Anyone watching the new series of Doctor Who, then? If so, then maybe you’ve been tempted on more than one occasion to just mute the TV and turn on the subtitles, so you can make out what’s going on without being deafened by Murray Gold’s incidental music. I know I have. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the Cybermen are about to take over the planet, or someone’s making a cup of tea, every scene is smothered by thick dollops of synth-strings that believe themselves to be accompanying the final action scenes of a big Hollywood blockbuster rather than a knockabout family adventure series shown at tea-time on the BBC.

I quite like Gold’s arrangement of the theme tune, but when music is used to tell a story then it is very much like an extra actor. When approached with subtlety and sensitivity, a well-judged piece of incidental music can bring out the best in a scene. Doctor Who, unfortunately, is lumbered with the musical equivelant of BRIAN BLESSED, SHOUTING all the time and CHEWING THE SCENERY.

Not that I’m suggesting that Fireworks Night should be soundtracking shots of Daleks exterminating folk, but my (admittedly strained) point is that with this single they prove themselves most capable of telling a story through the mutual interaction of words and music, knowing when to back one off and let the other have center stage, and that the banjo is a much-underrated and powerful tool for good.

A little too polite for some tastes, this might be music for wannabe doomed poets who imagine their lives to be far more tragic and romantic than they really are. But then, I think that’s why I like it.

Fireworks Night

I’m just home from this gig. My ears aren’t ringing as much as I’d anticipated, but man, my face is sore from grinning.

I nearly saw Lightning Bolt at ATP 2004. Something was clearly happening behind that whipped-up throng. Something loud and interesting, but something I was a bit disconnected with, partly because of the crowd, partly because I was a bit noised out by that point. I still bought a copy of their album “Wonderful Rainbow” at the merchandise stand, though. As I did so, a bystander looked at me, his eyes burning with a kind of religious mania. “Track three, man,” he said, indicating my new purchase. “The only song you’ll ever need.”

That track, “Dracula Mountain”, is pretty ace. A rich, thick slab of grotesquely melodic noise and hyperkinetic drumming. I continued to listen to other songs, and other albums, however, only revisiting that CD occasionally, remembering, for a while, how good it is, and putting it away again until my ears had cooled.

I did, however, continue to wonder what I was missing behind that wall of heads, so when I heard that they were playing Glasgow I was keen to see them. And even more so when I found out that they were playing at the Grand Old Oprey, a venue more used to Tuesday-night line-dancing classes and pretend shootouts between Govan cowboys, than extreme noise bands. Realising that if we stayed downstairs we were likely to have similar difficulty in actually seeing the band, we headed up to the balcony and secured a good spot.

First, though, Gay Against You, two young lads wearing their PE gear who scream about unicorns and the pains of being lactose intolerant to the sound of cheap Casio beats turned up to deafening and distorted volume. What could turn into a lot of awful, pretentious performance-art nonsense is saved by being tremendous fun, handing out cakes to the audience, and being carried around on the backs of (rightfully) enthusiastic fans.

Of course, they play on the floor surrounded by the crowd, as Lightning Bolt eschew stages and the Oprey’s is curtained off, leaving the bands to perform under the twin confederate flags mounted above it. This is good for Gay Against You. They like a bit of audience participation, and this particular audience, while a little bemused, are generally game for a laugh. After their set I descended to floor level to buy a cheap CD and a round of drinks, and noticed an unusually smiley atmosphere about the crowd.

This good mood carries through to Lightning Bolt’s set, but the uneducated observer might have seen the pushing, elbowing mass that formed as soon as the first distorted bass chord was struck as an angry mob. Not a bit of it, of course. Where the support act still had room to move, the space around Lightning Bolt contracts whippet-fast. The lone bouncer, looking, in his nice smart coat and tie, more like a school headmaster, tries gamely to keep order, but surrenders about ten minutes in. Inter-song requests by the band themselves to give them some breathing room have a bit more power, but as soon as they start playing, the crowd moves in again, particles excited by the energy of the Lightning Bolt, subservient to physics more than anything else. The hardest of the hard-core invite physical injury in addition to hearing loss by placing their hands over Brian Chippendale’s cymbals, drawn like moths to the flame because while Lightning Bolt hurt it’s only because life hurts too and reminds you that you’re still breathing and…

Oh, I’m overanalysing.

All you need to know is that Lightning Bolt are fucking awesome, man!

And they are the only band you’ll ever need.

Lightning Bolt
Gay Against You

Before the first half of “Snow On Moss On Snow” concludes, you will be imagining that you have the measure of it. On “Treehouse”, Mauri Haikenen randomly drops into growly monster-voice, while “Bakery” sounds like he’s singing to a class of schoolchildren about the joys of bread-making as a career. It’s not that the album is childish; just bubbling over with ebullient joy for life’s small pleasures.

Which is all very good, and you’ll likely be expecting more jolly acoustic singalongs to come. Enjoying them, probably. Worrying that they’ll be getting on your nerves by the end, most likely? But then mid-album track “Good Old Odd Good” proves to be a quirky multi-instrumental. (Is that a harmonium? I don’t know.) It cleverly resets the ears in preparation for a turn towards darkness in the second half. It’s a pity that this album on vinyl, since it’s hard to think of another in recent memory which has divided itself so neatly down the middle, without seeming like two disparate albums welded clumsily together. The acoustic guitar doesn’t get abandoned, but it’s plucked with melancholy rather than joyously bashed, and his voice drops an octave. I’d never go so far as to apply the word “concept album” to this record, because it’s a horrible term with many negative connotations, and I like it more than that, but it might not be too far off the mark to assume a “childhood/puberty/adulthood/old age” structure to it. The second half is far from a gloomy march-to-the-grave, but when it’s positive it’s with tactful understatement. That is until penultimate track “Off You Go All Authors”, where Haikenen bellows over a single pair of accordian chords in the manner of Jeff Mangum. Not like a five year old with a new toy, but in the manner of one who has passed through self-consciousness and given it up at the last minute. And, of course, nothing implies death like a sad piano instrumental like the one which closes the album.

In summary then: nice music by a young man with a brain in his head and more than one trick up his sleeve. A good thing.

Fat Cat Records

In the case of most gigs I go to, I do so because I’m genuinely interested or excited by the music. There are a handful of bands, however, whose shows I attend more out of a sense of duty than anything else. These are generally artists who were extremely important to me when I was much younger, but who don’t play locally too often. While I might not actually listen to their records much any more, it would seem wrong to let them pass through Glasgow without making an appearance, for old time’s sake.

Bob Mould is one such artist. I was too young to be into Husker Du (And no, I can’t be bothered scanning the character map for a “u” with umlauts. You may draw them in yourself, if you wish.) while they were still a going concern, but the brief NME-lead hyping of Mould’s subsequent outfit Sugar provided a gateway to his back-catalogue which, as an angsty teenager, I devoured keenly.

My tastes have moved on, as tastes tend to do, and I didn’t really bother with his last couple of solo albums, so I wasn’t expecting to know too much of the set last night. It was surprising, then, that it was largely made up of older material. Lots of old Huskers songs (“Hardly Getting Over It”, “Chartered Trips” and “Celebrated Summer” being particular highlights), and a large pile from the first few solo records and his Sugar output comprised the bulk of it. In the end I counted only two that I didn’t know, despite not having purchased a Bob Mould album in years. One has to wonder if this indicates a lack of confidence in his newer work, or simply an acceptance that his audience largely consists of aging Huskers fans. His recent electronic sideline warranted not even a mention, despite the fact that the format of this tour – just Bob on his own – might have been the perfect opportunity to bring both facets of his output together without having to dismiss a band from the stage when it came time to do some laptop-twiddling.

For nostalgists, then, this gig is about as perfect as could be expected without the Huskers getting back together and the associated freezing-over of hell. (Though a recent charity appearance with Grant Hart suggests that hatchets may have been buried in that area.) The songs, and Bob’s voice, have both aged well, and his performance is a pleasing reminder that he is a songwriter who can endow his lyrics with a rare sense of originality and honesty, even while allowing himself a relatively narrow thematic palette. It’s incredible how many songs the man can write about relationships going wrong, without sounding like a one-trick pony. But I can’t quite decide whether to be disappointed that someone who tried so hard in recent years to reinvent himself seems to be so dependant on his past in order to keep an audience, or to take it as a sign that he’s more at peace with his own history and be happy for him. It’s possible that this tour is just one step in a larger game-plan – a clever reclaiming of goodwill after a long absence. So while this was a night of retrospection, for the first time in years I’m curious about what Bob Mould will do next.

About three-quarters of the way through “Screaming Masterpiece”, we are introduced to “Nilfisk”. They are a teenage punk band who practice in a garage and all live in a tiny, remote village on the south-coast of Iceland. (“There are only three girls in this town – and everyone’s been with them.”) After bumping into Dave Grohl, they landed their first ever gig – supporting the Foo Fighters.

It’s a great story, but like most of the film, it doesn’t do much to dispel the image of Icelanders as hardy eccentrics, clinging precariously to a mid-atlantic ice-cube, a situation that’s granted them an intense tenacity. The movie is full of shots of hot springs, helicopter flyovers of frozen tundra, single lonely buildings perched on icy cliffs, but never, for example, the streets of downtown Reykjavik. Repeatedly, the point is made that Icelandic musicians are inspired primarily by the dramatic environment in which they live, and by the nation’s long folk-song tradition. You can’t blame the filmmakers for trying to find a common thread with which to link the musicians that their film showcases, and I’m hardly qualified to suggest that these things don’t loom large in the Icelandic psyche. But beyond a brief mention of the 1970’s punk scene, many of the interviews in this documentary would have you believe that the Icelandic music scene is built upon glaciers and beardy folk-singers alone.

Happily, most of the interviews are kept fairly succinct, allowing the music to speak for itself. It does so more eloquently and interestingly than most of the musicians who channel it, and it should quickly become clear that environment and tradition are only part of the equation. Screaming Masterpiece’s strength is in the great diversity of music that it promotes, from the obvious “big hitters” like Björk and Sigur Ros playing to massive stadium audiences, to tiny inner-city clubs hosting hip-hop, electronica, death-metal and all points in-between, and if the aforementioned big names get a smigeon more time that could maybe have been better used to crowbar in one more lesser-known artist, then it’s hard to complain given the exposure that their success has given the scene. Indeed, Björk is one of the few interviewees who doesn’t play the “landscape” card and has something more interesting to say about Iceland’s artistic output and the search for a national identity in the years since they became independent.

But who cares, when Screaming Masterpiece does the bit that’s important – the music – so well. Each act is captured in a live setting, and their performances are afforded the same high production values whether they’re selling out shows in New York, or playing in a corner of a mate’s house. Worth seeing in a cinema with a decent sound system, or, if you’re at home, with the DVD plugged into the stereo and turned way up, it’s as much a mini all-Iceland music festival as a documentary, and well worth the ticket price whether you’re looking for horizon-expanding, or just some ace tunes.

It must be tough to be an electronicist nowadays, it being a genre that’s entered a kind of adolescence. Older forms have a long and fruitful past to draw upon. A guitar-rock band can easily flourish and become massively successful while sounding much like another guitar-rock band that was around thirty years ago, based entirely on an ear for a catchy tune and nice white smiles. Form a folk act, and while there are many qualities that your audience will expect from you, exciting new forms of sonic creation are going to be fairly low down on their list of priorities. Novelty, while always entertaining, holds far less value to a long-established musical genre than it does one for which the listener’s perception is that of acres of new ideas and possibilities stretching into the horizon, waiting to be harvested.

Partly, this is an illusion caused by massive growth spurts over the life of the genre. Hardware which would have required the taking out of a mortgage in order to possess a decade ago is now available, in one form or another, to any back-bedroom tinkerer of a modest income. Undoubtedly a good thing, optimistically leading to the democratization of music and making the major labels sweat, this rush of technological advance has had the effect of stamping a “best-before” date on almost every new work, to the point where the canny listener can place previously unheard records to within a couple of years.

Now that’s reaching an age where, while still a young pup, it actually has some kind of commonly recognized history, electronica is faced with a problem. How to address its past while still expected to be constantly eyeing the future?

Richard D. James gave us one answer with his Analord series of EPs, restricting himself to ancient equipment but approaching it without a hint of nostalgia to produce something that sounds every bit as fresh as you would expect if he allowed himself a less restrictive palette, but which is sonically rooted in his own personal tradition.

For Huddersfield’s Signal Generator, on the other hand, the past isn’t there to be dissassembled and pillaged for raw material, but is a place whose customs and architecture are familiar and comforting. If played this record without any prompting as to its origin, I would have placed it in 1995 sooner than 2005. By putting out an EP of electronic music which has so little regard for recent fashion, Signal Generator seem to suggest that the electronic genre might be one which could do with slowing down, taking a breath, and spending some time coming to terms with its own history before it goes tearing off again. If, indeed, there really is anywhere left that’s worth tearing off to. The four tracks on this record range from the playfully melodic (“Memory Helmet”) to the pleasingly ambient (“Legno Lungo”) or skittishly sinister (“Radix Lecti”) and are all perfectly effective and constructed with a sense of confidence which is admirable. Somehow, they fail to engage as they might, but there’s a sense of promise which, while frustrating at present, suggests that the individual behind Signal Generator might yet unearth something rare and exciting from his personal archaelogical dig.

Occasional Records

You know that ad that’s on at the moment, with the girl talking straight to camera about how she’s glad that she split up with her boyfriend because it’s given her inspiration for an album that she’s going to write, record and produce using Windows XP? Well, if that lass was real, then the first single off that album might sound something like this.

Four tracks, then, of spiky guitar tunes with strong melodies and lyrics about being young and working in a shit job and fancying someone and getting your heart broken, which, surely, are the themes upon which all great pop songs are built. In truth, however, this record made me feel a bit… well… dirty. Like illicitly reading a teenage girl’s diary. It’s just not for me. I’m still in my twenties (just), but I feel way too old for this record. I strongly suspect that it might be a great, and very fun, slice of indie-pop, but I’ll hate it forever for making me feel like my dad.

And marks off for shameless apostrophe abuse. Tsk – young folk today!

The Hussy’s

On at least three occasions in Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers, Bill Murray sits and stares into space. The camera stares at him, unmoving. He stares back. Nothing happens, but somehow that stare tells you more about the character than a dozen pages of exposition-heavy dialog would in the hands of a lesser film-maker. Tiny details, both of character and individual shots, make this a film genuinely worth seeing more than once.

Murray plays Don Johnston (with a ‘T’), an ageing lothario who, shortly after yet another girlfriend walks out on him, receives a mysterious letter from an anonymous former lover informing him that he has an 18 year old son. Despite being outwardly uncaring, it doesn’t take much prompting from his dope-smoking amateur-sleuth neighbour Winston (the excellent and underrated Jeffrey Wright) to set him on a trip across the US to track down his old flames and find out if it’s really true.

It’s probably the most accessibly comedic film in Jarmusch’s canon, and runs the gamut from fairly broad laughs (the outrageously flirtatious teenage daughter of one of Johnston’s exes) to more subtle humour (watch out for Winston almost-but-not-quite picking up the bill for lunch), but it’s shot through with melancholy. Murray’s character may seem like a reprise of Bob Harris from Lost In Translation, and indeed there’s much similarity between the two films – both are gently paced tales about lonely people trying to find something to anchor them in a world in which they can participate but never feel at peace in – but Broken Flowers is far less optimistic than that movie. Early belly-laughs give way to a growing sadness as Don’s journey increasingly echoes each and every one of his failed relationships; joyful in the beginning, giving way to familiarity, coldness and anger, until all that’s left is a memory of something that was once beautiful. The search for his son becomes a quest to find something permanent in his life before it’s too late.

If you’re one of those individuals who found Lost in Translation to be duller than a bread sandwich, or who can’t stomach Murray’s laconic-loner schtick, Broken Flowers won’t be for you. For which I’m deeply sorry. Everyone else should give it a try.

Official site
IMDB entry

I went to see The Go! Team at the QMU last night. I was going to write a full review, but what can I say about how great The Go! Team are that hasn’t already been said, and better, by someone else? Suffice to say, they make me grin from ear-to-ear; quite an achievement at the best of times.

I do have to wonder, though, how much of their appeal is simply down to them knowing how to press my particular generation’s nostalgia buttons. Will they have the same effect on someone who wasn’t born in the seventies? Someone who didn’t grow up watching The Littlest Hobo and the A-Team? Who didn’t drink from a Sodastream? I suspect that it was an over-14’s night, based on the little yellow wristbands they were giving out at the door to anyone who was over 18 and declared that they would want to buy alcohol once inside, but I didn’t see too many people who looked more than a few years older or younger than me in the crowd.

Or am I thinking about it too much, and they’re just a good band with good tunes which just happen to be cannibalised from the pop-culture of my childhood? Is the fact that they make me feel like I’m eight years old just a happy but unessential accident?

I dunno. But I do know that I want “Everyone Is A V.I.P. To Someone” played at my funeral, just as my coffin is moving down the conveyor-belt towards the crematory flames. There won’t be a dry-eye in the house.

That, or the end-theme to “Taxi”.

Evil. Funny how attractive it is when you’re not the victim, at least in it’s more dramatic forms. Enough too keep the horror movie and serial killer book industries quite comfortably afloat, anyway. It’s even more potent still when it’s pretending to be its own polar opposite, though not hiding so well that we can’t spot it and pat ourselves on the back for being savvy enough to see through it, while still being affected by the contrast.

Misty’s Big Adventure have a song called “Evil.” (Look – the point! At last!) It’s introduced as being about GW Bush and his cronies. Ho-hum, so what? Bush is a cock, and it’s not like anyone really needs it pointing out any more. But what would otherwise be fairly inconsequential indie-pop tunes that can only snipe at easy targets they know everyone in the house will agree with (Because, yeah, discos are rubbish, aren’t they?) are saved by a vein of the black stuff which hints at something far nastier. Of course, the creepy Bez-as-satanic-clown character they have jumping about and beatboxing while covered in blue paint and rubber gloves might have something to do with that. (One has to wonder what a Top of the Pops appearance would be like, given the fuss over The Magic Numbers and the fact that they – shock! – have a few extra pounds on them.) But even taken on a purely musical basis, there’s something ever so slightly wrong about this band, but it’s this wrongness that makes them good.

But there is an evil that is any many ways worse than anything hinted at by Misty’s. “Big” evil – the sort that bombs civilians – tends swoop into your life and fuck it up in a sudden and devastating way. It’s awful, but at least it’s quick, and you are usually aware of it when it happens. Far more insidious are life’s many subtle, everyday evils – commercials for hair products, soul-crushing office jobs, ITV sitcoms – that slowly grind us down and leave us dull and soulless before we’ve even noticed. It gets under your skin and seeps out your pores and affects those around you as well. It’s this far more awful evil that seems to have gotten to M.Station. The usual sensitive white boys with guitars (and white girl with keyboard and xylophone, though they were so low in the mix it’s hard not to jump to the conclusion that she’s only in the band as eye-candy), the majority of their set had already faded from memory a few moments after they left the stage. Undoubtedly competent, but dreadfully dreadfully unexciting.

But of course everyone’s here for The Magic Numbers, and here they are with their happy songs about love and stuff. Woo! Yay! This is sunny pop music that it’s ok for indie kids to like. And that’s fine. They’re good at it. A reaffirmation of pop’s ecstatic and redemptive qualities. The crowd loved it. Drunk girls sang along at the top of their lungs. The forces of darkness were exorcised from the room. Hooray! Everyone was delighted, except possibly a few miserable old gits like me who have spent too much time sitting about listening to grim depressing music that we just don’t have the palette for something quite so sweet and innocent. But even if you spend every minute of the rest of your life listening to awful tuneless dirges made by beating the carcasses of dead dogs, you’re never immune to the power of a catchy hook. And you have to admit, The Numbers have one or two of those.

It could be argued that it’s only really in a live context that The Magic Numbers make sense. Their jolliness makes them seem like genuine children’s party entertainers, rather than sinister clowns, and as such they are exactly right for the depressingly interesting times in which we live.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a dead dog to mic-up.

The Magic Numbers
Music For Ears (Home of M.Craft)
Misty’s Big Adventure