(Originally posted July 2002)

This’ll be an interesting movie column if for no other reason than my complete lack of movie-watching action over the past month. But hey – don’t use this as a reason to hate me, or to follow me down the nearest dark alley in order to assault me whilst my mind is on other things – because I AM NOT ENTIRELY TO BLAME FOR THIS SITUATION.

Here’s the deal, see: up until recently, I shared a house with two of my friends, and many a happy evening was spent watching videos, or going down to the cinema, or indeed simply sitting around discussing the post-modern Brechtian tendencies of so much of the work of Don Simpson as producer AND ALSO actor. Then, just as life couldn’t be any more perfect, one of my friends decided to move away down to Brighton, where the pebbles are smooth and the hair is styled, and as he moved out I came to realise exactly how many items of furniture, electrical equipment and cutlery in the house he actually owned. Can you see where this is leading? Correct. My video recorder – and I do consider it MY video recorder, simply as a result of having shared a house with it for about five years – now lives in Brighton, which means a three-hour train journey simply to watch crap like ‘Jeepers Creepers’ or ‘Dude, Where’s My Car?’, let alone the exciting new ‘Apocalypse Now Redux’ edit or ‘Psych-Out’ once again. And that’s like, too much, man.

You might be thinking “why doesn’t he just go to the cinema, like anybody else?”. But to be honest with you, if you’re thinking that, you obviously haven’t been reading all my previous columns and hanging on my every fucking word like I expect you to. Let me run through it once more, though, for those of you not paying attention: I live in Reading, where there are two cinemas within easy distance – one walkable, one not – but both of these cinemas show, pretty much consistently, THE WORST KIND OF HOLLYWOOD SHITE THAT EVER WASTED VALUABLE CELLULOID. So, are there any other options? Well, one: the local university has a film club kinda thing which shows your more art-house and your more obscure films, which is a short car journey away.

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(Originally posted July 2002)

It’s a real American sitcom thing to start a sentence with ‘So,’ don’t you think? As in ‘So, I was in the coffee shop and that girl I like spilt her mochachino all over my Danish’ and all that. I prefer using ‘Anyway,’ as in ‘Anyway, I went blind momentarily and ended up in the dock on a handling stolen goods charge!’. The intricacies of our fair language, eh?

So anyway, I saw SONIC YOUTH play live the other night and woooo I was excited about the prospect. They’ve been my #1 favourite band (if it’s not too teenage to have a favourite band) for over ten years now, and I only ever saw them play live once before, when they performed a Birmingham date of their ‘Goo’ tour for my acid-addled brain. It’s a bit strange how I felt about it this time, though, as I travelled home afterwards – and it got me thinking about how I actually feel about them as a band. I’ve not bought ‘Murray Street’ yet, and I didn’t buy ‘NYC Ghosts and Flowers’ yet either, which must be some kind of insight into something or other. I used to rush out and buy everything I could get my hands on by them. I still do, in fact, quite happily shell out for rare bootleg live albums from ebay or vinyl versions of their albums I already own on CD. Maybe it’s something to do with the music I grew up with, or the number of times I’ve listened to some music, but I’m much more comfortable with ‘Sister’ or ‘Daydream Nation’ than their more recent LPs. I’m not saying I don’t like the recent LPs, it’s just that I seem to like the older ones (especially that mid-to-late-80s-phase) a whole lot more. This would lead you to think that perhaps I’d have been super-happy about the split of songs played at their recent live show being pretty much 50/50 old/new material. And I was, to a degree, but I kept thinking “why are they letting me off easily like this? shouldn’t they be forcing me to appreciate and experience their new music, rather than treating me to a fanboy’s set of ‘the classics’?” It’s an odd situation. While I hear that their ‘Goodbye 20th Century’-style show at ATP a couple of years ago was excruciating to the point of delerium, I think I’d still like to have been there, forcing myself to accept the challenge of listening to music I wouldn’t normally experience. Sonic Youth have this role as ‘musical pioneers’, and that’s what I always want them to be – never a greatest-hits-played-for-solely-Goo-owning-dullards band.

So anyway, phew! They rocked on, regardless. And I dug them severely. They even played ‘Making the nature scene’.

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A quick mention of this album as it’s been on repeat here in my work room for the past week or so now, soundtracking my exciting world of designing, writing, computer gaming and sitting blankly staring at a monitor, without ever becoming tiresome or irritating. This is very subtle, very relaxing electronic music, meandering through the ambient world in which Aphex Twin, Orbital and Underworld have left trails (obvious names to use as comparison I admit, but it’s true). The emphasis is on warm, comfortable pillows of sound – as a whole, this album is one long, shimmering glow. Good music to work to, it would seem.

Port-Royal
Resonant

(Originally posted May 2002)

Mulholland Drive. The Devil’s Backbone. Storytelling. Bully. What do these films have in common? They’re all interesting-sounding films, films which seem to offer something aside from the norm, and all films which I’ll be watching over the next couple of months! That, you may notice, is the future, and currently we are in the present, or at times the past, and so I’ll have to make do with telling you about some other, less interesting movies instead, but still, movies which I’ve actually seen. Damn you Reading, and your shoddy selection of cinemas! Stay awake at the back. It begins.

First up in this rollercoaster ride of low-quality, second-rate programming we have LEGALLY BLONDE. To be fair, however, this isn’t really so low-quality or second-rate. It’s very Hollywood, very safe, very ‘nice ending’, and yet it’s still very watchable and I enjoyed it. Okay? I can hear your cries of “but it’s a girl’s film!”, but you know what? If this is a girl’s film, then goddammit, I’m a girl. No, hold on, I’m regretting saying that now. I’m not a girl. But I enjoyed this. It’s just further evidence of the world being screwy at times. Anyway, this ain’t no trial, and I ain’t no defendant, so get off my back, alright? I can’t control my likes and dislikes any more than I can control my drunken limb placement, and it just so happens that I like these cutey-pie, heart-warming, troubled-teen type movies. I own records by both the Fat Tulips and Bouquet, for Christ’s sake, and if you know who either of those bands are, you’ll understand what it means to own them. But I ain’t no cutie pop fan no more. It’s ROCK all the way for me, oh yes, a souped-up V12 RockMobile is what I drive to the video store and back. Right on. But I digress. This film is about a Valley Girl-type Californian ‘dumb blonde’ who, in order to attract the affections of her straying boyfriend, successfully enrols at Harvard Law School to impress him and spend more time with him. “With hilarious, and emotional, consequences”. You can guess how it turns out. But in the same way that CLUELESS seemed to avoid any over-sentimental nightmares of cheese, LEGALLY BLONDE seems also to tread a fine line between stupid and clever. Er. Whatever that means. And Reese Witherspoon is just great in the lead role, playing dumb-is-cleverer-than-you-really-think with exactly the right combination of sassy and naive. Aah, if you don’t like this, you’ve got no heart.

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(Originally posted May 2002)

MY CHILDREN! Walk with me. Walk through the forest of popular (although some would say unpopular) music as I guide you through an inky morass of badly-formed sentences and hasty reviews of some bits of plastic what have been spinning on my dusty, antique turntable and within my shiny, laser-guided compact disc unit. These are the tunes you should be digging like a weathered cemetery operative whilst you go about your daily business, and whilst you relax in your silk pajamas after a hard day’s hanging out.

EMETREX
Curve of the earth
CD single
Seriously Groovy LLL2125CD-S
I was scrabbling for literally HOURS in the back of my mind to place what ‘Curve of the Earth’ reminded me of, and it’s just come to me in a literally blinding flash. fdsluc cuicoui900 cjk;sa;e;e .. Ho Ho. I’ve not really been blinded. Anyway, it’s Grandaddy it reminds me of, in a similarly bass-driven, laid back kinda way, very nice indeed oh yes. I like it. It may not be particularly original but this kind of unoriginality is still streets ahead of the most original dour indie-goes-AOR shiterock which we’re forced to think of as ‘alternative’ via the media of the NME and Radio 1. But you know that, right? Otherwise you wouldn’t be sitting here with me, reading this over my shoulder (which, incidentally, is very rude). But, enough of that. There’s two more tracks on here which are a bit more half-asleep vocal in style, ‘langorous’ is a word which I don’t understand but which seems to sum it up. Like Built to Spill in a waking dream blah blah blah.
www.seriouslygroovy.com/emetrex.htm

I AM SPARTACUS
Forward
CD
Gringo Records 012
Hello like, antelope Greg marceline rocks xylophone. Seven at times unconnected words, here connected to form a sentence which ultimately reads as a slew of gibberine. But look between the words and that’s where you’ll find meaning. Or maybe not. But you get what I’m driving at, right? I’m drawing parallels, see, between music and poetry. It’s as obvious as the nose on your face. Which brings almost too neatly to this album, which I found in my little bag after visiting All Tomorrow’s Parties this year. Did anyone from diskant mention that we’d been to ATP? It was pretty good, like. And anywhere that you come back from with records and CDs in your bag which you never previously owned has to be pretty good. Unless they’re stuffed full of heroin and you’re passing through a Middle Eastern airport, in which case look out! Them internal searches can be hell on the organs. But you do the crime, and you should do the crime, you know what I’m saying? Anyway. Don’t annoy me, and let me get back to this album. It’s great, very restful, a kind of slow builder, like Godspeed You Black Emperor! (or A Silver Mt. Zion, I’m told) in its use of mournful, scraping cello (?), chattering violins, plucked guitars and intricate, yet relaxed and spacious, melodies and textures. It’s about as post- as post-rock goes, which some could construe as unoriginality, but it’s so warm and welcoming that you can’t get angry with it. Hurray!
www.gringorecords.com

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Sweden’s Library Tapes have been following a steady path for some years now; developing and experimenting around a core sound of soft, echoed piano lines and an atmosphere of loss and regret that is beautiful and, at times, heartbreakingly intimate. As with previous work, this album sounds plaintive and thoughtful, and it’s very, very quiet. Circular piano melodies build slowly, augmented with subtle string arrangements and occasional ‘real-life’ sounds of distant traffic and the hiss and pop of vinyl. In previous work, Library Tapes have sometimes been in danger of drifting off into a meander, but on A Summer Beneath The Trees the songs have more direction, more individual character across the set. ‘The Modest Triumph,’ for example, is quietly confident and positive; the fantastic, ten-minute-plus ‘…And The Rain Did Fall’ reflects on endlessly repeating notes, recalling Michael Nyman’s Greenaway film scores. This definition of character helps the album to sound warmer and more comforting than previous work, with some forays into string-led semi-ambient soundscapes suggesting a combination of the feelings engendered by Rachel’s, Godspeed! You Black Emperor and even Mike Oldfield, when glockenspiel and a distant trumpet come into play and the arrangements become more complex. It’s certainly music to create feelings.

Library Tapes
Make Mine Music

In his post-Spacemen 3 years, Sonic Boom has followed a determined path of experimentation, releasing countless volumes of electronic music under the Spectrum and E.A.R. names, moving from the melodic Soul Kiss (Glide Divine) into more esoteric territory with collections of drones and relentlessly repetitive keyboard motifs. Indian Giver, Spectrum’s collaborative effort with Captain Memphis (aka Jim Dickinson, producer of Big Star’s Third, amongst a variety of other production work including the Replacements and Mudhoney) changes tack, being something of a collection of nods to the past. It features a variety of analogue instrumentation – upright bass, fiddles, trumpet, sax – alongside Sonic Boom’s trademark electronic shimmers, augmented here with space-rock sweeps and wooshes from Randall Nieman (Windy & Carl/Füxa). The album includes reworkings of Sonic Boom’s previous output – Spectrum’s ‘Take Your Time’, Spacemen 3’s ‘Hey Man’ and Mudhoney’s ‘When Tomorrow Hits’ (as previously covered by Spacemen 3 years ago). This, combined with Dickinson’s smoky, gruff blues vocals, create a warmer, more human sound, and one that has not been heard in Sonic Boom’s output for some time. He has always dug into the past for musical references from the blues and psychedelia, but here these influences are more transparent, less swathed in electronic experimentation, than ever before. For every soft Krautrock meditation like ‘Mary’ and ‘Take Your Time’ here, there are tracks like ‘Til Your Mainline Comes’ and ‘The Old Cow Died’ – raw, unpolished work that sounds all the better for it. The two styles merge to create songs like ‘Confederate Dead’, a wonderfully sedated take on Neu!, with added fiddle, and ‘The Lonesome Death Of Johnny Ace’, a travelling blues tale set to Duane Eddy’s twang over Kraftwerk’s synths. It’s great stuff, humanistic music combining Sonic Boom’s past loves and present interests to impressively natural-sounding ends.

Sonic Boom
Birdman Records

(Originally posted April 2002)

I’ve been experiencing this strange phenomenon lately, whenever I see movies. I keep looking for evidence of the good side of humanity in celluloid situations, and find myself getting weirdly choked up at any vaguely emotional or bittersweet scenes – leaving myself thinking ‘ah, so everything’s not so bad, after all’. So, this I presume must mean I’m either experiencing movies on a different level recently, or I’ve become more hyper-sensitive to things, or I’m having some kind of emotional breakdown. I strongly suspect the latter. But fingers crossed, eh?

Example one: The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), whilst ostensibly a bizarre and sharply-defined comedy, seemed to throw in a couple of moments of pure heartbreaking poignancy within the jokes, to great effect. It turned what at first I suspected of being a lightweight humourous movie into a real, deep, affecting movie, in much the same way as American Beauty was. The storyline is, on the surface, pretty basic – an aging father (named Royal Tenenbaum) tries to bring his strange family back together and at the same time repair his guilty feelings about not being a good parent for most of his life. But the collection of characters in, and related to, the family are drawn with a Coen Brothers-style eye for quirky individuality, developing the one-dimensional nature of the storyline into something more complex: the childishly naughty Royal doing his best to understand family members including a recently-widowed financial genius son who is obsessively over-protective of his two sons, whom he dresses like miniature versions of himself, a failed writer daughter with a finger missing and a secret smoking habit for 25 years, and an ex-pro tennis star son who happens to be in love with his sister. The characters could have been annoyingly over-defined if they weren’t played so well by a brilliantly understated cast including Gene Hackman, Gwyneth Paltrow, Anjelica Huston and Ben Stiller. The gradual resolution of how the family all feel about eachother slowly develops through the film, and whilst nothing particularly major happens to twist or confuse the plot, the richness of the characters and their relationships sustain the movie without any problem.

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(Originally posted April 2002)

I know, I know, I’ve left this too late again, and everything I write seems to be the blandest gibberine that’s spilt from my tired, flu-stricken fingers for some time. But I soldier on because I love you, and because I get the guilts easily. No promises about my spelling or quality control, I have faith in the other music columnists here to carry me through this time of uninspiration.

NIK TURNER’S FANTASTIC ALLSTARS/46000 FIBRES
Split 7″
Earworm WORMSS11
Crazy mad weird stuff this. Nik Turner’s Fantastic Allstars (featuring Nik Turner of Hawkwind, no less) do a kind of John-Coltrane-recorded-by-Stock-Aitken-and-Waterman-in-a-Stray-Cats-stylee thing, and 46000 Fibres do a Sun Ra tune in a murky, cack-handed triphop way. And that sounds horrible, right? But the strange thing is, something about the naive sounds here and the general feeling of being entirely off your face on hallucinogenics whilst listening to it give this record a unique charm.
THE SLEEVE: is an Earworm singles club standard sleeve, a generic two-colour affair with a sticker on it. ‘Workmanlike’ is the term.
www.earwormrecords.com

VARIOUS ARTISTS
A Boy, a Girl and a Rendez-vous
CD
Red Roses For Me RRFMCD01
A 15-song compilation which seems almost like a CD version of an old-school indiepop compilation tape (the likes of which are so very rarely seen around in these cynical, digital times). The thing about those tapes was that they were so cheap that you could put up with a few duff tracks on the understanding that there’d be a gem or two hidden away there too. The same theory applies here too, really, because whilst this dips somewhat in the middle (getting into a bit of a solitary-indie-boy-strumming-guitar-about-lost-love thang for four or five tracks), there’s good stuff aplenty going on. The mood never entirely shifts away from the indiepop/Sarah way of doing things, but hey – that’s not a problem for me. So, White Town, The Sugargliders, Callow and Tree Fort Angst all deliver assuredly soft-centred and tuneful tunes, with the absolute jewel being The Aislers Set whose ‘Hit the Snow’ is like Spectoresque girl group melody gone cute. Throughout the other tracks (The Dudley Corporation, Watoo Watoo, Lovejoy, Bart & Friends, The Windmills, The Jordans, Aberdeen, The Zambonis, The Arrogants and The Lucksmiths there are a couple of moments which remind me why I went off that whole cutie/Sarah scene, but that’s just my evil, black heart for you.
THE SLEEVE: sepia-style photographs of obviously American scenes give off a certain charm, but the use of what looks to be the nightmarish Impact typeface is inexcusable!
www.redrosesforme.com

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This five track album from the increasingly prolific Telescopes is the first in a trio of releases – two albums proper and one live recording – that reflect a shift in their style that sees them edging ever more deeply into the world of abstract noise and improvisation. This shift could be very likely due to the influence of Bridget Hayden (once of Vibracathedral Orchestra); with a new interest in the examination of sound in ever-increasing detail, stepping further and further away from the original song-based forms of the Telescopes’ past.

The five tracks of Infinite Suns are recorded onto analogue tape with recording levels set to intentionally overload. The album is literally packed with noise, often distorting so much that the recording itself breaks down into glitches of silence. It’s hard going, but impressive in its relentless focus. Across the album is shared a set of harsh, tinny core tones and textures, with each track digging around the roots in an exploratory fashion. ‘Thought Loops’ has a weirdly human, intensely repeating, pained voice throughout – pretty hellish stuff. ‘Northumberland’ is a purer circular drone, touching down and taking off regularly, delightful in its simplicity. ‘Tidal bandwidth’ is akin to being trapped within a broken wind tunnel: occasional rising and falling tones are buried beneath layers of fuzz and noise. ‘Chrome gulls’ is violent and sporadic, until descending into a relentless, bloody-minded scrawl of noise and feedback.

Easily listening this is not, but an interesting development for an outfit with a 20+ year lifespan it most certainly is. The Telescopes in their current form are several worlds apart from the band(s) they once were – but listen back to their earlier output and you can spot hints of experimentalism that are finally being given absolute free rein and free experiment.

The Telescopes
Textile Records