I’ve been putting off writing about this album for ages. There’s such a gargantuan collision of styles on display here that it’s hard to know where to begin. Over the course of ten tracks, Capillary Action display elements of King Crimson’s kooky song structures, the Fucking Champs’ NWOBHM-drenched metallic gleam, Lightning Bolt’s clattering chaos and disorientation, the chunks of rock favoured across the Oxes/American Heritage/Don Caballero axis and – more surprisingly despite all of that – Mike Oldfield’s pastoral mutterings and any number of cheese-laden jazz-lite conspirators. Initially, I found this a difficult album to get through – at first listen it’s nigh-on impossible to get a handle on who Capillary Action really are, if not simply a duplicator of musical styles. This seems genuinely to be an album which benefits from repeated plays, and I think I finally get it after many spins: the album works as a whole, and should only be taken as such. The high quality parts of the album far outshine the low, and ultimately this is more than a collection of Fragments.

Pangaea Recordings
Capillary Action

One day people will look back and say, “I saw KJA play at a bistro in Dulwich”.
Which is a shame because he deserves so much more.

For those of you not acquainted with the joys of how KJA writes songs, and because I’m lazy, imagine a soup blended with all the best cuts of Robyn Hitchcock, The Kinks, Presley, Barrett, Jonathan Richman and Lonnie Donegan.
Yes. He’s that good.

“Pip” is a beautifully warm record. Even moreso than his previous “Sunshine Loft”, the songs here sound as though Keith is sitting next to you telling stories.
The album is all acoustic guitar and fuzz bass, clattering drums and KJA’s delightful asides.
Occassionally KJA has been bemoaned for using humour. I disagree. He doesn’t use humour in a Half Man Half Biscuit this’ll-be-funny-for-a-couple-of-listens kind of way.
The humour on “Pip” is a vehicle for honest emotion.
Take “Dad”, a song about KJA’s father and about the death of his mother. The opening verse made me laugh out loud,

“Comfortable as a pair of old shoes,
rational views on the national news,
drinking our tea in the glistening dew,
that’s me and my dad.”

but it’s tempered by a chorus of,

“when you share a life then you’re really living,
can you really live until you’re really giving,
when you lost a wife and i lost a mother,
but she’s kind of there when we’re with each other.”

which made me cry.
And that doesn’t happen very often.

Further into the album there are moments of touching beauty, like “In Love” with it’s gentle melody and whistled asides (the ghost of Donegan rears it’s head).
“Keep an Eye” is typical KJA tomfoolery. A skewed tune rattles around while Keith asks us to keep an eye on him as he doesn’t want to be “just a little speck floating out to sea”.

So, what else can I say?
A few people will remember him with huge fondness.
Why don’t you become one of them?

This year has seen the reissue of all three albums by one of my favourite favourite bands. The Nightingales always seemed a bit overlooked but for the few people that noticed they were a vital noise.
“ITGOCW” was the band’s final album and at the time of it’s original release seemed a rather odd step. The title of the album gives it away. It’s a country & western inflected slab of pop.
With hindsight though, this change of sound makes perfect sense. Main ‘Gale Robert Lloyd was always a country fan and, if you listen closely enough, some of the early records have a C&W flavour even if it’s hidden away under the post-punk guitar scrape.
Lyrically the band were always astonishing. Snapshots of working class toil wound up in wordplay that led to The Independent saying, “Lloyd is the most underestimated songwriter of his generation”.
From “The Headache Collector” onwards, this is an album of stunning and often very funny insight. “How to Age” is a six plus minute journey through unsightly hair and bodily decay over itching violins and glorious bass riffs. The addition of the couple of EPs that came out around the same time make for a complete view of The Nightingales in the mid-eighties.
Anyone with soul should have this record.

Ah, the noble guitar! So many things to so many people. To some it’s a vessel for the summoning of dark spirits; to others it’s an easy way to make quick cash, or a best bet for getting laid. For others still, it’s a warm and obedient friend on long, cold, lonely winter nights.

New Zealand ex-pat Cameron Bain, formerly of a number of varyingly obscure noise and punk bands, and here sailing under the flag of VAW, is someone who appears not to be content with just having a warm and obedient friend to keep him company until spring, but prefers to (is compelled to?) use this friend to summon dark spirits too. It’s a fascinating two-birds-with-one-stone combination, and results in a compelling first side of this split vinyl LP. Mainly the fruits of solo labour, the Vaw tracks are uglybeautiful: dark, scratchy and slightly claustrophobic smears of things that nevertheless contain moments of real tenderness and poignancy. There are wonderful snatches of harmony, sustained afterglows, fragments of chance melodies, all poking out from under a thick layer of dust. Occasionally throughout the set, Sean O’Reilly pops into the cabin to warm his hands at the piano, the shaker or the oboe. It’s low key, lo-fi, but highly satisfying.

The flip side is occupied by oddball duo Heliogabalus, also New Zealand ex-pats, and also veterans of the fertile NZ noise scene. Their side is considerably more rabid, as they channel mischievous poltergeists, rather than the more reflective, melancholy lost souls that Vaw invoke. Interestingly though, it’s all done with acoustic instruments – so instead of rich amp fuzz, we get cascades of feverishly plucked nylon, catgut and steel string, and the layers of silt on this side are entirely due to the joyously outdated recording technology. If at times it seems directionless, that’s because sometimes it’s more fun to just wander around and enjoy being lost than to map out strict routes, and every now and then you stumble across something incredible that you wouldn’t otherwise have seen. Deranged, and, consequently, quite a thrill.

Difficult Fun

Let’s say that one night you come round to my place, just to hang out. No real purpose. Sometimes it’s nice just to spend time in someone else’s house. And while I go and put the kettle on, This Is Where Our Hearts Collide by Amandine is playing on the stereo, and it’s playing slightly louder than it ought to be, really, loud enough so that you have to raise your voice everso slightly in order for me to hear what you’re saying. After it’s finished, we both get that feeling that it’s s shame there isn’t more – neither of us are losing our minds over it, but when it’s over, there’s simply a vague sense of loss. It’s created a nice, warm easy-going reflective mood perfect for drinking tea to that I can’t really sustain with any of my other records. Everything else I’ve got is either too harsh, too minimal, cold, depressing, or intrusive. So I put it on again, and it’s comforting to be vaguely familiar with it second time round. Now – this is the interesting bit – when I tell you what it is you’re listening to, you are totally amazed by two facts:

1. It’s on FatCat records, supercool Brighton based home to such left field artists as Black Dice, Animal Collective, Janek Schaefer, Ultra-Red, Xinlisupreme etc.
2. The band are from Sweden.

You are amazed, because This Is Where Our Hearts Collide is a thoroughly pleasing collection of gentle, intimate and uplifting alt-country Americana. Olof (God, I wish I was called Olof) has a wonderful, fragile-but-noble voice, and he’s backed by breezy guitars, melancholy piano, accordians, banjos, a trumpet and some poignant strings. Most of the songs actually sound like sea-shanties. There’s certainly a sense of traditional folk about this. It’s the kind of music that I’d love to see live in a small coffee shop in small-town US. Or maybe a small, darkly lit chapel. Whatever, there’s an intimacy about this that would be ruined in a large venue. Which, in a way, is a shame, because the more people that hear this the better.

Amandine
FatCat Records

This band’s name begs the obvious question of what exactly is the most terrifying thing. Is it that a band who claim Slayer and the Gang Of Four as influences can come up with the turgid alt-rock displayed on this single? Or is it rather that these guys appear to have serious aspirations for their music? Or further yet, is it that they appear to get radio play? Such potshots based only around this band’s name are, of course, all too easy and certainly below this reviewer (besides, we all know that nothing is more terrifying than being buried alive). It remains, however, that this reminds me of mid-90s alternative rock. By that, I don’t mean the bands that came from the underground and somehow managed to attain commerical success–Nirvana and Sonic Youth immediately spring to mind–but rather the tripe we were subjected to when the A&R vultures kept on picking at the carcass and brought us bands destined for the cut out bin such as Collective Soul. To their credit, The Most Terrifying Thing have a post-hardcore/emo sound going on, at least with the guitars, that saves this from being essentially cock rock leftovers, but that isn’t nearly enough to prevent this from being middling “disaffected yet sensitive” white boy rubbish. I never thought that I would be thankful for the state of modern commercial music, but in a climate where post-punk styled bands sell a lot of records, The Most Terrifying Thing don’t stand a chance, and that’s fine by me.

The Most Terrifying Thing
SEECA

With a forthcoming full length on Matador and having already played All Tomorrow’s Parties with only this release, their three song demo given a proper release by Monitor, New York City’s Early Man are primed for stardom, at least by modest indie standards. From song titles like “Fight”, “Death Is The Answer To My Prayers”, and “The Undertaker Is Calling You”, to the inverted pentagram formed from pointy guitars adorning the CD, and musical reference points such as early Metallica and Black Sabbath, everything about this release is loudly shouting “METAL”. The problem is that Early Man are rarely convincing in their quest. They are far too sluggish and lack the attitude to pull off even mediocre thrash, and when, on the middle track of this EP, they make a foray into Sabbathy territory, they don’t have the riffs or the groove to be able to pay a proper homage to the dark altar of high priests Osbourne, Iommi, Butler, and Ward. The most compelling part of these three songs comes near the end of the second song when Early Man change from insipid Sabbath worship to melodic hard rock somewhat reminiscent of Thin Lizzy. Given that this is only their demo, I am giving Early Man the benefit of the doubt; they simply haven’t yet found their sound and, in my opinion, would be much better off if they dropped the metal pretense. Given their early successes, they have a lot to prove on their Matador debut.

Early Man
Monitor Records

Girl/boy duos, is there anything better? Especially when they both sing, the boy’s drumming and the girl’s playing guitar. And the boy’s our own Stevipus. This is one of Steve’s new projects now that Cat on Form are sadly no more and my lord are they great proving that, really, drumming is just all about hitting stuff with enthusiasm. Blood Red Shoes take the violence and playground poetry of Huggy Bear and team it up with the interlacing duelling vocals of Sleater-Kinney to create basic, thrilling songs. With repeated statements of intent over jagged guitar, there’s no mistaking their aim. The taunts of “I hate you” in Don’t Always Say Yes are delivered with matter of fact bluntness and a glint in their eyes. Stamp it into black and red swirled vinyl and package it in screenprinted cardboard and it’s like riot girl never ended. Which it didn’t, not in our hearts.

Blood Red Shoes
Jonson Family

1-2-3-4! I’m trying to remember the last time I bought a pop single. It’s probably not since they stopped releasing them on 7″ vinyl. CD singles have always seemed an enormous rip-off to me – horribly packaged and taking up way too much space in my collection for one song since the b-side is usually a dodgy remix or – woo – an instrumental version. However, the main reason for this purchase (well, apart from feelings of slsk guilt and some kind of wish to make Rachel Stevens not feel like a failure come Sunday evening) was the fact that the b-side is amazing and bizarrely has been left off the album. Waiting Game is co-written by Rachel Stevens herself and while it’s not the most innovative song ever recorded the “no, no, no-no-no-no” bit at least should win some kind of catchy pop award. With lyrics consisting of a stream of pop cliches and a bassline with the snap of elastic it harks back to those classic S/A/W album tracks, the ones maybe lacking that extra spark that makes a pop hit but still pressing all the right buttons. The a-side you must have heard, a drum-heavy Adam and the Ants style stomper glittered up and filled with enough gleeful energy, whoa-ohs and hey-eys to get anyone singing along. Just give in.

This is the sort of thing that sounds wrong whatever speed you play it at. And yet so, so right. These short songs delight me in their oddness and madness and cleverness. Holy Fire is my favourite, all sped-up banjo, tinny beats and droll vocals. At times Um is a Fisher Price Beck, Syd Barrett thrown blinking into the sunlight and Dawn of the Replicants trapped in their bedroom for a month with nothing but a box of toys and some sherbet. You can probably get a good enough idea of the brilliance herein from the list of lists on Um’s website which include ‘Things I’m A Bit Kinky About’ and ‘A List Of Businesses On Mill Road Who Wouldn’t Hide You From The Nazis’. On this evidence Um is almost a reason to visit Cambridge.

Um
Strange Lights