The Blue In The Air

THE BROTHERS JOHNSON: Strawberry Letter 23

2008-07-18T18:09:00.002+01:00

Another 1977 which I’m not sure has still been properly understood; another hot summer, NME front covers about punk but also about Zen and sunglasses, my dad yelling at me to get the hell out into the street and the sunshine - in both situations, you learn to keep yourself to yourself – wandering circuitously around the village as though it were the world, searching in vain for familiar faces from school, realising they were absent, off into their own, or their families’, world, unresolvable crushes. Dreams of hearing a kiss from a lover…was this really 1977?

Was it really 1977 (that knowing chuckle of “is it cool? Is it cool?”), with the carousel gliding from channel to channel, fading out, and then…harpsichords and words which sounded ten years old but also an endless spaciousness of rhythm, bass, drums and guitar all playing distant triple ping pong on the planet Venus, and then a Rundgren “Hello, my love” with references to red magic satin, west purple shower bells and tea in the garden – but, as in “Flowers In The Rain” by the Move, the real rain is endless. Not that this lover cares; orange birds, green-clad river cousins, blue flowers and cherry clouds, and always the music you’ll never be able to hear on an iPod; the world as it thrives and breathes despite everything we throw at it.

Because he’s with his Other, he’s empathically free, as the curtains of the song slowly draw even more open to reveal the drift of the glide, over the sea (even then I was dubious that I’d find salvation in my home village); he has this letter scented with strawberries (“Strawberry letter 22” to which letter 23 is a euphorically pink reply), and after every fancied colour imagery of 1967 has decorated his path he abandons the need for words altogether, the harpsichord tinkling the main melody and deep but lush “oooooooohhhhhhh”s speakers of kite drifting happily around the lover’s mauve field with a sudden burst of floridity as guitar erupts from the sea in a kettle of idealised ecstasy, echoing its external rotation into and of itself before drums signal a return to the placidly plaid dream.

As the song itself advises, playgrounds will laugh, and no doubt they would have done if I’d tried to explain this unforeseen magic in any “realistic” consideration of 1977’s music – you learn to keep such things to yourself – and Quincy ’s expert deployment of echo and space was a path he’d been patiently pursuing for at least the previous fifteen years. Only later, in a different century and nearing the end of a different life, did I hear the original on Shuggie Otis’ Inspiration Information, recorded in 1971; an extraordinary bedroom tape of an indie-soul-God knows what fusion album which would long since have been worshipped had it been early Beck or Ariel Pink (and without the advantage of subsequent technology), and its procedurals are different (beyond rudimentary drum machines – but then, 1971!) but its aims the same. And now I’m able to talk about the magic and the associated pattern. I no longer need to keep anything to myself.

SUPERCHUNK: Skip Steps 1 & 3

2008-07-17T17:27:00.001+01:00

A boom and a curtain of swooping blades unveil this example of a strain of indie guitar rock that seems to have become lost to pop follow-up. No Pocky For Kitty was Superchunk's second album, and the North Carolina four dipped back into contented obscurity after briefly being a music press future in the very early nineties, but "Skip Steps 1 & 3" has a three-dimensional attack to its brushes - together with its similarly sliding vocals - which fix it in the firm, immediate post-Daydream Nation "tradition." Albini recorded it, but production "credits" on the sleeve were given to bassist Laura Ballance, who "sat in the right chair" albeit with "eyes closed."

With its increasingly frantic, popping cries of "Why don't you move?" and climactic refrain of "you've been sucking wind so long," the song is an impassioned cry to action and decision - remember that this just about preceded Nevermind and everything that allowed and condemned - from bop-boggling Mac McCaughan tearing at the cocktails of if only and yes but. "Well it's your free time in the back of your skull," he observes, "and that's fine for now, but what comes after?" The propulsion is pop but the threat or promise of immolating noise is always in the middleground, even though it is forever on poise and never forces itself forward. The overall feeling is not one of frustration but of overdue joy, and Sloan, among others, took up some of this slack from thereonin.

GEORGE JONES: These Days (I Barely Get By)

2008-07-16T17:14:00.002+01:00

If Deep Soul is a state of mind then it can be found anywhere and in anyone, even though some are better at articulating it than others. Like sportsmen, the best - or at least, the most "soulful" - of singers frequently turn out to be those who don't appear to be trying or sweating as hard as others; it's the old faithful of matches or races being won by those who try less, or seem to need the victory less.

Listening to George Jones it's hard to pinpoint exactly where his magic occurs, although it is obviously present. He never seems to do much except sing in what is more or less his normal, used-for-speaking voice. There are no vibratos, no acrobatic grandstanding, and yet, through its slow, painful patience, his voice punctumises you dead centre.

"These Days" is a tacit case in point. Recorded towards the end of 1974, two weeks before Christmas Day and two days before he walked out on Tammy "for good," it presents us with a picture of Jones seemingly willing his own premature and ruinous end. It is, essentially, the same old same old, except that his woes methodically stack up like an especially shaky house of bamboo cards. And he of course has his unobtrusive techniques for communicating this to us; the extended "aching" in the first line illustrates both his early frustration and the hint of Lear-esque descent to come. The last thing he feels like doing is working, but he'll give it a try, even if he has to thumb all the way - his car's in the shop, but by the glassy stress he puts on the word "shop" the implication is that it's there to stay because he can't afford to pay the labour costs. No clearcut city like London or Toronto, this, with its convenient buses and tubes.

The music is standard Sherrill-issue C&W waltz grief; a choir of angels even materialises at the start of the second verse in expectation as Jones experiences further microhumiliations - he has to walk all the way home from work and it rains all the way. So sodden with self-pity is he that he doesn't even realise that he's answered his own question: "My wife left and didn't say why," he says, before immediately noting "She laid all our bills on the desk in the hall."

The sorrow grows more constant and gruelling. He puts his last two dollars on his favourite horse; it loses by a nose and he cries, but puts all the crying weight through the word "nose." Then his boss comes and talks to him; we fear a fiery firing, but he's as mournful as George and suggests that "come winter we'll all be laid off."

It is at this point that he collapses, weeping on high on the extended "wanna" of "I wanna give up, lay down and die." He makes it clear that his wife's departure is the main source of his pain, but at the end turns to the fourth wall and proclaims in a curious Sandringham Palace-via-Nashville tone that "oh, these days, one barely gets by," fully aware that he has worked hard at building one's own crucifix.

MONCHY Y ALEXANDRA: Hoja En Blanco

2008-07-15T17:17:00.001+01:00

On Saturday I found a CD I thought I'd never see again. As usual, I stumbled across it without especially looking for it - I was literally down on my knees to assess the contents of the dusty bottom shelves of the shop - I blinked curiously at the spine, wondering where I might have seen it before, and when I pulled it out it took me a little while to work out what it was, whereupon I uttered a silent gasp.

You see, this compilation, prepared and released by Latin House DJ/lawyer John Armstrong in 1999, I had bought back then following an astonishing DJ mix set which Armstrong performed on the John Peel s how. The idea of Revolucion was to illustrate the wide array of styles then coming to roost under the general roof of Latin House, from its origins to its future. It was and is one of the most immensely danceable of all albums, but then, as you know, things happened in 2001 and I didn't want to dance anymore and couldn't envisage ever dancing again, so I let it go. Inevitably it drifted out of print (probably was out of print by 2001) and so it became a ghost for the next seven years; something I recalled with increasing vagueness but there was also a subtly increasing urge to have and hear it again. I've no idea whether this copy I've now found is the exact same copy I sold to the exact same branch of MVE back then, but the important thing (and something that you do not get from Amazon or ebay or the chainstores) was the serendipity of finding it again now, at a time when I most assuredly am dancing again, as if it were too waiting for my ghosts to subside and settle into history.

It still sounds remarkable and hugely danceable. I note the general tone of local pride - vital when you consider the decades/centuries of shit that the Puerto Ricans havev had to go through - in things like "Todo Puerto Rico" by the Bad Boy Orchestra (the same writer/producer responsible for 2 In A Room, who also appear on the compilation, a very long way from "Wiggle It"). Nuevo merengue band Fulanito are explosively brilliant, Public Enemy with accordions; their "Guallando" fulfills fhe fantasy of where the electro-merengue track on Duck Rock might have led.

But "Hoja En Blanco" by seemingly squeaky clean Santa Domingo boy/girl duo Monchy y Alexandra remains its most remarkable track. In his sleevenote Armstrong refers to the song as a harbinger of "bachata house" - bachata being a form of Latin song structured somewhere between bolero and blues - "a completely new style that's my tip for Latin's cutting edge this summer." The poignancy of hindsight.

It still sounds like nothing else ever, and yet like a lot of things thrown together in an Argos blender. It begins with huge, gory rave raspberries and beats as a maniacal voice yells out "grossio millennio - check it out!" Fuzzed Eno synth wobbles mixes with Nigerian hi-life guitar with the swift addition of an arsenal of live Latin percussion (always Latin House's vital heartbeat); the same maniacal voice yells in a halfway house between Rachid Taha and Joe Strummer and then the most elegant and graceful of bachata ballads (but still with the propulsive beat) makes its entry, the guitar/rhythm relations now closer to Cuba. The song plays fairly straight until the beats begin to gather gradual intensity again and suddenly (on the hinge of "hasta la LU-na!") we are back in 2 Unlimited on steroids territory, pinball whizzes, screams (especially the one at 2:29-2:30). Vintage avant-rave anti-chords ricochet at 1000 bpm while a frantic Abbott and Costello rap exchange skids into being, streaking across a nailbed of staccato consonants. Finally it's back to the central song, again sung and performed beautifully, before the rave coda adds a gasometer blink of a full stop. I'd love to think what might have happened if this had topped global charts rather than "Macarena" - but these 15 tracks are among the most vital you can listen and dance to in this age, a decade on...a lifetime on...and it's time, thankfully, to dance again.

IAN DURY AND THE BLOCKHEADS: Dance Of The Screamers

2008-07-14T17:40:00.002+01:00

The song was written from the point of view of a man stricken by polio, of course, but here was the point where Dury's characteristic sympathy for the societal underdog turned to revengeful rage. There was still "Spasticus Autisticus" to come a couple of years later, of course, but "Screamers" possesses a calm terror which threw any notion of amiability out of the window. 1979's Do It Yourself, despite its multiple wallpaper design covers, was a nocturnal, inward-looking and inwardly bleeding record, the precise opposite of its contemporaneous single "Reasons To Be Cheerful Part 3" (which doesn't appear on the album at all), and "Dance Of The Screamers" was an anti-anthem in which Dury finally loses his patience and stands for his constituency, everyone in "the last place in the queue," the ugly, the small, the useless ("they haven't got the where-with-al" he hisses syllable by syllable), the metaphors for unattainable "normality" ("We went and missed the ending," "We never quite caught the bus"), the stripping down of pretence ("It's hard to be a hero...when you've had your helmet cracked"). Throughout Dury dots his rueful venom with a string of ironic endearments - "angel," "sailor," "handsome," "sweetie" - which he knows will never be reciprocated; those excluded from society and by extension life, those with no desire to fly high, those cursed from birth ("Some of us are born like this, while others got it by the yard") to a third class of the third class existence ("Some of us get nervous...when you look us in the eye," "We're ever so pathetic...we know quite well that we try too hard") and reasons why some of us need to write in order to communicate what has to be communicated, or provide a key to open the door and get past the barrier.

The music plays out like quasi-sterile jazz-funk (with Chaz Jankel, sterility could never be an issue) within the club while outside, right at the back of the queue, Dury unleashes horrifying but perfectly pitched and timed screams ("Cold Turkey"/"The Boiler" level) and Davey Payne's alto takes over for the howl of howls, screaming, honking, slurring, gurgling like the weirdo the bouncers will never let in, or the world for that matter, trying to communicate, breaking his back and his lungs in an attempt to prove his case, but the music drives and sparkles on regardless. "Screamers" is not a model for encouragement; it rubs the listener's face in the undodgeable dirt of facts as they are faced - but it is a roaring, atonal plea for love, or at the very least understanding. The inbetweenies, as Dury describes on the album's best known song, locked out of the palace as Thatcher swept in, determined to sort out and keep out all of the unsorted, or unsortable. But Dury, as all of us must, triumphs by virtue of his art as means of expression. Given half a chance.

ORNETTE COLEMAN: Beauty Is A Rare Thing

2008-07-10T17:28:00.003+01:00

I’ve been bombarded with emails (OK, I had one email) asking me why I haven’t “done” Pacific Ocean Blue yet and the simple answer is that I’m not sure I’m qualified to write about it; as magnificent as it is (and the extra tracks, including all the surviving material, complete and incomplete, from the Bambu sessions, make it even more magnificent than the humble, Walkman-friendly cassette reissue I bought out of Virgin in 1992 and luckily kept – younger readers may wish to consult their grandparents for full explanation of what a “Walkman” was), I feel that proper understanding of its spaces, its long, measured (or immeasurable) silences, its sudden Neptunian eruptions, can only really be gained by full immersion in its Californianess; i.e. you have to have lived in California to appreciate its sense of isolation, benign or otherwise, breathed the same atoms (or versions of them), appreciate the vastness. I think this may be one for my (Californian) wife to tackle.

Likewise, although the four members of Ornette’s 1961 quartet all arrived from different places, they were all more or less raised in Los Angeles , and “Beauty Is A Rare Thing” is a glassy pearl of sparkling hugeness which I think could only have been conceived in L.A. With Coleman’s music, but especially with his ballads, you have to think of his songs – and true songs they all are – as gently unwinding stories rather than squared-off declarations of schematic intent. Perhaps this more than anything was what warned off all the jazz boys back in that particular day; barlines occurring as naturally and unforcedly as commas or semi-colons might appear in a long, meditative piece of literature. So the top line melody of “Beauty” is a declaration – although there are no words as such, Coleman’s pauses while playing the tune suggest that, like Lester Young, he’s working very hard to remember the lyrics – which takes as long to state as nature and life require. Behind – no, around – him, Haden and Blackwell stay on bowed bass and (mostly) tuned tom toms throughout the performance, their waves quietly but intently lapping at the feet of Coleman’s soul.

There is a climactic squeak from the alto, but as this returns at reasonably regular intervals throughout Coleman’s subsequent solo we can delineate this as an aural comma or barline, punctuation to help determine the part of the exposition that we have reached. Cherry nudges in like rusty marmalade; picking up immediately on Blackwell’s New Orleans subdivisions he seems on the verge of turning the performance into calypso (and as Kevin LeGendre’s sleevenote to the CD reissue of This Is Our Music attests, I’m not the only one who spots prototype rude boy in those shades Cherry’s wearing on the cover) but catches himself and drifts between warm extended tones and quick but not frantic flurries of notes. Periodically he and Coleman lock blessings of horns and squeal, fulfilled, towards the sun.

Then Coleman re-enters, methodically unpicking and expanding the central song; Haden’s continuo suddenly responds with an impromptu, upwardly scuttling figure and he becomes more active, Blackwell always alternating between solemn tom tom circularities and gauze mists of cymbals. The music absorbs, contracts and expands with a solitary sense of community, priceless, exotic, tender, stroking, endless, green, turquoise and then aquatic blue and they combine for a sated sigh of an ending and it is, as simply as anyone could phrase or frame it, love.

DARREN STYLES: Skydiving

2008-07-09T17:31:00.001+01:00

Happy Hardcore, the people's music that never really went away, much as other people would have liked it to; first Scooter get a number one album, then Darren Styles' double CD package Skydiving goes straight into the top five and stays there. Formerly half of the duo Breeze and Styles - much played on Peel's show, lest any of us forget, and a few of their greatest hits are dusted down here, most noticeably the magical "You're Shining" lent immense extra poignancy by Lisa Abbott's cracked, straining voice - he has proved very astute; as with Jumping All Over The World, Skydiving is a double, one CD "hardcore" and the second "commercial," and 2008 pop is unlikely to get perkier.

As I say, the music has both survived and thrived despite blanket ignorance on the part of radio and TV, the true soundtrack of the British working class, the thrust you hear leaking out of every headphone on a council estate bus, music by and for The People; it would seem that, just as the Beatles are unlikely to vanish as a talisman for some demographics, equal numbers (and in 2008 Britain it's very likely to be equal) have never forgotten rave and what it once promised and what it can yet promise, to the splendidly great inconvenience of those who would presume to run our affairs.

The remarkable thing about Skydiving is that its Stylistic division appears both schizophrenic and entirely symbiotic; several tunes appear in different versions or mixes on both CDs and each version complements the other as naturally as the two versions of "Hey Hey, My My" which bracket Rust Never Sleeps. Listen to the "commercial" "Save Me" for instance and you might wish to shake yourself from the dream of a lost Howard Jones album, only much, much better; Styles seeks not to proclaim his changing of your world but sings in a pinched, enthusiastic, vibrato-free high voice, direct and truthful. Much of the "commercial" CD pitches itself in a late eighties recreation scenario far more securely than hamfisted revivalists like Neon Neon; again, the lightness is crucial to help see the light.

The divergence and convergence are best demonstrated by the two versions of the title track. The "commercial" "Skydiving" is fairly straightforward post-eighties pop of the quality to which the likes of McFly aspire, bouncing, bounteous and always with the hint of the rave lurking behind its aquamarine corridors of life, as well as the lyrics; most of Styles' lyrics repeatedly hark back (and forward) to the credos of rave, lots of skies and heavens ("I feel like I'm drifting through the sky/Through the heavens I can hear your voice"). But, and again crucially, Styles' outlook is always optimistic and filled with renewed awe; "Skydiving" is far from the only track where he emphasises the liberation of "feeling alive"; "Take me to a place where I can dream/So we can climb up above the clouds and feel/So free" - we are on very familiar territory here.

But also: "And as we fall I'll take your hand." On the "hardcore" versions the anticipatory beats are radiantly itching to go and the song kicks into fulsome, hands up, klaxons at the ready, stadium Happy Hardcore wherein Styles sounds even freer - the great axial lurch of his warped synth bass as he steps up the power is akin to the thumb of God pressing the remote control of eternity - and it's simple to understand why this represents freedom, rather than escapism, in the turgid, pitiless Britain of these times; here's a way out, here's a laugh and a smiley face in defiance of grey compromise, here's some of the finest pop music of current times. Like New Pop, no one can truly kill this floating but rock solid spirit.

SUPERSISTER: Dona Nobis Pacem

2008-07-08T17:27:00.003+01:00

Strange, or not, how I've recently been veering back to the curvatures of Canterbury Rock, the coils of organ awaiting encasement in fuzz bass with flyswatter drumming and the occasional winsome vocal. It all seems agreeably perpendicular and light with the continued (if seldom fulfilled; tension band wiring was the glue that held Canterbury Rock together) promise of explosions. Supersister were Canterbury Rock as viewed through a North Sea telescope; they were from the Hague, teenagers or thereabouts (but mostly, or totally, child prodigies, particularly keyboard man Robert-Jan Stips), and their non-Kentness created an airvent of new inspiration down which new breaths of retrospective influence could flow, not that they've been revived as such until very recently.

Present From Nancy, their debut album, is from 1970, and a remarkable 47 minutes' worth of homework; it essentially takes its lead from Wyatt-led song form Soft Machine, yet although there are "songs," they are liable to swerve into fuzzier, extended waters, hence "Memories Are New," a generation ahead of Stereolab, begins by swooning over spent tropes ("Forever try to live in the past" as bassist/singer Rob Van Eck sighs) before driving into 11/8 cataclysms, Stips thrashing his organ as much like a guitar as he can get away with, always stepping halfway over the tonality brink, or fussing at one wah-wah note until it curls up into a soup, balanced out by the contemplative flute of the late Sacha Van Geest, until finally organ and flute unite for a slow ice lake dance of Lytton Strachey damaged elegance. They tried singles as well; the first, "She Was Naked," essentially is the album in precis (with the calamitously brilliant line "Reveal philosophies like instant pudding"), cantering from moody musing to near-freeform detonations (and it still nearly made the Dutch top ten).

But "Dona Nobis Pacem" is perhaps the record's simplest track as well as its deepest. A semi-solemn Gregorian procedural (also bearing hints of Beaver and Krause's Gandharva in places), it steps along in ominously beautiful manner, a pacing four-note bass line providing the margin for flute and keyboards to breathe in, and out, and slower, and more regularly; a huge hug of grace to conclude the album's scattering adventures, and then, after seven or eight minutes, the tempo gradually quickens and the pitch systematically heightens as though the musicians are negotiating their way across the narrowest of drawbridges to reach a pinched, nearly airless apex. As the journey converges Stips abruptly (but logically) converts into a bouncy Blackpool Tower Ballroom/Organist Entertains melody (fooled you! Or have we?) but then persists with his extended, terminal, deep, key-ambiguous sustenato; after one final, minute scatter for seeds, a giant, stereophonic gong crash wakes us all up. Custard pie as salvation?

THE FOUR SEASONS: Look Up, Look Down

2008-07-07T17:43:00.002+01:00

Like SMiLE, Genuine Imitation Life Gazette was the sound of a band bursting its skin; the difference being that where Brian and Van Dyke sought to burst the Beach Boys from the outside, the Four Seasons were keen to break out of what they perceived to be a teenbeat straitjacket. One difference, anyway; another important one being that, with sometime folkie Jake Holmes as the Parks to Bob Gaudio's Wilson, there was no dildo-requesting Mike Love to query procedure - all of the Four Seasons, and especially Frankie Valli, were up for the adventure.

Does it stand up? Even with the Jersey Boys-sparked interest revival I'm not sure there's yet much room for GILG to stand; currently only available as half of a rather expensive twofer (the other half being their 1966 Working My Way Back To You set), it needs proper resuscitation (as does its undervalued 1975 bookend Who Loves You? which despite three top ten singles, one of which was their only UK number one, remains out of print) and I think I may have heard "Soul Of A Woman" creeping out of an obscure nocturnal radio dial at the turn of the nineties; certainly something about this album haunted me then and continues to do so, even now that I've finally found a stand-alone CD copy (complete with minute, Jodrell Bank Grade A telescope-required-to-read reproduction of the original foldout newspaper sleeve format).

It was out of place when it came out and it still hasn't found a new place; it was released on the last day of 1968 and did as well as could be expected (i.e. completely flopped) for even then the attempted avant-garding of MoR was fighting a losing battle - Scott slowly withdrawing into himself, Jimmy Webb gamely carrying on with Richard Harris but doing rather better with Glen Campbell, the Ryan twins huge in Europe but hardly likely to fill Serious Stadia since this was of course the fork in the road; either go down the Zep road of LOUD AND HEAVY or the bedsit acoustic singer/songwriter path - even though it stands up as well as, say, the Fifth Dimension's contemporaneous The Magic Garden (another extended Webb concept) or anything by the Association (but even they were beginning to slip off the charts by the end of '68). Furthermore, it eventually turned out to be just half the story, since the chronicles of Watertown, complete with cross-lyrical references, were continued on Sinatra's Watertown album, also written and produced by Gaudio and Holmes.

The Sinatra reference sums it up; Watertown, a place which the aesthetic boom, if not surface prosperity, has passed by. Here are all the lumbered souls who would have understood "Let The Heartaches Begin" in an instant, never fashionable, striving, or is that struggling, to keep afloat, keep whatever they can of themselves before it all collapses; meanwhile, on their tinted semicircular mirror floating out upon the world, they see change and blood and it confuses them; the album's bookend setpieces, "American Crucifixion Resurrection" and "Soul Of A Woman," look alternately outward and inward, the former commencing with sombrely brash orchestrations and the chant of "the King is dead, long live the (Martin Luther) King," the latter moving from courtly baroque to "Beggin'" teen swerve via Song Cycle hanging question marks ("and so you give yourself to him...forever...") before, as a precedent to the Beach Boys' "When Girls Get Together," ushering in the symbolic mortality, the life now merging with Charles Callelo's high, quiet Unanswered Question strings...it begins with Barack and ends with Hillary?

Sometimes it strives a little too mechanically - the title track with its "Hey Jude" extended outro and anticipated battery of backwards drums, guitars etc., for instance - but it works most warmly when it aims at the microscope of everyday minutiae; the ice cream melt of tears that is "Saturday's Father" and especially "Look Up, Look Down," simultaneously the album's most conventional and radical track - sprites of memory hovering greyly around the dying home as Valli's lead, as tender and dread-filled as it has ever been, sings with calm franticity about the living death that the song's central relationship has become; she smiles at his kiss, but in truth she's gone - he's betrayed her, and he knows it, and the pull of the sliver of grievous guilt will summon the cobwebs before any rainbows have a chance to grow. Which is how a lot of people felt about things generally as 1968 solidified into 1969. At least, that's what I'm told.

THE WEB: Like The Man Said

2008-07-03T17:21:00.003+01:00

It's ripe for revival, you know - big brassy soulful bands, without having to go down the BS&T route. Personally I can't get enough of them and wish there were more of them now. The Web? Six jazzers from Bournemouth who certainly weren't slumming but somehow managed temporary stardom on the Continent - the Hollies and the Nice supported them - and had a sizeable following over here. Listening to the extraordinary strains of their second album, 1970's Theraphosa Blondi (it's the species of spider you see on the cover), is enough to make one wonder whether we really lost something substantial when we jettisoned the chops in '76; a group both fluent enough and imaginative enough to venture into early World Music waters ("Kilimanjaro" is what ELP might have sounded like had they paid more attention to Les Baxter) as well as the more familiar soul-jazz waters and even the occasional flicker at pop stardom - see the string-laden ballad "'Til I Come Home Again Once More," written by the young Gilbert O'Sullivan.

Bands with vibes, sax and double drums - you really are not going to get fluid (in ANY sense) with Elbow or the Zutons - we need more of them, and the Web demonstrated just how much need they could inspire. Their "Sunshine Of Your Love" is dazzled into difference by Tom Harris' rollercoaster Rollins sax work (and he's not bad on flute, either, if not quite Harold McNair in overblowing terms). The absence of a keyboardist, and the general back seat reticence of the guitars, means that there's much more space in which the musicians may breathe.

There is the feeling of Lighthouse (though this horn section is simply a multitracked Harris) about their faster work, and "Like The Man Said" shows them at their best, as well as showcasing the remarkable voice of black American lead singer John L Watson, then recently demobbed from the US Air Force. "Like The Man Said"'s intro comes on like a 1964 Gerry Anderson theme tune, squared guitars and determined drums, but Watson's bizarre and unstable cabaret croon is seriously disarming and disorientating. pulling out of the hat tricks and stances which the likes of Combustible Edison would discover a quarter of a century later, the drums slowing down emphatically to echo Watson's carefully delirious joy to "be...back...home again" before a ballad tempo ensues with muted flutes and bass clarinet, Watson sounding like a baffled Engelbert newly kidnapped by Joe Meek as he ponders his uncertain future, released from the pressure of a girl every night, number one hits and so forth (after this album he went solo and the trail goes cold), before the heat incenses again and the stage is cleared for Harris' tenor to soliloquise and interact with Dick Lee-Smith's bass and Ken Beveridge's kit drums, first in a buoyant if slightly stiff swing, then into tentative bebop, followed by moves into "Fables Of Faubus" territory, but just before Harris breaks free of structure the band reach a suitable climax and reassemble for the final verse and chorus, as well as a dizzying seesaw ride of a question mark finale which then canters straight into "Sunshine Of Your Love." More of this sort of thing in 2008 would be exceptionally welcome.

FAUST/NURSE WITH WOUND: Disconnected

2008-07-02T17:30:00.004+01:00

The knowledge of connection, yet the feeling that you've been cocooned in a separate but not displeasing world; "Disconnected" is ideal Sunday morning Walkman (or, if you must - I don't have to - iPod) listening for wandering around Chelsea Harbour. Four slabs of Faust sound undergoing manipulation under Stapleton anaesthetic, and where, say, "Lass Mich" is a thirteen-minute spring of custard pie devant-rock (a Hendrix to the Monkees of the Stereolab/NWW collaboration "Simple Headphone Mind" - is it really a dozen years old? Or more? - as Stapleton dreams his own ideal radio station amidst the jangle and the throb), the title track hovers, not necessarily threateningly but unsettlingly enough to keep you on your guard through unfamiliar terrain; the broadswards of planted grass which stretch out towards the river, the ghosts of Apprentice never-will-bes proceeding through the various gated towers of residence, Battersea's new eulogy of St Mary beaming or scowling directly at me from across the water.

The melting of assertive neo-modernity against terraced streets from 1971 Blackpool; peaceful, red, talkative, communal. The lovely clash with elements which will never quite, or quietly, fit; the exceptionally reluctant mechanical arm which has to raise, grudgingly, in order for the bus to pass through the outskirts of Chelsea Harbour, a prematurely resigned village; secretaries with enterprising boyfriends lug shopping bags through the less than gloomy dawn. Steep-ish streets which lead to Lots Road or to...Lots Road (it divides in two halfway uphill, one half veering off to the right to crawl behind the World's End Estate like a snail's telescope, the other half, over a pacific canal, towards the familiar King's Road though in truth you could wander in this beige and green jungle for months; the Lots Road Power Station, Battersea's younger and smarter cousin, blinks warily as you turn the corner, brick red against ski-slip blue - a little further uproad, demolition/reconstruction work, as yet unspecified, and you can't be sure what's being knocked down and what's being built up...

There's no hum in the air (plenty of blue, though) but "Disconnected" supplies it with nosy ease; it starts off sounding like the end of "A Day In The Life" slowly regurgitating and regrouping its particles into a solid, if subdued, whole - some muttered utterances from Jean-Herve Peron about disconnection, mostly in German - and then Fennesz drone meets disqualified gable ends, disturbed ex-docklands, vaguely queasy but not quite acidic - synths give way to eternal fleet flows of hymnal organ, a drum track far off in the distance which may be a ticking ghost; and so it continues to ebb and crescent, though is in no hurry to reach a climax - a heartbreakingly semi-dissonant five-chord guitar motif (four connected, then a pause and a final full stop) floats in and out of its steely skies like an elusive kiss, now the sound fulsome and alive (where's that muted bugle coming from and does it even exist?), now transient and maybe also transparent beyond the realms of tactility; a depeopled wharf teeming with hidden life. Peron returns at the end for an observational bookend, and then and only then do the clanking shards of former industry take Christmas tree precedence, a heartbeat restored, a life renewed, and as I fade into roads King's and Fulham - and towards the long-undervisited Earl's Court, a place to which I'm habitually drawn when life looks set to start again - I once more realise that this city I've known and breathed for fully 23 years has tricked me, as always; and that I still don't really know it, but only for the purpose of the fun and joy we will have in learning, as we have to keep on doing.

INSPIRAL CARPETS WITH MARK E. SMITH: I Want You

2008-07-01T17:22:00.001+01:00

The talk has all been about the disorientated ecstasy, the giddily weightless unreality which trickles through one's body and mind like microcurrents of non-static euphoria when one is in love and is loved back - the dizzy flotations of MBV, the symbiosis between fulfilled voice and relentless, unchanging machine cogs which powers "I Feel Love." And maybe this sneaks in too, even though I can already visualise Mark curling his Sykes nose in professed affront at the mere thought of his singing "love songs."

But this "I Want You" is about the urge, the rush and the secondary and tertiary urges which dazzle one into pursuance and acceptance. I never really shared a pop bunk with the Inspiral Carpets; I liked the slogans and the cows and the coolers and the washing powder briskness of their liveliness but their music rarely seemed to get elevated beyond the level of merely acceptable. Granted, "This Is How It Feels" was an important reminder that the "Mad" in Madchester could stand for worse things as well as better, but elsewhere it was largely efficient early 1966 beat group stuff, too easily what people thought the Teardrop Explodes sounded like (especially with Tom Hingley's more stentorian Julian Cope of a vocal style).

Yet "I Want You" is a pursuit of lasting ecstasy (that is, without a capital "E"), ribbing and speeding like no Inspirals song did before or afterwards; the broken barriers, the white knuckle ride, a chase perhaps a little too hard set to be comfortable ("The chance of defeat is not in my nature"), but the band is all fused into one rush tour steam train of activity; guitars and organs indistinguishable, drums skidding like toothbrushes on ice.

Over this we get the megaphoned punctum of Mark E Smith, finally getting a Top 20 hit and a TOTP appearance, crinkling his throat up, almost playing the part of an older and wiser Madchester veteran commenting like a grumpy dad or a renewed youth on what he's hearing and seeing, diving in or out of the song like a jagged angelfish, frequently crashing into Hingley's vocal and especially into the choruses, drawling icicle whimsy about rumours of illness circulating, "singing" or at least chanting along with the verses without recourse to adherence of bar lines, mumbling about "a course" and "of course," proclaiming his disgust at the supposedly sincere usury of the Dutch East India Company, reminding us whose side "we" should be on, at one point giggling, at the key point (viz. the end) barking "Shut up!" and it's more than enough to turn white knuckles into blackcurrants; a phenomenal classic of bipolar pop, the graceful collapse into the back garden of chaos, the Carpets' greatest moment, shouting and speeding into the best possible 1994.

JAY-Z: Wonderwall

2008-06-30T17:36:00.002+01:00

I think you're expecting me to talk about custard pies in Noel's face. I think you might anticipate expression of queasy joy at a "Wonderwall" worthy of the Shaggs. I think you're wanting me to speak of the scarved ringmaster, the missing link between Sammy Davis Jr and Son Of Bazerk, becalmed, energised, and his throaty BACK IN BLACK solution (the non-missing link between Bon Scott and Scott La Rock) which immediately cancelled out all 99 problems in one parcelled pavement of brotherly breath. I think you'd chide me for not mentioning Westwood's paean to Peel, high-snapping Tottenham Court Road ghetto fallback orders to Broadcasting House, the antidote to Noel nausea ("SIGN UP NOEL THIS IS HIP HOP THIS IS 2008 AND BEYOND") and even if three Westwood "RUBBISH"es just about add up to two of Jay-Z's "TAKING THE PISS"es he is DJ dynamite which makes Dale Winton and his 90 Mad Stuntman seconds look like Stuart Maconie's back garden.

I think you'd not forgive me for missing out musing on this Carter man and his effort-whispering reorganisation of Pop History's Tapestric Jukebox so that Amy and Rihanna and the Prodigy all become part of his Learesque jigsaw puzzle, and if you put it all together you'd build a mirror of 200,000 punters who empowered the biggest fuck you to a 2008 Britain that virulently needs it. I think you'd guess that I'd consider Jay-Z the Ishmael Reed to Gallagher's Mailer (what would he do without the booze and the promise of brawl inspiration?). I think you ought to know that it's all turning wrongly right again - the feasted, reddened-to-the-point-of-Klein blue faces in Henley, the more subtle Chiltern water torture racism of the Wimbledon crowds against Murray, the theorise-themselves-further-into-their-armchairs sneers at Harman's Equality Bill, the super-eager leap to grab people like Alexandra de G and Naomi C and hold them up as FACES OF SHAME - and no, neither exactly does themselves any favours, let's not go over the Mailer bowsprit here, but young, uppity, black and female; evidently a fatal quartet (what would the reaction have been had either been white? Oh yes, like Jade, we just breathe for a fortnight and then, um, REHABILITATE them again) - and the amiable apartheid of BBC music radio (1Xtra, oh good, we can shove them all into this pen, now quick, before Cameron gets upsettily uppity) and especially the crushing shame of Radio 2, with ex-Skrewdriver roadies and magazine writers who thought it a pleasant idea to plaster Union Jacks on covers as an anti-American protest (the spirit of Richard Hoggart's NASTY AMERICA/THEIR LIVES ARE BETTER THAN OURS AND WE'RE SCARED BEND YOUR HEAD AND DRINK YOUR TRIANGLE OF MILK quadriceps cap lives on!) laughing at Jay-Z being at the Glasto and losing all those sales when they should have booked somebody PROPER like I don't know the FUCKING FLEET FOXES, and what the fuck, I turned on Radio 1 yesterday morning and there was a jingle from picket line disregarder Jo Whiley, still skippingly trying to pretend that a multi-millionaire company director can be down with any kids other than her own, sniggering (note the hidden word, of course) "Back in the kennel, Westwood! Glastonbury isn't just about hip hop (but it has HARDLY EVER been about hip hop)! It's about guitars because I'M SCARED because if we play you HALF A SECOND of rude rap you'll scuttle off to Virgin or Capital or xfm STAY IN YOUR BOXES LISTENERS EVEN IF WE HAVE TO NAIL THE FUCKERS DOWN because I'LL LOSE MY JOB and after all great radio is always run by fear ISN'T IT?" - just keeps on pressing because they need you to stay with your demographics (your "own kind")...eclectic? What is that? Eclectic Light Orchestra? That's Radio 2, isn't it?...

I think, therefore, you'll gather that Saturday was a glorious strawberry and absinthe lollipop of a FUCK YOU to all of that; the global jigsaw of Jay-Z which puts Noel in alongside Bush and Kim the whatever number he is (and he should feel honoured, if indeed he is capable of feeling) just PWNING POP at that moment, that time...and what is pop if it's not about those moments, those GLISTENING CATHODES when it all shifts into a new and better focus and you instinctively know you were rightly wrong all along? Yes, he could have done a more "purist" set (purity! authenticity! does Joe Boyd really still believe in that Indiana Jones hollow pot of bronzed truth?) and the "bitches" bother me but Civil War-old jazz slang (and probably Thoreau invented the bloody thing anyway on a ropey Wednesday afternoon just to prove a point to Ralph Waldo J Gleason Emerson) does not a Taliban make (but then: definition of a lady, someone who could walk out on stage at any time, as Beyonce could have done on Saturday, but doesn't? Where are my Ibsen Brodie's Notes when I need them?) and anyway Jay-Z's JIG-ANTIC POP-HOP was RIGHT without any capitals in the way where the Verve with their mollusc-burdened 1974-style soft rock (now is THAT not the deepest of insults to weekend audiences?) could never travel (maybe in '92 when they were still capable of quantumising anti-solace but would you even buy a once-used Chad and Jeremy single from Ashcroft now?); the whole history lapped up in his tops and then the "FUCK BUSH!" and the extended acappella freestyles where Doc Johnson's London (and the don Estelle), Bush fuckability and Barack BIG-ups all solidify and liquefy into a pleasing punch that everyone could lap up top and did, the solos as flighty and magnificent as prime unaccompanied Cecil T, the seemingly casual moves from references to references (rather than "songs" as such - note that back door RADICALISM of PROCESS OVER FORM, READERS) reminiscent of late-period Gil Evans or George Russell, but they were all there - Big Pimpin', and Annie, and blink and you bliss it Takeover, and Show Them Watcha Got (Jan Garbarek solitude reincorporated into a Buddy big band blast!) and Punjabi Knight Rider MC and Take Three Girls (yep) and Dirt Off Everyone's Shoulders and even as a spectator from x hundred miles away (not that many hundred, I wouldn't have thought, but huge spiritual leagues had to be negotiated on Saturday) it felt justified and less than ancient, and yes it's a fucking shame that thirty years after Kool and Flash and Bam started all this off hip hop still has to "justify" itself and boy were they waiting for the Hova to be CONTROVERSIAL and PUSHY and ABUSIVE (I contemplate the zero fuss that would have arisen if, say, Eminem had been picked to close Saturday) but no, he was as dignified and politely unapologetic as Ellington was in any given sixties festival bill his band had to be on under Christ knows who these kids are; he was unashamedly generous, humble with a genuineness that was unfakeable, but always the underlying message, THIS IS OUR MUSIC, but by being such it then becomes everyone's music, like the 200,000 at Glasto who KNEW that the old "rules" couldn't be magicked to work anymore (if they ever did, and petrified old Eavis closes the door on his future as a result of whiteboy plantation media scares), like the young black hoodies who wandered into the basement at Notting Hill MVE on Saturday afternoon and immediately undertook a detailed investigation, with much furrowed associated debate, of the basement's extensive indie section, yet another cumulatively massive rebuff to scared, old people of all ages who want us to be settled, tidy, accepting of censures and compromise - and the most important spark flying from the arc-weld of Jay-Z at Glasto on Saturday night was the one which smilingly said, there's nothing to be scared of (and the mirror on the other side to those intent to enemise: "you have EVERYTHING to fear!"). It was pop music saved, I think you'd know I was going to conclude.

KING OF THE SLUMS: Bear With Me

2008-06-25T13:11:00.003+01:00

Before Alex Turner, there was Charley Keigher, and there was King Of The Slums, the group Madchester forgot. Certainly the immediate impression on rehearing "Bear With Me" a soberer generation later is one of a sly Arctic Monkey's uncle as Keigher does his worst and sends up the Roses and the dying embers of Madchester (already!) with his "wiv a lot of material" and "la la la la la la got loads" refrain of stirred concrete (and it also serves to send up Oasis before they even existed) before going on to laugh down the labyrinths of 'avin' it ("Oh I've done nuffin wrong/Just ain't quite cum on," and he doesn't sing that "cum" as though it's a misprint). The music is slightly stiff and tense, Sarah Curtis' electric violin poised to pounce, Stuart Owen shuffling mock-timidly on his broken beat drums, as Keigher sneers "But I don't care...And I don't care..." before screaming "BUT YOU DO!," whereupon the music shifts up to a higher and more dangerous gear. Like the dying old lady at the climax of Johnson's House Mother Normal, Keigher is driven to late lucidity ("The impertinent swagger," "The Herculean stance of a self-made man"), before dipping back into moribund character ("Sounds like I might have to work/And that gets on me nerves") and so we get more "got loads" and "My best is yet to cum," and the music continues to shift upwards, pitch by pitch, Curtis grimly grinding away like a missed mixed doubles partnership of Scarlet Rivera and John Cale, even creating her own feedback, the band peaking greyly, and then scattering away, for one further, more expensive and less impressive album, and thence to the workaday dust of their Mancunian ways.

SEBASTIEN TELLIER: Divine

2008-06-24T17:35:00.001+01:00

Apparently the Chivers are a high school pop group in a film called Steak - I haven't seen it, nor do I feel any real urge to do so, but Sebastien Tellier is involved in its music somewhere along the way and hence "I love the Chivers anyway/'Cos Chivers look divine" in the song "Divine." How good does it sound outside the entrapment of Eurovision? Far more modest and it affects far more deeply; live performance does not suit its Daft Punk-assisted contours. Indeed, both song and performance committed the fatal Eurovision sin of subtlety; a broad audience requires broad strokes, the huge gesture, the instantly recognisable sub-Esperanto language of post-Cowell pop.

In Tellier's "reality" (and how did France get away with submitting an entry sung for the most part in English, but then Tellier, c'est Tellier...) Daft Punk's sureness transmogrifies magically into Air lightness, with a briskness which the latter duo have not seen for some age; post-Lynch girl group doowops, a vaguely disinterested lead voice ("I'm alone in life to say") which regularly bends the song's brightness to reveal a more dramatic, uncertain undertow with its out of tempo piano, its extended needles of pauses, before bouncing back into a 1962 which exists only in the far western corner of his mind ("They try to find the Milky Way/They love to drink it every day"); cool ice cubes of string synth - and then the balladic dropout where Tellier crouches towards us and supplicates his need for unrestrained wonder - does he want to be a Chiver on pain of instant death or eternal life? Well, he loves them, and thus the ELO as Mitch Murray might have known them backdrop returns, those bop shoo bops indestructible, impermeable; at his time of life, which is not that far away from mine, he refuses to put away childish thoughts in the sure knowledge that they can on occasion be the most profound of all thoughts.

NO-MAN: Days In The Trees

2008-06-23T18:48:00.001+01:00

Nearly twenty years old, and more or less impossible to find now - so do I leave it alone, as forlorn as the weeds and broken bricks over which it sings, or do I bring it out into the open as the song itself is so reluctant to do, since I would be hard put to put it out of my personal top ten of singles?

No-Man, but not no wonder; they continue to this day, forging a path which causes even them to lose their way now and then - their music unsentimental but clinging, its horizons universal yet as surely focused as the nose to the dagger - but "Days In The Trees" was their moment, and it should have been nineties pop's moment, had people not run from it bemused, or not even been able to hear it at all, even if it only shares with Duras the notion of mortality set against a love which even hate cannot define (how many more "even"s do I need here to beat the odds?).

Well, it was six minutes and 20 or so seconds long, the "Mahler" version at any rate (there is no definitive version of "Days In The Trees" any more than there was one of "Higher Than The Sun"; the progressive randomisation of the concept of the pop single in those early post-House nineties continues to be wilfully overlooked and not properly followed through), and there's the "Funky Drummer" beat slowed down to a wary Cotswolds canter, string synthesiser and real strings, Tim Bowness singing timidly, mouth half covered like a Cliff Richard who can't really get used to children seeing him crying, singing maybe a half-second too slowly for listeners to grasp, but there are the trees, and there she (or he?) is - hiding, darting, teasing, escaping? Whoever it is, they are running "to the shelter of the trees" while the singer stands there with the aforementioned weeds and broken bricks, pale fingers curling autumn grass...

...and then an awakening, or a strange and less than pleasant dawning - is he pursuer or pursued? Is he victim or perpetrator? - as piano traces out hugely regretful (and very French, so that should be rueful) chord changes. Then, a possible prayer; the crack in Bowness' larynx as he breathes in (and out) an awed whisper of "the real taste of God." But this taste isn't quite a divinity that the Kate Bush of side one of Hounds Of Love might have recognise; he's draining the heaven from the warmth of her breasts, but then he tears the seams "of my smooth and laundered clothes" and suddenly it is he (or is it a disguised "she"?) fleeing to the trees, climbing a rope ladder while trying to avoid hanging himself ("the ascent to your heaven")...an earthier but equally smouldering perspective on Mark Hollis' ideations of deliverance.

But it's when Bowness' vocal ends that the song's spirit breaks through like a Wessex Poseidon (but where's the sea? Inside one's self?) as Ben Coleman's violins take over with the apposite Mahlerian tragic flair; his melody multiplying itself as feedback and ascending "A Day In The Life" eruptions force him to become a Penderecki section - he peaks and then the music dives back into the sofa of blade-strewn grass as Coleman does some Grappelli riffing with Nyman downturns, allowing for the brief resurgence of Bowness' heaven sent ascent (but is it assent?) before the song "ends," the sky darkens, the birds, the owls, a tolling buoy of a bell, and in among the sea which has suddenly arisen out of the forest (if it ever existed), the steely icicles of the opening strings to Walker's "Such A Small Love." Hear it in tandem with the far briefer "Reich" version - the verse melody topline played on Aphex-anticipating mock-marimba while a phantom voice from Twin Peaks (with which this was contemporary) speaks in equal parts dread and wonder of the first time she really felt love; and sweetness just about wins out - but the resonance, the torn immaculacy, the unarticulated ghosts and truths; they all continue to refract out onto the universe, as though to prove to themselves that it is not all merely a mirror. Or is that a blue in that there air?

THOMAS FEINER AND ANYWHEN: Yonderhead

2008-06-19T17:29:00.002+01:00

"...the point of life is now...the point of life, for now..."

It originally came out in 2001, The Opiates, and it seems that practically everyone missed it, but then it wasn't quite finished; a band which had been a band but had gradually, if amicably, trickled out of existence and Feiner had to sort the art out himself but then he did have the Warsaw Symphony Orchestra to hand, just in case he might get encased in unending nothingness. Much was lost or missing or missed in 2001.

But then it was found, and quietly marvelled at, and eventually he turned back, or sideways, or forward, and completed the necessary heartstrokes; and now it gets a proper (if still lateral) release and is conveyed to me. How to describe the thing that was Anywhen? From the available evidence (since I have yet to hear their previous duo of albums), let's conjure an a-ha who went a little deeper, grew a crucial bit older, who slowed down and let out what might once have been steam but was now melancholy streams of selected low-grade colours; the opening "The Sirens Song" petals forth a tremendous, steady crescendo of purpling power and purpose with both orchestra and group crashing through cosmos to find themselves in the rosier end of the opium pipe from which a Beaton-captured set of the original Cocteau twins are absorbing on the cover; the closing "All That Numbs You" bears the procedurals of U2 ceremony but is careful not to declaim its interior turbulence too brashly.

In between there is - what? A voice which undoubtedly must have attracted, in its rich quiver and petrified reassurance, Mr Sylvian (since he was the original album's finder and retriever); the skidable depth of the longly smouldering "Dinah & The Beautiful Blue" recalls brilliant trees grown into a febrile forest of anti-motion. Even when Anywhen "rock" ("Mesmerene") it is rock of the strobe-lit Moby Dick Rehearsed staggering ship type; nothing is totally in focus, the beat's tension crumbles if you try to sit atop it; Feiner ends the song by thrashing himself with the "into my arms" refrain as though to drowse his burning building of a brain. "Toy," meanwhile, is deeply disturbing; a lucidly conversant debate between woodwinds underscored by distant electronic scrapes, squeaks and semi-refrains unspeakable - the woodwork squeaks, and out come...at other times it is the Blue Nile transposed to Feiner's hometown of Gothenburg; the extraordinary, deliriously delicate "Betty Caine" rallentandos almost to the point of there not being a point.

There are two more recent songs - which act as the belated finishing touches - one of which, "For Now," gathers up the scattered cartilages of life, resigns itself to their eventual fate and proceeds forth with rare nobility. The other, "Yonderhead," is the album's masterpiece, an intimately blossoming cry of reclaiming life, from its distorted (or bedroom) piano and introductory plucked strings, while two flanks of brushed percussion (and subtle string instrument bridges) scrape their footsteps like angels washing their feet in the attic. Gradually all rises into place; low strings, fuzzy synth, feedback. and the deep sea whale of his voice: "My spine and leverage were not mine" which soon rises to a mid-pitch prayer: "Pick me up - animate me - render me - take me back to the ghosts of the day" - which then turns more passionate a plea: "Lend me a life - put me in a loooooooooooop (he sings that loop as though balancing precariously on the topmost outside rim of the London Eye) again," a "define" which encompasses eight syllables just as the strings begin to widen out across the becalmed panorama, the 'celli becoming increasingly forceful as Feiner asks to be hooked up and ignited with a ghost.

Then two minutes or so of the crucial transition; piano which debates with strings, which in turn turn dense to the point of breakthrough atonality; a wordless voice, hanging on that extended "L" labial for the dearest of lives before swerving back into determined focus: "...llllllllllllLLLLEND me a life!" Finally, connected and transforming, he hums of liberties and hopes, but is he really free? "Bind me - and I'll walk the pretty path." In other words, leap off the tightrope and trust me, for I happen to be the leaper. Seven minutes and 52 seconds after it began, you have to unpack your soul, for fear of missing it.

JOAN AS POLICE WOMAN: To Be Loved

2008-06-18T13:16:00.002+01:00

Consolations and regenerations at times of underpredicted trauma. The second Joan Wasser album is a light of not quite serene guidance for the disturbed compulsive traveller through the increasingly serrated windows of life; alternately as angrily remorseful as Hugo and as comfortingly sensual as Sterne, To Survive comes in the wake of her mother’s wake; she died of cancer just before recording started and so most of this record concerns itself with the uncertainty of breaths, the grey bewilderment of non-existence and the shining yellow lights of bodily communion. “Holiday” is boldly perky but she has to be careful to breathe regularly amidst the sinkings of “at the sway of your diamond black ocean” but “To Be Lonely” could represent the last, sorely snatched breaths prior to expiration or the resigned, contented and regular heartbeats of aged compromise; her “protect me, night, I’ll make it through” comes out as the blackened other end of Kristofferson’s thirty-five year telescope. Sometimes she will glance down with imperious disgust at the world; the siren fire of the bobbing electric piano on “Furious” and the so subtle she could still join him in Paris denunciations of “To America,” Rufus present in a told-you-so sense.

This fury sometimes converts to pangs of fuckable sensuality – “I wanna throw you up against the hard white wall,” she quivers on “Hard White Wall,” “and make you mine” and her tremulousness makes it the most arresting swift come-on since Patti’s “Gloria”; or it can subdue itself to metronomic, atomised pondering, as on the title track, a lullaby from daughter to mother, and she “must find the spark to go on” trying to pierce her pitch above those of the patient, stranded strings even though the candles have long since run out in favour of desperation-inspired guesswork. And the span, and the threat, between spark, fire and storm (“Magpies,” with its itchy strings and hornet horns, alludes to her mother’s fear to end up as a previous Joan had done (“didn’t live too long/seventeen and gone/but what I learned from St Joan/is heed to the voice in your heart/in this life, this life”).

The purpose is this dread, this anti-fire, that Joan keeps trying to subdue in the full knowledge that she can, and then fulfilling blessed and hard-won sweetness. “Honor Wishes” are her dreams expressed as a prayer to the god which she hopes will lay next to her; forgive all sins (“Would you stay with me anyway?”), and the tremble, the divine equation, the Molly blossom sway of her “bloom” in “will it be my bloom that still excites you?,” her labials drawn out with finesse spiky enough to rival Bonnard, the distant drum rolls (which only become explicit at the album’s other end) and that depthless ocean of oscillating baritone voices which caresses her hair and allows her to float in the song’s second half and they are all mirrors of David Sylvian (for it is indeed he – hi David, if you’re reading this)…and “the SUEDE of your skin”? If only Troy had known.

Still, it is with “To Be Loved” that the torch Joan’s too polite to light or blow out feathers most radiantly; horns at a discreet distance, the piano, the souled-in yearning – the beyond palpable satisfaction of “every breath that’s met us here” next to the sopranino wriggles of “the words, they escape me through my singing cage” but they have found each other through means inaccessible to behaviourists (“how on earth could you have found me/huddled under grapes of wrath”), the now buried ashes of that same wrath (“It’s safe to be alone and be lonely…/But…/I am going to shoot down my ghost town completely ‘CAUSE I KNOW THERE’S A PLACE FOR US – I MADE IT, I MADE IT”) – and I, WE, will make it again however many more times necessary. Outgrow the crowded house, and the now impassable universe between the no longer imaginable “I could not be loved” and the butter rainbows of “OH, I feel the sigh.” Breathe, then try it again, then learn to live. Again.

HOWLING BELLS: Setting Sun

2008-06-16T17:25:00.004+01:00

Everything I need to hear gets heard by me in time, and when the time is right. And when the time is right, and you seize the moment, sometimes the immediate need will be so immense that you'll want to listen to it at least a couple of dozen consecutive times. The eponymous debut album by Sydney-transplanted-to-London quartet Howling Bells came out to fair acclaim a couple of years ago and I've only just listened to it but already I want to hear "Setting Sun" forever.

There's nothing "new" about either the song or what the group do with or to it, but it's an approach I've been missing for the last decade and a half; is this "shoegazing"? Well, the gaze of the group, and especially that of lead singer/guitarist Juanita Stein, seems more fixed on the stars, or more properly straight ahead at what's in front of them; Stein has a certain sardonic tone in the bright catherine wheel of her voice, learned in part from Lush, as though she would be quite keen for you to stamp out the last cigarette with your best and brownest brogues, but also a great, galactic faith which ascends over the mountain to the chorus - so dense and eager that the drums are still building up tension when the first line of the chorus is halfway through. Verses are dwelling, unresolved, Church guitars, Chills synth, and "nobody waits for this long, can't you see?," the harmonies distantly swooping in their harbour of drone, and this time will the frost melt to reveal geraniums? "One..." yes! "More..." YES! "Day...is not ENOUGH to change the world!" as buoys toll and the grey sky ventures into corridors of Klein blue, "but we'll rise and fall just like the setting sun!" as birthday presents of shaded harmonies and gilded guitars hymn out the sort of uplifting and soul-sundering chord changes you haven't heard since...well, some critics have said All About Eve, but Lena rightly reckons the Heart Throbs, the pop shoegazers virtually forgotten by everyone else (but not by us); the sublime control of brother Joel's seagull swoops of single notes in the middle eight, the slight pause before he repeats them, and the sustenance of the smiling major chords over the first half of the final verse before Mark Hart's keyboards - and Ken Nelson's luminescent production, fresh from working with and similarly elevating Coldplay - reintroduce the question mark; yet again and again they will rise and rule, above not-yet-loving haters, above the dreams sinners could never dream, those who hurt themselves knowing only of hurting themselves, to pull the sleeves of the universe up to their skyline level and watch the purples, the lilacs, the peach bursts of light and revelation such that we can fly with them and perhaps even outrise the sun; their bells now tolling a time I read with gladness and relief.

ROBERT PALMER: I Dream Of Wires

2008-06-13T17:54:00.002+01:00

He was always more convincing when he was quiet. The role of the seventies seniors in the rise of New Pop should not be underestimated; Marianne Faithfull, Sparks, Grace Jones - those survivors from the old (i.e. pre-punk) ways who largely and wisely sat actual punk out, took stock, kept watching, dropped a line to Barry Reynolds, or Sly and Robbie, and then, when they knew the times were right, came back and suddenly found themselves at or near the front.

And Palmer was maybe the most obviously enthusiastic of them, and still, I think, the most underrated. The Vinegar Joe bluesy burp never really left him, of course - "Addicted To Love," his biggest and most overrated hit, is little more than pub rock with unsightly Fairlight and Linn daubs - but still I preferred the hunched whisperer in the corner of the hot garden of "Johnny And Mary," which always threatens to lurch into something shocking (the wavering bass volume) but never quite does; the jittery Docklands Light Railway (Neptune to Nassau line) of "Looking For Clues," the splendidly amber autumnal comforts of "She Makes My Day," the proudly cowering dread of his take on Jam and Lewis' "I Didn't Mean To Turn You On," the babbling nonsense and Russell Mael impersonations of "Some Guys Have All The Luck." And he was keen not to appear left behind or caught out; hence his fortissimo bellow finds its ideal home in his quickfire cover of the System's "You Are In My System," the version which hit in the UK at the expense of the original (but since David Frank was producing and playing keyboards on Palmer's version, I expect he didn't mind too much - those "hyuk hyuks" and atonal tolls of indrawing DX7s!).

With "I Dream Of Wires," though, he took on Numan (with the help of Numan as producer and keyboardist and most of Numan's band as back-up) and played the part of this particular "Electrician" to cold perfection. With its peopleless ticks and non-resonating drones, Palmer is walking in the world after the revolution, when steel has melted into fire and finally emptiness - "I am the final silence/The last electrician alive," he sings to the skeletal forest (Vera Lynn singing Tom Paxton again?) the morning after the future has ended. He reminisces with all the desuetude of a 25th century Max Bygraves singing "Fings Ain't Wot They Used To Be" about opening doors by thinking, sleeping by pressing "go" and driving to work "by backseat" - Palmer's voice is still stalwart and proud but the stable rim is already beginning to splinter: "So I press C for Comfort/I dream of wires - the old days" as the music filters those familiar Numan underpasses of Hammersmith, or is it East Berlin, echoes (come out of Hammersmith tube station via the Fulham Palace Road exit, glance back behind you and tell me that's not East Berlin), its "new days" now past their explode-by date. He didn't mean to turn it on.

TRAVIS: Flowers In The Window

2008-06-12T17:42:00.002+01:00

My friend terms it "ambushed by unexpected emotion" and it happened the other night, while listening to the radio. I've never been crazy about Travis - despite the comedy Radiohead of "All I Wanna Do Is Rock," they have never been the sort of band that one is supposed to go crazy about - but apart from "Why Does It Always Rain On Me?" being played 600 times an hour on national radio I've never hated them either; a good and (oh, dear) solid Glasgow band into whom I bumped every now and then with a hurried hello.

But I did recall "Flowers In The Window" as being a special song, to do with the life I used to live, even if I couldn't quite place the reason or the timescale - was it eight? nine? TEN years ago? Then I checked to remind myself when The Invisible Band was released and I froze - April 2001. Near the end.

"When I first held you I was cold.

A melting snowman, I was told.

But there was no one there to hold

Before I swore that I would be alone forevermore"

I didn't bother too much with that part; it was the slowly joyful clang of the chorus which got me, the "wow, look at you now" part, the idyllic Junior Campbell chord changes (since at their best Travis do remind me of "Reflections"-period Marmalade). The song seemed to echo more than agreeably a newly found peace and happiness; we were happy all right, the happiest we had been for a long time, we had plans, and if it wasn't for that annoying bloody cough we could get on with them.

You can imagine how, in the ensuing few years, I dared not go near the song, as with so much other 2001 music, but especially not that song. Eventually happiness returned, renewed, but still I was not much inclined to revisit Travis; there were too many other exciting things going on. So hearing it on the radio the other night was the first time I'd found myself listening to it for some seven years (and, as ever, sometimes it seems like seven minutes, at other times like seven centuries) - and it hit me anew, and renewed.

Beginning with a foursquare foot stamp, the gentle petals of the song fall into place, Fran Healy maybe amazed by discovering what he never knew, or refused to acknowledge, he had in him; thus the cruciality of the "wow" and the courtliness of "such a lovely day" with its indications towards surviving into old age. Healy can sing lines like "I'm here to help you with the load" and make you believe him - that plaintively awkward Glaswegian counter-tenor - and furthermore, the lines "You are one in a million/And I love you so" sound as newly sprung a language as Esperanto.

"So now we're here and now it's fine,
So far away from there...
And there is time, time, TIME!"

That triple time is the heart of the song, as quietly embracing as the three "times" sung in successive verses of "Who Knows Where The Time Goes?," every one from a different perspective - Fran STILL can't believe he can help another human being and make her happy - but it's happening and all they have do now is plant the seeds and "watch the flowers grow" with a final, graceful thanks to the sky before bowing out with the most plaintive of "Bohemian Rhapsody" gongs (producer Nigel Godrich just KNOWS). And so I looked out of my - sorry, OUR - new front room window, and saw the pink flowers growing in the windowbox and...well, some emotions are too private even for here, but I don't think I need to spell it out. The past righted yet again, in the finest of detail. The tears were those of joy. Joy, joy, JOY.

TOM RUSH: Sunshine, Sunshine

2008-06-11T18:41:00.001+01:00

He's there on the cover, a typical young face of '68; tall, swarthy, secretly smiling, but underneath the jacket and pullover lurks a darkness. Behind him a girl clings to him, but does he even know she's there?

The album was The Circle Game, it was 1968, and Rush was one of many Elektrafied balladeers; the photograph was taken by the young Linda Eastman, and does he really know where he's going? Ten tracks, all lushly arranged by Paul "Touch Me" Harris and produced by one Arthur Gordon. Eight of these songs are interpretations of other, then unknown writers; Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell and James Taylor, and also including a curious stab at a pre-rock standard ("Glory Of Love"). Just two of the songs were his, but one of them was "No Regrets" with its anti-ripple guitar motif, an extended exercise in self-annihilating denial - and Scott knew well enough not to make his torch burn too brightly with his cover.

It's all very characteristic '68 hazed comedown but strides above "typical" by Rush's vibrato-free voice with its fatalistic end of line dives and its slight, pleading baritone hoarseness which puts me immediately in mind of Bill Fay; more minute portraits of small movements liable to cause giant earthquakes.

"Sunshine, Sunshine," a James Taylor composition, is the best of entry points; a carousing caress of light strings, a clinging-onto-noble Last Post trumpet, delicately heartbreaking chord changes, Rush singing as though he's in no kind of mood at all, other than perhaps a quizzical one, for "sounds of laughter" or "smiling faces," instead choosing to muse on what happens to sunshine when there are no longer people to help define it ("Is that a cloud across your smile?"). As with the Supremes' "The Happening" there are deep currents of emotional discordancy underneath the placid surface ("Pain and rain and misery/Illness in the family") but not a uniformly dark picture ("and sunshine means a lot to me"). But then sunshine (it could be capitalised; it may be a girl's name) grows darker with the day ("...and bleak all quiet and grey by dawn," "trading her mood of yellow gold for frostbitten shades of silver...blue") even though the music's tortured beauty doesn't diminish. Eventually - all right, let's give her an S - the singer is "running out of things to be" and "Sunshine means a lot to me"; he beckons her closer, for comfort and release, as the strings close in on a reluctant major key ending.

LADYTRON: I'm Not Scared

2008-06-10T18:25:00.003+01:00

Congratulations are surely due to Ladytron for finally breaching the album chart at their fourth attempt - true, the album has debuted at #75 in the Top 75, and I wouldn't place a bet on it racking up a second week on the list, but it does represent an important breakthrough, as does Velocifero as a record. The quartet's musical world is now securely insecure; never have they sounded bolder or louder; never have they sounded so scared or quiet. There is a tremendous, poignant twinge to their not-as-hard-as-it-sounds post-electro/post-shoegazing/post-Goth (only just) intimately epic pop which hasn't been heard for some while; I think back to the very early British indie nineties, and certainly to Lush (with naturally sad meditations on where they could have gone if only *...*), but also to less immediately celebrated operatives of the time; my wife has already suggested the Heart Throbs, former Mark Radcliffe Show favourites who haven't been heard from for a decade and a half but briefly threatened to impose with superbly dense songs like "Dreamtime" (the answer to the under-asked question: the public opted for the more easily digestible cod-indie of the Cranberries).

Velocifero is similarly intense but light; the thunderous organ chords which prevail throughout "They Gave You A Heart, They Gave You A Name" provide an unlikely but logical reminder of Aaliyah's "We Have A Resolution" (but I see that many record shops have now opted to file Ladytron under "Dance"). They've gone electro, yet the closing "Versus" which affords the chance to hear both girls and boys singing, is more tender than gravity has a logical right to allow.

But "I'm Not Scared" is the one to which I've gone back approximately three dozen times to date - it isn't the Pet Shop Boys/Patsy K number, but its booming imperiousness is certainly influenced by the PSBs as much as whatever New Order or Miss Kittin or Blonde Redhead or Slowdive contributed to the fabric; throne-like double-patterning drums, fencing with themselves, a 1965 echo of what a synthesiser might produce, the very Lush-like vocal sadly shaking its mind over the over-rolling stone which it is trying to charm back to serenity: "January clipped your wires/The summer went straight through your tyres/Every faded sign that passed you/Used to point the way towards you."

And then the chorus manifests and it is glorious; successive trapdoors of dreamlike chord changes, a post-"Atomic" grandeur of the boldest bronze, high vocal dabs alternating with Fairlight phantoms before the storm continues to gather dust (even though there's a divine one-beat pause at 1:49 to allow everyone to catch their breath before resuming their charge), warning of the over-reliance on "the generosity of strangers" and the vital need to return again: "And you've gone - you know that I'm not scared to go home." Give up, climb out of that empty ring, wave the generous flag of white, come back, stop being a fool and the tank of the music rolls on, indestructible yet ineffably fragile.

PAUL WELLER: Why Walk When You Can Run

2008-06-09T18:27:00.001+01:00

Paul Weller and I haven't been in touch for a long time. Of course I don't mean personally - even if he did buy a copy of Laura's fanzine way back in the Michael Sobell Centre day - but as artist and listener at one remove. It used to be that we were as close as closeness could be; and after all Laura and I came into contact largely because of the Jam. Every record (even the dodgy Bruce-dominant ones) was like a new and more urgent communique but we still thought the Jam finished at the right time. Then the Style Council, and we followed eagerly at first before steadily drifting away towards other concerns, and they ended up merging with a lot of other "reasonable" artists of the mid-late eighties, not quite fulfilling the Mod ZTT hairline they might originally have promised.

And then Weller with his Movement, who moved out, and finally just Paul, and Britpop got into tune with him and he appreciated it and so Wild Wood and Stanley Road, even if they weren't profound records, worked in a very elemental way. But again we sensed that he was systematically moving to a place barred from our scope of interest, although he never quite shifted out of focus; when he was good and even a little mischievous, as on 2000's Heliocentric, we bucked up our ears and hearts again.

But after Heliocentric two declined into one, and I couldn't listen to Weller's stuff for years; too, too close to my bones. I sensed him in the far distance but couldn't really connect; I was sniffily dismissive of his cover of "Wishing On A Star" in Time Out in 2004 and suspect he still loathes me for that.

Whatever. Because 22 Dreams is where we violently and vibrantly lock back into contact again. My initial view was kneejerk sceptical; 22 tracks (or, as it has turned out, 21), double vinyl, tribute to Alice Coltrane, flowery pastoral 1968 Photoshop cover design, Noel, Ocean Colour Scene and all the usual lads, limited edition booklet, trying too hard. But once actually listened to, it is a startling affair indeed and I'd be inclined to say that it's Weller's most shamelessly adventurous album in any format since Sound Affects.

There is the curiously three-legged chair thumping rock patent of latterday Weller still very much in presence, but he's no longer content to let the chair lie; thus songs like "All I Wanna Do (Is Be With You)" starts out like a standard Weller rocker but then drifts into strange tunings, notes and gestures which don't quite fit, tonalities totally unexpected. The title track is slowly undermined by a distaff of discordant horns. "Echoes Round The Sun," the Noel collaboration, plays like the Leslie cabinet-modified Donovan of "Hurdy Gurdy Man" slowly being drowned in Blue Cheer's tarmac with querulous strings to help wield the shovel.

Despite its 21 tracks (the "missing dream" comes in the form of a semi-abstract short story by poet Simon Armitage which is to be found in the CD booklet) the record's dreams are frequently dark, and increasingly as the listener proceeds the skies cloud over ominously; "Invisible" is a quietly tortured and powerful soulboy variant on Costello's "I Want To Vanish"; "Empty Ring," with its portrait of a defeated ego, still throwing punches at invisible enemies, bangs around in empty echoes like a vacated pair of crutches. "Cold Moments" sees Weller barely able to raise his voice above acoustic guitar level, being dragged away from the world he knows, staggering onto the first Green Line coach to emerge from Victoria Coach Station, looking for somewhere brighter. "Black River," featuring the flat footed thwack of guest drummer Graham Coxon, is a loose-knit ballad which periodically explodes into Temperance Seven vaudeville frolics.

Hope does eventually dawn, as it must; "One Bright Star" is one of Weller's more startling vocal performances on the album, drawing a cosmos of meaning and significance out of what is little more than minute variations on "you're the one bright star in my life," and eventually he floats out of the harsh world and into the gentler one which the strings promised on the opening "Light Nights"; the folk ballad "Where'er Ye Go" is very touching, both because of John McCusker's violin and the push-and-pull of being apart from the spirit or person who sustains you - taking most of the hope and light, but coming back with such stories. Even God makes a cameo appearance, on "God," booming at the recidivist security blanket clutcher to get the Hell out of him - and then, after a semi-abstract Moog/mellotron interlude ("111"), the lights of home in "Sea Spray" (which makes me think of a happier "happy ending" to Johnson's Trawl) gratefully merging into the lengthy ambient dissolution of the closing "Night Lights."

For indeed much of 22 Dreams draws a touchable line between 1967 adventurism and 2008 vanguard, even if the free-ish adventures of "A Dream Reprise" and the aforementioned "111" will shock only those unfamiliar with or forgetful of things like "Music For The Last Couple" almost three decades ago. For the story and emotion to work, the record has to be listened to from start to finish, uninterrupted - and even then, the outtakes collected on the bonus second CD sound indispensable, although they don't quite fit into the overall concept; "Love's Got Me Crazy," for instance, pitches a terrified Weller vocal against a modified "I'm Not In Love" background of synthesised chorales.

"Song For Alice" itself is a nice salute to the late Mrs Coltrane, made agreeably spikey by the unmistakeable baritone piano and melancholy trumpet of Robert Wyatt, switching from channel to style at unexpected junctions but still holding together (by the explicit piano-as-harp cascades). But the deepest work, and perhaps the most stunning vocal performance of Weller's career, comes, not quite with the nearly deranged rock of "Push It Along" (in which Weller sounds a dead ringer for, of all tortured souls, Barry Ryan), but absolutely with the song for his son, "Why Walk When You Can Run." One of his truest ballads - perhaps the truest since "English Rose" - Weller's voice reaches a pitch of passion and fear which we have never previously heard from him; he knows that his son's running off, running like the wind, even (and Weller manages to make that particular lyrical cliche sound as new as tomorrow); he knows he has to, and that he can never stop him or even reach him now, but still there's that scarcely suppressed heartbreak in his voice - "no turning back, no giving in" - he's growing and he's not going to listen and Weller is struck temporarily immobile by the dread of repeated futures, or no future, and where does that leave him, except to carry on as he and only he can carry on or be carried. A performance which the Weller of 30 or 20 or even eight years ago couldn't have envisaged - finally, his own "Wishing On A Star" - and one which, like most of the other tracks on 22 Dreams, can perhaps only make sense to those of us who have lived as long as he has, who have reached, or are reaching, that stage. Yes - he's in touch again, all right.

PIETRA MONTECORVINO: O Sole Mio

2008-06-05T18:26:00.002+01:00

What has to be remembered is that the comparatively recent tradition of the Neapolitan popular song was born out of economic necessity. After the unification of Italy in the 1860s, when Naples was stripped of its capital city status and most of its assets, it became a desperate place; many thousands emigrated. So jolly songs like "O Sole Mio" with its simple sun-as-lover analogy were an attempted magnet to draw back tourists, visitors and maybe some of the emigres; the vibrant sun and sea imagery were as much of a construct as Coca-Cola or the ploughman's lunch.

As things turned out, the Naples influx into the States in particular proved crucial, and not just for the long-term benefit of popular music. "O Sole Mio" ended up as "It's Now Or Never" as though using Presley to illustrate just how far the world had travelled, from impersonations of innocent celebrations of carefree joy to patently truthful, albeit suppressed, lust, and Pavarotti subsequently had no choice but to try to reclaim it.

But I think Pietra Montecorvino made a better job of reclamation. Napoli Mediterranea was her album of 2003, reshaping some of those youngish songs, utilising musicians from the trading African countries (Morocco, Tunisia) as well as some from Greece, France and elsewhere, feeding the pulse back into the bustling port that the city once was. Vocally she sounds like a female Paolo Conte; hoarse, 40 a day habit, raspy, confidential but pitch perfect. She transforms "Guaglione" (more famous in the Guinness-revived Perez Prado version) as a dark throb of sensual starvation. With "O Sole Mio" she preserves the central melody but the harmonies are quarter-tone askew and percussion echoes from all quarters like refloated buoys; you have to work to establish a stable listener's base, but it's more than worth it - she sings it with some sense of mourning, of chances lost and opportunities not to be regained - but finds hope towards the end, and her electrifying "SO-le mio" at 2:06 is as justified and ancient a cry of redemption as the "Jerusalem" which eventually swallows up "It's Grim Up North."