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

“Hamell is Bill Hicks, Hunter S. Thompson and Joe Strummer all rolled into one sweaty, snarling, pugnacious pit bull of a man.” Well, the press release is half right. You could just as easily say this rasping American comedian is one very angry bastard – you would be if you were brought up in a horrendously conservative American family in horrendously conservative America in the 70s.

There is one gem of a story involving a mother’s dead body and her son’s extremely inappropriate humour. The whole DVD is worth just this story, and I won’t ruin it for you. Hamell says his excuse for divulging in his friends’ most private of stories is, with an irresistible shrug: “well, if you’re my friend and you tell me these stories…”There’s also a horrifying satirical song about ‘The Trough’, an ultra-modern restaurant of Hamell’s invention which advertises “our friendly immigrant staff will even chew the food for you… you know, doing those jobs us Americans don’t wanna do.” Despite the unattractive aspects of ‘Rant and Roll’ there are some pretty clever cracks (e.g. Hamell visits “a crack bar from ‘Cheers’”, whatever a crack bar is) and without being patronising his memory for lines is astonishing.

Footage from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival seldom tickles the un-PC ribs; a great deal of his material can be lazily vulgar and extremely irreverent. This is just a personal thing, but I’m not massively comfortable when drugs are glamorized. Luckily for Hamell he doesn’t exactly do this, yet he looks on his drug-fuelled days (we’re talking crack, here, ho bloody ho) with undisguised nostalgia. A lesser prude would probably love the spaced-out tales more than I do – going to church on acid and being horrified by ‘eating the body of Christ’ is a good one, admittedly.

The incessant verbal attacks, the angry ramblings get a bit too much towards even the half hour mark, but if you think you can stomach some seriously crude material, then give ‘Rant and Roll’ and spin and I think you’d enjoy his “wicked sense of humour” more than I did.

www.hamellontrial.com

Pascal Ansell

How many albums do you know of that were recorded in an abattoir? The noise/drone duo Terry Burrows and John Bowers answer that question under the name of Tonesucker, whose 2006 album ‘Slaughterhouse’ captures the intense claustrophobia of a filthy parade through an abattoir.

The album opens with a monolithic guitar chord repeated every twenty seconds, the track’s title ‘Hook’ ominously punning on the portent of the horror that the listener / cow awaits. As the song develops there are some wonderfully weird guitar crackles that begin to burn then gently fizz out – just a sample of the great tones and effects the two guitarists Bowers and Burrows achieve in this album. One of the most nerve-wracking songs imaginable is ‘Crush’: a glacier-slow raising of pitch and tension, which achieved (I would guess) by gradually moving a slide up the guitar’s neck. On ‘Slice’ the duo treat us to hypnotic wavelength vibrations – that underlying hum synonymous with Earth and Sunn O))).

It’s amazing to think ‘Slaughterhouse’ was recorded with just guitars (plus pedals and amps) – the array of sounds squeezed out of a couple of the instruments is immense. It’s an incredibly intense listen packed full of triumphant droning and delicious noise. According to Terry the final product of ‘Slaughterhouse’ insisted on “tortuous amounts of audio sculpting” – all worthwhile in a particularly effective four songs.

Listening to this album makes you wish there was a drummer somewhere in the mix, and lo, Tonesucker have done the right thing. Drummer Steven Elsey joined earlier this year, and the band will surely benefit from this addition.

Tonesucker Myspace

Pascal Ansell

Ah, it’s nice to receive vinyl once in a while. This one comes from a new label that goes by the quietly sinister name of Autumn Ferment Records – Lisa O Piu marks their first release.

Lisa Issaksson is a Swedish singer/songwriter and with her band are known collectively as Lisa O Piu – the Swedish ‘piu’ roughly translating as ‘and more’ according to the press release. This release gives us two songs which both master the plain and darkly beautiful niche in the acoustic/folk genre. ‘Whisperers, Wavers, Hunters and Sailors’ is a brooding and melodious tune with just enough gleams of light in a dark and dense couple of minutes. The second track ‘Equatorial Changes’ is crammed full of delicate harmonies, gorgeous guitar picking and little else – the lily left ungilded in all its rough charm.

The general production (or lack of) is what makes this release really shine: stark and rugged, and with an unbeatably warm tone that you can only get from recording it on your 4-track as Lisa did. Good stuff; some great cover art designed by Lisa herself, and I look forward to any more Autumn Ferment releases. 

Pascal Ansell

http://www.myspace.com/lisaolillportan

Autumn Ferment Records

Oxfordshire bunch The Youngs Plan are an indie 5-piece and are, yak yak, rather young – this year sees them contributing a new track to the Truck Fest compilation as well as playing the marvellous weekend. Woopee!

Singer Ash Cooke* provides most of the songwriting, and has an excellent upper-range. ‘Our Getaway Car’ is a tricky but not contrived tune, serving as an example for the whole album; a shrewd balance between technicality and artifice. At times borrowing from At The Drive In and Bloc Party (the beginning of ‘Temper, Temper’ features some ace ‘choppy-guitar’ action of the latter band) but sounding original enough to fly from its immediate inspirations.

Thankfully, ‘Eveningtalk’ is bursting with an unhealthy amount of anxious, neurotic lyrics. It begins with the hyped-up energy of a beginning of an epic night out, twinned with comic-book fantasy: “the streets, this heavy concrete, so I’ll tight-rope walk the telephone wires” and the heavily ironic “tonight let’s migrate to where the bass is pumping”. The latter lyric almost achieves its object in sounding like the more cool, less ill-at-ease half of the digital generation – conveying instead is the pathos of not belonging, not fitting in.

‘Eveningtalk’ embodies the diverse kinds of twilight conversation: the hyper, rambling speeches; maniac splurges; deep, profound discussions and plain (danceable) banter. Twenty minutes in and the EP lolls itself to the end of its night-out: “now I’m tired. Everyone can stay here.”

It seems TYP are a bit of a tricky band to be in considering you’d have to literally crap in a bowl or record child-birth to create something original. Crap indie, i.e. jaunty guitars and brooding ‘situational’ lyrics indie has been done to death. But somehow they slip through this almost ubiquitous net: TYP are genuine enough to pull off the sheer complexity of the music and achieve an intelligent but not unfeeling EP.

Pascal Ansell

http://www.myspace.com/theyoungsplan

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=6hrFZjobmsk[/youtube]

*The reviewer acknowledges the fact that he shares a close (and some would say amorous) acquaintance with each of the five Youngs Plan chaps. The reviewer also acknowledges the fact that no review is ever fully objective – you could say I have a more intimate knowledge of what’s going on with the music. Whatever, TYP are good enough for me to stoop down to the level of ‘my homies’, and bribes aside, TYP are a good band like any other I’d go out of my way to review.

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/

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  

Well this has just put my faith back in life.

The Mother Dear disturbs my Coursework-Bedroom-Workingoncomputer strife – I’m happily playing ‘The GrimmRobe demos’ and I, slightly embarrassed, make a joke that it’s the latest release from our local church choir. Ho bloody ho. She brushed aside the shite joke, stopped for a moment and asked:

“Is it ‘Atom Heart Mother’?” (the record she grew up with)

“No, it’s some ‘drone-metal’ band called Sunn O)))” said I, obviously ommitting the brackets. I sighed and turned to my screen.

‘I quite like it’ she said.

Brilliant.

Cracking albums of 2007

Animal Collective – Strawberry Jam
Battles – Mirrored
No Age – Weirdo Rippers
Deerhoof – Friend Opportunity

Less amazing:

Songs Of Green Pheasant – Gyllyng Street
Z – Mikabe
Hauschka – Room To Expand

GIGS

That Fucking Tank + (argh I forgot their name…)– Port Mahon, Oxford: dancing in my boxers
Shellac + Lords – the thingy in London… oh what’s it called…
Rolo Tomassi – Port Mahon
Jazkamer, Mogwai, Sunn O))), Shit & Shine, Modified Toy Orchestra, Qui – Super Sonic Fest, Birmingham
Othello at the Globe – alright not a gig, but still incredible
Acoustic Ladyland – Zodiac
So So Modern – Cellar, Oxford
The Turn of the Screw – London Coliseum

3 BEST THINGS
Singing in an opera
Peru
Skinny Rugby http://hs.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5561864423

3 WORST THINGS
Hella latest album
Hella latest album
SHITE INDIE TRUCK FEST

Overall: Fee Fi Fo Fum, AS Levels, Uni visits, Finland, Pe bloody Ru, Tenor & Bass, Verdi’s Requiem, Baths, Horndean Special Bitter, teaching guitar, Oxfam records, Taize, Thelonious Monk, 18, Matt Bayliss.

New Flying Lotus EP – massive, incredible. Like a squelchy Prefuse 73 – big beats!!!

Phew.

Pascal xx