apologies for linking to another muic website but after reporting the Sleater-Kinney split I feel the need to even things up with some good news

Link

They’re doing a few more final U.S. dates and then calling it a day it seems.

End of era.

Leicester’s Fabulous Foxes return with this longer collection. As usual, it’s main-man Bob Cluley singing and playing guitar, accompanied by various folk on guitar, violin, sax and drums. Some of these songs surfaced on a demo a while back, and it’s a mark of their quality that songs like the triumphant Don’t Give Up and the plaintive Fisherman Friend are instantly recognised as old friends.

I was a little harsh on the arrangements on the demo. Granted, it’s still Bob’s voice that sticks out for me, but on a longer recording, little touches from the other instruments start to emerge. This is particularly evident in the snatches of loose, captured sounds that permeate the record, such as in Pick Me Up along or Let’s Start, which suggest a palette of sounds waiting to be tapped.

The newer songs stand out in this respect, all moving away from the expected singer/songwriter vein. Follow Your Heart is a strong opener, recalling classic indie in the vein of GBV and Teenage Fanclub in the best possible way. Rescue Me, with its mod stomp, lunging bass and straight-up sax conjures up a very English feeling of imminent aggro. By remarkable contrast, the final instrumental Walk Home is redolent of nothing less than The Black Heart Procession providing the music for a particularly voodoo-saturated New Orleans funeral

All in all, a band and a songwriter finding their feet with some style.

Fabulous Foxes

This is an extract from a letter written to a friend, basically me freaking out about Henry Thomas. The dude who lent me his stuff also lent me the ENTIRE Charley Patton Revenant box set, Vol. 4 of Harry Smith’s epoch-ending/beginning Anthology of American Folk Music, Fred McDowell, Bukka White, Blind Willie Johnson. Noel, I love you. As a bit of context, Thomas was born 1874 in Big Sandy, Texas, and left home, presumably as a teenager, to leave behind farm work. Hardly anything is known about his life, save the sessions he did for Vocalion in Chicago between 1927 and 1929. Nothing is known about him after 1929. His songs are a precursor to most country blues as they were recorded around the same time, not strictly being “blues” as defined by the structure of those songs, and it’s thought most were composed or arranged up to 30 years before he sung them for Vocalion. His songs are incredible, timeless, immensely soulful, mourning, frequently very funny and fascinating. He accompanied himself on guitar and quills, a sort of pan-pipes type wind instrument that sounds like the railroad’s ancient call to the skies.

“ok, Henry Thomas. You’re right, he was a bit of an anomaly – he apparently (and this is mostly speculation) played to mostly white audiences, hence the large number of dances and up-tempo stuff. The stuff’s so ancient…probably started playing those songs before the turn of the century. What I found intensely fascinating is that, despite the speculation that he was more “uptown” and played on street corners and at dances etc, where people where less likely the listen to the actual song and just enjoy the rhythm, there’s so much of himself in these songs. He sings them, even the great deal of traditional fragments and amalgamations, not only as if they’re autobiographical, but as if he’s the only person who ever lived what he’s singing about. I guess there can be a certain distance involved when he does the stylistic things like repeating a line 3 times for the standard structure, but his voice speaks like a true traveller. Like he was tricking his audiences into having a good time without the bother of listening to a man’s soul, but Thomas , completely deadpan and utterly poker-faced, is all the while divulging huge secrets, smiling inwardly, strumming the beat faster as the song nears the end. The sound on his quills on Railroadin’ Some…that elegiac whistle….unlike anything I’ve ever heard. The combination of the whistle and the chord he’s playing evokes such an otherwordly realm, a prarie, the escape attempt, endless tracks, wheat in the sun, like he’s letting his songs out of him like a boiling kettle lets out steam, the way he sounds so resigned and collected without a hint of fear, and yet you can tell regrets weigh on his soul like rocks. When he sings “I’ve been a fool…”, he means it, and that’s what keeps him moving. Stunning. I felt utterly altered after spending two nights listening to his music.”

Get his complete recorded works, they came out on Yazoo. Incedentally, Canned Heat re-worked Bull-Doze Blues to brilliant effect on their Going up the Country, those dudes knew their shit.

Yes, sorry, I have a brand new Nintendo DS Lite and I haven’t been doing much other than settle into my new Animal Crossing town, capture literally millions of escaped animals in Zoo Keeper (oh, the wasted hours) and do maths and sudoku under the kindly tutorings of Dr Kawashima. Thanks to the wonders of wireless internet I have picked up a message in a bottle on the beach from someone random I will never know and there’s hope yet for a diskant AC online meet-up. Oh the irony. It’ll be like diskant online Scrabble team all over again…

Thus there is little to report in the world of diskant. We do have a few reviewers set to join us so keep an eye out for them making some inroads into the review mountain. The Robot is almost too ashamed to respond to new review requests. I really will have to put the DS aside and dig in, as there’s been some wonderful stuff through lately which I have been enjoying. You might want to take the opportunity provided by this lull in activity by perusing the diskant archives, especially since I’ve gone to the effort of making this page load up a random article for you every time you come here. Have a look to your right and see what you find.

Also of extreme enjoyment has been a book collecting the posters of Jay Ryan, 100 Posters, 134 Squirrels, published by Punk Planet. Not only is it filled with one hundred colour prints full of his trademark fat, slightly idiotic looking animals but you get insights into the thought process, Steve Albini on good form, a whole load of facts about Wooly Mammoths and the greatest band name ever -which I may steal – Squirrels Taking Risks. I got my copy from Amazon for less than ten quid- go, go! I look forward to the Chris Summerlin edition in 2010.

Current listening: Pet Shop Boys, Sonic Youth, West End Girls, the Pipettes, Gay Against You.

diskant interview slackness stats: Interviewees: 2, Me: 2

So, what do we reckon to the new Sonic Youth album? I’m finding it lacking…..something. It seems to have gone straight to ‘comfortable’ after 2 or 3 listens without either the immediacy that has you obsessed for a week or the difficult, growing to like it period. It’s like I already know it well and dug it out after a year except, of course, it lacks the nostalgia and memories. Maybe that’s what’s bothering me – it has a nostalgic quality but the only memories I have associated with it so far are getting the bus to work the other morning. Thoughts?

Also can we stop with the Special Editions already? Fair enough spending an extra 7 quid to get a whole extra album of brilliant remixes Christmas songs. videos etc. but extra money for two EXCLUSIVE UK ONLY tracks is just taking the piss. Yes, I should have bought the vinyl, I know.

Having been seduced by nice packaging, the breathless recommendation of the record-store staff, and the loose purse-strings that payday always brings, however briefly, I took this album home wondering if I’d made a wise purchase. Having seen Haino perform at Glasgow’s Instal festival a couple of years ago, I knew that it would be an interesting record, if not an especially pleasant one to listen to. I was concerned that, having been played once, it would end up on on eBay, or, worse still, egregiously keep around solely for “my record collection is better than your record collection”-type bragging rights.

Man, was I wrong.

Which isn’t to say that this album marks Haino’s embracing of the pop song, but nor is it the straight-up unstructured guitar-noise that I had come to expect, and realize that I didn’t much enjoy listening to particularly often. Instead, it is an unexpectedly beautiful thing which builds slowly from a bare tickling of the ears to a powerful meditative thrum that made me feel quite peculiar. Staring into space for extended periods as it repeatedly found sympathetic frequencies within my skull, I felt oddly refreshed after taking off my headphones, as though I had just undergone the aural equivalent of being driven through a car-wash.

Sitaar Tah!, as the name suggests, are a 20 piece sitar orchestra, who, over the course of Animamima’s two tracks (One per disc. Both recorded live.) make wonderful drones which rise and fall like tides, while Haino is handed the keys to the school music department’s store cupboard and left to his own devices, adding, among other things, occasional flute, vocals, and electric hurdy-gurdy, precisely when required and never more.

Once in a while, a record comes along that reminds you why you are a music nerd in the first place. Animamima is a refreshing glass of ice-water after the dry cream-crackers of endless soundalike “The” bands.

aRCHIVE Recordings
Important Records

It really is summer now and diskant is being neglected in quite a horrifying manner for which I can only apologise. But, you know, get off the internet and go and enjoy the sun. We are still plugging away at the overflowing Review Box and will hopefully bring it down a little once I stop obsessively listening to the new Pet Shop Boys album. It has gotten so bad that Last.fm gave up listing any other bands in my weekly chart. It’s not even that it’s the greatest album ever made or anything, but it does have just the perfect mix of optimism, heartbreak, electro-pop and theatrics to make it indispensible. My copy also has some amusing style of anti-copyright where it will play and be ripped happily on my laptop but is extremely reluctant to play in my stereo.

I can’t think of even a tenuous link but Glasgow’s Stereo closed its doors last weekend and will be sadly missed. There will be a new Stereo opening later in the year which I’m sure will be even better but I have a lot of happy memories of Stereo, both on and off stage. The Asking For Trouble record launch where Sunnyvale were awesome and I spent half of my band’s set hidden behind an enormous amp. The Errors/Uter gig where people threw paper aeroplanes at us with incomprehensible messages scrawled on them. All the great, great bands I saw there from my favourite vantage point between the sound desk and, er, the boys toilets. It’s one of my favourite things about Glasgow that we have places like Stereo, Mono and Sleazys where you can almost guarantee you’ll bump into someone you know, and random band members, whenever you go there. It’s one of the millions of reasons I am still in love with Glasgow, six years after I moved here.

Actually, I probably could have made a tenuous link involving Glasgow’s electrostupidnoise duo Gay Against You who are our newest Talentspotter subjects. As hoped, they have provided entertaining and illuminating answers to all questions and you should go read it now, and love them.

Current listening: Pet Shop Boys, duh. Sonic Youth, Girls Aloud, Findo Gask, Errors. But mostly Pet Shop Boys.

diskant interview slackness stats: Interviewees: 2, Me: 1

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

It is a curious thing that after three decades during which much of popular music has aspired to a posture of perfect cynicism, be it sneering (70s), aloof (80s), or bored (90s), that now in the mid-noughties (someone thyink of a better name for the decade, please!) a new breed of bands are making music that doesn’t so much want to spit in your face as put its arm around you and tell you at length how amaaazing the universe is. Maybe the ecstacy revolution has finally seeped into the collective consciousness. Maybe we’re just bored of being bored. Maybe (and this is my theory), youth culture and pop music, which are now getting towards sixty years old have got over the midlife crisis of the 80s and 90s and are now experiencing a second childhood through early onset dementia.

Whatever the reason, the latest band to attempt the Sigur Ros/Explosions in the Sky formula of taking the three seconds of orgasm and stretching them out to fill an album are five angular and interesting looking Swedes called Jeniferever. In common with the aforementioned Icelandic/Texan purveyors of wonderment, Jeniferever fashion long drawn-out bliss-fests out of echos, chimes, sparkly bits and Mogwai’s early classic Helicon 1 (given that the ‘gwai have been having far more fun indulging their darkside since then, this seems fair enough). In contrast, they ditch the no-vocals/
funny-falsetto-choirboy-vocals-in-made-up-language approach in favour of Kristofer Jonsen’s hushed breathy tones and even the occassional traditional song structure. The results are fucking great, songs that are light and airy but somehow rumblingly powerful, calling to mind many adjectives you can’t use in a music review without sounding like a twat: magical, bewitching, fluffy…

It might not hit you outright with the obviousness of your local emo band, but if you have the time, the inclination, and don’t mind being thought a bit of a pussy by your metaller mates, this record will richly rewards your efforts. Listened to in space, post-coitally on some kind of mid-strength hallucinogenic drugs, it would almost certainly cause you to explode in a shower of loveliness. My NASA application goes in this afternoon.