Album: MASSIVE ATTACK – Heligoland (Virgin 2010)

One of the problems of a seven year wait for an album is that people’s expectations get higher and higher with time. Almost inevitably this leads to disappointment. The most common whinge I’ve read about Heligoland is that it’s not Mezzanine. Well, that was twelve years ago. If Massive Attack had come up with Mezzanine II, the consensus would probably be that they’d become stuck in a rut. So they could never really win.

I must admit, that the first couple of listens didn’t really bowl me over, with a couple of exceptions. But having lived with it for a while, it’s really grown on me. More than on any previous album, it’s the featured vocalists that are pushed to the forefront. In some ways it feels like the band have worked around the singers rather than adopted them as honoury members, and so the album plays like a well chosen and well programmed compilation tape rather than a coherent piece of work.

Four of the tracks do feature the old guard of 3D, G and Horace Andy, and its not altogether surprising that these are the ones that sound most like the old Massive Attack. All three appear on “Splitting the Atom”, a song that’s built on a deceptively simple beat and stabs of organ, but flowers into some of the most impressive vocal work that the trio have done. 3D takes the reins on “Rush Minute”, a track that would have fit just fine on M*******e, and on the lengthy closer “Atlas Air” which, despite its unpromising beginnings of a clicktrack disco beat and Wurlitzer organ, develops into a hypnotic dark groove and ends in a collision of early Tangerine Dream and acid techno. It’s brilliant, and only topped in this quartet by the terrific, dense psychosis of Horace Andy’s “Girl I Love You” with its superbly atonal brass and deep guitar drone. In my view it’s his finest track with the band.

The other six songs feature the guests. No one fits in as well as Shara Nelson did, but there’s nothing as remotely jarring as Sinead O’Connor’s contributions to 100th Window either. Martina Topley-Bird is pretty much part of the family anyway, although neither of her contributions, “Babel” and “Psyche”, really stand out, enjoyable as they are. Hope Sandoval does what Hope Sandoval always does, and makes her contribution sound like a Hope Sandoval song. It’s that sexy, sleepy drawl that she does so brilliantly. She’s a bit of a one-trick pony, but does her trick better than anyone, so who’s to criticise? “Paradise Circus” kind of puts her on a pedestal, as the band surround her with a rich sonic pallette. It’s a gorgeous track.

The three tunes with guest male singers seem to be the ones that most people have a problem with, probably because none of the trio seems much like a Massive Attack type vocalist. Indeed, the slight tones of Tunde Adebimpe do nothing for me, and a stripped down instrumental version of “Prayer For Rain” would have been a far more positive way to lead into the record. Guy Garvey is a bit of a marmite singer. Sure he’s emotional, but his kind of troubador balladry is an awkward fit in this context. “Flat of the Blade” is definitely a grower, though. I didn’t like it at all on first hearing, but I’m warming to it. Finally, the guy who gets the most flack is Damon Albarn, doing his plaintive East End orphan thing on “Saturday Come Slow”. That lad sure gets some people’s backs up! I think it’s an excellent piece, with some really dirty distortion thrown in to counterbalance the winsomeness.

So, it’s not Mezzanine. It doesn’t have that undercurrent of darkness, dread and discomfort. But then Heligoland wasn’t born into an atmosphere of civil war, so it’s bound to be lighter in mood. It has its gloomy moments, but generally it has a fairly upbeat tone without sacrificing the depth. The production is tremendous, too. The naysayers may find that this is an album that will grow on them, and that they’ll be playing it more than they expected. It deserves the effort.

Tracks
1 Pray For Rain 6:44
2 Babel 5:20
3 Splitting The Atom 5:17
4 Girl I Love You 5:27
5 Psyche 3:25
6 Flat Of The Blade 5:30
7 Paradise Circus 4:58
8 Rush Minute 4:51
9 Saturday Come Slow 3:44
10 Atlas Air 7:49

Websites
massiveattack.com

Oxfam Glasgow Book Quiz II

It’s back. ’twas supposed to be a quarterly thing, but never mind. Eight months on from the inaugural Oxfam Glasgow Book Quiz, the second takes place on Tuesday March 9th at approx 7.30/8 at the 78 Bar, Kelvinhaugh Street (same place as last time). The format will be similar. Proceeds were always planned to go to Haiti, even before the catastrophic earthquake, and they still will, but as funding for ongoing projects, not just disaster relief.

Anyway, if you can, come along. You’ll see me in the flesh doing my Bamber Gasciogne / Jeremy Paxman impression.

Updates at the Oxfam Bookshop blog here.

Album: REDHOOKER – Vespers (Soft Landing 2010)

Redhooker is a Brooklyn based chamber quartet / quintet led by Slow Six’s guitarist Stephen Griesgraber. Also on board are current and former Slow Six violinists Ben Lively and Maxim Moston, plus third violinist Andie Springer and bass clarinetist Peter Hess. Since their last mini LP, 2007’s The Future According to Yesterday, the ensemble’s sound has changed with the loss of Rob Collins’ electric piano. This leaves the guitar and bass clarinet to provide much of the rhythmic structure while the violins provide most of the melodic colour.

The six tracks that make up Vespers include four composed pieces and two lengthy improvisations. The former are generally reflective chamber pieces, although “Friction” has a sprightly air about it and “Trip and Fall” builds from something melancholy into something full-blooded and joyful..

The improvised tracks have a completely different character, with drone and space as their foundation. “Presence and Reflection” is like a dust cloud of sound that gradually coalesces and gains form and structure with a simple guitar progression emerging more than half way through that has a melody the others eventually follow and work around. It’s a beautifully constructed and paced piece. “Black Light Poster Child” creaks and sighs like the hull of a galleon, before drifting into a narcotic drone-piece over which micro-melodies rise and fall. And then it gradually dissolves away into the void.

The composed pieces are delightful and full of charm, especially the closing track, but for me it’s the two longform works that make Vespers essential listening.

Tracks
1 . Standing Still 5:48
2 . Bedside 5:35
3 . Presence and Reflection 12:53
4 . Friction 4:32
5 . Black Light Poster Child 14:26
6 . Trip and Fall 6:24

Websites
www.myspace.com/redhooker

The Absurdities of Copyright Writ Large…

Spot on piece by the reliably grumpy Marx’s Beard on the recent Men at Work copyright infringement case down under (sic). Well worth reading:

The Absurdities of Copyright Writ Large…

The week #1

Coming up to this blog’s third birthday. Lack of time means that I can’t write as much as I want to about stuff, especially with the amount of music I’ve got in my ‘to listen to’ pile. So I thought I’d start a weekly blurb of bits and pieces, general thoughts etc. that otherwise wouldn’t get an airing.

Coming soon – reviews of Erik XVI remixes and a new album by Redhooker. Tonight, though, I’ve been listening to Manifesto, a compilation I was sent by the FeedbackLoop Label back in early December (I know). It’s a terrific genre-bending release available free from the label for download from feedbacklooplabel.blogspot.com. The music ranges from gentle, ethereal pop, to blasts of electronic noise and everything in between. It’s a fantastic collection that features some acts I’ve written about before like Karlheinz Essl, Pintail, Elisa Luu and Subterminal, but many others that are new to me. A couple of tracks that leaped out on first listen were the 12 minute turntable static and found sound epic by Aaldo and the ghostly “The Night Sky” by Jednota feat. Wood Nymph. If I get the chance, I’ll do a proper review.

Mojo this month has a cover CD of Syd Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs reinterpreted by various folk. It’s a decidedly mixed bag as these things often are, but I liked the Mascis, Besnard Lakes, Hope Sandoval and Hawkwind tracks.

Telly wise, I’m a Mad Men addict, and season three is proving just as brilliant as the previous two.

Not much else to report. I’m headed down south for the first time in a year next weekend. Should catch the mighty Windsor & Eton FC, currently unbeaten and 17 points clear at the top of the Zamaretto South West division, take on Mangotsfield. Heady days!

The M M & M 1000 – part 53

Here’s the latest batch of Music Musings and Miscellany’s unapologetically subjective selection of the twentieth century’s best 1000 singles. Wrapping up the Ss.

VELVET UNDERGROUND – Sunday Morning / Femme Fatale (Verve 1966)
A deceptively bucolic way to begin The Velvet Underground and Nico. Anyone who bought the album back in ‘67 simply on the back of this calm and optimistic little number must have got the shock of their lives by the time “Black Angel Death Song” and “European Son” came around!

DWIGHT PULLEN – Sunglasses After Dark / Teen Age Bug (Carlton 1958)
Classic bad boy rock & roll from Dwight Pullen that was never a hit in its day, but was immortalised years later by the Cramps. Sadly, Pullen never lived to see that, dying of prostate cancer in 1961.

CREAM – Sunshine of Your Love / SWLABR (Reaction 1968)
One of those immortal guitar riffs. For me, Hendrix totally owned it when he played it on the Lulu Show.

GANJA KRU – Super Sharp Shooter / Revolution (Parousia 1996)
BEASTIE BOYS – Sure Shot / Mullet Head (Capitol 1994)
Ganja Kru were a collective of three renowned drum & bass producers – Hype, Zinc and Pascal. “Super Sharp Shooter” was Zinc’s baby, a kind of gangsta jungle using samples of LL Cool J and Method Man. Still rolls like a bastard. “Timing Like A Clock When I Rock The Hip Hop / Top Notch Is My Stock On The Soap Box” says Ad Rock and who could disagree? What a banging tune “Sure Shot” is, with the trio at the top of their game.

CURTIS MAYFIELD – Superfly / Underground (Curtom 1972)
Along with Isaac Hayes’s Shaft, Superfly represents the cream of the early seventies blaxploitation soundtracks. While the movie portrayed the titular drug dealer as some kind of urban hero, the morally centred Mayfield provided a contrasting soundtrack that focused on the victims, and portrayed Superfly himself as an arrogant, urban menace.

CARPENTERS – Superstar / Bless the Beasts and Children (A&M 1971)
Sonic Youth teased a hidden darkness out of this song with Thurston Moore’s sinister half-whispered vocal. But that was perhaps coloured by the tragedy of Karen Carpenter’s death. Her own version is rich and honeyed, although not without a little melodrama.

STEVIE WONDER – Superstition / You’ve Got It Bad Girl (Tamla 1972)
One of the great intros, a bubbling funky keyboard pattern that gets the body moving even before the drums come in. The brass adds even more spice to the brew, and Stevie gives a wonderfully loose vocal performance. One of the best things from the beginning of his five year creative zenith.

BEACH BOYS – Surfer Girl / Little Deuce Coupe (Capitol 1963)
BEACH BOYS – Surf’s Up / Don’t Go Near the Water (Brother 1971)
Just the way they fell, but if I were to choose two songs to bookend the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson’s journey from youth to nostalgic adulthood it would be these. “Surfer Girl” may be a ballad, but it’s a joyful paean to first love that is as much a tribute to the great doowop groups of the fifties as it is to the Californian surfing scene. While the lyrics of “Surf’s Up” may border on the incomprehensible (“Columnated ruins domino” anyone?), there’s definitely a poetry about them, and an atmosphere of dusty nostalgia with some heart-wrenching moments. “The laughs come hard in Auld Lang Syne” is a particularly perceptive line that covers the march of time and loss of youth, and brings a sad resonance to a song that is always sung in a joyful spirit. The multiple melodies and the arrangement of the piece are both near perfect. A song to wallow in.

STIFF LITTLE FINGERS – Suspect Device / Wasted Life (Rigid Digits 1978)
While the English punks whined about being bored (get a hobby) or being on the dole (no, I’m not going to say it – I’m not Norman Tebbitt), across the water in Belfast, the kids had something to be genuinely angry about – especially those who hadn’t been brainwashed into sectarian hatred by those twin bastions of liberalism the puritanical, pope-bashing protestants and the guilt as control freakery of the Vatican. “Suspect Device” explodes with anger at the petty bigotry of the province. It’s an important record in that it gave people on the mainland a real glimpse that Northern Ireland wasn’t just a swirling sea of sectarian hatred, but that there were people as pissed off with the whole situation as anybody, but whose voices were seldom heard above all the posturing and the constant stream of atrocities.

ELVIS PRESLEY – Suspicious Minds / You’ll Think of Me (RCA 1969)
From his brief late sixties renaissance when the music began to matter again. A gloriously huge-sounding soup of paranoia, jealousy, suspicion and despair sung like it’s really meant.

CHAMELEONS – Swamp Thing / John I’m Only Dancing (Geffen 1986)
The endless intro probably didn’t endear this to commercial radio, but it’s integral to the song, a cavestomp that’s nothing to do with fifties sci-fi, but everything to do with disengagement from a world that would sell you your own blood if it could.

CHIFFONS – Sweet Talkin’ Guy / Did You Ever Go Steady (Laurie 1966)
By 1966, the girl meets boy froth of the early sixties had become an anachronism. Emotions ran deeper in popular song, reflecting a change in American teen-hood from the prom and soda fountain world to garage bands, drugs and an increased political awareness. “Sweet Talkin’ Guy” is one of the last classic songs from an age of innocence that had already passed.

LUSH – Sweetness and Light / Breeze (4AD 1990)
I might be wrong, but wasn’t the term shoegazers originally coined in a review of a Lush gig? It was unfair, if true, because the band always had a breeziness and lightness of touch absent from the plodding likes of Chapterhouse. The heavy handed, muffled production of their debut album Spooky by Robin Guthrie is one of the worst cases of production vandalism I’ve heard to be filed along side Spector’s desecration of Leonard Cohen’s Death of Ladies Man. Predating this, “Sweetness and Light” is airy and dreamy, particularly in its full incarnation on the twelve inch.

More soon

Album: TINDERSTICKS – Falling Down a Mountain (4AD / Constellation 2010)

Over the years, Tindersticks have become one of those venerable groups that seem critic proof. As each album emerges, it generally receives glowing praise, but very little context from any mainstream journalists. If you wanted to know where a record stood in the band’s pantheon, you’d be none the wiser after reading through the dashed-off hackwork that passes for most mainstream criticism these days. (In journalists’ defence, they are too often given something like one paragraph, a hundred words and a internet-beating deadline to produce something – not exactly ideal conditions for great writing).

The reason I brought this up, is that I’ve seen nothing but praise for Falling Down a Mountain, an album which in my view is the weakest thing they’ve ever put their name to. It’s the second release by the shorn-off band, but that’s not the problem. After all, the Hungry Saw, for all its flaws, had a handful of tunes that can be counted among their very best work (In particular “Boobar” and “The Turns We Took”).

This album seems like the work of a band looking for a new direction but finding only dead ends. The title track, a clattering, seemingly semi-improvised jazz-influenced piece with a repetitive lyric is a brave way to start, and it works. But the momentum is lost by the insipid “Keep You Beautiful”. From there on in, there’s a mixture of balladry and loose rock that sometimes seems oddly reminiscent of Iggy Pop’s Berlin albums. But memorable tunes are in short supply, and the lyrical content is way below the standard you’d expect from Stuart Staples.

Saving graces are “Peanuts”, a duet with the sainted Mary Margaret O’Hara, that is a kind of 21st century Nancy and Lee with added kookiness and the two instrumentals “Hubbards Hill” and the gloriously lush “Piano Music”. It’s understandable that the band would want to try their hand at more urgent and sparer material, but the uptempo tracks are flat and lacking in drama, unworthy of comparison to “Her”, an old song that (still) proves the band can roar when they want to.

All great bands eventually make a mediocre record. In time they’re forgotten. It’s disappointing that a band that were so immense the last time I saw them in October 2008 have come up with something so lacklustre.

Tracks
1 Falling Down A Mountain
2 Keep You Beautiful
3 Harmony Around My Table
4 Peanuts
5 She Rode Me Down
6 Hubbards Hill
7 Black Smoke
8 No Place So Alone
9 Factory Girls
10 Piano Music

Websites
www.tindersticks.co.uk

Mini Album: GOOD WEATHER FOR AN AIRSTRIKE – Signals (Sonic Reverie 2010)

Good Weather For An Airstrike is the project of Winchester based guitarist Tom Honey, although it has to be said there ain’t a great deal of guitar on it. Signals is predominantly a set of ambient pieces, some drone-based such as the mordant bass tones of “Beside Me Today”, but others with more intricate instrumentation – even live drums on the short “A Last Farewell and We Shall Run”.

The title track has a melody played by something that sounds like a glass harmonica over a looped background of fizz and chimes. It’s a reflective, but captivating little piece. Opener “Hand in Hand Into the Ocean Blue” sounds like it took less long to compose than it took to type, but it’s the only throwaway piece. The real stars of the show are the two versions of “We Fall Back Into The Ocean” which are both gorgeous. Imagine a cross between Brian Eno’s Apollo and some of Max Richter’s more reflective work, and you’ll be somewhere there.

Signals‘ genesis lies in Honey trying to compose music to fall asleep to, having suffered from tinnitus-induced insomnia for a while. The music is certainly gentle enough for slumber, but I wouldn’t want to doze off before the final track! The EP / mini LP (take your pick) is available as a free download from the Sonic Reverie website

Tracks
1 . Hand In Hand Into The Ocean Blue 1:48
2 . We Fall Back Into The Ocean 4:11
3 . Beside Me Today 5:48
4 . A Last Farewell and We Shall Run 2:03
5 . Signals 4:24
6 . We Fall Back Into The Ocean (reprise) 7:13

Websites
sonicreverie.bandcamp.com
www.myspace.com/gwfaa