(Originally posted March 2004)

It always feels awkward to launch straight into a bunch of barely-related rants masquerading as reviews for these column things, but how the hell do you introduce a series of moans about music as disparate as I’ve found fit to write about this time around?

I was wondering whether I should protest that my favourite film of 2003, All The Real Girls (enjoy the fucking waiting for anything to happen if you click on that link), didn’t even get a mention in diskant’s round-up of last year’s films, but it all seems a bit pointless now. Or earlier today I was wondering about the socio-political implications of Friendster on a community/scene, but that’s probably because almost all of diskant’s staff members have been mugged by this particular online popularity contest, and it’s hugely distracting when you’re trying to write shit like this. Plus, I get to count Will Oldham amongst my friends, so nerr. Ahem. Whatever.

Anyway, this Growing album, The Sky’s Run Into The Sea, on Kranky/Southern has been hanging around waiting for me to review since last October, so maybe now’s the time to actually get around to it. Fittingly, following January’s tribute to Sunn 0))), here’s another band mightily influenced by shotgun enthusiast Dylan Carson’s Earth project and its massively detuned guitars. A mysterious art trio, Growing comes across as much more of a minimalist art project than a band. Their ‘songs’ are drone pieces that shift from textured rumblings of electric guitars into cymbal crashes, or the occasional startling, scratchy melody. Sometimes, as the first track exemplifies, this works fantastically – we shift from an opening gambit of five minutes of soothing ambience into an appropriately stoned chugtastic* riff by a very loud guitar, which quickly fades out into the same riff played on an unplugged guitar. All very affecting. But there are some moments on the album that just grate – some of the textures of the distorted guitars are more annoyingly fuzzy than warm and entrancing, and the movement of the last song into a folk melody hazily sung by a few folks but dominated by a yowling guitar is actually not very good at all. I’m sure that the guitar is supposed to be reminiscent of Jimi Hendrix’s infamous shagging the Stars & Stripes up the arse, but to these ears it sounds like he was reincarnated as a stillborn baby that’s playing with someone else’s mucky shitter. Not good. Bad, bad. Which is a shame, because about half of this double LP is class.

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(Originally posted January 2004)

SOUTHERN LORD: AN APPRECIATION OF SOME BANDS

Metal’s shit, isn’t it?

I mean, it’s just a lot of ugly chest-beating and testosterone thrown around most of the time, and when it’s not, it’s this awful po-faced ‘serious evil’ bollocks. I mean, all that crap about hidden subliminal satanic messages being audible when you play Kiss’ ‘Destroyer’ album or Black Oak Arkansas backwards – what all the cultural commentators neglected to mention was that the only reason you’d play a metal record backwards was because it probably sounded better than going forwards.

And then you’ve got black metal – the prime exponents of such are generally held to be Dimmu Borgir, a band that was once described to me as ‘The Backstreet Boys of metal’. I mean, come on! I spent the entirety of the 90s taking the piss out of people into metal, and its newfound ‘credibility’ hasn’t changed my mind a bit – I still think that Slayer suck shit, despite any protestations from well-meaning friends.

Unfortunately, Southern Lord has managed to blow my theory to pieces in the space of little over a year of exposure to their darkest manifestations. The primary source behind all this can be found in the output of SL’s finest, Sunn0))). Ostensibly SL gurus Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley, Sunn0))) is in essence the sound of two massively detuned guitars playing Sabbath riffs at about 20 beats per minute. And that’s pretty much it on their second album ’00-Void’ (their first release ‘The Grimmrobe Demos’ is kind of hard to get hold of); there’re four songs, each around 15 minutes long. No hooks, no discernable versus and choruses, no goddamned drums! Just pure slow-crunching riffs submerged in low-end drones that seem to increase the density of the air in the room you’re in, if you turn the volume up high enough.

As they say themselves, ‘The Sunn0))) mission is to create trance-like soundscapes with the ultimate low end/bottom frequencies intended to massage the listener’s intestines into an act of defecation.’ Joking aside, the beauty of Sunn0))) is their dedication to taking the blueprint established by Dylan Carson’s legendary Earth project and pushing at the boundaries of what you can do with extreme low-end signals created by guitars. On last year’s ‘3: Flight of the Behemoth’, they perfected their guitar-only approach on the first two songs, then invited Merzbow to remix the next couple of tracks, and then put drums and even some vocals all over the climactic closer! Though Masami Akita’s piano samples occasionally sound a little clumsy over such refined noise, the rest of the album is little short of absolutely fabulous. Involving enough to demand your attention at all times, yet droning and repetitive enough to push you into some kind of meditative state, ‘Flight of the Behemoth’ is an hour of pretty much utter bliss if you’re in the mood for it.

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(Originally posted October 2003)

“Next month,” I wrote [something like], “expect arbitrary gurglings about Lightning Bolt’s ‘Wonderful Rainbow’”. That was back in April. Since then there’s been a bit of an upheaval here at Diskant Towers, so we’ve been away. However, normal service can now be resumed – if under a different, altogether more appropriate, banner from now on.

You may have come here after reading the blurb about me being an obscurist bastard, for which I applaud, because I certainly wouldn’t have bothered. There’s nothing worse than reading a whole load of shit by some twat dribbling on like some heinous King of the Scene about some bands that you’ve never heard of (and will probably never hear of again), in terms that mean nothing to the average passer-by. So if you find yourself thinking, “What an [elitist] asshole!” at any point during this column, please feel free to email me and admonish me accordingly. It certainly isn’t my intention to alienate or blow my own-fucking-cleverness trumpet.

Speaking of which, do you know that godawful scene in that heinously smug film ‘High Fidelity’? You know, the one with Mincing John Cusack doing a wonderfully subtle bit of product placement for the Beta Band by saying “Watch me sell three copies of the Bayda Band”, putting it on the stereo, and having a strategically placed ‘customer’ turn around and say “What’s this?”; just so he can knowledgably assert “It’s the Bayda Band!”, and the customer guy can nod approval and say “cool” whilst stroking his namby-pamby adolescent beard like a faux-pseudo-bohemian hipster? I fucking hate that contrived ‘hey, I’m Hollywood, but I’m hip to the alternative’ scene. Unfortunately, it is the closest reference I can find for my intentions for this column. Bah.

But there are few things that make me happier than seeing someone turned onto music that I myself have discovered by random chance, or by taking a blind leap of faith in something I’ve heard about. It’s not the ego rush of being there first and being a superior snobby bastard about it, but the genuine pleasure of seeing someone get a kick out of something that presses your button too. The last time this happened to me was a couple of weeks ago, and once again my hapless victim was Simmo, who has frequently been my passenger on road trips. (In fact, most of my tapes in my car are designed to assuage/aggravate his moods, depending on how annoying I’m feeling whilst I drive.) This time around, we were off gallivanting to what was going to be our shared abode in Nottingham, and I’d just got this self-titled 7” on Wantage by an American band called The Whip. Upon hearing it once, I had to dub it straight onto the end of a dodgy Orchid tape, because it was the biggest, best, most rockingest new thing I’d heard in absolutely ages. Like since the time I first heard the mighty Part Chimp fellas. Even better, they had these huge heavy riffs with slightly odd rhythms, and weren’t afraid to pound them out again and again for your sonic delight. Hell, the A-side even has a couple false endings before it blasts through a few more repetitions towards a final conclusion. Plus, the singer sounds like Ian McKaye fattened up by years of WeightGain3000 abuse and no skateboarding. I haven’t got a clue what he’s singing about, but it sounds grand and I’m sure it’s deadly important. Unfortunately, The Whip’s drummer recently passed away in an unfortunate riverside accident (which isn’t funny, you Spinal Tap-loving trickster), and I’ve not idea whether they intend to carry on or not. It’s a damn shame because there’s some fantastic skin pounding on this, and it’s some really good stuff. Gah. In fact, it’s safely the best 7” single I’ve bought all year – mainly because I can’t think of anything else I’ve acquired that was any cop at all that wasn’t something grotesquely expensive+by Black Dice.

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(Originally posted April 2003)

[Cue: shift from bright-eyed enthusiasm of a spazzy debut column to world-weary sighs for this month’s disorganised heap of inconsequential rubbish.]

I’m sure you’ll be incredibly grateful to find out that since I moved into my current bedroom there’s always been this great stack of records that resides somewhere around me feet whenever I dint to use this pathetic excuse for a personal computing machine. Usually comprising of the stuff I’ve most recently bought/received/borrowed/stolen, it lives perpetually piled up against my stereo’s speakers. And though the vinyl and CDs (occasionally abetted by tapes and minidiscs) are in a constant state of cycle, some occasionally get clogged up in the stack for months and months. The Dischord box-set is still there (something to do with 73 songs to listen to), as is The Polyphonic Spree’s album, for some bizarre reason (probably because I’m never cheerful enough to trust myself to put it on). A bunch of CDs by Rob Crow’s bands have just found their way into there, and I can’t see them leaving for a while: Heavy Vegetable/Thingy/Pinback are just all too endearingly good for a day to go by where listening to at least one of them isn’t required. All of this is fascinating, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Anyway, top of this heap for the last month has been Sole‘s second album, Selling Live Water. Not long after I first discovered Anticon through cLOUDDEAD (much like everyone else, then), I heard lots of intriguing things about Sole… he was an original co-founder of the collective, and a rap prodigy at 14, only to ‘lose it’ and disappear for the best part of a decade. This is his second album on Anticon (I haven’t found his first in 18-odd months of looking), and a fine creation it is too. As an MC, Sole’s scathing wit and coruscating delivery often verges on brilliance, and he scores points over his similarly talented label-mate Sage Francis (an amazing live performer and freestyler, if you get the chance to see him) by avoiding gauche cartoons of self-flagellation – neatly reducing the Marshall Mathers comparisons. Instead you get a nice sticker on the front, screaming about David Koresh meets G.G. Allin, or something (I wish), which is partly a lie, but at least gives you a warning that Sole’s well aware of the troubles in the world/his soul, and he’s not gonna let up until you’ve heard all about them too. So, right, like; the album’s really good and everything, and there are some great words and some decent loops and beats and shit, but I’m starting to worry. I now own the best part of a dozen Anticon LPs, and they’re all starting to sound the same. I’ve seen the press release for this one talking shit about “a bomb squad of a production team,” or some such rot, which just means that again all these friends in Anticon are making ‘guest appearances’ on eachother’s albums. Predictions begin here that within six months all Anticon output will become as depressingly and numbingly monotonous in its consistency of sound/output as Morr Music managed last year. This album is definitely going to be the last Anticon record I buy unless persuaded otherwise by several positive reviews – admittedly because it’s probably as close as you’re going to get to a definitive MC’s record from these guys. (If you’re thinking of doing the same, make sure you get cLOUDDEAD, Boom Bip & DoseOne, and either Alias or Sage Francis before you pack it in. Actually, anything with Dose One is bound to be good).

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(Originally posted February 2003)

Introductions? Pah! You’ll get no introductions here. Or explanations, for that matter.

Instead, I’ll break into full-flow about a rather dandy 7″ EP by Fonda 500, entitled ‘The Colours and the Birdsongs.’ Though it’s a donkey-flogging second single from their third album, it’s another engagingly quirky and mildly endearing release from the band. Which is always nice. Like a particularly lively Attention Deficit Disorder-suffering infant, it wobbles and gurgles all over the place, rarely stopping on one idea for more than thirty seconds. All mildly silly instrumentation and occasionally indecipherable vocals, there’s identifiably an ‘indie band’ hidden beneath the plethora of vocoders, Casio keyboards and crappy drum machines, but don’t let that put you off. Moreover, there’s seven “tracks” in the space of fourteen minutes, so little room for baggage on this decidedly rickety yet incredibly comfortable and familiar cart. Decidedly lovable then, all wibble-and-burble-y, and it all far from outstays its welcome. The words woo and yay are rarely more appropriate in such a cutesy setting.

Continuing the “damn you all to hell, we like stupidity and we like it pop” ethos, Grandpa Records‘ own Stars of Aviation (okay, so it’s their own label) are looking for someone to release their music, you insensitive tripe. They used to be called Florence y’see, under which banner they got played by the John Peel man who dares spin records on airwaves reserved for music you’ve already heard a thousand times, and also released an EP too. For some inexplicable reason, they decided to abandon all that momentum and become another band with stars in their name (see Stars on the Water, Stars of the Lid, Trembling Blue Stars, Planes mistaken for Stars, yawn…)… and for what reason? We know not. Oh well, names matter little when you’ve discovered the magic Grandaddy trick of arpeggiated keyboard chords, which instantly makes any song a heady mix of lovely pop lullaby and heart-aching slow depression. Just as well that they’ve got a whole bunch of other good things in their little bags of songsmithery to keep you distracted.

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(Originally posted August 2004)

Hot, isn’t it? I’m beginning to realise that I’m more a fan of cold weather than warm. It’s great that the sun is out, don’t get me wrong, I’m not wishing it was pouring with rain all day long. I’m just missing the times when I could walk about in town for ten minutes without feeling like I’m going to pass out, and when I could get some decent sleep at night without the need for wide-open windows, and the insect attacks resulting from them.

But the English love to complain about the weather, eh? I’m such a walking cliché.

In other news, I cut my own hair the other day and inadvertantly clippered a few bald patches in there. I’m a trend setter.

Here’s some of the things which have been on my stereo recently.

Deep Peace is a compilation CD album from Autoclave Records. It’s ‘curated’ (i.e. put together) by calamateur, who I have reviewed here before. The raison d’etre behind this – all compilations need a raison d’etre – is awareness (and fund) raising for Trident Ploughshares, who aim to shut down Britain’s nuclear weapons capability. There are 14 tracks here, not of early 90s deep Goan Trance (as the hippyish title may make you think) but of a variety of (mostly) guitar-oriented independent music. It’s quite a rich variety too, taking in, amongst other things stripped-down acoustic introspective pop (Aereogramme), moody paranoid-sounding rock (calamateur), woozy My Bloody Valentine-like noise (Slow Storm) and minimalist blissed-out drones (Apologist). Aside from those four tracks – my favourites on here – the album also features Oldsolar, Brahm, Frog Pocket featuring calamateur, Spare Snare, The Gena Rowlands Band, Les Tinglies, The Out_Circuit, alicebelts, Lewis Turner and tenyards. What ties the individual tracks together, beyond the Trident Ploughshares connection, is a very high standard of production and recording, and consistently healthy quality control.

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(Originally posted July 2004)

I’m fluctuating wildly these days between my usual lifestyle of drinking too much, not eating enough and not getting enough decent sleep and a New Thing of not drinking, trying to eat well and generally trying to keep myself together. I’m getting tired of continually dealing with health and psychological issues, and think that the latter of the two lifestyles mentioned above might be just what I need to sort myself out.

So, let me know if you notice a newly confident and healthy glow about this column. And forgive me my regular trips to refill my reviewer’s bottle of water – I am well into water at the moment, and convinced that it is a cure for pretty much everything. A serious delusion, perhaps, but I’m all for the placebo effect if it works.

Anyway, on to some music. It’s what I’m here for.

The new Jet Johnson CD single, Death Song, is a languorous, soft-edged and sweet pop song with odd subject matter – it’s about a woman losing the top of her head during a train crash, and about some of the many ways there are to die. Jet Johnson are masters of indie pop with a dark edge – beautiful melodies, understated guitar lines and dreamy vocals. It’s the delightful singing voice of Caroline Nesbø which, for me, propels the band into real They Should Be Famous territory. Half Björk, half Nina Persson, it’s an individual and charming voice which combines with nicely laid-back songwriting to create an idiosyncratic pop band, the likes of which seem to be few and far between these days. The CD, as well as three more tracks, also features a Death Song video, which is a relatively lo-fi, scratchy and intriguing animated affair by Ebba Erikzon.

Jet Johnson also appear on Moo Sick, a budget-priced CD album sampler from their label Seriously Groovy and a fine introduction to that label’s good work. It also features Emetrex (smooth-edged, soft-centred indie rock), Econoline (fizzing good-time noisy/reflective pop music) and Mother Goose (weird, vaguely hypnotic power pop sort of stuff). All good stuff. But I really dislike the cover artwork. But then, who am I?

Next, I’ve got a couple of things here in my little review pile from some other bands which I’ve mentioned in the past.

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(Originally posted April 2004)

Benevolent good egg David J Stockwell gave me a pile of stuff from Narnack Records, after informing me that he had two copies of the Sonic Youth/Erase Errata split which they’ve released. I was convinced that fate had decided that I would never own that record, after ordering it direct from the label and twice being foiled by the postal system. However, nothing is free, and I was given the Narnack records and CDs on the understanding that I mention them in my column. So…

My new Narnack Records things (some new, some old)

Firstly, the Sonic Youth/Erase Errata split. It’s a seven inch on lovely white vinyl, with some kind of Mariah Carey theme running through it: “Mariah Carey is funny and everyone knows it!” as the insert states. SY’s side is great, a frenetic Kim Gordon-led burst of tension with the chaos and growling guitars which seem so rare on Sonic Youth records nowadays. It fair reaffirms my belief in them as a Great Band, so it does. EE are also pretty crazed on their side, with their reassuringly choppy guitar stabs and vocal yelps mixing it up to a stomping drumbeat and a one-step-from-collapse structure. Their song ends like the end is unexpected – and that’s in no way a criticism.

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(Originally posted February 2004)

Looks like it might be time for another column – all the signs are falling into place: a parcel of review goodies turned up from the boss this morning, I’ve got the day off work, and it is currently blizzarding outside to an extent that makes me think not only that there’s no way I’m leaving my house at the moment, but also that I may never leave the house again. So here I sit in my warm reviewing chamber, cup of coffee before me, with a pile of stuff to tell you about. This column’s theme? Here’s a load of records and CDs which I’ve bought and which I’ve been sent to review. What a concept, eh?

Füxa We could be together (7″, The Great Pop Supplement gps06)
Kinski I guess I’m falling in love (7″, The Great Pop Supplement gps07)
The latest two releases from the wonderful Great Pop Supplement, the label dedicated to releasing beautifully packaged, carefully chosen, stupidly limited (111 copies per release) records. Füxa offer two mellow, melodic and warm dreampop songs, which almost sound like two halves of the same ‘piece’. A trumpet plays out vocal-style melodies over sleepy, pleasant backdrops, and the general feeling created, to place it in the current meteorological context, is one of a warm sweater and a log fire to counter the freezing conditions outside. Kinski’s record is wrapped in a hand-sprayed silver foil sleeve, which is most attractive. Strange tunes these ones; ‘I guess I’m falling in love’ is a low fidelity, simplistic and repetitive barre chord-workout which falls somewhere in between drone rock heaven and ‘first band’ nervousness. Like Stereolab, aged seventeen, playing Stooges covers in a rehearsal room. Or something. However, flipside ‘Hiding drugs in the temple’ is the sound of a warped tape playing at the wrong speed. Seriously – that’s it. Not meaning to sound old or out of touch, but is it supposed to sound like that?

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(Originally posted October 2003)

INCOMING!

Wow, hey, look at this great big pile of records and CDs I have before me, which I should have been listening to diligently and reviewing regularly. It’s almost like I haven’t written any reviews for ages, and like I’ve been neglecting my solemn duty to keep you informed of, er, musical things. Let me try and address this problem. Some of the things you read about below may be slightly out of date – but such is the nature of the internet. Anyway, how do I know that you’re not reading this in 2056?

I have to be honest with you. I have no recollection about where this first CD by Calamateur, called ‘Tiny pushes vol.1 (how to be childlike)’, came from. As good a place to start as any though, eh? Weirdly, although this is a CD, this whole collection is available to download for free here. Hey, don’t worry too much about big slow download times either, because the whole ten songs clock in altogether at only around seventeen minutes. It’s worth downloading the whole lot too, as some of the tracks individually are cut-up snippets and fragments of random samples and sounds, and so it’s best listened to as a whole – the more ‘song’-like tracks (which, even then, are only glimpses of ideas) being interspersed with passages of vaguely electronic, vaguely dreamlike strangeness. It’s hard to get a grip on where Calamateur are at, but from this selection, they seem to exist in a world of half-asleep-yet-heartfelt acoustic songs in a suitably lo-fi style. They remind me of tapes which people used to put out in the old indiepop/underground cassette days, ideas committed to magnetic tape before too much refinement comes into play. An interesting listen which makes me want to hear more – hopefully, their invention and reluctance to submit to traditional songwriting rules is carried throughout their other work.

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