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Play It As It Lays has moved. We're now at www.playitasitlays.net.

Ssion - holding God up for ransom just to get you all dancing.

Ssion (pronounced "shun", as in "session" without the "se") are great looking. Like they've been hired for the wedding of John Waters and Larry Levan. Or to run the door at a gay club in Interzone. The frontman looks like a Moroccan street punk werewolf, while their leading lady looks like she runs an S&M cubicle in an open plan accountant's office.

The music is predictably ludicrous, and some tracks like "Bullshit" and "Street Jizz" are just bad American electroclash, that go for provocative but end up numbing. But when they let a bit of sunshine in, they transform.

"Heaven" is like being bombarded with Pick'n'Mix fired from a giant cock-shaped cannon. It's camp, silly, and you won't like it if you don't have a sweet tooth, but it'll probably make you smile and flail around like a dancing 5-year-old.

Ssion - Heaven

My love for Glass Candy is extremely strong, and while their remix of "Clown" has their usual irresistable icy sass, I think the original has the edge. I'm a sucker for a Chic-like one note rhythm guitar and middle-8's full of demented laughter.

Ssion - Clown

Reissue joys continue!

Hot on the heels of Dennis Wilson, another essential record is being reissued in style. The Microphones' The Glow Pt. 2 is coming back around with 20 (!) extra tracks, spread across 2 CDs and 3 LPs, and released by its original home, the mighty K Records.

The Glow Pt. 2 doesn't sound like anything else. It was written and recorded in Olympia, in the Pacific Northwest of America, a place of thick pine forests and icy inlets, and this landscape is shot through the record. Rather than acousmatically sample natural sounds, the songwriters attune themselves to a natural rhythmic order, with the moon-pull of tides and regularity of solar orbit alongside the chaos of flightpaths and animal free will.

Tracks move from one to another with the sudden strangeness of waking in an unfamiliar bed. Blizzards of raging static ebb away to allow bursts of delicate acoustic sunlight through; naive campfire singsongs sit alongside faceless soundscapes. The listener is wrapped in the cosiness of home and left out in the fearsome open, the latter of these evoked with an amazing noise that sounds throughout the record, like a gong being sounded from across a misty valley.


At one point Phil Elverum (above) sings of "the awful feeling of electric heat". This is an album that is full of the crisp chill of winter wind and the genuine warmth of wood aflame. The electricity used to produce it seems to have been threaded out of the air rather than taken from a socket. It's back out on April 8th. Rather than try and represent every facet of this stunning record, here's the opening three tracks. I defy you not to crave the rest.

The Microphones - I Want Wind To Blow
The Microphones - The Glow, Pt. 2
The Microphones - The Moon

This is a blog post.

Matching Mole have re-entered my radar in the last few months after the release of Robert Wyatt's Comicopera in the dog end of last year. Matching Mole was formed by Wyatt in 1971, two years before he fell from a balcony and was paralysed from the waist down. Matching Mole had four members, one of them David Sinclair from psychedelic proggers Caravan. The name 'Matching Mole' is a play on Machine Molle, which is French for Soft Machine, whom Wyatt had just departed company with. They only lasted two years and two albums, along with a handful of releases in the last decade or so.

"Signed Curtain" is from the bands self-titled debut, released a year after forming. It was composed almost entirely by Wyatt, as is most of the album, and features his voice audibly weaker than it sounds now - on the brink of something; clutching at clumps of grass to stop himself slipping over the edge.

The lyrics are relflective, literally: "this is the first verse/this is the first verse/this is the first, the first first first" They feature only statements like this, tracking the song through its stages; bridge, chorus, verse. But Wyatt becomes more unsure of where he's up to as the song continues, losing the conviction he started with, in a way that feels daft and tragic all at once.

Accompanied by simple piano and no percussion "Signed Curtain" is remarkably moving, with all emotional content directly generated by Wyatt's vocals. The gradual sense of loss dissolves the silliness the song began with, ending the song on the lyrics - "or perhaps its the bridge/or just another key change?/never mind,it doesnt hurt/it only means that I/lost faith in this song/it wont help me, retune."

Matching Mole - Signed Curtain

Wyatt's most recent album Compicopera is available everywhere, and is really very good. It featured on lots of End Of Year Lists and comes highly recommended by me.