute pieces and folk ballads juxtaposed with brain-curdling electrics, jazz effects that scurry from lounge-y hokeyness to bebop and free-fired whiteouts. You’ll also hear the sound of Wagner and Bartok being wrung dry. Unlike many subsequent prog outings, King Crimson provided the feeling that, rather than being cuddled up to, classical music’s cage was being rattled until it screamed.
Fripp’s guitar playing is the closest thing that King Crimson have ever had to a trademark sound. Here, though, it’s merely part of the ensemble – it was an approach which was applied far more to underpinning the band’s hefty array of textures and sonics than to taking on the guru trappings it would later assume. And it was up against formidable, if beneficial, competition. Yet to become the self-satisfied face of ELP, a pre-pomp Greg Lake was already achieving a career best. Michael Giles was providing an object lesson in how to drum with subtle, taut complexity and economy rather than bombast, yet simultaneously make yourself unmissable.
Seen from the here and now, the overwhelming musicality of Ian McDonald is a particular shock. A few years later he’d be reduced to providing Foreigner with a horribly diluted version of Crimson’s hybrid sounds, but here he’s untouchable. His robotic Mellotron orchestras were a benchmark in violent grandeur – as structurally stressed and queasy as sailing ships, and played with demented intensity. Hearing him stabbing and slamming the ‘Tron into an inferno of junked but coherent string-death noise on Mars is little short of a revelation. As are the moments when he leads the band on a blazing, wailing saxophone that strained towards Albert Ayler’s fierce free jazz rather than British dance-bands or pirated Stax records.
Off in the wings, Peter Sinfield is the silent participant here – only audible in the odd buzz (since his then-revolutionary stage lights also affected the speakers). However, he was also present in the ornamental lyrics which – even at their most floridly Victorian and romantic – got to grips with the contradictions implied in the music and in the civilisation of its time.
The four BBC radio session recordings display a group already far more ambitious than even the ’60s norm – maybe only rivalled, in their day, by The Doors at their peak – and a good deal more haunted in outlook. 21st Century Schizoid Man is still one of the most calculatedly vicious pop songs ever – a ‘Mad Max’ duelling-car of a piece, studded with flails, razor blades and serpentine instrumentation – and one of the notable occasions on which Sinfield’s flamboyant verbosity hit the mark on every line. The inflated stateliness of In the Court of the Crimson King’s title track, soaked in mediaeval imagery (jesters, witches and all), may well have given the green light to every sub-Gothic fantasy that would blight prog during the ’70s. But here it still looms sad, bad, blood-soaked and as steeped in pitiless history as the Tower of London – a heavy, tattered tapestry of the creeping and destructive blights that come with civilisation. Lake delivers it with a wounded and disaffected majesty.
For all their pomp and ceremony, their purple filters, King Crimson were as political as any of their contemporaries. It seems odd to hear a group featuring the notoriously abstemious Fripp singing “let’s all get stoned” on their unexpected, woozy but ballsy cover of Donovan’s Get Thy Bearings. But Crimson – a band with strong working-class roots, despite the bourgeois tag prog-rock was to be lumbered with by punk revisionists – identified themselves far more with the ’60s counter-culture (drugs notwithstanding) than they did with the establishment. On one concert recording, Fripp pointedly dedicates Schizoid Man to Spiro Agnew. The shadows of Altamont’s rude awakening, Vietnam’s ongoing barbarities, and the precarious threat to a future Utopia are all present in the bleak scary screech of the band’s wilder moments and in the epic mourning of their ballads. Of which Epitaph itself takes the crown – ageless, with Fripp’s watchful guitars rolling out acoustic swathes and quietly brimming electric tears, Mellotrons sweeping across like opera house curtains, and Lake singing with trepidation into the face of an uncertain future.
The concert recordings stem from that first, final, fatal American tour, including the ’69 Crimson’s last bow in its entirety (the concerts at San Francisco’s Filmore West just before both McDonald and Giles quit). As expected, magnificent string-drenched versions of Epitaph and a couple of overwhelming breakneck runthroughs of Schizoid Man rear their heads; but you also get earlier, raw versions of evolving new material.
Drop In is a version of The Letters (the Jacobean nightmare from ‘Islands‘) with a different lyric. But the violent emotional sentiments remain the same – the form is lazy bluesy pop, the words are typically detached, sardonic Crimson menace. “Why don’t you just drop in, / and let the game begin? / You wished you’d learned to play, / and lived to die another day. / The rules you pick and you choose. / The odds are stacked for you to lose.” The music has a far nastier focus. Chopped and diced, riff-stamping, the sneer of McDonald’s deadly tenor sax and Giles’ explosive, spasmodic bop drums bring it closer to the level of a Coltrane scream.
A Man, a City would later evolve into Pictures of a City. Here, you can hear King Crimson attempting to blend New York’s pitiless industry with a Hieronymous Bosch nightmare, via a lurching Gothically-proportioned snarl of R’n’B sax riffs and metal-tearing guitar. On the road, their painstakingly written rock texts were transformed by interpretation and improvisation (from McDonald and Giles in particular). Though the results were inescapably lofty and English – and also rigidly stark – they make an interesting parallel to the electrified jazz-scapes Miles Davis and Tony Williams were pursuing on ‘In a Silent Way’ and ‘Lifetime’, or which John McLaughlin had already carved into for ‘Extrapolation’.
At Filmore West, in the home of the hippy movement, King Crimson opened up with In the Court of the Crimson King, lacing English roses into Haight-Ashbury hair. Typically, this was a sly and malevolent seduction to soften them up for the full Schizoid onslaught. Perhaps as an adjunct to this, Crimson also showed more of their softer, more fragrant side. Travel Weary Capricorn was one of their few moments of hippyish peace: a fragment of boppy Traffic-y pop, with Lake almost scatting and McDonald’s blissy jazz flute darting and scurrying like Herbie Mann over the band’s deconstructing, half-melted bluesiness.
Although Mantra shows its age (pleasant kaftan-y stuff with, admittedly, some ravishing flute solos – bits of it would later show up on Exiles), Travel Bleary Capricorn has them accidentally anticipating the post-modern dissections of the ’90s as they turn, briefly, into an improvising lounge act. Spanish guitar wobbles while McDonald pisses about on the Mellotron presets (cheesy piano and lounge rhythms), as King Crimson pay a quizzical visit back to their hideous apprenticeships in hotel dance groups, army bands and cabaret backings. Right from the start, Fripp’s humour was always a tad elliptical, and his glimpses into a future of “chance and hazard” are often surprising in retrospect.
But what you’ll remember most is the head-crunching power and violence in their improv treatments of Gustav Holst’s ‘Mars’. Each version builds from a gentle bass and drum throb, with McDonald unwinding the harmonies out of the dark, bloodied guts of a Mellotron. Growing ever more loud, staccato and harsh, the theme is psychotically smacked against the back wall; and ends up in blistering ray-gun effects over the stabbing, splintering, deafening unison riffs – the first sighting of thrash-classical. You can hear the seeds of math-rock, Mogwai/Slint crunch, and Foetus-style orchestral-industrial here; and The Young Gods clearly owe Crimson everything.
What must those stoned California hippies have made of it, with their storybook pictures of England? It must have been like being stomped into the ground by a full-armour cavalry charge, just when you were expecting Maid Marion to give you an apple. Listen back to Crimson’s second, post-split album ‘In the Wake of Poseidon’, and you can catch a persistent flutter of Frippish hands clutching at the memories of that jaw-dropping tour.
Some music takes years to fade. For all its baroque bloodiness, this still sounds freshly minted. A remarkable rediscovery.
King Crimson: ‘Epitaph: Live in 1969’
Discipline Global Mobile, DGM 9607A (5 028676 900252)
CD-only double live album
Released: 6th May 1997 Get it from: (2020 update) Burning Shed King Crimson online:
In the world of contemporary pop music, I thought ‑ hell, we all thought ‑ we had the equation worked out. Electronica = The Future. Trad Guitar Rock (Oasis + Kula Shaker + Cast + Ocean Colour Scene) = The Past. But State Of Grace, a Northampton electro‑ambient quartet now on their third album, are here to prove otherwise. It’s electronic, yes, but it’s also as retro and dated as Noel Gallagher’s Beatles pastiches.
Conspiracy is a six‑part concept track… or rather, it’s an obvious way to become immediately suspicious about an album just by looking at the track listing. (Six‑part concept tracks issue a subliminal message to me. That message is “run away!”). Part 1, Forest Fields Forever is horribly slick‑sounding trance, complete with weedy female vocal and obligatory ethnic voice sample. The parts seem often to be linked by ambient wind and water effects… oh no, sorry, that was Part 2. I dozed off for a moment. Part 3 (Single Spies) tries to be Dubstar, but with Sarah Simmond’s ultra‑forgettable voice and gibberish lyrics, plus powder‑puff electronics, it makes Dubstar sound like Nine Inch Nails. Part 4, Noel Street Blues, ups the tempo to a sleek techno and, by including the sampled combination of a warbling operatic diva, more generic‑ethnic wailing and an accordion, momentarily arouses some interest. But by this point I didn’t know which part I was listening to. It all continued in this insipid vein for a number of years, by which time I’d lost the will to live.
Perfect And Wild is more suffocatingly polite techno‑pop, with the joyful addition of a twee slide guitar. Still, as so often on this album, the awful lyrics offer a laugh. “And when love is calling / Like an open book” ‑ look, I’m sorry, but books don’t call; they’re inanimate objects! So innocuous and bland is this music that you could walk round supermarkets to its accompaniment.
Now where was I? I need a dozen eggs, some margarine, a packet of mini chicken kievs… oh, sorry. Right, then. Er, Sea‑Saw. Oh, mild trip‑hop. Sarah tries to sing with a lazy, underwater vibe, but only ends up sounding as disinterested as I am, like she’s about to drop off to sleep. And will somebody please alter that bloody drum machine pattern! Now! (If you think I’m losing patience, you’re right).
Be afraid. Be very afraid, for there are three versions of the track Hello on this album (they obviously place great faith in the song‑‑poor, deluded souls). This version, subtitled Fall Out The Lions (eh? Your guess is as good as mine…), is musically somewhat engaging: mournful violins and a rising/falling keyboard sequence over brushed electronic drums. But the words are more sixth-form gobbledegook: “In the silence / the colour is an island. / Fall out the lions, / take everybody with you.” What? Still, the chorus is one to join in on – “Is it so? Hello, hello. / Is it so? / Hello, hello.” Poetry, utter poetry.
Version two of Hello is a remix by Jack Dangers of Meat Beat Manifesto. To a clattering beat and a phased dub keyboard, plus Meat‑treated vocal, it all manages to sound at least vaguely contemporary, whilst hardly essential. Version three (gosh, you can have too much of a good thing, can’t you?) is an Aphex Twin‑style remix‑‑it dismisses all the elements of the original track save for a ghost of the vocals, and constructs a stomping bass‑heavy techno track. By now, it is so far from State Of Grace’s original that it hardly belongs to them at all. Consequently, it’s the best thing on the album.
Rose II begins and ends in an oozing of tepid ambience, but would potentially be an affecting minor‑chord‑laden melody if it hadn’t been subjected to another sheen of bland synthesizers and, worst of all, whining treated electronic guitar. By now, lost somewhere in a maddening nightmare, praying for this album to end, I suddenly sense a name appearing before me. M…? M…? M… M‑… M‑Mike Oldfield?! Jesus, it does ‑ it sounds like bleedin’ Mike Oldfield!! (Worse than that, Vaughan. It sounds like late ’80s Mike Oldfield, the stuff that not even Oldfield fans seem to have any more… ‑ PROG ED.)
State Of Grace are awfully, horribly dated. They are trying to be some sort of combination of modern ambient techno ‑ for which the music sounds simply too out‑of‑date‑‑and the pristine machine pop of, say, Propaganda… yet lacking that group’s excellent song constructions. The lyrics are abysmal, too. The hip new title State Of Grace would like to have conferred on them ‑ electronica ‑ is redundant. This is, being as kind as possible, what used to be known in the pop world as “electronic music”, which would firmly date it as being pre‑1987’s acid‑house revolution.
But let’s not be kind. Let’s be unkind. This is out‑of‑date, bad europop, bad trance, bad electro‑prog… get the idea?
I don’t want it in my universe.
(review by Vaughan Simons)
State Of Grace: ‘Everyone Else’s Universe’
3rd Stone Ltd., STONE 028CD (5023693002828)
CD‑only compilation album
Released: 28th April 1997
Get it from: (2018 update) best obtained second-hand.
Heard it all before, but I can always hear it again.
Matt Keating is one of those characters who’s always to be found blowing in off the road and settling himself on the stage. The sort of guy who could quite easily survive in a world made up merely of roads, acoustic guitars, small vans, and at every stop a bar with a stage. His music’s of that well-worn style that’s like those magical rock star jeans Springsteen’s patented that never wear out, just go on weathering forever.
You’ve heard what it’s like many times before, in a world where guitars are sharp, to the point, and preferably recorded in one take in a converted potato shed (or a basement eight track in Matt’s case) and where Neil Young, Tom Petty et al still have the last word in what something should sound like. But with ‘Killjoy’, where it’s at is in what he’s saying, not how he sounds.
‘Killjoy’ is a bleak, wistful record. Memories of apartments and arguments, knowing that you’re too smart to deserve the fate you’re doling out to yourself, but too much pulled down by slack to get out of it. The travelogue of a not-so-beautiful loser, punctuated by cracks of sharp, self-aware laughter: “you wanted a man of substance, you got one with substance abuse”, or “once in a while I lose control, and gain my soul.” Matt’s world is one where it’s a constant struggle to crawl out from under the rocks: shame, despondency, the baggage of the past. In the dozen songs on this record, he drags himself about halfway out. The beaky stare he’s giving me off the back of the album seems to say “well, I try, but it’s life that slumps.”
That said, it’s not one of those whinging therapy records, even if The L Word’s chunky garage guitar and swamp-bird slide hints otherwise. In a post-breakdown breakdown of all the denials in a life, Matt explores the words for the ideas which people forbid themselves to say out of fear, and thereby condemn themselves to ignorance and incapability. Suicide, the mysteries of sex, the terrors of commitment – all end up edged around in language reducing them from human situations to “specimens / floating in formaldehyde.”
Far better to try to get your message across, though more people seem to be spending their time escaping from the obligation to do this. You and Me and This TV has Matt and his girlfriend cheek-to-cheek in a small room, numbed out of conversation by the telly (“stranded on a cathode sea, surfing channels for days, / fixing our gaze – not on each other”), as he pleads “just hit the remote and read what I wrote / before the rays erase me.” Not that getting through is easy with the other things crawling out from under those rocks, too. Like the sour small town working man in While We Fiddle whose discontent leads him into the arms of right wing revolt: or the girl in Just to Feel Something who starts off cutting herself and ends up cutting off her own hope.
The perversity of human nature is on display everywhere. In the Leonard Cohen-ish drawl of The Fruit You Can’t Eat, Matt sourly comments “young people wish they were old, the old folks all wish they were young, / and some people wish they were dead, but most would just settle to see someone hung / for a crime they dream of committing, but commitment’s what they’re afraid of. / In this case the punishment’s fitting to wring your own hands ’til your fingers are numb.” Against this wounded cynicism you can set his compassion, continually coming through like cracks in a stone face – “I wouldn’t trade a day for the moments I’ve wasted / listening to your heart pound like a sad drummer’s beat.”
Like Mark Eitzel or Morrissey, he continually stares into the abyss yawning behind humanity’s tiny fractures, unable to ignore it. Transcendent despair and anger isn’t his way, though: more a sturdy refusal to give in. On By the Way, Matt might complain that “the pieces fit, but I’m still puzzled”, but he knows that to be alive means having to constantly deal with the swinging inconsistent gaps between aspiration, failure and effort: to recognise sometimes that “what you’ve mistaken for peaceful / is only the sound of good and evil’s uneasy truce.” And that being alive and caring about all this means that you’re stuck with the bittersweet burden.
On Happy Again, rolling around the outskirts of the Trees Lounge to the accompaniment of near-comatose piano, he announces “I don’t ever want to be happy again, I’m feeling too free. / I don’t ever want to feel something someone could steal. / But just between you and me I’m happy again again, and so terribly / ‘Cos I can’t even pretend that happiness won’t come to an end.”
In other words, he’s one of those people who speaks openly of the little wounds we all Band-Aid our souls over and shut up about: one of those people whom we handle with a little admiration, a little fear, both too intimate for comfort. Later, I’ll speak to Matt at the bar. I’ll buy him a drink when it’s my turn. We’ll spend about fifteen minutes chatting, but no more. When we part, we’ll have recognised a lot in each other; there’ll be a lot of sympathy, even. But we’ll probably not meet again. He’ll be back on the road, taking his tales of working TVs and broken relationships on to some new town and waking up fellow spirits there. I’ll go home with this album. Brief, shrugged encounter.
Matt Keating: ‘Killjoy’ Alias Records, A093 ADV (093716009320)
CD/LP album
Released: 8th April 1997 Get it from:Alias Records Matt Keating online: <
The elegant grace of tragedy is often linked with the splat of farce. This album’s major selling point (on some copies of the CD, it’s trumpeted by a sticker ‑ I kid you not) is that it features the music from last year’s TV ads for Orange mobile phones, namely Jocelyn Pook’s setting of “Blow The Wind Southerly” sung by Kathleen Ferrier.
Sigh. It’s sad but true that increasingly weird and wonderful music is getting picked up and co‑opted by advertising agencies for their campaigns. Your average ‘Coronation Street’ ad‑break may currently play to a soundtrack of Michael Nyman, Gavin Bryars, Aphex Twin, U‑Ziq, Cocteau Twins… and Pook. They’re selling their souls for the filthy lucre from red‑braced ad execs. Of course they are: rampant fucking capitalism is bringing us the best that post‑modern music has to offer. It’s art selling out!
But… Mr or Ms Normal Music Fan are going into Our Price and humming this music over the counter to Shop Assistant. Consequently, they’re getting turned on to (at least relatively) experimental music, er, man… And as Jocelyn Pook joins the hideous capitalist gravy train (look, I’m not being cruel: my tongue is in my cheek) from obscurity to the CD racks, the musos among us will smugly tell that Pook is widely known as the leader of the Electra Strings (along with Caroline Lavelle, Sonia Slaney and others), who have no doubt been rushed off their feet in the past couple of years as every British pop act decided they must show their serious side by having at least one strings‑based track in their repertoire (I think we call it “hiring in a touch of class”).
But here ‑ ably backed by the Electras, knife‑edged art‑scene soprano Melanie Pappenheim and a pocketful of exotic musicians and sounds ‑ Jocelyn Pook shows herself as being beyond simply a viola player. She’s a composer of emotion and invention and, in the best traditions of post‑modernism, introduces classical and traditional musics to the brave new world of samples and electronics. OK, so it has to be admitted that Dead Can Dance are an immediate and convenient comparison, but ‘Deluge’ is warmer, more emotional: less monumentally impressive, perhaps, but also nowhere near as harsh and Wagnerian.
The twelve tracks of ‘Deluge’ (germinating from a clutch of “post‑modern hymns” written for a Canadian dance‑theatre project) are best appreciated as one pre‑millennial suite with recurring themes (the emotions drawn from the year 1000, the methodology from 2000). Requiem Aeternam, like many elements of the other tracks, opens the album with solo and multitracked singing of a traditional requiem over one sustained root note. Post‑modern chamber plainsong, in other words, founded upon a sense of inevitability that’s unchanged by the impact of technology.
Technology, in fact, might even be hastening that grand inevitable. Oppenheimer is undoubtedly one of the central parts of ‘Deluge’. It opens with a disturbing sample of Robert Oppenheimer talking (he seems heavy with emotion, a man with the weight of his discovery of nuclear destruction bearing down upon him) surrounded by a foreboding nuclear wind: this merges into the poignant but more hopeful sound of the Jewish call to prayer and a dawn chorus of birds. As the central sung theme from the first track returns with a supporting string section, a haunting, heartbreaking elegy is created.
For Oppenheimer himself, this could be the emotions created by his dread and foresight at what he had created. More powerfully, however, this piece stands as a requiem for a world forever changed by the knowledge of possible nuclear annihilation. A post‑Cold War planet we may now be, but his music took me right back to the nervousness of the mid‑’80s and its accompanying, tangible dread of nuclear war.
Lightening the mood and returning to the music, Blow The Wind (subtitled Pie Jesu) does indeed feature that Orange ad music again. Heard without those connotations, however, this is a brilliant interweaving of samples and live sound, as Kathleen Ferrier’s familiar rendition of the traditional vocal is interspersed with Pappenheim and Pook’s plangent vocal counterpoint, the echoing sounds of children playing, and more soaring strings. As in hip‑hop, the form that originally used sampling to such great effect and historic importance, the sample of Ferrier is used as a basis to build other musical sequences, instrumentation and vocals. It’s humble, beautiful, and ends far too soon.
The lessons in the new technology of music Jocelyn Pook has gained will undoubtedly further influence the writing and performance of her music for her own instrument ‑ strings. The penultimate piece, La Blanche Traversée, appears to be a fairly standard chamber‑piece setting of words by Racine, but more remarkable is the subtle instrumental backing. Pook and the Electra Strings play a slightly off‑rhythm pattern of oscillating notes that, to any DJ or mixer who knows his decks, would be regarded as a loop. I feel that it is safe to assume that the original hip‑hop DJs never had this development in mind when they crafted scratching and looping. ‘Deluge’ is a long way from being electronica, but the ’90s cross‑pollination continues.
While music has broken all the boundaries of genre in the ’90s, the end products have resulted in albums of naked emotion or sonic inventiveness. But rarely both together. ‘Deluge’ is a suite of stunning invention and sheer beauty in its music, but with all the necessary emotion of a requiem for the post‑nuclear age. The wind blows cold, with the sound of ravens on the air, but it tugs your whole life right to the surface of your skin.
Never mind the politics of how you got to hear of Jocelyn Pook or ‘Deluge’. Open your mind to it.
(review by Vaughan Simons)
Jocelyn Pook: ‘Deluge’ Virgin Records, CDVE 933 7243 (7 24384 29632 2)
CD-only album
Released: 24th February 1997
Get it from: (2018 update) long out-of-print, so best picked up second-hand. Most of the tracks on ‘Deluge’ were remixed and reissued on the ‘Flood’ album in 1999.
When a band have made it, are popular, and their songs are heard in every commercial outlet, a person is simply playing a game of pathetic one‑upmanship if they smugly proclaim: “Oh, I liked them when they were a cult band. They’ve gone all pop now!” These are very sad people.
Ahem. Now…
I liked James when they were a cult band. They’ve gone all pop now. Yes, I admit it. I am a sad person and I claim my five pounds.
In truth, I lost touch with James after ‘Gold Mother’, when they entered the pop stratosphere and those T‑shirts became ubiquitous. My attitude to Sit Down exemplifies my attitude to ‘Whiplash’. Sit Down started life as a strumalong of identification with those who felt alone or slightly dispossessed, insecure. It was re‑released as an epic soundtrack which seemed to command “You WILL Sit Down!!”. And whilst every baggy‑shirted indie kid and raver performed the increasingly meaningless charade of plonking their arses on the stage, that song (and James themselves) sounded, to these ears, like a New Age, slightly more subtle Simple Minds. When my mother chose Sit Down as her favourite song, opined that Tim Booth was “a nice young man” and started asking me which one in the band was “James”, my interest in the band as a pop entity virtually evaporated. (You none‑more‑punk, you! ‑ ED.)
‘Whiplash’ promises much. It is heralded as “a return to form”. For old James fans, this is a pronouncement we’ve heard before. But the opening track, Tomorrow, has the pulsing rhythm, the simplicity and directness, the expanding layers of sound that I so remember were classic James; and so it is better to forget, perhaps, that this song is about three years old and first appeared in embryonic form on ’94’s experimental excursion ‘Wah Wah’. Elsewhere, Lost A Friend features verses with a skeletal musical backing and Booth returning to hitting all those strange half‑note harmonies of old, before breaking into the obligatory big chorus. It’s still James’ version of their Big Music, but it no longer lumbers like an over‑produced fabrication as in recent years. Sadly, trite lyrics like “my TV’s telling me / that all of our money goes into the military” and “I see some soldiers with guns / they are killing for fun / they are killing to entertain me” do not raise my political consciousness one iota. May I call you Bono, Tim?
This album’s biggest problems come where the much‑vaunted contemporary feel exerts itself. There is always an awful doubt when a band returns from a long break saying that they’ve been listening to techno/trip‑hop/drum’n’bass/ambient (or whatever; delete as applicable), and the new masterpiece is produced under these influences. Eighty per cent of ‘Whiplash’ features these dabbles in new styles, mostly unsatisfactorily.
The album’s first single, She’s A Star, is the most startling and perhaps most successful, sounding like Suede-lite. But it lacks Brett Anderson’s detailing of urban degeneration, suburbia and glamorous smack habits. With Suede, She’s A Star would be blackly ironic ‑ she would be a lonely girl in a dead commuter belt, or a wasted junkie. But Tim means it ‑ she really is a “star”. That’s lovely for him and her (whoever she may be), but ultimately rather naive for us.
Go To The Bank is roughly the third song on the album that mentions TVs, so James have obviously spent their time away wisely. Seemingly a diatribe against the evils of money, the lyrics leave a bad taste in the mouth with the repeated line “it all belongs to Caesar…” Is someone rather peeved about recently having to settle a large bill for unpaid taxes, eh? This track and the next, Play Dead, are full of techno effects that ultimately do not go far enough. They dabble in electronica, but still align themselves to typical James nervy strumalongs. But the two styles don’t gel, and they’d be more satisfying as one or the other. Play Dead, in particular, could be one of James’ truly haunting acoustic numbers if it dropped the excess techno zeitgeist baggage: it is one of the few obviously beautiful melodies here.
Greenpeace (oh Tim, do you have to be so fucking obvious? What next? Veggie? ’90s Hippie? Beanbag?) is a dark, slightly rockier take on trip‑hop, alternating between distorted vocals and ambience in the verses and a chorus that feels like it’s built on the bassline of Massive Attack’s Safe From Harm. It is leaden, and rather desperate to show how contemporary it is. Where James once had that aura of being a band of weird but pleasant loners down the end of the corridor, they now come across more like insufferably tedious born‑again Christians; but, as Greenpeace shows, ones who are desperate to prove to the church elders that they are hip and rebellious, and that “this is what the kids are into.”
It’s all so frustrating when elsewhere there’s such a blatant demonstration of the simple, peculiar emotional alchemy that James can muster so well. I’m talking about Blue Pastures, a quiet, near‑acoustic whisper of a coda to ‘Whiplash’s technophilic sprawl. Jim Glennie’s bass rings like a sleepy bell, guitars fill out dark clouds in the sky, and James’ old Patti Smith influences are evoked once more as Booth unwinds the story: someone quietly putting things to rights, then walking out into the snow to die. Their thoughts slow, the ground gets closer. Snow covering. Peace arriving. Fade‑out. Perfection ‑ for once, we respond with tears of compassion and recognition rather than of frustration.
But in the reckoning, this album is a disappointment after the marvellous and underrated ‘Wah Wah’. Which proved that, in the right laid‑back conditions and with the right production influence from Brian Eno (who part‑produced and “interfered” with this one, but evidently not enough), James could come up with the post‑modern experimental pop they so desperately seek on ‘Whiplash’. Chained, often rather clumsily, to the typical James of old, the two styles pull against each other. U2 have managed to cling to the bandwagon by enlisting the best technoheads around. If James want to do likewise, they’d better get someone who can do a better job at improving the rather leaden attempts at electronica on here. Or they can forget the zeitgeist and return to being the pre‑pomposity weirdo folkies still to be glimpsed occasionally.
Which way, Tim?
(review by Col Ainsley)
James: ‘Whiplash’
Mercury Records/Fontana Records, 534 354‑2 (731453435421)
CD/cassette album
Released: 24th February 1997
Chris Thomson is The Bathers. He’s been ploughing his lonely furrow for ten years, since the break up of the seminal Glasgow group Friends Again (who also featured James Grant of Love And Money ‑ no, me neither…). This is The Bathers’ fifth album ‑ it will doubtless be received with the same resounding silence as all the others, save for the tiny devoted following who will think manna has descended from heaven. So why was I worried? Well, the sleeve to the last album, ‘Sunpowder’, contained the desperately insecure messages “Support the Arts ‑ Hug A Musician” and “The Dream Is Over ‑ Long Live The Dream”. Sob.
Now you’ll have to take The Bathers to your hearts, surely…?
In truth, the first three or so tracks are a touch disconcerting by normal Bathers standards. The (frankly pretentious, but marvellous) European‑influenced titles are absent; the credits show a preponderance of Wurlitzer, Rhodes and electric pianos rather than the normally ever‑present ethereal strings and chiming classical piano lines. And while Van Morrison has often been an undoubted influence, on this album the influence is perhaps too pervasive, and it verges at times on sounding like an avant‑garde Hothouse Flowers. The trio of Girlfriend, If Love Could Last Forever and East Of East Delier ‑ whilst gloriously late‑night ‑ can make them sound like a barely‑audible, zonked‑out but musically polite cafe band. At one point, I half expected Thomson to slur: “Ladeez and gennelmen, we’re your band this evening. Gonna take a little ol’ break now. See you at the bar, which is now open.”.
But for East Of East Delier, the European outlook (“I dreamed she’d come from Copenhagen…”) is back, serenaded by Thomson’s 2 a.m‑feel, decidedly tipsy, highly emotional display, and the album twitches into life with No Risk No Glory. With a sparse acoustic base to the verse, and sympathetic soul‑style backing vocals (by, of all people, Del Amitri’s Justin Currie ‑ bang goes the indie cred) that echo Thomson’s lyric, the chorus rises to breast‑beating Celtic soul and a lyric full of self‑awareness ‑ “I was born to suffer.”
And after a slightly hazy start to the album, Once Upon A Time On The Rapenburg restores my faith. It’s like an old friend, and you should never change an old friend. All the signature Bathers motifs are there ‑ the classical piano, the strings, the over‑emotional vocals, the continental cool. And the lyrical concern is a familiar one about kissing a girl under starlit skies in various exotic European locations. What a guy…
Kelvingrove Baby itself is the album’s central epic ‑ there’s always one, full of Celtic soul histrionics, surging choruses and delicate instrumental interludes. It begins as a simple piano motif before bursting into life with haunting voices and an operatic diva weaving in and out of Thomson’s lyrics ‑ which could be corny, but instead sends a shiver down the spine. He’s expectantly waiting for a girl again, and dedicating his overflowing paean of love to her hometown. The music regularly builds, swells and bursts like a raincloud, as Thomson reaches ecstatic preacherly heights of inspiration: “when your girl looks at you, and she sighs, / when she moves beside you, you want the moment touched with magic and immortality. / You want rain, / you want soft music, / and the last words to be about love!” Pianos and drums explode. The song ends, soaked to the skin and smiling.
On a quieter tip, Girl From The Polders is a good example of what Thomson does so well: taking a standard, timeless melody (you know the tune already, from the first notes onwards) and drawing out of it something haunting and emotional. He seems to be waiting through the seasons, until summer, for her this time. (Hands up if you see a lyrical theme emerging…)
The one unforgivable track ‑ the first real blot on Thomson’s copy book I’ve heard in ages, is Dial. More cafe band music; too mellow, man. Lots of filmic guitar, elongated major‑7th chords, treacle‑smooth backing vocals and an irredeemably cringeworthy chorus ‑ “Caller, you’re divine.” Ugh. But Hellespont In A Storm (yes! titles! titles!) wins us back: a late‑night lament guided by an accordion, acoustic guitar and violin. Although, gorgeous as it is, Thomson’s way with a familiar melody takes a tumble in the verses, where echoes of Unchained Melody can be clearly heard. Oh, never mind…
The final track, Twelve, finds Thomson devoting himself to a girl in the most poetic and tangible of ways; “I’ll love you ’til the roses lose their perfume… / until the poets run out of rhymes… / ’til the twelfth of never. / And, baby, you know / that’s a long, long time…” Then that “Bathers moment” appears ‑ distant voices appear and disappear through snatches of ghostly telephone conversations, string passages shoot up at the back of the recording like incense rushing up the dome of St Peter’s. The callers hang up.
Chris Thomson will be waiting for you, bottle of red wine in hand in the late‑night rain, under the street lamp’s orange glow. He’ll be singing quietly to himself.
Goodbye, Chris. See you at the same place next time.
(review by Vaughan Simons)
The Bathers: ‘Kelvingrove Baby’ Marina Records, MA 22/MACD 4468‑2 (4 015698 446821)
CD-only album
Released: 24th February 1997
Get it from: (2018 update) the original Marina pressing of this album has long since sold out, so is best obtained second-hand. The 2000 reissue on Wrasse Records is still available.
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 tangible relief. You know when you treasure a band whose very awkwardness is their spur to genius? And you dread the day when they inevitably develop, move on, make that breakthrough? How you torture yourself with wondering exactly how they’re going to sell out, which part of their off-the-wall wonder is going to be sloughed off like an old coat or an outgrown friend? And how wonderful (and how rare) it is, when they make that leap while still swinging all of that weird and precious baggage.
Over four albums and assorted spring showers of invention, Pram have made music which sounds like daydreams captured in rented rooms and played on dolls-house instruments. Tinkly, tiny and exquisite: beautifully fragile songs, with profundity stretched over that soap-bubble surface. Music recorded in the kitchen sink during those sparkling times an hour or so before noon or dusk sets in; dusted by trumpets and cobwebs, and licked by ebbtides of slide guitar. They’ve got only the flakiest of reference points – tranquillised ’50s lounge-music echoes, say; or the ferment of polycultural Birmingham nightclubs; or Can’s immersive and unlikely groove; or the deliquescing pop of Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd on See Emily Play (it’s that sustained, wobbly organ, and that obstinate un-rock twitchiness to Daren Garratt’s drumming: free-jazz leanings, or dodgy-but-compelling technique?). They’ve none of the portentousness of yer Sylvians or Cures, and none of the slackitudes of post-rockers: nor the inhumanity of those ambient characters who sound as if they’re wearing their eyeballs back-to-front. Pram’s music has always been winningly human: frail, sensual, intimate, and very lovely.
The last time we heard from them (on ‘Sargasso Sea’), Pram had drifted aground and drew wonder even from that, rattling like a wind-harp as they moulded music out of disappointment, sleep and stranded hearts. On ‘Music for Your Movies’, they’ve kept their home-made clatter and every scrap of their inventiveness, but have tightened up their pop. Everything falls into place now instead of merely stumbling together, weaving in delicate threads of dub, drum’n’bass, cinema organ. Rosie’s voice, though still weary conversationalist rather than acrobatic diva, has a new bounce and a lilt to it. And her lyrics (while still existing in the reverie that the white page lends so many poems, crucially detaching them from registering as real life) have a new zest.
There’s something celebratory about these songs. The Sargasso that trapped is now a playground for her to transform with enchantment in Sea Jungle’s free-floating love song, while Silver Nitrate celebrates the transforming imaginative power of film as a feminist liberation: “The woman who discovered light / was dazzled by her ingenuity /…With silver nitrate she could make time wait / she could gather all of her hopes and her dreams and make them her destiny / …and spun her thoughts like spiders webs / and with these delicate chains was set free.” On Eggshells it might be Rosie who suffers, locked out from her lover by his own absorption in his past wounds, but she’s the stronger, the more loyal, despite her exposure. Only Carnival of Souls sees Rosie failing to escape the net of her own entrapments, with figures from her past parading through her sleeping head (“feels like I’m living / in a zombie movie”).
Pram have already made stagnation seductive. Now, wheels oiled, they’re rolling forward to explore the waking world. Lucky world.
Pram: ‘Music for Your Movies’
Duophonic Super 45s, DS45-CD15 (5024545032727)
CD/vinyl EP
Released: 18th November 1996 Get it from:(2020 update) Best obtained second-hand. Pram online:
A bizarre, triple-jointed noise, ‘Brain Ep’ is twenty-two minutes worth of sixteen razor-honed two-minute songs. Any band of indie stoners could copy this note for note, slow it down by two-thirds and still end up with enough music for three years of releases. Bunty Chunks slam it all out at once. They’re probably one of the only groups who could deliver you a full concept album using only a split 7-inch with Napalm Death. And the Ep is short for Epilepsy.
So what kind of band would name themselves after a dismembered issue of a long-defunct girl’s comic? Well, theirs is a sound of seriously intense stunt guitar, twitchy hardcore tub-bashing and voice-of-doom Valkyrie vocals from Lisa Bailey. It’s as if Steve Vai (during his Zappa tenure, not his metal stardom) had skidded on the soap during bathtime, crashed through the window dripping and naked as a newborn, and finally fallen splat through next door’s roof, straigh into the middle of a women-only workshop of opera lessons. (Yeah, well, things like that happen to me most weeks…) I could also suggest L7 doing a jigsaw with Wire, Slapp Happy being forced to speak after being shut away and mainlining espresso for a solid month, or a Public Image Ltd. lineup with a Zappa complexity fetish. Otherwise there don’t seem to be many precedents for Bunty Chunks’ music. Which is a shame, because then life would be a lot more interesting than it actually is.
‘Brain Ep’ delivers a fruit salad stunt-punk, where the guitar weaves ridiculously complicated loops as Lisa vomits up hairball blasts of surrealist rhetoric. These in turn are decorated with scattered ad-slogans, one-liners and dismembered moments of sharp poetry. Seemingly taking as much influence from random cartoons and Rorschach blots as from real life, Bunty Chunks lean heavily into a disturbed world of childlike imagination and often topple into ludicrous playroom weirdness. Songs sport titles like Dog Made of Foam, Kojak Ring of Confidence or Fly Away Sausage Boy. Lisa’s lyrics are full of sinister, comical transformations: feet turn into chickens, stirrup pumps hurl abuse, and even Pavarotti reveals a hideous alter-ego. Yet there are stories in there too (embedded in the word-rashes) even if they do seem to have been tied in knots by a Turkish masseur and forced through a shattered kaleidoscope.
Lisa’s unstoppable voice – iron-hard and utterly committed, with a car-alarm urgency – is key to this. Taking what could otherwise be colourful whimsy, she pushes it out sounding like no-nonsense observation. She can navigate the paranoid mutterings and memories of a vagrant (in Hobo) or hurl out chattering expressions of rage at the demands of scrounging friends and partners (in Pay Up Ape). Similarly, she can also handle the put-upon fretting that sizzles in The Cat Tooth; the feverish dreams of mortality and aging in We Grow Up With Bones; and all of the bizarre characters that these songs suggest are marching in and out of her memory and life like a plague of amorphous, opportunistic aliens. (“Years later I would say I realise then, the only thing you can sell and still own… he was not a cripple, but he could pretend to be like no other.”)
While there’s little variety in her arresting, confrontational tone, its sheer conviction nails Bunty Chunks’ apparent flights of fancy down hard to the tarmac, rendering them as gritty as life in a rotting tower block. Despite the hallucinatory feel of the band’s songs, her edge gives them a visionary clarity. Lisa’s simultaneously the person who urgently buttonholes you for attention in the wasteland, and the woman who’s guarding and watching at the door, keeping a hard eye on the inside and the outside. Balanced between violent eccentricity and an atmosphere of coded warning, ‘Brain Ep’ comes across like a lifetime of very tricky parallel-dimension social work, carried out in a city of grotesques.
Considering that they’re the ones who got us into this, Bunty Chunks make pretty good guides to get us through. This in spite of the fact that they’ve junked verse-chorus-verse, and you’d better come in strapped up for a relentless (sometimes irritating) barrage of storm-tossed notes. But it’s worth the visit. At the very least you get to see Lisa and the other ‘Chunks playing with giddy intent: within sight of a million tunes yet never settling on any particular one, with eyes and ears stretched far too wide open to settle for anything as simple as boy-meets-girl. “Brain ep convulsions.” You said it, Lisa. Fits for a queen. So where’s the sixty-minute triple album, then?
With two albums already behind them, it’s time to stop lumping Labradford in with Tortoise as the only two notable examples of American post-rock. Post-rock is an uncomfortable catch-all that can’t really adequately describe a spectrum that takes in the noisy Trans Am at one end and the classical minimalism of Rachel’s at the other. And where Tortoise approach from an obviously jazzy direction, Labradford’s methods are ice-cold developments on ambience that now seem to be reaching a creative peak.
When a known band suddenly gives, say, their third album the name of the band (the way one would usually do for a debut), you can generally guess that they’re making a pointed statement of identity and distancing themselves from much of what went before. And – appropriately – ‘Labradford’ is Labradford’s most fulfilling statement so far; showing a fully-developed band consolidating the intriguing (but ultimately frustrating and insubstantial) thumbnail sketches they provided on ‘Prazision’ and ‘A Stable Reference’.
Experiments like the deep sub-frequency bass – straight out of acid house – dropping into the chilling ambience of The Cipher or the dissonant tones that break up the background of Lake Speed are perhaps signs of ears being opened to electronica; although this also leads to a loss of the band’s shared interest in the ancient music and religious plainsong which influenced their earlier albums. And which kept me listening past the point where I’d gotten infuriated by their sheer collegiate lethargy, the way they sounded like something made by people who only got out of bed to turn their Neu! record over.
That spectral and distinctly European quality is missing from this year’s model to be replaced by more obviously technologically produced atmospherics, and better production has separated out the sounds from the claustrophobia of ‘A Stable Reference’. The addition of rhythms, albeit perfunctory and not necessarily conventional drum sounds, makes a big difference to the progress of the pieces. Where previously Labradford songs started, hung in stasis in a foggy air and then disappeared, there is now a definite propulsion, a moving forward. Reassuringly, though, we’re not talking 120 bpm…
For a group dealing in mainly instrumental ambient atmospheres, it comes as something of a joy to come across titles that, for once, bear some relation to the sounds being heard. The first track really does sound like a Phantom Channel Crossing – the most nightmarish vision imaginable of a midnight journey in a tin hulk of a ferry. The engines, the chains, the metallic resonances, the emptiness – all there. Maybe I’m imagining things. Painting my own picture for the sounds I’m hearing.
But if that’s not what Labradford’s all about, then there’s no point. This is a gallery of sound, rather than music. And yes, Midrange really does appear to exist all in that spectrum. It’s claustrophobic. While Mark Nelson’s voice mouths more of his usual indecipherable profundities over the group’s ghostly atmospherics, it is noticeable that more light is seeping into the sonic palette – distant violins and, most distinct from the usual swirling morass, a subtly tapped-out rhythm. It still ends with the growing unease of that Labradford noise, however – the closest description being the amplified sound of air ventilation.
Lake Speed is underpinned by a metronomic, surprisingly insistent bass drum rhythm, like a niggling thought tapping constantly on the wall of your brain. “Like a clock / In pieces / On the floor / I try to fix it fast / So I don’t lose too much time” – and as the clock ticks, all manner of worryingly gentle alarms go off in the background. It gives the impression of a David Lynch piece that is seeking to add to your feelings of paranoia. Aural massage never sounded so nerve-wracking. One of the track’s twisted and elongated effects sounds like a man giving vent to a low, painful scream. It’s buried deep in the mix… but it’s there. How appropriate.
Scenic Recovery retains much of the sound and atmosphere of Lake Speed. But still the thoughts keep churning away inside. The tap-tap-tapping rhythm has altered slightly – suddenly it’s the regular but ineffectual pulse of a coma patient. As the mire of sound envelops you, and tension hangs in the air, a solitary violin carries a melody through the ether. Pico is one of Labradford’s “songs”; rather than just shifting atmospheres. Almost hymnal in its simplicity – a sequence of heartbreaking chords, a melody that is played by a friendly alien on a space-age tin whistle, a barely-there whisper of a vocal and another minimalist, almost endearingly clumsy rhythm. The pace is processional, almost holy.
Oh God, how does one describe The Cipher? It is just there. It exists, like sounds exist even in the most silent of nights. Look, this is the sound of digital and analogue air rustling chains. Ghostly. Calming. It is all of these things. But mostly, it just is.
Battered, the closer, is almost eventful. Delicately balanced on a hesitant mandolin-like guitar, a brightly melodic riff, and with a beep providing the rhythm – coma patients again, nurse – it hits a Cocteaus-like bliss-out at the end. Perfect pop for Prozac people.
The last notes we hear are desert guitars drifting into the night. Death Valley, here we come…
(review by Col Ainsley)
Labradford: ‘Labradford’ Mute Liberation Technologies/Blast First Records, BFFP 136CD (5 016027 611360)
CD/download album
Released: 12th November 1996
Get it from: (2018 update) CD best obtained second-hand, or download from Bandcamp.
Bands are volatile, and when people form them they need to deal carefully with the possibility of a built in death sentence. It happens, and it can leave scars. All over the world, sitting quietly in little bedsits, are former musicians still shattered by the breakup of their first and only band.
Conversely, some bands seem to shrug off splits and explosions as if they’d been no more than sneezes. During their on again/off again three-decade career, Yes have been no strangers to such events. The fallout from the innumerable bust-ups and drop-outs now seems to obscure the band for three years out of every five, ensuring they don’t so much keep jumping on the reunion bandwagon as never being quite stable enough to get off the damn thing in the first place.
After years of mostly being stadium pop-rockers (albeit tremendously accomplished, envelope-pushing ones), as of 1995 Yes are back to the extraordinarily popular 1970s lineup which held sway in arenas and stadia. High-pitched Accrington-seraph singer Jon Anderson, epic bassist Chris Squire and heavy-deft drummer Alan White have brought two of the other ’70s members back into the fold (eclecti-guitarist Steve Howe and ultra-flamboyant keyboardist icon Rick Wakeman). Despite the lofty title, though, the ‘Keys to Ascension’ double album is basically a holding exercise while Classic Yes glue themselves back together again. It’s an attempt to catch up on whatever ground may have been lost during fifteen years enmired in a Los Angelis rocker’s honeytrap with one foot jammed firmly in the AOR arenas.
So… there’s (two and a half hours) of live Yes classics from the ’70s, taken from the San Luis Obispo concerts earlier this year in which Yes took it to a smaller-scale theatre stage. Give or take a bit of backdrop projections, these were devoid of the band’s previous synaesthesic live trappings of lasers, revolves, or Roger Dean crystal outcroppings – for the most part, Yes just let the music speak for itself. There’s also about half a disc of new music appended onto the end. The odds aren’t on the project being a classic, but what it does look like is a fine and overdue opportunity to re-evaluate Yes, after they’ve spent twenty years in the critical doghouse as the target for any stroppy reviewer with a chip on his shoulder about being a middle-class honky under all of his street talk. Yes have perpetrated their fair share of folly, but that’s not the whole story by any means.
If you’re already properly familiar with Yes music – complex, electric and revelatory when it hits its peak – then you’ll know what to expect, and you get it in spades. Fragile their alliance may be (Anderson has often compared the band to a football team of pushy talents needing to be marshalled, as opposed to a mythic rock gang or sentimental brotherhood) but they’re sounding better than they have for ages. Apart from Wakeman’s dodgy new digital keyboard sounds – if you’re going for that full-on classic-prog majesty, it’s essential that you should also go for some blurry 1970s warmth – the Yes sonic armoury has been reinvigorated. Squire’s grinding sinewy bass is roaring back with a vengeance, and Howe’s back in the saddle with his elegant yet fiery mongrelised guitar styles. The rhythms still kick and charge like a mule on a diet of angel dust and Dada; many of Anderson’s baffling lyrics and fluting vocals are still a mystical jumble of tossed salad word-sounds, and the whole band’s playing as a unit again at long last.
If you’re not familiar with Yes – or if you’ve been suckered by all of that self-righteous punk bullshit about the worthlessness of the prog bands – there’s enough wonder on here to make you reconsider their legacy. For a start, ‘Keys to Ascension’ is laden with blazing melodies even in its most convoluted moments. It confirms Yes’ love for a mighty pop tune, as evidenced in the resurrection of their driving, pinwheeling and elaborately vibrant cover of Paul Simon’s America or on the surprise revisitation of 1978’s hymnal ballad Onwards (drawn from Squire’s formative experiences as part of an English cathedral choir, and rearranged here as an acoustic display of Yes’ uplifting harmonies).
As ever, Yes’ musical peaks sound timeless. Despite their flashy/esoteric/unpalatable reputation, during their first wind, they were actually a mainstream band: ferociously musical pop lovers with a weird streak who were restless to blow open the envelope and expand the possibilities, but who were always too abstractly sensual and romantic to tie in with modernism or the politics of underground music culture. That said, they were busily transgressing musical boundaries in a way that the mainstream is only now daring to attempt again.
Siberian Khatru remains a bucketing roar of jazzy harmonies and of splintered time and space; Anderson’s welter of images spurt like one of J.G. Ballard’s crystallised rivers. In the soaring, furious ritual of Awaken, hovering pouncing piano leads into a stark sunrise ceremony dominated by Anderson’s ascending liturgies and Howe’s guitar hurling itself upwards in an assault on the mountains. An interlude of Wakeman’s sedate celestial church organ, before another push upwards by the ensemble leaves Anderson triumphant on the summit, singing his faith into a clear sky. Monolithic, esoteric fantasia perhaps, but it strikes as many complex emotional chord as it does musical ones. It might not work as clear literature or as the amplified folk music of the classic songwriters, but this is nonetheless spiritual music in its ambitions and effect, ultimately serving a greater aim than to merely showcase the virtuosity of Yes members.
Elsewhere, there’s the rhythm-and-blues-meets-skywatchers coil of Starship Trooper; and the inevitable Roundabout. The latter in particular is despatched with the usual Yes flair – glitteringly elegant classical guitar, corkscrewing Hammond organ, Anderson’s joyfully kaleidoscopic lyrics and the best bass line which no one’s yet ripped off for a dance track. There’s even a chunk of that infamous folly ‘Tales from Topographic Oceans’ which (even if it does sound far bittier than everything else on the record) has been reclaimed from an overcooked mush of windy symphonic chanting and has become a sort of wobbly musical dragon kite. It’s still unwieldy and inescapably over-ambitious (Yes attempted to net the whole world and its metaphysical forces with that particular album, and they didn’t succeed) yet now there’s an odd grace and buoyancy to it. And that’s something I never thought I’d catch myself saying.
So far so good. But if Yes are to be taken seriously as a contemporary creative force then current work’s got to be taken into account. And listening to the new tracks can’t help but set a few alarm bells ringing. For a start, it sounds as if Yes are attempting to arbitrarily erase the intervening seventeen years since this line-up last played together, and to go back to the glitzy tail-end-of-first-generation prog they were doing in 1979 just when the rot first set in (and when cocaine, disco and attempts to steal a march on New Wave first began to interfere).
Right now, they seem to be writing off the stadium rock years led by former guitarist (and broad-spectrum producer-pop enthusiast) Trevor Rabin as if they were a temporary embarrassment, while simultaneously ditching everything which they learnt from those years. Into the bin goes the multi-track layering, MTV rock hooks and chart-teasing love songs. Out of the setlist and onto the shelf goes their early ’80s mega-hit Owner of a Lonely Heart. Also, it also seems as if Yes have gone from attempting to please the commercial market to attempting to indulge the 1970s fanbase. (Yes, choose your own route to potential artistic death, lads. Well done.)
The new tracks are indubitably a stopgap to keep those fans happy, pulling out all of the expected Yes ingredients. Classical guitar web-work, tight ensemble soloing; a structure as convoluted and precariously balanced as an orchid, dashes of classical structures and jazz harmony and an exploded concept that’s at least five times as big and bright as the world around it.
The problem is that Yes no longer sound haunting: they sound haunted. By their own past, no less. Hearing them continual harking back to ‘Topographic’ ambitions (fucking hell, you’d’ve thought they’d’ve learnt their lesson the first time round), dredging up old circus tricks and even incestuously close cousins of old riffs, one’s forced to think of an old acrobat slathering himself with liniment to handwalk the high wire in front of a cheering audience of young rivals and comeback rubberneckers… and then forgetting to wipe his hands before he takes hold of the rope.
Be the One kicks off with all the peak Yes joyousness, but sinks rapidly into baroque burbling and inflated pomp, Anderson’s melodies stretched to breaking point over slabby slices of ’70s seriousness. At nineteen minutes and seven sections, That, That Is sets itself up to be today’s Yes epic: and it nearly succeeds, with Chris Squire’s slithery bass riff capturing the blazing driven rush of On The Silent Wings Of Freedom and the whole swishing along in a set of colourful swerves you’d never have imagined could’ve come from a bunch of fifty year olds. Taking on contemporary concerns of crack in the cities and gang warfare, as if they were conscious hip hoppers, Yes conspicuous fail to do anything more to dress them up in cosmic flash and hurl them into orbit along with all of their old giant fish props and Roger Dean spacecraft.
It’s a bit like watching the Pope and all his cardinals trying to wrest control of a street football match. Anderson’s probably sincere, but he should leave this sort of thing to the hip hop nation… or at least to people who don’t point to New Age therapy as the obvious solution. Much ado about something important, achieving nothing despite its densely packed music. “Disjointed, but with purpose…” Yeah, Jon. You wish. Trying to force this flimsy, gaudy conceptual sheath onto a much knottier and uglier problem comes across as foolish at best, and as actively insulting at worst.
A prime old mixed bag then. There’s enough wanton brilliance on here to remind us of just what, in their chequered past, made Yes such a fantastic band and such a strong fusion of musical forces. There’s also enough rancid old codswallop to remind us just what insufferable heights of folly they can reach when they turn off their bullshit detector. Same old story… and it’s worrying that the codswallop counter is pointing more at the new stuff than at the old. But Yes’ often-naïve but unashamedly, sometimes transformatively beautiful light is shining brighter these days; and that’s definitely something to be glad about.
Where now, though?
Yes: ‘Keys to Ascension’
Castle Communications/Essential Records, GAS 0000417 EDF (5 017615 841725)
CD-only double album
Released: 28th October 1996 Get it from:(2020 update) Best obtained second-hand. Yes online:
Even as a small chunk of mid-’90s London rediscovered how to swing and posed for Time Magazine, life carried on as usual for most of the rest of us. The weeks of quiet desperation, the litter in the corners, the urges and the grinds that don’t match up. While the Britpop scene whooped it up in the happening neighbourhoods, Moonshake were sitting up late with whitened knuckles in rented high-rise rooms, or prowling the mean streets spitting out stories.
Moonshake’s intensely visual songwriting and soundcraft always seemed born of hard-boiled cinematic overload. On 1994’s stunning ‘The Sound Your Eyes Can Follow’, lead ‘Shake Dave Callahan rubbed the unsparing urban soul-mining of The The up against The Young Gods’ overpowering walls of sampled sound, and beat both of them for sheer grit and presence. Determinedly guitar-free, taking their cornered-rat savagery from Callahan’s paint-stripping sneer and Raymond Dickaty’s ferocious arsenal of treated saxes and flutes, Moonshake’s harrowing street-literature songs were heavily sample-textured: but they travelled light and fast, drawing on tooth-rattling, uptight, Can-inflected dub grooves. They were twenty-first-century urban blues, as tough and unyielding as steel wire. Most importantly, sound was everywhere: cramming into the ears, surrounding the head with a blurred, terrifying out-of-scale world.
For some, the methodology of post-rock has served as an excuse to get lost, to unshackle yourself from precision, swallow your own guitar, womb yourself up in universal sonic tissue and drop out of language altogether. For Moonshake, it goes the other way. Callahan’s bitter, precise, dramatic language – shading his harsh sorties into hard-times lives with a poetic flair reminiscent of a punk Dickens, or of Brecht and Weill – is central. It’s just that rock instrumentation is too imprecise, too blunt to do it justice. Post-rock possibilities, and the overwhelming landscapes regurgitated by samplers is the only sensible framework for the way this band captures the world. Moonshake songs are like ghost trains – whistling and rattling across the room on forbidding, chilling loops of warped and mangled sampled sound, whirling you through a clatter of noise; dropping you into the thick of things; fucking with your sense of placement and angles, and thrusting gritty reality into your face.
‘Dirty And Divine’ is – at first hearing, anyway – more modest in its scope than ‘The Sound Your Eyes Can Follow’, That album lunged out of the speakers and went for your throat, both the epic stinking script and score for a vast, hideous film about the downside of the London experience. In comparison, ‘Dirty And Divine’ is more Mike Leigh to its predecessor’s Terry Gilliam. The ram-raided orchestra samples are pared back in favour of metallic whooshes and industrial-sump bubbling; Dickaty’s been given a free rein to mutate himself into an ensemble of mangled brass and breath. Centrally, Callahan’s songwriting emphasis has narrowed down. The clank and snap of Cranes sets the agenda, capturing the ebb and flow of a locked-down, clock-watching workforce in widescreen: “the builders are earning their daily bread / and they make sure they eat it every day at one o’clock… / The housewife’s dreams evaporate / as her husband’s nightshift ends at eight.”
Yet ‘Dirty And Divine’ also provides the backdrop for rebellions against the timeclock and the grind. Most of the album homes in on the stories of individuals. Where previous songs were a pageant of strain, entrapment and stagnation (a whore and her regulars, a protracted divorce) this record deals with what happens when frustration breaks out and escalates into quests for further, greater stimulation. The chance-addict of Gambler’s Blues gropes for a chance to be empowered, to face a challenge he can respect (“sometimes I pluck order out of the form – / I slack for a moment, the moment is gone”) but pays the price anyway: “I’m a gambler, and sometimes I lose, / but the kick’s in the playing, not paying the dues. / Always an offer I cannot refuse, / always a time-bomb I cannot defuse.”
In Exotic Siren Song, a young man hits the wide world for a perilous life of opium-dens, brothels and high stakes, keeping company with gun-runners and fraudsters, dodging pirates and police. Initially rejoicing at the chance to live by his wits, he ends up jaded, complaining “nothing now is really new.” The adrenalin-hooked petty crook on Up For Anything lives by his instincts and his appetites – “I’ll balance on the balcony, twenty-one floors high, / swinging from the vapour trails, ropes in the sky… / I can’t count the conquests and I can’t tell the time.” The buzz is still strong enough for him to dismiss the damage that will come, when “in ten year’s time I’ll be the boy with the mashed potato body. / All this champagne living on beer money, / out among the bumper-car people who never say sorry.” His counterpart, the elusive criminal in House On Fire (think Nine Inch Nails meets ‘Badlands’) has perfected the art of living on the edge. His wife may break under police questioning, his invisibility may evaporate and the law pounce on him, but he’s already working on plans for manipulating his fellow jailbirds.
He’s the exception – in most songs the downslide is never far away. Throughout the album, speed and appetite are portrayed as a drive that becomes a monkey on the back. Yet while it lasts it’s a hell of a ride. Another of Callahan’s savage stress-head characters snarls: “You’re too open, and you’re too easy. / When I’m out, I do as I damn well pleasey… / The only light I need sweeps through the window… / Keeping a monster comes in handy. / Hard candy…” To stop and think in this rolling, callous world is to invite despair.
To do him credit, Callahan unflinchingly represents this as well, offering up a couple of his most intimate songs. The make-or-break musings of Nothing But Time ponder the next step (“now I come to a fork in the road”) and weigh up possibilities: “Shall I cause some destruction that none shall understand, / undyke my finger and flood the whole land?… / I let you go and then you come back. / Shall I pick at your nature until you react?” Ultimately, plans are left perpetually hanging in weary, lonely resignation (“I’ve got my own design for something quite grand… / You can appreciate even if you don’t understand,”) all wrapped in rolling Arabian horns and the gonging sound of empty vessels.
Too late. The Taboo (swathed in flugelhorn and rippling harpstrings) surfaces at the end of the album: the last moment of awful drunken clarity before the final fall. It’s a lament for the loss of honesty – for the lost ability to be vulnerable and unveil the tender truth of yourself. Cards should be on the table, but no-one will make the move. “If I were to be really careful, / and take pride in everything I do, / I would show you what ‘really’ is – / and I can’t, ‘cos it’s taboo.” The seasick backing music swirls: vision flattens. The loved one recedes across the table, behind a wall of well- worn gambling chips and smeared shot-glasses. “If I were to show you how I feel, / would you call me blue? / If we could reach out and touch each other? / But we can’t, ‘cos it’s taboo.” Almost touching, but out of sight. House wins.
This album is a brutally compassionate mausoleum to burnout, made from raw words and cracked sinews. Lay those dusty dreams to rest.
Wait in any given place for a long time and reckon up the odds. Which are you more likely to see passing by – Bigfoot, Lord Lucan, or a member of The Blue Nile? The chances are about equal each way.
In a business that thrives and surfeits on over-exposure, The Blue Nile only sidle into view when they absolutely have to. In fourteen years of tenuous existence, this reclusive biz-shy Glaswegian trio has offered up no more than three short albums of exquisite ambient Celtic soul; stripping away the armour of the heart with cheap drum machines, breathing synths and skeletal guitars, and the scalded, mournful grace of Paul Buchanan’s desperately romantic deep-tenor voice, leaving us flat on the floor and then departing so quietly we don’t hear the door shut.
While they’ve had stiff competition from Kate Bush and Scott Walker in the stakes for lying quietly in the long grass, sometimes The Blue Nile are out of view for so long that they seem no more than the shadows of our own heartbreaks. Three phantoms whom we can fill with the overflow of our ruined, hopeless good intentions and the agonising rush of a love with nothing and nowhere to ground itself on. Every now and then, though, they surface – as they have tonight – put out a record, and those shadows take on flesh.
But first we have Sinéad Lohan; a Cork lass with beaded hair, a salving murmur of a voice, and the composure of a marble Madonna figurine. From out of nowhere to the grandiosity of the Palladium, and still she’s not batting an eyelid as she delivers her soft thrumming folky songs to a warm reception. She even invites questions, and gets them. She has that atmosphere that some quietly private people have, the stillness that invites fascination.
From up here her eyes seem sleepy, focussed inwards, and her songs are the same, ripples of feeling reflected in still pools that make you feel like a privileged eavesdropper. All of this and the quietness makes her seem like an Irish Tanita Tikaram without the air of lazy resentment. After she’s left the stage, I realise I can’t actually remember what any of the songs were about, but the impressions of the emotions involved remain etched lightly on my imagination. She’s as subtle and strong a carver as smooth river water.
After seven years out of the public eye, most bands would return to the stage in a blaze of glory. The Blue Nile don’t even turn the lights out properly first as they slope onstage like reluctant supply teachers. I mistake them for roadies until I recognise Paul Buchanan’s pained, elegant features among the men fumbling to pick up the instruments, all but flinching at the applause and the eyes trained on them. But it’s something they’ll have to deal with.
For all of their heart-stricken loneliness, The Blue Nile carry a very special feeling of empathy and homecoming around with them. Literally, in some respects: tonight’s audience ripples with the voices of Glaswegian emigres. And when one Scots voice, brought to a pitch of excitement, calls out “Glasgow Celtic!” it’s followed as fast as a counterpunch by a Rangers fan’s disgusted “fuck off!” Rather than a slit face, this results in a ripple of laughter and recognition around the auditorium. There are wry, self-conscious chuckles from the band as they finally launch into the Van Morrison-gone-synth-pop chug’n’whoop of Body and Soul.
All of this civility (and this nod to a respectable musical touchstone) prompts the question. Have The Blue Nile, for all their cult status, ended up as another branch of hoary pop tradition for the impeccably adult? Certainly they shy away from sarky pop irony, and they’ve a sheepish but determined commitment to presenting their songs unvarnished by gimmicks. Don’t even try looking for Pet Shop Boys cleverness here.
And then there’s the impeccable cleanliness of their sound – the clipped white-gold ring of it, the slow stretch of the falling-evening keyboards, even the live drums compressed to stiff Linn thuds… Or, on the other hand, the occasional hints of country in the songs from the new ‘Peace At Last’ album and how Stay’s heartbroken synth pointillism develops from a Scottish electro-pop lament to a finale with suspicious hints of rockabilly or hoedown. And, of course, there’s the way Paul’s huge voice draws from Frank Sinatra’s warm cocooning sound, rather than any from any obvious rock source.
Sinatra, though, never sounded this touched; this blown through by overpowering feelings. Even behind the theatrics of his saddest songs there was a man preening in his power; the guy who was laughing now; the honorary Mob capo whose very tone was a muscle. Behind these songs are a man who winces; who knows the scuffed concrete in the buildings he walks past will outlive him. Who’s haunted by the moments where decisions rest before they fall into becoming facts, and who’s never short of melody but is often stripped of words. And who, on this occasion, is swigging Lemsip by the gallon to beat off a vicious cold. It brings the vulnerability of The Blue Nile’s songs into sharper focus.
But then they’ve never suggested that the business of being adult is supposed to be easy, or even make much sense. ‘Peace At Last’ made that as explicit as anything ever is in the Blue Nile universe – a middle-aged album (Paul Buchanan turned forty while recording it) which showed youthful, domestic and spiritual certainties past their flush and breaking down into a unflattering mirror of doubts and shaky illusions. A new testing ground after their landscapes of young men’s fears had slipped away back into the years. While The Blue Nile don’t go so far as to drag middle-aged trappings – such as chipped crucifixes or well-dusted-yet-unloved three-piece suites – onstage with them, they wouldn’t need them. The words to these songs swim to the surface in flashes; brief snatches and sketches of anguished images that settle into the heart’s eye as if their places had been waiting for them forever.
A couple of songs from 1989’s peerlessly lovelorn ‘Hats’ album illustrate this – Over The Hillside fumbles through the burden of day-to-day failure and the pull away from home; Headlights On The Parade sees Paul lose himself in night-haunted reverie, borne on by the serpentine romantic curve of the melody over the mechanistic drumming. Tonight’s rendition of Happiness, a song already riven by doubt (“Now that I’ve found peace at last, / tell me, Jesus, / will it last?”) has to replace the soaring black gospel chorus that boosts it on record with three uneasy white men murmuring into shared mikes. You wouldn’t have thought that it could reach the same hymnal level, but it does, albeit becoming more of a private prayer.
Another ‘Hats’ classic, The Downtown Lights, has the transcending, unresolved journey-feel of a crying fit; heart-stricken keyboard swells giving way to beautifully sad reflection and back again, rising to a frantic crescendo of loss. The atmospheric abstractions of A Walk Across The Rooftops don’t give away much in the way of clues, but they do give a night-time stroll a tint of darkest foreboding.
And Family Life just overwhelms – a mid-life crisis set to song. Echoes of Tom Waits, Randy Newman and crumbling Hollywood Christmases coming together in the heartbroken drunken pleas of a man whose marriage is unravelling, whose boyhood innocence is rising to ask bewildered questions. Paul, singing like a man suddenly and shockingly shrunken, plays the role to the hilt. But there’s no storytelling, no plot; just feelings and the alcohol dissolving reasoning down to more questions and a blurred, blundering comprehension. “Say, you know, / no honeymoons, / just separate chairs in separate rooms. / Jesus, please, / make us happy sometime – / no more shout, / no more fight…” As the last scraps of piano dissolve in the hush, the frenzied applause seems to spray tears of recognition and relief.
It’s still as un-showbiz as you can get. All of these emotions are being let off on a very tight leash. The magisterial Robert Bell doesn’t crack his stern kirkman’s expression all evening, whether he’s forcing compelling crabbed funk lines out of a bass, keening his rare backing vocals into Buchanan’s mike, or crouched cross-legged onstage beating out patterns from the tiny synth in his lap. Over on stage right, P.J. Moore plays with an abstracted serenity as the Blue Nile’s bare, effective colorations flood out from his keyboards. The supplemental three on drums, guitar and synths play with their heads slightly bowed – more quiet men. So it’s the hunched, embarrassed Buchanan that’s the reluctant centre of attention; muttering wry Glasgow “let’s-get-this-over-with” asides between the songs, but singing his heart out of his chest and punching it up at the sky every time the music rises.
I guess that even with embarrassment weighing at his coat-tails, he can’t help it. There’s often a desperate strand of hope-against-hope in The Blue Nile. The near-delirious Sentimental Man ascends out of a jumble of chippy funk facets to hit gospelly heights; the intently energised strum of Tomorrow Morning rushes towards the light as if Buchanan was trying to beat the pain off by hurtling towards hope. Tinseltown in the Rain – which belts along as if it was the peak of some uncompleted Glaswegian street-opera – bursts up to a plateau of emotion, aggressive certainty struggling with a sense of doom. (“do I love you? Yes, I love you! / Will we always be happy-go- lucky?… / But it’s easy come, and it’s easy go. / All this talking – / talking is only bravado”) before exploding in a carillon of stammering, tear-jerking guitar.
And on Saturday Night you can feel the blessed surge of relief at a simple romance – “an ordinary girl” hymned with a incredulous delight, an everyday date turned into a haven from the wracked, exhausting, damn-near-religious romantic angst of the Nile songbook – turning out right for once. As the last swooning joyous chimes mount the air, I hear a ecstatic voice screaming “Yes!”. It’s my own. I can’t help it either.
Later, Bell and Moore take up positions at the synths on each side of the stage, waiting to play Easter Parade. White-clad, calmly watching each other for the cue, they have the assured and tranquil air of surgeons waiting to lay on the hands and bring out the pain. Then the song comes – plangent clutchings of piano, gushes of night-breeze synth and Buchanan singing of being alone in a rapt crowd, carried along like a solitary bubble in their exhilaration. And the empathy is summoned up and floods through us like medicine.
They can still touch the pressure points of the soul like no-one else. In another few months they’ll be hiding from us again, but that touch is going to stay with us until they feel able to venture out into the world again, blinking with trepidation at the looming feelings waiting to catch them.
When they’re performing, flute players always look as if they’ve got a small, mysterious smile on their lips. Perhaps it just comes with the technique, but it’s an expression which seems to sit more appropriately on the faces of certain flautists than on others.
On the face of Eddie Parker, for instance: one of Django Bates‘ circle of contemporary British jazzers, and therefore an affable, witty maverick able to call on the services of a whole gang of other affable, witty mavericks. He’s spent time with Bates in the gloriously rowdy Loose Tubes (where he first made his mark as a writer) and in Delightful Precipice, contributing to a wealth of exuberant, contortionistic musical moments. Outside of the Loose Tubes alumni circle he’s blown away hardened New York jazz execs as the secret weapon on Bheki Mseleku’s ‘Celebration’, and has notched up work with Jazz Umbrella and with John Stevens’ Freebop along the way.
His 1994 solo debut, ‘Transformations of the Lamp’, brought his effervescent writing skills and bandleader’s warmth to the fore in a group partnering him with a couple of animated yet unsung heroes of the British new jazz crowd (journeyman pianist Pete Saberton and Perfect Houseplants drummer Mike Pickering) and two of his fellow Loose Tubes (saxophonist Julian Nicholas and double bassist Steve Watts). This follow-up – adding guitarist John Parricelli, a third ex-Tube – takes the celebratory warmth and involvement of Parker’s music even further.
If there’s one image that an Eddie Parker tune (usually blending Latin-American liveliness and township jazz celebration with a gently mischievous, cheeky British disrespectfulness) tends to bring to mind, it’s a picture of the Thames Valley suffused by bright Brazilian light and carnival energy. As perfectly illustrated on Mystery in Three: an opening of swimming, dreamy ringing melting with a airborne swish into Saberton’s animated, bunny-hopping piano and Parricelli’s sliding Larry Carlton guitar swells, while Parker and Nicholas trade off sprightly, interlocking, chatty dialogues of flute and soprano sax.
But with Parker’s background, you can’t expect even music this breezy to stay altogether straight, and part of the group’s skill is to mix up the virtuoso complexity of the tunes with a reckless, teasing sense of ridiculous good humour. Wonky Chorino – an animated, loose limbed Brazilian frolic, ambling back and forth like a seven legged donkey loose in the town square – lurches teasingly towards parody while always, laughingly, pulling itself back on the lifeline of its own breezy wit. It’s paired with Twerp, a bouncing bop disguised as light elevator funk continually landing on the wrong foot: sunny, carefree, fool on the hill flute leads, an alto sax nattering cheerfully to itself, and Parricelli’s soft interjections on wah-wah guitar. Lovably bewildered, like one of those endearingly clumsy guys who survive life by means of their unconscious, innocent charm.
But beyond this bubbling vivacity there’s a new quality to Parker’s work. Much of his previous writing seems to have rushed along with a crowded yet joyful clarity, but half of ‘Everything You Do to Me’ slips off sideways into a much less sturdy, unstable region fraught with deadfalls, pits, tricky space. While the warmth of Parker’s compositional personality remains consistent, here the group is cat-stepping through traps, delighting in their own agility, yet disorientated by the vanishing of landmarks.
Brocken Spectre emerges from a spiky snaggled mass of intersecting bebop melody ettes; mountaineering via long, leaping polyangular flute runs, taking the lead over staggered piano and ride cymbal and Parricelli’s distractedly comping guitar. It’s named after a high-altitude illusion, and sounds like it, with the music breaking down into instrumental doppelganging piano ornaments, crash cymbal swells, eerie flickery unisons of flute, tenor sax and guitar; a battle between abstract spikiness and propulsive swing. A tumble of sax leads to a crash, and then silence. Finally, a bass flute breathing fractured, forgetful waltz patterns, lilting back and forward in mirror images over spurts of confused piano.
It gets odder. Variable Geometry is a perilous quicksand of shifting rhythms, accents and tempos, Parker’s flute cautiously peeping out into a landscape of terse guitar blares and edgy piano. Mike Pickering (an excellent yet strangely self effacing presence throughout the album) works and manipulates the band with subtly sadistic tricks of timing and rogue beats as the band flit between free jazz games of chicken and acerbic electric keyboard workouts (like a cut-up Headhunters or Stevie Wonder in one of his occasional bouts of synth rage).
Auster, named after the Greek god of the south west wind, moves like fresh green leaves in a swirl of gently disturbed, randomised air. A free time feel, a cryptic ‘I Sing the Body Electric’ bass clarinet; Frisell-style yawns of guitar, disconnected piano; Parker drawing out high, shut eye musings over the top. Gradually it gets more involved and intense, finally clenching down to Derek Bailey guitar clicks and high tom skitters.
At last the flirtation with confusion becomes a full-blown affair on Delirium, which you can trace as you listen to it. The initial dazed Wayne Shorter pronouncements of Nicholas’ sax, sitting at the centre of the music, while flutes and arpeggiated guitar reel dizzily around it. The entry of the piano, displacing the drums: Parricelli’s guitar working away with the disorientated determination of John McLaughlin staggering away from a whirling carousel. The tripping melody establishing itself on the wind instruments as piano and guitar take up the reeling duties. A few moments of unified group arpeggios. Then a halt, then delirium transforming into vision as Parker gently soars lark like over Saberton’s floridly romantic piano, eventually joined by Nicholas’ sober tenor, resting from its delirium. A return to the melody, this time led by a forthright, exuberantly overdriven Parricelli. Finally a triumphant and conclusive unified chord, as the haze clears and resolution’s achieved.
After these journeys through chaotic freedom there’s a return to security, solidity, and faith, handled with as much sensitivity and control as all of Parker’s previous brinkmanship. Everything You Do to Me’s title track is a soft, wondering expression of utter love; a John Coltrane ballad refracted through Django Bates at his most delicate, up there with A Remark You Made as a modern classic. The sleepy, post-coital embrace of Parricelli’s guitar and the tender, barely-there burr of Nicholas’ tenor mingle with Parker’s gently lyrical piano lines, like a feathery caress of the fingertips along the back of a sleeping lover.
Music that embraces you, yes… but look out for that small enigmatic smile on its lips.
Eddie Parker Group: ‘Everything You Do to Me’ Future Music Records, FMR CD29 E0496 (7 86497 18202 2)
CD-only album
Released: 1st October 1996 Get it from:(2020 update) CD best obtained second-hand. Eddie Parker online:
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