(Originally posted February 2002)

Oh no oh no oh no, I’ve left myself way too little time to write this, and I can barely remember yesterday, let alone the whole of last year. What shall I do ? What shall I do ? First of all, I’ll calm down before I fall off my elegant brushed aluminium chair – deep breaths, it’s not a race – and the best thing is probably if I just get going with this. No guarantees for the reliability of this here list, and no apologies for neglecting to mention some of the brilliant releases of last year which I’m obviously about to forget. Let’s get on. Here we go now with…

MY BEST FAVOURITE RECORDS OF 2001, OH YES
(not all released in 2001, you understand. just my favourites of the year. OK? And they’re not in any order. So keep your bleedin’ shirt on.)

OXES
OXES (LP)
Remember that Trumans Water LP, Spasm Smash Ox Ox Ox and Assss, or whatever it was called? Well, beef that up a tad, give it more angles and poke its teeth with a turned-off power drill for a while and bam! there you have this OXES album. Hurrah!

HOOD
COLD HOUSE (LP)
And yes! YES! it is raining and cold outside as I type this – just as it should be. HOOD continue in the melancholic vein of their previous two albums, adding a touch of garble and a spring of hip hop to the mix. But they still haven’t managed to cheer me up, thank heavens.

VINCENT GALLO
WHEN (LP)
Another reason/excuse for me to mention BUFFALO 66, one of the greatest films in recent history! Yip! Woo! Not that this album’s anything to do with it, unless you consider the trembling introspect on display here something of an aural equivalent to the visuals of the movie. I do. I haven’t heard the soundtrack to the movie, mind

THE FUCKING CHAMPS
IV (LP)
ROCK! blart!! Proper old school metal played with a math-rocker’s eye for detail and a comedian’s eye for dual-guitar harmonic action.

VARIOUS OLD CHANCERS
CHOCOLATE SOUP FOR DIABETICS (LP)
Classy old compilation of sixties psych out mayhem featuring, among others, the wonderful FLIES with their drudgealong cover of ‘Stepping Stone’ and DANTALION’S CHARIOT giving it some flutey tripout magic too. I just wasn’t made for these times!

VARIOUS POST ROCK TYPES
ROCKET RACER BOX SET
This looks neato in its little white box containing three seven inch singles containing the sort of repetitive drone-based noise candy you may well expect from TANK, PORTAL, LACKLUSTER, YELLOW 6, THE AND/ORS and STYROFOAM.

THE FREED UNIT
CHEWINGUMOUTH (7″)
And wouldn’t you know it, this single was out on Rocket Racer Records too – the crazy old American alternotypes that they are. Rocket Racer I mean, not The Freed Unit. Hey, you know what I mean. This is their finest hour I think, a rollin’ ode just on the weird side of a weird Flaming Lips tune. Perhaps.

THE PRETTY THINGS
SF SORROW (LP)
“My boyfriend looks like Phil May out of the Pretty Things” – anyone who tells me where that quote came from can have a special prize. More psychedelic madness going on here, with this – ooh – concept album which sounds like Rolling Stones go Beach Boys in a Brian Wilson stylee. Which is, pretty much, what it is.

AVROCAR
CINEMATOGRAPHY (LP)
OOOH class. An album which sounds like waking up after sleeping for a hundred years, breaking up with somebody you never really liked, reminiscing about the good times with that person, etc etc etc. Shame it’s CD only. Boo hiss. But at least the gentle chiming nature of the album doesn’t get interrupted by needle noise.

SONIC YOUTH
ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING THEY’VE DONE
Oh, just because, alright? 50% of my time last year was spent listening to Sonic Youth.

CLICK HERE!

There has never been a more fitting title for an album than Volcano’s debut Beautiful Seizure. The Chicago three-piece introduced to an unsuspecting few a world of swirling electronics, spasmodic guitars and rolling, charged semi-improvised drumming – it’s one of my favourite albums. There’s no band that comes close to sounding like Volcano – a hot delicious juicy musical lava to be readily engulfed in. Actually, they sound a little bit like Storm and Stress, just not shit.

What sets Volcano from other bands is the choice you have to listen to any respective musician in any song and be entertained – each consistently provide endlessly interesting melodic lines, chewy noise or rhythmic rolls. Aaron With’s guitar is a scratchy, plucky delight with an abrasive and raw tone. The synths, laptop and bass player Mark Cartwright is even more intriguing to listen to, playing atmospheric rumblings and fuzzy keys; winding lines of bass guitar to all-out delicious noise, and he seldom stays in one mode for long. I might have read this somewhere before, but a perfect description of Volcano’s drummer, Sam Scranton, is that he resembles a jazz drummer playing rock. Like many a jazz hitter he’s delicate and soft in his execution, but with a generous enough groove to back up his bandmates.

The expectations laid upon Paperwork couldn’t be higher, but it is so good because it sounds in parts a bit, well, wrong. In ‘Sweet Tooth’ instruments are played how they shouldn’t; the faintly jarring guitar and keyboard are slightly out of tune with each other, and With’s muted plucking is a definition of understated beauty. ‘Astronomer’s Ballad’ begins with a floating splendour and carries on with a wonderful chaos, bordering on the free-improv. This is Volcano’s trademark sound: loose, wobbly, partially improvised, but somehow they never sound self-indulgent – and this is where Storm and Stress often fall flat on their skinny pretentious arses.

Apparently, ‘Paperwork’ is infused with cynical political stabs and celebrity-bashing, but With’s lyrics are often hard to make out. No matter. He’s got a ripe falsetto, a tremendous wail that’s relatively Thom York-ish in a more upbeat, less suicidal strain.

I doubt there’s a higher compliment you can pay a band or artist than to say that they are never, not even for the slightest second, dull. Volcano are always gratifyingly pricking the ears with some odd keyboard blip here and huge cascading wave of beauty there; they are a consistently entertaining listen. It’s hardly a problem that Volcano’s latest album is not quite as breathtaking as Beautiful Seizure because it’s barely possible for it to be bettered. To look at it another way, Paperwork is a more ordered and coherent listen than their debut, and is generally easier to digest. And the great consolation is that it’s an album you can play at the odd shindig without too many people scratching their heads.

myspace.com/volcanoisaband

Pascal Ansell

After a complaint about punters shagging at the Arches‘ “Burly” gay club night, the venue has been told to shut for the next 6 weeks.

Could have serious consequences for the Arches, which is 85% self financing and shows some of the most innovative work in Glasgow, including hosting the Instal festival for most / all of its time.

It’s not all bleak though, this story about an orgy in a nightclub does include a policeman saying “Lest the chief constable’s position be misinterpreted”…

(Originally posted December 2001)

Today’s lesson begins with some ramblings about an ACTUAL, REAL BOOK with words in it and everything. Because oh yes, I do more than just listen to records, I live a fulfilling and exciting life which occasionally involves reading and watching the telly. Anyway, this ‘ere book is called ‘The Creation Records Story’ and is a great big eight-hundred page mutha of a tome, covering the, er, Creation Records Story from shambolic beginnings in the early 80s up to becoming The Record Label Of Oasis. And along the way, of course, we meet all kinds of crazy pop kids such as The Jesus And Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, The House Of Love and Teenage Fanclub. It’s an interesting story not just because any sane music fan will and must own many of the records mentioned along the way, but also because in a proper in-depth kinda way it takes in the surrounding independent music scene which grew up from punk days, through the eighties, up to today, when ‘indie’ means something entirely different to the pop man in the street. It’s packed full of juicy little anecdotes and revealing insights into the machinations of the evil big business side of music, it if nothing else it’ll make you dig out some of those old 7″s in wraparound sleeves to remind yourself of times gone by.

But, no time for reading? Then let’s get on with talking about some records. Or CDs. (Much as I hate CDs, they don’t seem to be going away).

Continue reading »

It’s a rare band indeed that can play the irony card without coming across as just plain irritating, and sadly for them, The Chap fall well short of that dubious gold standard. This latest 7”, out this week, offers up two examples of the kind of music that it’s impossible to enjoy without the application of a liberal dose of irony to one’s own critical faculties to mask all the self-congratulatory whimsy. It’s crammed to the gills with falsetto-ridden, over-enunciated globs of lyrical smugness that nudge you in the ribs, raise their eyebrows and demand that you acknowledge how clever they’ve just been. ‘Massive tunes, put them on your ‘pod, Rod / Proper songs about girls and clubbing’ – tailor-made drivel for new media tools to jig themselves into a froth over.

It’s a shame, really, because when they put their foot down towards the end, drop the frolicsome archness for a few seconds, there’s actually some deft guitar work on display here, with some neat high-end figures building over an undercarriage of bubbling synth tones. That doesn’t, however, prevent this from being a really annoying piece of music that I want nothing more to do with.

The B-side does little to improve my mood – a half-arsed, teeth-grindingly pointless cover of Tina Turner’s ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It’, in which the singer can’t hold his deadpan spoken-word drawl together and bursts into peals of laughter at how clever it all is. It’s a sad day when you’re aching for the proper rock delivery that only Tina Turner can provide.

The Chap website

(Originally posted October 2001)

Hey kids. I’ve just been listening to the 14 Iced Bears, and if you don’t remember them, then that’s not entirely important (although it’s quite important, as they were REALLY RATHER GOOD). The point is, where is all the good music these days? Why do I fill my time with all these old records, when surely I should be listening to the hip sounds of youth and getting down to where it’s at in the scene. I can barely get it together to buy anything even vaguely new any more, my shopping habits are erratic to say the least and leave me clutching weird armfuls of records from all over the place and from random years and people. Such is the delightful nature of aimlessly shambling through one’s musical life. Still, this isn’t a confession, it’s an excuse to pad out some space before I get started on a paltry selection of reviews of the only half-recent records I’ve got lying around here right now. Sit down comfortably, this won’t take too long…

First up is a 7″ split single featuring V/VM and PORTAL, on the simply marvellous Earworm Records, which upon first impressions looks a bit dull, sitting as it does in a generic Earworm company sleeve and having as it does no labels on the record to speak of, just an area of white. this does mean it’s difficult to tell which side is which, but you’ll know soon enough by listening to the damn record, fool. Portal’s two tracks are on the sinister side of relaxed, with super-repeated, super-barren frightening child’s story style melodies burrowing into your head and fiddling around with stuff, like the more melodic, more unnerving parts of the Aphex Twin‘s ‘Volume II’ in one way, and like stripped-down versions of an old David Cronenberg film soundtrack in another way. pretty cold-sounding, but atmospheric to the point of suffocation. V/VM, on the other hand, are clearly disturbed in several ways, and proffer some kind of twisted happy house tune which has been fed backwards through a sharp blender and brought up on a diet of sampling and knowing glances at people with worse record collections than itself. Strangely enough, for all its cut-up oddity and scratched record (in the traditional sense) charm, it manages to be simultaneously respectful and damning of the ten or so old tunes it’s sellotaped together with. You can’t say they’re not originals.

Next next next. This is a three 7″ box set from Rocket Racer records, and it looks fantastic – minimal yet a delight to open and treasure. As the insert says, ‘it’s been a while since i’ve seen a 7″ box set’, and i couldn’t agree more, it’s great to see effort being made to produce this kind of artefact, so much attention to detail, and so much belief in the music contained within. and the music? well, there’s more PORTAL, this time they seem to have cheered up somewhat and give us a skippy light breakbeat mixed with ominous synth sounds and quiet echo-heavy vocals. respect. the other side has THE AND/ORS who take the more traditional guitar band route and use it to good effect, with a lazy and plaintive song that sounds like an old Sarah Records band existing nowadays, operating at a slower speed, and with a slightly warped edge. The second record kicks off with YELLOW 6. I say kicks, but it’s more of a slow shuffle, with lulling, shifting sounds intermingling amongst pleasant acoustic guitar, like certain areas of Godspeed You Black Emperor! or even Aerial M. It’s bee-eautiful. LACKLUSTER bring things weird to the flip, with what some might pretentiously say is a ‘soundscape’, but what I pretentiously like to call ‘a bad-dreamy passing of noise’ which recalls cold winds on miserable evenings and drifting lost at sea. or at least recalls ideas like those. like Portal’s stuff on the earworm record, it’s certainly unnerving, and definitely memorable. STYROFOAM, next, sound the most electronic of the folks in this box, with a tune which could have been produced in the early 1980s on 1970s equipment. But recorded in the 1990s. It builds and builds, piano sound over synth sound over drum machine sound, not really going anywhere, but never getting dull. TANK round off this superb selection of talent, and stay true to their flawless form with a Neu! style urgent repetition, sounding utterly meaningful without the need for lyrics. They have it going on, or off, or something.

And there I will end. Only two reviews, you cry? Well, quality beats quantity every time. And those two releases are of The Quality which should make all you dear readers go form a band, or release a record, or write something, or produce something worthwhile. As Add N To X would say, ‘you must create’.

Go on then.

Some ideas people come up with make no sense but they don’t see it.

I appreciate that there are 2 ways to increase profit from a product. You sell more, or you sell more expensively. So any ridiculous item is made to seem luxurious, from bog roll to fabric softener.

But I think some kind of limit has been reached with White Diamond & Lotus Flower-scented washing powder. As far as I know, lotus flowers were the ancient Greeks’ version of heroin and diamonds are solid lumps of carbon that don’t emit chemicals and can therefore have no smell.

I decided to investigate.

I thought that perhaps there’d been a printing error and that it wasn’t the smell of white diamonds, but the smell of the jakey’s favourite £3 tipple White Lightning. (Cider is, after all, pretty trendy these days.)

Alas no. I had a sniff in the supermarket this afternoon and can exclusively reveal that what White Diamond & Lotus Flowers smells like is… Continue reading »

One of the strongest electronic beep records you will ever hear, the new record from Elite Barbarian achieves a certain kind of ambience ordinarily/usually harboured by the most strung out and sensitive of electronic acts without using such barbed sonics. 

Tickling like the insides of a ZX Spectrum and playing out like the soundtrack of several Atari 2600 games; over the course of 58 minutes the album takes the listener on a journey of unexplored confines electronic beats/beeps often coupled with crazed sick piano licks. 

The author of the album is Ben Page who as a member of both Rothko and Rocket No.9 is a seasoned and accomplished composer of modern ambient extracts often emerging from improvisation and instinctive desires and trajectories.

The real strength of this record is the manner in which it achieves being both relentless and relaxed at the same time, tempered and tenacious in its brute meditation.  As the atmospherics grow so does the intensity as sonic layers reminiscent of raindrops, pulses and bubbling machinery scour your consciousness almost feeling transient as it interrupts the flow of your immediate activities.

Listened to as a whole the album merges into one great body of work not strictly to be swallowed whole but to accompany any mindset or duty that requires a holding hand to assist concentration and clarity.

By the time it reaches the 16 minute climax “Let’s Go Back To Morse Code” you sense you are coming to the end of being subjected to some kind of subliminal intake and that it is actually quite possible that the beeps could well be pieced together Joe Bonham style to forge together some kind of alien message.  You’re unlikely to hear this record at parties, only funerals.

Thesaurus moment: static.

Elite Barbarian

Front And Follow

The fledgling Scottish label Autumn Ferment have done it again in sharing with the world another fantastically original folk artist. When not singing, Flake Brown is a father named Tony Ramsay, a folk-guitar fiddler fiddling his way around whirs of plucked strings and tastily surreal lyrics. Admittedly the combination of folk + odd voice + humour (albeit a slight, tasteful wit) does not immediately smack you of making an enjoyable listen. But his debut album ‘Help the Overdog’ is a real grower; his distinctive voice turns from strange to charming and you realise you’re in the company of a jolly good album.

Flake has a friendly bass-baritone voice which he shows off with terrific low humming. He’s the owner of what I would have assumed is a West Country croak, but Sussex is where he really hails so I’m a quite a few miles off at least.

There are some classic folk song-titles here: ‘Pilgrim Song’, ‘The Weathercatcher’ and ‘Eddie the Puss’, but nothing in the album suggests trite folk idioms. The latter song is wonderfully perplexing:

I am a mistress of fate,
I wait for you at the gate…
Staple my face to the hours…
Skate on the top of your breath,
Ride on the wings of desire,
Buy a house and then retire.
Be good to mum throughout life,
Go to the shops, buy a knife…

and includes some sinister chuckling and the two longest hums I’ve ever heard. ‘The Angry Courtyard’ hits you in the stomach with its sheer beauty, and is coupled with some spectacular lyrics: “Moon drips into the Angry Courtyard… I watch the life that dangled on your thigh”.

Flake is funny but never facetious and has a witty idiosyncrasy that makes comparison very tricky. Sadly, and this is very sadly, Flake’s guitar playing can be pretty scatty when trying to impress. Most of the album displays an original and reserved take on some very tricky folk fingerpicking, and this is when he performs best. His guitar playing is can be too ambitious towards the end of the album and songs are spoiled, but not ruined, by some pretty shoddy playing. He’s no Django and does at times attempt playing which only a virtuoso could pick, slide, hammer and pull off. This is, however, the only criticism I can (very reluctantly) find in such a fine, fine, grand, wonderful, humorous, comforting album – an album helped me find peace in a rush-hour, oh-shit-I’ve-lost-my-keys London. A must for metropophobes!

Flake Brown Myspace

Pascal Ansell