If you win the Nobel Prize for Literature, you generally have to be pretty good at writing (this is not the case with the Peace Prize). The 3 novels I’ve read by Prize winners have all been pretty good but poetry and theatre aren’t so much my thing. Harold Pinter was the 2005 Laureate and his The Caretaker is currently running at the Citizens Theatre.

It’s a good production but I was left feeling cold. Never having seen any Pinter before, it still seemed quite familiar, perhaps showing the large influence his work has had in the nearly 50 years since this play launched him. The words aren’t really dialogue; often it seems that the characters on stage are talking to themselves more than each other. The 3 performances are affecting and funny by turns, so why was I so unmoved?

I think there’s a lack of humanity in the play.

I get the feeling that Harold Pinter just doesn’t like people very much. I’m not arguing for unrealistic, Hollywood-ised views of relationships, but making things look bleak is no more realistic than making them look bright. You can find a chink of light as easily as a shadow in any scenario. I’m not interested in being made to feel that human contact and friendship is impossible, that hell is other people, or any of that nihilistic, existentialist “angry young man” stuff that seems common in post-WW2 theatre. If you want to eavesdrop on misery, that’s what Eastenders is for. I came away feeling like I had been manipulated into feeling bad. And not in a good way, but in a “no sympathy between people” way.

The humour seems to come from mocking the characters’ aspirations. When we’re told about the shed that clearly isn’t likely to get built, are we being invited to mock that character’s failure to achieve even that modest ambition? No thanks. That’s on the level of forum trolling.

So yeah: performances excellent, obviously an important and influential play, but did I enjoy it? No.

Sorta post-rock, sorta like Appliance, they sound warm and uplifting:

The French Quarter Myspace page

(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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A host of swirling echoes and schoolgirl voices jump from ear to ear. A proud and primal beat follows. Welcome to the jarringly entertaining world of Grampall Jookabox, Indiana’s prime beat master and tune churner.

Quite a bit of drama to this release. David Adamson, the man behind the moniker, was struck by inspiration, cancelled a weekend of gigs and sat in his basement to write and record ‘a string of songs that seemed to arise spontaneously’. A week later and here we have ‘Ropechain’, Adamson’s second release.

Grampall Jookabox could very easily be simplistic rather than attractively plain and simple. His ethos would appear to be fancy-free dirty pop tunes. It’s not easy to aim for interesting simplicity and skirt the border of being simplistic. Plenty of tracks have booming, rudimentary drums with one sizeable chunk of a beat sufficiently carrying the song along. Rather like how one hefty pasty carries the appetite through the day, no-nonsense – it just simply delivers.

‘Old Earth, Wash My Beat’ includes lush tropical chimes and tribal chants. It’s this and the ponderous drum, washed down with hits of excessively reverb’d vocals, that define Grampall Jookabox in all his wild idiosyncrasy. Iggy Pop certainly has some influence of Adamson’s loose, slurred vocal delivery but it does in no way try to mimic the Stooge’s ‘spat’ style.

What seems to be a rough treatment of a rather delicate subject turns out to be the opposite. In ‘The Girl Ain’t Preggers’ Adamson at first pines at the fact he might have impregnated some ‘girl’: “Ain’t got no money – I can’t pay for no baby”. But nearing the end of the song we see a true realisation that is pretty saddening: “I love the baby’s hands (tiny hands) I wanna wrap it round my finger”. Not exactly depressing on a Lou Reed scale but still a troubling and faintly tragic mourning for a child that was not to be.

‘Ropechain’ is well produced enough for the beats and bass to get underneath and shake to high-heaven that low, unlocatable part of the ear. It’s a solid album – not the most easy of listens nor a headache to get through. But the album’s beauty is that Adamson has left the core musical message to resemble what it is: a bare, un-polished and muddily proud bunch of rugged tunes.

myspace.com/grampalljookabox

Pascal Ansell

(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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Two Minute Noodles display all the reasons why watching a duo can be great fun. Keys and drums face each other, interplaying and generally having a ball. This is well-formed and intense tunes, taking some influence from the thumping drive of Philadelphia’s Need New Body. Drummer ‘Moz’ (also in Chops and Quack Quack) swings his head round, tongue out, with a hard-hitting drive, obstinately forcing and thrusting the song onwards. He sounds a tad like John Stanier of Battles; mechanical and relentless at times, like a live drumming machine. The keyboard riffs could be a little more imaginative but the mind rarely wonders – a sure indication of an exciting live act.

An unexpected follow-up to minimal instrumental rock is Paper Tiger. The mean-looking seven-piece specialise in spaced out dub/hip hop with situational lyrics by an unnamed MC. Each musician is as interesting as they possibly could be, with a monolithic sub-bass, choppy guitar, chilled drums and scratch DJ delivering endless variety. Most notable is the saxophonist. He randomly taps his pedals, expertly squashing and looping his riffs – the inventiveness is impressive. One of the best things about Paper Tiger is that each instrument never rides over the other; you could listen to any of them and be entertained. Each tune seamlessly segues into the other at an unrushed pace, content where it’s staying but hinting at new horizons – brilliant viewing.

Time to get geeky. The monome is a wee box with a grid of flashing buttons. Each button yields a sample which the artist can chop and change at his/her own will, thereby banishing all boring laptop performances forever! Yeah!

Daedelus A.K.A. Alfred Darlington hails from LA with a good handful of electronic and hip hop samples and beats flying under his Victorian cape-thing. Seemingly because of the supposed ultra-pretention of the scene, Darlington was “totally disillusioned by the whole world of jazz” and so sought to produce his own composite brand of glitchy beats, folk & RnB (in the old sense) samples and live improvisation. With what I hear you ask? Well, if we observe the equation we have a pretty good evening in store: Daedelus + monomer = massive tunes.

The monomer makes the night. His passion is poured into this odd box for a very good reason as he points out that “most electronic music is a hidden process” or in other words, “cheating”. This is a perfect compromise between sophisticated electronic and live instrumentation. The songs’ foundations lie somewhere in his laptop but there’s a good deal of improvisation going on with the monomer; his modus operandi consisting of “sitting with the audience trying to figure out what they need or want… it doesn’t have to be an automatic throw-up of previous material… keep messing with it, messing with it, messing with it…” He then has a subsidiary monomer to the side, which squeezes the signal, rumbles it around then throws it back into the speakers. Samples from Nirvana, T2 and Aphex Twin make it a wonderfully diverse cut-and-paste affair, never palling. Incredibly good scouting from Room 237.

Two Minute Noodles

Paper Tiger

Daedalus

Pascal Ansell

(Originally posted April 2003)

This week, or month, or year, or however often I do these columns during brief moments of lucidity and calm, I’ll be approaching the affair in an altogether orthodox way. I have a pile of things to review. I’m going to review them. You will read the reviews. Your life will become better by an insignificant margin. My review pile is made up of actual things which people have sent for review, so who knows what might happen over the course of this column? Snap judgements? Rash decisions based on a first listen? Hell yeah! I’m never gonna land that choice reviewer’s job on the NME if I think about what I’m writing logically and rationally, am I?

JUXTAPOSITION
EP 5-track CD
This is one o’those oh-so-modern CDs with a silver side and a black side, like you get with Playstation games. Modern technology, huh? Next you’ll be telling me that they can record sound onto thin strips of magnetic ribbon. Anyway. This is a very well-recorded, cut crystal set of songs which roughly exist in the 50% “melodic epic indie” (Coldplay, James et al) + 50% “slightly odd noisy pop” (more recent Flaming Lips, Grandaddy etc) brackets. To me, personally, this means that it is unfortunately 50% “slightly annoying” as my tastes tend to fall into more skewed and bizarre brackets these days. However, I am in full appreciation of the care and attention with which this has been put together, which makes me realise that the band aren’t just some random chances who are playing at music. Self-belief is always refreshing to see in today’s climate of cynical and manipulated/manipulative bands.
www.capturedmango.co.uk

GRANDMASTER GARETH
Introduction to Minute Melodies CD album
Awkward Records AWKWARD 005
Hmm strange one this, thirty one-minute long songs/compositions which I entirely imagine to have been created by a strange loner sitting in a dark room at a computer and giggling to himself. The album takes us through a series of somewhat frustrating and aggravating ‘sound sketches’ (and hey, you can use that phrase if you like), taking in hallucinogenically-enhanced children’s television show themes, cod-hip-hop, sub-musique concrete word poems and general ‘ho ho I’m so funny’ experiments with samples and sound effects. It all sounds like it’s been created with a sustained blast of ‘messing around with my new music software and seeing what happens’. Over thirty tracks, despite their short nature, I’m afraid to say it gets kind of grating, and makes me that the album has been created for self-amusement rather than as any kind of grand musical statement. But I’m in two minds about whether that’s actually a bad thing or not…
www.awkward-records.co.uk

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There’s always been a problem with bands trying to find a tuneful middle-ground between math-y technical instrumentation and vocals. Maps and Atlases provide a welcome solution to this problem – solving the other dilemma that is: sounding how you want to sound (even if this happens to be pretty technical and complicated) and not resembling a contrived mess.

Singer/guitarist Dave Davison has no problem with the term ‘math-rock’ in particular, but these pigeonholes will always be clumsy. It may be that when a band aims to sound like a pigeonhole that they trip over their pansy wee skinny jeans. May very well be.

Davison sports the true mark of any dedicated and humble guitarist: massive nails on his right hand. Respect! If you get the chance to speak to him after a gig, test his English accent; pretty impressive considering M&A hail from Chicago. And that of course most Americans of course are thickos. Anybody would be pretty chuffed with a city that bears such names as Shellac, Wilco, The Smashing Pumpkins, Patti Smashing, Volcano and Fall Out Boy (…). The Big D believes that, like any other city, many bands never make much of an impression elsewhere and simply end up with a respectable fanbase in Chicago. There are probably a good handful of bands that don’t make it across the Atlantic that are kept in a little jar for the little Window City dwellers to feast upon. Probably.

M&A are an interesting – and relaxing – band to spy: chilled out and at ease, with the odd look homeward to the incredibly skilled drummer Chris Hainey. Like with Don Caballero, Hella and the many other ‘mathy’ bands that M&A draw influence from, drums are integral to their workings of this particular breed of band. There is a genuinely chuffed grin on Davison’s face as an encore is noisily suggested by a good chunk of the sweaty Brudenell regulars – and nono you’re right Mr Diskant surfingman, you just can’t beat that.

http://www.myspace.com/mapsandatlases

Pascal Ansell

I like this idea. Ten hand-picked MP3s for £1, with new sets available monthly. Licensed by MCPS-PRS so the bands get paid but DRM free so the listeners aren’t getting a crap deal instead. Partnered with Scotland’s free arts paper The Skinny and currently featuring a set of tunes picked by Optimo so it’s checking all the local hipster buttons too. Swishy iTunes style website. AND they have a track by diskant faves Findo Gask.

It seems so rare these days to see a good idea in the music business that isn’t ripping people off or making a quick buck or getting sued by the RIAA. I wish them the best of luck.

www.tentracks.co.uk

(Originally posted December 2002)

Ah, hello again everybody. I hope this finds you all in good health and in good spirits, and not with a sore thumb like I’ve got, after accidentally stabbing myself with a scalpel earlier on. So you’ll be expecting a column, I presume? Well, here you go. I’m going to break with convention this time and do one in the most straightforward way possible – yes, this is going to be a list of reviews, and nothing else besides! You see, I have a few things here which I am obliged or feel compelled to write about, and in either instance I know that I’ll feel bad if I don’t write about them. Being the logical creature that I am, I’ve put them in a pile in front of me and will be going through them one by one, reminding myself of each of them one by one, and telling you about them one by one. That is, if my damned CD player ever realises there’s a CD in it, rather than spinning aimlessly and forcing me to try out all kinds of stop/start/skip-track trickery in order to get it to play.

LEMON JELLY
CD single
Not exactly sure what this is, as the (rather attractive) packaging has no mention of artist, songs, names, anything. It turned up with a note from Marceline along the lines of “the one with the nice packaging is Lemon Jelly, one of those electronic bands”. I suspected I heard the Lemon Jelly name before, and in the back of my mind seemed to remember them as a horrendously ‘accessible’ trip-hop-dance-lite kind of outfit. And lo, I was right! For shatter my knees if this isn’t a god-awful trio of tracks which in no way challenge, add to, upset, make you think about, or reinforce one’s interest in the musical landscape WHATSOEVER. Rather attractive packaging, though. Anybody want it? My CD player’s just refused to carry on playing it!
www.lemonjelly.ky

ECONOLINE
Full tar
CD single
A taster of what’s to come on their album (more of which later…), ‘Full tar’ is an Econoline pop song, with catchy melody lines dipping their toes in and out of grimier, noisier waters. Great drums too, sounding like they were recorded at the bottom of a giant oil drum. Like all good pop songs it’s over in around two and a half minutes, leaving you wanting more and – were it not for the aforementioned album – scrabbling around for old Superchunk and Boyracer records. The two other tracks here, I presume, showcase the ‘other sides of Econoline’, being a slower, slightly introspective sort of tune and a fuzzy lo-fi recorded-at-home alternative-version sort of tune (the latter being a bit too much along the Graham Coxon intentionally reduced quality line for me…)
www.seriouslygroovy.com/econoline.htm

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