(Originally posted December 2001)

So this was it… this was supposed to be my big break. When diskant contacted me about writing a music column, I figured I’d hit the big time. No longer would I be a part time loser with a full time absinthe addiction, travelling the streets, forlorn and dejected.. By wielding the vast power and clout that came with an organization such as diskant, I’d be on the inside track of the music business. No longer would I have to stand in 100-person lines to watch the big acts; instead, the bouncers would simply wave me through. No longer would I have to hide in the bass drum to get backstage, I’d simply flash my diskant badge and I’d be smoking crack with Axl Rose and Dr. Dre. (On that note: Marceline, where is my diskant badge? You said you’d mailed it weeks ago.) THIS WAS THE BIG TIME, BABY.

The problem came when I sat down to write. As a writer, you’re not so much a self-motivated creative force as you are an ANTENNA TO THE UNIVERSE. You sit down, tune in to the cosmic A.M. and spit out what the great Gods talk at you. Unfortunately the Gods were about as quiet as Harpo in the Marx Bros. films. I just couldn’t get the juices flowing. It seemed a simple enough task – all I had to do was lay down my thoughts on the music of the day. (Sure, most music of today sucks, as did most music of yesterday and will most music of tomorrow, but there’s still plenty of chill stuff to hip people to.) It wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to say about it, it was just… it had all been said before. So, I was sitting there, feeling the rage of literary impotency wash over me and my eyes desperately cast themselves about my bedroom for inspiration. Could that pile of dirty socks speak to me about the state of modern music? For the first time, they were quiet. What about my collection of 1960s erotica? It too held its tongue. But then my eye settled on the darkest corner of my room and Shiva, Jesus, Elvis and all the other Gods of inspiration spoke to me. In that corner, you see, lay my record collection… my beautiful record collection… comprised mostly of obscure audio treats I’d picked up at a variety of pawnshops, garage sales and home invasions throughout the years. These records had eased the pain of many a lonesome night and spoke singularly about me – about my tastes and my ideas. Who else would have an album by the 1970’s progressive rock band, Kayak, next to the Broadway soundtrack for “A Chorus Line.” Or the Brothers Johnson’s 70’s funk masterpiece, “Light Up The Night,” sleeve to sleeve with Robert Goulet’s “Summer Sounds.” None other than little old me, that’s who! And I realized that I finally had a tangible theme I could work with! By examining records like the vinyl that lay resting amongst the filth-strewn contents of my room I could provide a look at the history of rock and roll. Because the albums that end up in the used bins and pawnshops truly are a genre unto themselves. They’re the one hit wonders and the no-hit flounders. They represented lifetimes of rock and roll dreams gone up in smoke due to record company bankruptcies, changing fads, lack of talent or plain ol’ tragedy. These records were the grimy old men who sit at the end of the bar… and at last someone would tell their story!

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Amazing!

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=160246683389&fromMakeTrack=true

Plus, strange nudity trend:

http://www.snopes.com/photos/risque/kettle.asp

Things are finally happening again at diskant, you’ll be pleased to hear. Our first new feature in about 8 months is now online; a round-up of our fun times at All Tomorrow’s Parties (curated by Explosions in the Sky). There are a few more articles and interviews in the pipeline so hopefully we’ll be back to some kind of regular schedule soon.

It is diskant’s ten year anniversary this summer, so to celebrate I will be pulling some stuff out of the vast diskant archives and making it available again. We’ll be starting with a series of columns that Wil Forbis wrote for us a few years ago – a hilarious set of reviews of forgotten and unloved bargain bin classics. 3 of these columns actually feature in his awesome new book so consider it a taster for new readers. I’ll be posting one or two columns a week here on the blog and there’s plenty more good stuff to come after that.

I’m also pulling the main content of diskant (articles, interview, Talentspotter etc.) into the new diskant style but expect this to take a while. There is a new features index which will be updated as the new pages are created. The other sections will follow suit, eventually.

Not long after writing my rant about Michel Houellebecq, I picked up (for pennies) a book of essays (Some Recent Attacks) by James Kelman. He’s the author that best transmits Glasgow’s voice, but only famous elsewhere for being the Booker Prize winner who says “fuck” a lot.

One essay, Artists and Value, argues that stereotype and cliché are marks of a bad writer. Of course. But he goes further, making the connection between bad writing and bad attitudes:

“One thing you do find is that many writers who are described as “good” aren’t that good at all, not when you examine their work closely (…) the clichés, the shopsoiled phrases, the timeworn description; basic technical stuff. What it usually signifies is a striaghtforward lack of interest in, or awareness of, particulars. They don’t reach the concrete. (…) And by quick extension of that:

“Everybody on the broo is lazy. Jews are greedy. Black people are criminals. Red haired people are bad tempered. Irish people are ignorant. Peasants are hamfisted. Glaswegian working class males are drunken wife-beaters.

(…) Writers who use too many clichés or timeworn phrases or shopsoiled figures of speech either just don’t care or they’re being lazy.”

And why are we told that certain writers are “good”?

“In our society it isn’t only works of art that have a value placed on them by external forces, so do the actual creators themselves, the artists. The value is economic although it occasionally attempts to masquerade as aesthetic, and received wisdom brooks no distinction.”

JK Rocking! Best £1.50 I’ve spent this year. He wrote this ~15 years ago and it’s still both true and hardly recognised.

What was it that prompted me to fork out £3.49 for a seven inch single in this day and age?  One thing may have been the classily twisted cover art straight from the school of Raymond Pettibon displaying the vivid attitude that accompanied Big Black’s Songs About Fucking LP sleeve.  Perhaps it was the label it is released on, the wonderful Jonson Family Records who I had vague dealings with straight back to the first Stanton single released by them up to the Ten Minutemen vinyls and the Peel session(s).  Maybe it is the autographs and signatures on the back of the sleeve making it prime for Ebay!  Perhaps it is the jukebox hole in the centre.  Regardless they got my money.

Eclipsing all these elements however are the dirty sounding guitars and bouncing stride of confidence that accompanies all of the above.  With a set of influences that read straight out of my shelves/collection, here is truly one of the last remaining independent releases you will see in stores

In a time when guitars no longer whistle or scream, as inept guitar players take over the shop and make it boring, here is a house for the estranged and desperate, a tune so lumbering it actually helps to be obese to enjoy it.

The influences of this band are said to be Sub Pop grunge and I can hear that in a dirge that reminds me of the Thrown Ups and their ilk, the less conventional bands on the label during that prized era, the fallen heroes.  What the record reminds me of most are the early lo-fi punk songs of the Beastie Boys from the Some Old Bullshit compilation, an association in sound that is most welcomed.

And as a bonus you get a band member that looks like a younger version of the dad from Malcolm In The Middle.  Lovvers have everything and more!

Thesaurus moment: BBW.

Lovvers

Jonson Family Records

Straight away I have to come clean and admit that this mini album is a few years old now but only a recent discovery for me after experiencing several exhilarating live performance.  Not owning this release until now ultimately is several years my loss as I genuinely love this release.

Spread over seven tracks Scorpio Scorpio is a mean motherfucker from Australia, very much in the Mark “Chopper” Read mold with no mould, a one man assault system with a twisted sense of humour and a vocabulary turns the air blue. 

The life of a one band as described/explained by Leo Sayer many years ago is a tough and lonely road of existence.  It is made even lonelier when you are selling drugs and performing bank jobs.  To combine drum n bass with guitars in this manner truly is something of a criminal act, like an Australian Devo on crystal meth, packing to settle nerves.

Scorpio Scorpio is the king of the infectious blast of aggression, slamming/smashing electro music fires through in a lo-fi industrial style as jagged guitars like parchments of AC/DC feedback with hooks aplenty. 

The real strength of the release is in the lyrical content that is spat out like bullets – this is pure poetry in its execution.  Opening track “Utility (You And Me)” verges on pure pop perfection, following the announcement “fuckin’ turn it up”, Scorpio Scorpio calls out the listener “have a go” before using the basic genius principle of having a chorus including “na na na na na.”  It just works!

With song titles as “Ayatollah Rock’N’Roller” and “Cobra (Knobya)” it would take a very stone faced person not to find humour in this record, the type of person that may have experienced a fatality at the hands of Mr Scorpio Scorpio himself.  There are no innocent bystanders connected with this music, especially when “Cobra (Knobya)” is concerned. 

The one sad flaw of this record are the high fidelity qualities, they are sadly lower than such a collection deserves.  For some this could prove a spoiling point but for others this may even make the music.

Thesaurus moment: schismatic. 

Scorpio Scorpio

After 17 studio albums and having a foreign organism having fed off her food then forcibly left her poor body in a process known as ‘child-birth’, the Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Ani Difranco decided not to put her feet up. Instead she decided to make a live DVD of her band playing in a converted church in downtown Manhattan. It happens to be one she restored into the delightful venue Babeville, named after her record label, Righteous Babe.

Ani plays a sophisticated strain of acoustic pop; intelligent, tasteful and shrewdly put together. Her music resembles a toned-down and less bloody-minded Alanis Morissette, but not without a terrific bite to the lyrics. They concern a few main topics: politics, activism, identity; a good number of songs sketch out the ‘get-out-of-my-house-and-my-life’ scenario, or the pursuing of a successful relationship and the inevitable pain of it never succeeding. And how bloody awful men are. Hmm. Ani’s a long-suffering activist and outspoken critic of, well, lots of things, evident in this gem of a justification:

Every time I say something they find hard to hear / They chalk it up to my anger / And never to their own fear

As she begins her set, Ani tells the crowd that “I hope you feel photogenic” as 6 cameras dart around the hall, her drummer, percussionist and bassist retaining poise as they poke around their unmentionables. The percussionist, Mike Dillon, is Difranco’s discreet but remarkable bandmember, who warps his vibes through a delay pedal, squashing the signal about the tall church walls, with some delicate tabla tapping to compliment the mix.

While trying to avoid, avoid, avoid the irresistible cliché, (her lyrics are so clever that it will out anyhow): every song is a story, an argument. Let’s not forget the magnificent lyrics to her latest song ‘Present/Infant’ – (very touching considering the arrival of her child): “I would defend to the ends of the earth / Her perfect right to be”. The sight of a parent moulding their young to an ‘ideal child’ is always worrying – Ani’s artistic and maternal dignity is sealed in a sentence. I think I love her.

Pascal Ansell

http://www.righteousbabe.com/

The good folks at Cityscape sent me a marvellous panoply of things to do with this release – not only a nice-looking snow-white 7″, but a CD, DVD containing the ‘Sometimes’ video and even a badge. So they’re already scoring high on generosity alone. Not that I can be bought, of course. Merchandise releases gone by have twinned low-fi ‘knowing loser’ pop with subtle electronica, but on ‘Sometimes’ it’s as simple a format as can be: plinky-plonk piano and sweet-hearted lyrics skipping along over a relaxed, summer-in-the-park arrangement of walking bassline and brushed drums. It’s all very cute, innocent and likeable, akin to a Badly Drawn Boy whose face you do not wish to smash in. B-side ‘Glitterati’ follows in a very similar vein, with fresh-feeling music and a vocal delivery that leans over Pulp’s garden fence. This isn’t a record for the cynics or noisemongers amongst you, but there must be some pop fans left out there?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM41ws8BY2E[/youtube]

Contemporary jazz is a horrendously difficult goat to reign in. The cerebral, ‘difficult’ nature of many modern players I’ve come across means that trying to make any sense of it nigh-on impossible, the whiff of academia too overpowering. I’ve moaned before of newer jazz that seems “relentlessly modern… cold and unfeeling”. Yet all has changed, you’ll be pant-wettingly excited to read. After slotting itself through the letterbox, the self-titled album from Swedish jazz quartet Gushpanka has embedded itself in my noggin with its thoroughly addictive and tuneful melodies. 

The Gushpanka modus operandi revolves around the “belief in the timeless power of melody and rhythm”. Bingo! The word ‘gushpanka’ is an old Aramaic word meaning ‘approval’ or ‘seal’; Sweden, Finland and Israel all come under the band’s cloak. With piano, sax, bass and drums, the general mood of their debut album is nothing but friendly, and more importantly, tuneful!

‘Counter reset’ (along with the whole album) gains from multiple listens – an intelligent and dynamic piece, not without warmth or melody. A brilliant break-down mid-way through the piece is the album’s peak: gusty pumping from saxophonist Jonas Knutsson – outrageous pangs and slaps, brilliantly playful invention. Knutsson is impressive throughout the album, retaining a wonderfully clear and crisp tone. An addictive, rambling and meandering motif kicks off ‘Algo-rhythm’ – this is ace modern jazz! Complicated, dynamic, but, thankfully, tuneful! 

Even after many, many listens, there are still plenty to explore in ‘Gushpanka’ – a remarkable album of original compositions with tons of depth. It’s endlessly diverse: ballads, songs bordering on free-jazz, pumped-up rhythmic pieces… An aural joy for tired-out modern ears. 

Pascal Ansell

http://www.myspace.com/gushpanka  

Diskant likes pie. This New York Times columnist doesn’t like pie as much as he likes rich people. And wars. He’s boring. This video is the best thing he’s ever been (inadvertently) involved with:[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=sv6nvMUq10U[/youtube]

Apparently the pastry-wielding prankster in the video is facing expulsion from their university. Online petitions don’t amount to much more than a biscuit, but, hey, a University’s more likely to listen than a government, so why not sign this in support of the pie-thrower.