A Few Forthcoming Releases – May 2010

May 3rd

• APPLES IN STEREO – Travellers In Space and Time (Yep Roc)
• DOSH – Tommy (Anticon)
• FLYING LOTUS – Cosmogramma (Warp)
• FUNKI PORCINI – On (Ninja Tune)
• KINGBASTARD – Beautiful Isolation (Herb)
• MURS – Fornever (SMC)
• VARIOUS – Auteur Labels: Independent Project (LTM)
• WALLS – Walls (Kompakt)

May 10th

• A GUY CALLED GERALD – Tronic Jazz: The Berlin Sesions (Laboratory Instinct)
• BILL LASWELL – Dub Chamber Vol.4: Book of Exit (Roir)
• BLACK DOG – Music for Real Airports (Soma)
• BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE – Forgiveness Rock Record (City Slang)
• IMAGINARY FORCES – Filth Columnist (Ohm Resistance)
• NATIONAL – High Violet (4AD)
• NEU! – Vinyl Box Set (Gronland)
• OLAFUR ARNALDS – And They Have Escaped The Weight Of Darkness (Erased Tapes)
• ROEDELIUS – The Diary Of The Unforgotten (Selbstportrait VI) (Bureau B)
• RUDI ZYGADLO – Great Western Laymen (Planet Mu)
• SAGE FRANCIS – Li(f)e (Anti)
• UNKLE – Where Did the Night Fall (Surrender All)

May 17th

• ELLEN ALLIEN – Dust (BPitch Control)
• JAMIE LIDELL – Compass (Warp)
• LCD SOUNDSYSTEM – This Is Happening (EMI)
• SLEEPY SUN – Fever (ATP)
• TRACEY THORN – Love And Its Opposite (Strange Feeling)

May 24th

• FAUST – Faust Is Last (Klangbad)
• KEN IKEDA – Kosame (Spekk)
• MEURSAULT – All Creatures Will Make Merry (Song by Toad)
• SCORN – Refuse; Start Fires (Ohm Resistance)

May 31st

• KLUTE – Music for Prophet (Commercial Suicide)
• LAND OF KUSH’S EGYPTIAN LIGHT ORCHESTRA – Monogamy (Constellation)
• MELVINS – The Bride Screamed Murder (Ipecac)
• TELEVISION PERSONALITIES – A Memory Is Better Than Nothing (Rocket Girl)

Jun 7th

• A CERTAIN RATIO – Mind Made Up (LTM)
• ASTRAL SOCIAL CLUB – Happy Horse (Happy Prince)
• BRENDAN PERRY – Ark (Cooking Vinyl)
• CHEMICAL BROTHERS – Further (Freestyle Dust)
• ISAN – Glow In The Dark Safari Set (Morr Music)
• WOLFGANG VOIGT – Freiland Klaviermusik (Profan)

Jul 5th

• MATMOS – Treasure State (Cantaloupe)

EPs: LOUD AND SAD – TM_09 (Electric Tapes 2009) / TALVIHORROS – Let Us Be Thankful We Have Commerce (My Dance The Skull 2010)

Just a short mention of a couple of interesting EPs. First up a single track 3 inch CD recorded in Vermont in March last night by the duo Loud and Sad which consists of Joe Houpert and Nathan McLaughlin. This is a long form piano piece that stands as a kind of work in progress for their forthcoming album False Intimacy. Using two pianos and a series of effects, they’ve created a long, atmospheric piece that exists somewhere between John Cage’s prepared piano compositions, and William Basinski’s tape loop works. It’s quite abstract, and yet has a consistent atmosphere and calm centre.

Talvihorros’s Let Us Be Thankful We Have Commerce is a first for MMM in that it’s a C20 cassette with two untitled ten minute tracks. Talvihorros is London based Ben Chatwin, and he too has an LP imminent entitled Music In Four Movements. The tracks on this release are very filmic, with themes developing and then moving on, passages of static noise, atmospheric melody and ghostly voice samples. The second piece is particularly impressive as it emerges from some distant nightmarish swirl of looped voices into a guitar and gamelan dub.

Both of these releases are the kind of marginal mega-limited type things that have a certain kind of collector frothing at the mouth. For me, none of that’s important. It’s the music that matters and I’d recommend the pair of them.

Websites
loudandsad.com
www.talvihorros.com
www.mydancetheskull.com

The M M & M 1000 – part 60

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

PUBLIC ENEMY – Welcome to the Terrordrome / version (Def Jam 1990)
Not just an intense rush of sonic warfare, but a masterclass in rapping from Chuck D. The rhythms and rhymes in the verses are incredible, and the lyrics themselves are both an astute political scattergun attack on modern society and also a joyful barrage of wordplay almost for the hell of it.

McCARTHY – Well of Loneliness / Antimamericancretin / Unfortunately (September 1987)
Jangly agitpropers McCarthy also had a gifted lyricist in Malcolm Eden. Well of Loneliness has nothing much to do with the Radclyffe Hall novel of the same name. Instead it’s a world-weary piece of defeatist cynicism. Nothing’ll change, so what’s the point? A view, I might add, that Eden the optimist is satirising.

LOUIS ARMSTRONG & HIS HOT FIVE – West End Blues / Fireworks (Okeh 1928)
PET SHOP BOYS – West End Girls / A Man Could Get Arrested (Parlophone 1985)
One of the very best tunes from a three year period during which Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Sevens rolled out classic after classic, West End Blues is a mournful piece, swaying almost drunkenly. Perhaps the tune that fits the prohibition era more than any other in its air of melancholy and moonshine. Sixty years on, there is an air of sadness to West End Girls, too, that also reflects the age of rampant greed and an ever-widening gap between the haves and the have nots. The east end boys are the Flash ‘Arry brokers of the Loadsamoney generation, and the west end girls the ‘class’ that they aspire to. Consume, consume, consume – but as Tennant says in the second verse – “How much do you need?“

RUTS – West One (Shine On Me) / The Crack (Virgin 1980)
Malcolm Owen’s final statement before his death from a heroin overdose is another song that fits the vague theme of the last few of being cut adrift and lost in a society that never turns back to pick up stragglers. A lot of punk bands did reggae, usually badly, but the Ruts were the only ones who managed to fit driving rock and dub together like they were natural bedfellows. West One’s final two minutes is essentially ‘versioned’ from the first three, and just adds to the feeling of disconnection.

PFM – The Western / Hypnotising (Good Looking 1995)
Not the Italian proggers of the same name, PFM were originally junglists Mike Bolton and Jamie Saker. The Western is possibly the finest example of the ambient/electronica side of drum & bass pioneered by LTJ Bukem’s Good Looking Records. Some muppet labelled the sound ‘Intelligent Drum & Bass’, a patronising epiphet that fortunately didn’t stick. The track is an eight minute gallop through the grandeur of Monument Valley – John Ford does jungle.

JIMMY RUFFIN – What Becomes of the Broken Hearted / Baby I’ve Got It (Soul 1966)
JR. WALKER – What Does It Take? / Brainwasher (Soul 1969)
Two belting Motown tunes that everybody is probably familiar with. Walker’s was the more surprising, as he’d never done much in the way of conventional pop-soul before – the All Stars forté was groove-based, brass-led and tight as a gnat’s anus.

SMITHS – What Difference Does It Make? / Back to the Old House (Rough Trade 1984)
For those who weren’t around at the time, it’s hard to stress enough what difference they actually did make. At the time, the NME (then pretty much the official arbiter of what was cool and what wasn’t) had virtually sidelined guitar rock in favour of white-boy funk, Latin disco, jazz-lite and (more understandably) hip hop, electro and go-go. Guitar rock was there to be sneered at, in the main. The Smiths gave the genre a new lease of life (as, in a different way, did the likes of the Minutemen, Husker Du, the Replacements and their ilk across the pond). Unfortunately, 25 years on, their legacy seems more a curse than a blessing.

BUZZCOCKS – What Do I Get? / Oh Shit (United Artists 1978)
The grandfathers of emo? Discuss.

DJ SHADOW – What Does Your Soul Look Like? parts 1-4 (Mo Wax 1995)
OK, stretching my own definition of what is a single here. You could argue it’s not even an EP, but a short album. Whatever. This is Shadow at his best, something, sadly, that he hasn’t begun to approach in recent years. Four pieces of sample based instrumental hip hop that are chilled and expansive. Near as dammit perfect.

PET SHOP BOYS – What Have I Done to Deserve This? / A New Life (Parlophone 1987)
Tennant and Lowe again, this time helping to give Dusty Springfield’s career a deserved Indian Summer. One of the finest singers these islands have ever produced, she was always unfairly put in the box marked ‘middle of the road entertainers’ with the likes of the vastly inferior Cilla and Lulu. Even her (now recognised) masterpiece Dusty In Memphis bombed when it was first issued. She only sings the chorus on this song, but can’t help stealing the show.

GANG OF FOUR – What We All Want / History’s Bunk (EMI 1981)
They never recaptured the glory of their first album, and Solid Gold was (unfairly) seen as a massive disappointment when it came out. The real dross came later. What We All Want is an anti-consumerist anthem built on a crushing bass and drums rhythm.

RAY CHARLES – What’d I Say / part 2 (Atlantic 1959)
Pretty much Ray’s parting shot for Atlantic before he joined ABC and achieved full crossover stardom with the, frankly, ghastly Modern Sounds in Country and Western albums. This is his true legacy. Furious call and response Gospel-soul.

MARVIN GAYE – What’s Going On? / God Is Love (Tamla 1971)
Not a lot I can say about this that hasn’t been said by others. A canonical song from a canonical album.

INVITATIONS – What’s Wrong With Me Baby? / Why Did My Baby Turn Bad (Dynovoice 1965)
Even though I always head this series with a disclaimer that it is totally subjective, one of the major problems of attempting something like this is that there is just so much music that I’ve never heard and never will. Obviously, you get to hear major hits as you go through life and then you get a feel for the artists you like and it all snowballs from there. A lot of songs you hear totally by accident. I hadn’t a clue who the Invitations were, but this song appeared on a Northern Soul comp I bought. It just stood out for me. To be honest, it could be by anybody. The band don’t have anything that marks them out from a thousand other soul vocal groups, and the sound is strictly copycat Motown. But the song’s just great. There’s probably thousands of things out there this good which could have made it on this list if not for pure chance.

More soon

Album: KINGBASTARD – Beautiful Isolation (Herb 2010)

First up, there’s been a lot of talk about hypnagogic pop recently (in the Wire in particular). My dictionary defines hypnagogic as 1. of or pertaining to drowsiness and 2. inducing drowsiness. Is that really what they mean – pop that makes you sleepy? Or is it just misuse of big words that folk don’t really know the meaning of?

It’s just an aside, although there is a sense that the adjective could be used to describe the new Kingbastard magnum opus Beautiful Isolation. It’s too good to induce drowsiness, but it does inhabit a weird area between dreams and reality.

Anyone familiar with Chris Weeks’ previous works will know him as a playful and eclectic purveyor of electronic music that weaves found sounds and acoustic instrumentation into its melodic fabric. But they won’t be prepared for this at all. Beautiful Isolation plunders its ideas from prog, psych, folk, ambient, new age and soft rock but in unexpected ways. It’s an odyssey of sound and song that is consistently fascinating. Although there are ten tracks, most don’t stick to one theme throughout and often go wandering off in unrelated directions. The whole, though, flows beautifully.

Throughout the album, you catch glimpses of things that remind you of something else, but never in a blatant way. Structurally and thematically its closest cousin would be something like Dark Side of the Moon. It’s partly the way it flows and yet paradoxically leaps about stylistically, partly the way that field recordings – snatches of manic laughter, static, car alarms etc – are integrated, and partly the loose concept that holds the album together: a theme of, well, isolation.

Nearly every song is a conglomeration of different music ideas – some mere snatches, some fully developed into songs that could be plucked from the whole more or less fully formed. Losing My Mind Through Bridge Meadow immediately drags you into the KB soundworld, with multi-tracked vocal harmonies, acoustic guitar, a short snatch of staccato strings and all this before the central song emerges – a brief gem of bucolic, psychedelic pop.

All but three of the tracks are, for the most part, beatless. The title piece is one of the trio that isn’t, and is one of the most melodically straightforward songs on the record, even though the organ driven song is broken up with sections of quasi-ambience, and the coda consists of some fairly grandiose washes of synth. The Deserter is an outstanding folkish, acoustic ballad and one of the album’s key highlights (and why does the little loop at the end remind me of Trumpton?). Others include Sound the Alarm, a distant cousin of the Beach Boys’ Sloop John B played at half the tempo and with twice the melancholy which somehow ends up rattling along like a drum ‘n’ bass tune.

The finale Hapus A Ddaeth I Ben (Croesi Bysedd) brings us back to the Dark Side of the Moon comparisons, as there is some common ground with that record’s closing duo Brain Damage / Eclipse, although the Kingbastard track is much more fractured into different bits, even more than anything preceding it.

Beautiful Isolation is a fantastic achievement, and an unqualified success. It’s a phenomenal patchwork of splintered themes, fully-realised songs and splendid sonic exploration. I’ve hardly scratched the surface in this review, there’s so much going on. I’m no fan of the ‘buy-if-you-like’ tagline since it reduces music to lazy ghettos. But if a record that is part early seventies Floyd, part Future Sound of London, part side two of Eno’s Before and After Science and part Animal Collective sounds at all intriguing to you, I’d say get your wallet or purse out. The album is out at the beginning of May

Tracks
1. Losing My Mind Through Bridge Meadow 7:01
2. The Slippery Slope to The Lost Art of Conversation 8:48
3. Beautiful Isolation 8:28
4. The Deserter 5:10
5. Open Up Your Mind and the Door 6:44
6. Multicoloured Octopus Ink Nightmares 7:01
7. Seawater Fool – Firewater Fool 4:34
8. Prendegast Cherry Grove 5:21
9. Sound the Alarm, There’s a Dark Sea Rising 8:31
10. Hapus a Ddaeth i Ben (Croesi Bysedd) 8:39

Websites
www.herbrecordings.com
www.kingbastard.co.uk
www.kingbastard.bandcamp.com

The M M & M 1000 – part 59

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

FLAMING LIPS – Waiting For a Superman / mixes (Warner 1999)
Is this a metaphor for global warming? About how no one wants to act in the hope that someone else will sort the problem out for them. Some things are just too big for even the proverbial superman.

EVERLY BROTHERS – Wake Up Little Susie / Maybe Tomorrow (Cadence 1958)
And is this a veiled reference to teenage sex? – not something you could explicitly deal with in a pop song in 1958.

FOUR TOPS – Walk Away Renee / Your Love Is Wonderful (Motown 1967)
Of course it’s a song by psyche-popsters the Left Banke, but good as the original is, they didn’t have the mighty Levi Stubbs. And a song this full of hurt was just made for him.

CANNON’S JUG STOMPERS – Walk Right In / Whoa Mule! Get Up the Alley (Victor 1929)
Gus Cannon’s group and Will Shade’s Memphis Jug Band were probably the two biggest jug bands of the late twenties / early thirties. By 1962 when the Rooftop Singers covered Walk Right In and took the song to the top of the Billboard chart, Cannon was a largely forgotten figure. In fact, so forgotten, that the story goes that everybody assumed he was dead and never thought to check. It was only when he heard it on the radio that he had any idea that the song had been remade. It ended well for him, and although in his late seventies, he enjoyed an Indian summer of recording and acclaim.

EVERYTHING BUT THE GIRL – Walking Wounded / mixes (Virgin 1996)
Many people sneered when Everything But the Girl ‘went drum & bass’, but they absolutely nailed the fusion of late night melancholy pop and quicksilver beats. In retrospect it’s not so surprising that it worked. Omni Trio (who provided a remix) and others had always had a sad, downbeat air to their tunes, and Tracey Thorn had proved with Massive Attack that she had the perfect voice for that late twentieth century urban loneliness.

HOWLIN’ WOLF – Wang Dang Doodle / Back Door Man (Chess 1960)
Two great slices of bad boy blues from the big man. What more can you add?

EDWIN STARR – War / He Who Picks a Rose (Gordy 1970)
It’s kind of ironic that Berry Gordy, one of the most reticent label bosses when it came to allowing real life and real issues to infect his feel-good pop factory, eventually issued a string of songs that were some of the most profoundly political pop of the era. Edwin Starr’s War is just one example – an angry blast that no Iraq or Afghanistan demo would feel complete without.

KILLING JOKE – Wardance / Pssyche (Malicious Damage 1980)
For me, Killing Joke never really delivered on the promise of their debut album’s furious, dense industrial punk. Wardance is a vicious, tribal yell, but it’s Pssyche that gets the blood flowing. Youth’s bass is like a battering ram and Jaz lets rip with some real fury, although the targets of his ire seem almost random. And there’s something uncomfortably Nietzschan about the line Dodge the bullets or carry the gun, the choice is yours.

ATLANTIC OCEAN – Waterfall / Mimosa (Eastern Bloc 1994)
Sometimes a melody can be so simple and yet so effective. This house / proto-trance track sounds like it could’ve been thrown together in five minutes, but still sounds terrific.

TLC – Waterfalls / mixes (LaFace 1995)
I’m not the biggest fan of modern R&B. Too much is just dreary. I always liked TLC, though. They had a bit of grit about them that was lacking in most of their contemporaries and acolytes. They also could harmonise effortlessly and turn in a ballad that actually felt like it came from the heart. Then tastes changed to the sub-Gospel wailing of Destiny’s Child and their ilk, and TLC got bumped to the sidelines as the cult of celebrity became the be all and end all. Pity.

KINKS – Waterloo Sunset / Act Nice and Gentle (Pye 1967)
A love letter to Swinging London that somehow captures its death throes, a year before Grosvenor Square bashed out the chippy innocence for good.

TEMPTATIONS – The Way You Do The Things You Do / Just Let Me Know (Gordy 1964)
One of the best songs from the group’s Smokey era, before they really found their own voice. That happened in the first twenty seconds of Ain’t Too Proud to Beg, two years later.

POP GROUP – We Are All Prostitutes / Amnesty Report (Rough Trade 1979)
A band that burned like a magnesium flare. A band that foretold the future with chilling accuracy, and one that still stands unique thirty years on. There are no Pop Group soundalikes.

We Are All Prostitutes
Everyone has their price
And you too will learn to live the lie
Aggression
Competition
Ambition
Consumer fascism

Capitalism is the most barbaric of all religions

Department stores are our new cathedrals
Our cars are martyrs to the cause

We are all prostitutes

Our children shall rise up against us
Because we are the ones to blame
We are the ones to blame
They will give us a new name
We shall be
Hypocrites hypocrites hypocrites

Now available as a ringtone (true). FFS!

SISTER SLEDGE – We Are Family / Easier to Love (Cotillion 1979)
By 1979, disco’s name was mud. It had become ubiquitous and ridiculous, a bandwagon jumped upon by every chancer from Rod Stewart to Barbra Streisand. And yet it was the year that produced the two greatest albums of the genre – Chic’s Risqué and the Chic produced We Are Family. Both are rhythm led, with songs as seductive as they are simple and as dancefloor friendly as you can possibly get. They are also chock full of optimism of the kind that is hard to do without coming across as twee or just plain gormless. Those two albums alone produced half a dozen great singles of which this is but one.

ANIMALS – We Gotta Get Out Of This Place / I Can’t Believe It (EMI Columbia 1965)
One recurring feature on this list is the classic bassline, and they don’t get much better than this. I admit to being sold on the bassline in some cases, even if the rest of the tune isn’t up to much. Not the case with this one, though. It’s like one of the great British kitchen sink dramas full of angry young men and downtrodden women. Or Our Friends In the North encapsulated in three minutes.

LOUIS ARMSTRONG – We Have All the Time in the World / Pretty Little Missy (United Artists 1969)
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was an odd Bond film. Firstly, it had George Lazeby in his only appearance as 007. Secondly, he got married in it (and became a widower). Thirdly, the official theme tune was the instrumental of the same name, with Louis Armstrong’s beautifully rendered ballad demoted to the end credits. My Bloody Valentine’s version is a swoonsome thing that’s well worth hearing too.

THE BAND – The Weight / I Shall Be Released (Capitol 1968)
Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed? / He just grinned and shook my hand, and “No!”, was all he said. That line always makes me laugh out loud. It’s just the mental picture it conjours up.

More soon

Album: E.L. HEATH – Snailbeach Mines Trust (Wayside & Woodland 2010)

Snailbeach Mines Trust are the custodians of the Snailbeach Lead Mines in Shropshire. There was mining there from the eighteenth century through to 1955, although there is evidence of workings dating as far back as Roman times. There is a fascinating history of the site at shropshiremines.org.uk/snailbeach, as well as visitor information etc.

Eric Heath spent much of his childhood in the area, and unsurprisingly, all of the abandoned shafts, buildings and blocked off tunnels were an endless source of fascination. The album is a kind of aural exploration of the major features of the mines, with Heath sketching musical evocations that are obviously deeply felt.

In the main, there is a melancholy ambience in this music, with the ghosts from history seeping through field recordings. He uses guitar, analogue synths and all manner of effects to create a sound world that bears some resemblance to Christian Fennesz’s work. On tracks like Perkins Level, treated guitar weaves a spell of something approaching desolation, while Chapel Shaft conjours up the ghostly echoes of those who used to work the mines. Lordshill Engine Shaft breaks the spell with an angry clatter of machinery, but this too fades into silence.

Snailbeach District Railway snaps us firmly into the present, with a bright tune and the huff-puff of a restored steam locomotive, and the sounds of chattering tourists. Then it lifts off into something of sweeping grandeur as the train steams away into the past. The only vocal tune is the short, folky Tragedy At George’s Shaft that tells an impressionistic tale of an 1895 accident that killed seven mineworkers. It sounds a bit Damon Albarn-ish, but not in a bad way.

Snailbeach Mines Trust is a deeply felt and beautifully realised work that does a fantastic job of painting a musical picture of the history and wonder of the area. I’ve never been, but it isn’t hard to paint a mental picture of the place through Heath’s interpretation.

Tracks
1 . Black Tom Shaft 2:05
2 . Scott Level 3:40
3 . Chapel Shaft 3:51
4 . Day Level 3:31
5 . Upper Works Reservoir 5:58
6 . Tragedy At George’s Shaft 2:24
7 . Perkins Level 4:17
8 . Lordshill Engine Shaft 2:40
9 . Snailbeach District Railway 3:47

Websites
www.myspace.com/elheathmusic
www.myspace.com/waysideandwoodland