2007 has had some richly varied highlights, but for me the overarching constant was the level of quality from, without wanting to sound too Brit Awards about it, solo female artists. While some artists have outright disappointed (Alicia Keys, Kate Nash, Uffie) and others have yet to show their full potential (Candie Payne, Amanda Blank), these 30 women have made music that my iPod thumb keeps returning to. (I've linked to the myspace pages of a few of the less well known artists - give them all a once-over, you won't be disappointed).
30. Yelle – Irrepressible French cheese-pop chanting, but also soft naïve afternoon grooves.
29. Joanna Newsom – “Colleen” is the only new stuff released this year, but it mines a groove as deep as any funk queen.
28. Eve – “Tambourine” is a risky, brilliant track, and her fluoro-Versace look is awesome.
27. Duffy – Radio 2 incarnate, but some voices just cannot be denied. The Bernard Butler co-writing/producing avoids the cheese-layering production that sadly befell talented singers like James Morrison.
26. Rye Rye – Impenetrable Bmore b-girl stances from a girl who knows how good she is.
25. Alena Diane – Sandstone folk torch songs a world away from pell-mell modernity.
24. Robyn – “With Every Heartbeat” looked like it might not get picked up by the mainstream, and then suddenly it was Number 1. Anything less would have been criminal.
23. Amerie – She’s plainly got the funk up inside her, and you can still hear her hunger.
22. Hanne Hukkelberg – 2nd essential album in two years. A truly unique talent.
21. Tiffany Evans – American Idol reject comes good on the overlooked Timbaland jam of the year below.
mp3: Tiffany Evans - Girl Gone Wild
20. Bjork – Volta may not be my personal favourite of her records, but she is still operating outside her comfort zone as ever.
19. Gwen Stefani – “The Sweet Escape” unforgettably uplifting pop, and the “Now That You Got It” remix was equally insidious sunshine.
18. Stacy Epps – Warm but coughing soulful hip-hop. Check out her verse over one of the best beats of the year below.
mp3: Shape Of Broad Minds - They Don't Know (feat. Stacy Epps)
17. Sharon Jones – Hell hath no fury...
16. Santogold – Effortlessly straddles Switchy squelch-garage and 80’s powerpop.
15. Adele – Going to own 2008. Takes the bruised soul of Amy Winehouse and nurses it back to health; takes the quirks of Regina Spektor and makes them guileless.
14. Julianna Barwick – Hypnotic sylvan loops. Ragas for hissing summer lawns.
mp3: Julianna Barwick - Dancing With Friends
13. Janelle Monaé – Great guest spots on Outkast’s Idlewild, even better on this space-pop classic. A big tip for next year.
mp3: Janelle Monaé - Violet Stars Happy Hunting!
12. Kid Sister – Another one who could go stratospheric. Like Rye Rye she has that ridiculous flow that doesn't show off but just calmly announces its own brilliance.
11. Leona Lewis - Holy shit:
10. Bat For Lashes – Eventually made it this year despite some rather half-hearted promotion from her record company.
9. Tracy Thorn – Her album had the kind of production that tips its cap at the 80’s without pastiche. Metro Area, Ewan Pearson et al go to town with that timeless voice.
mp3: Tracy Thorn - It's All True (Escort extended remix)
8. Feist – Breezy afternoon picnic-radio music.
7. Amy Winehouse – A modern icon. Roll on the Grammys.
6. Roisin Murphy - Classic house and pop sung by unglazed porcelain. Kylie is jealous.
5. Alice Smith – Will her album For The Lovers, Dreamers And Me ever get a UK release? Subtly modern, blatantly sensual.
mp3: Alice Smith - Dream
4. Rihanna – Her album has some high points, but come on, she's here for “Umbrella”. Instantly memorable and still endlessly involving.
3. Kathy Diamond – Her Miss Diamond To You will go down as one of the all-time great lost records. Insane shimmering disco production from Maurice Fulton.
mp3: Kathy Diamond - All Woman
2. M.I.A. – Absolutely attuned to phonetics as all great rappers should be, and a fantastic producer.
1. Ciara – Her album is underrated, she can dance better than any other R'n'B starlet, but she's at the top for “Promise”, perhaps my most listened-to track this year, and the greatest R’n’B slow jam ever recorded. Amazing precise delivery, transcendent production, a furlined future-caramel masterpiece.
mp3: Ciara - Promise
In the space of a couple of months, I've watched Fuck Buttons go from a duo with a support slot in a dingy upstairs room at the edge of Manchester's curry mile, without a proper website or any releases to speak of, to being blogged every three days, signing to ATP Recordings, releasing a dinky little 7" picture disc at Rough Trade and finally, last week - giving up their day jobs. They also premiered the video to "Bright Tomorrow" on Pitchfork a week or two ago.
In Manchester, they used a table in the centre of the standing space to construct an inspiring set up of wires, satin lined suitcases, pocket-sized casios and a fisher-price tape recorder. They sound gloriously noisy, colourful and excited. From the confusion of wires, samplers, keyboards and laptop erupt fireworks; bright infusions of cyclic melody disrupt the brash, gloopy haze of feedback and white noise. Vocals are channelled through the Fisher-price contraption, wedged in the jaws of Benjamin John Power as his screams are distorted into wide grimacing squawks.
I believe they are a band to see live, after nearly standing too close to the table in Manchester, frozen to the spot from fear and excitement, I can't imagine it being batter in any other medium. In headphones - crank it up and have somewhere to be - altered states induced at night. they have signed up for ATPvsPitchfork and will no doubt crop up around the country again soon. check their myspace for dates.
"Bright Tomorrow" works the frequencies, sonic heartbeats charged, synths stuck in a glitch, harmonious keyboard melodies that slide amongst the wreckage of electronic abuse and twisted wires strewn about, fuelling the vocal screech, the metallic strain to hit the build; the hard, fast peak of aural bliss.
Note: only two Fuck Buttons tracks have been officially released, so its feels a little cheeky to post their entire back catalogue in one fell swoop. Buy the 7", or better still: support them live.
Words like "transcendent" and "sublime" get bandied about a great deal in music journalism, but Jen and I were lucky enough to see something recently that we both agreed merited both words - Norwegian accordianist Frode Haltli performing his recent album Passing Images, the concert which closed this year's Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.
The record is a series of traditional Nordic folk songs reinterpreted in a contemporary way alongside Haltli's own compositions. Playing on the record and with him in Huddersfield were singer/vocalist Maya Ratkje, viola player Garth Knox and trumpeter (and PIAIL fave) Arve Henriksen.
Knox ranged from sudden dramatic swathes to near-inaudible high-tensile rapture; Ratkje, as well as providing effortlessly soaring passages, contributed an astonishing range of clicks, whistles and ululations to evoke an organic, outdoor sound-world.
Henriksen is simply perfect here. Not only does he make having sloping shoulders look cool (jealous), his own interests – the natural world, acknowledging heritage alongside sonic envelope-pushing – match those of Haltli. His signature sound, a kind of freeze-dried Don Cherry, dovetailed precisely with the coolly alive physicality of this music. But his instrument burst towards other poles, from 808-like robotics on “Lude” to the warmly brash Miles Davis of “Vandring”.
As for Haltli, he wrings every possible sound from his accordion, from piercingly blank high-end to convulsing mumbling; from doom-laden drones to hymnal beauty. The sight of an accordion being played with such sensitivity is mesmerising, the impossible full length of it exposed like a conjurer’s trick, its crenelated curves like some strange Scandinavian mollusc.
The inexorability of its ebb and flow is the perfect visual complement for his work, which folds in every drip of snowmelt and rustle of pine, every faded footprint and half-remembered melody, before unfurling it all in a thrillingly fresh way and yet still on its own terms. This concert was uplifting in a way that only the most wondrous natural sights can usually create – this is music that moves with the logic of starlings, with the half-life of sunset.
Here's a couple of tracks from the record, which has shot straight to the upper echelons of my year's best list:
Frode Haltli - Vandring (alternative ZShare link)
Frode Haltli - Jag Haver Ingen Karare (alternative ZShare link)
This track came upon my person from I'm not sure where. My iTunes keeps playing it without me noticing - apt, I'd say, due to its swirling phosphorescent nature. They are the musical offspring of West Coast art-pop - Animal Collective are an influence 60 Watt Kid wear on their sleeves in 'Ocsicnarf Nas' - but often more mellow. Vocals are warped in sunshine warmth, distorting like heat off the road.
'Ocsicnarf Nas' is impressionistic - colours blurring and smudging into a palette of dancing guitars with spinning skirts; vocals like a tuned-out radio at twilight; a sonic backdrop of dense, ambiguous programming.
'Every Day' is more manic - scrappy garage rock smacked up by bleepy synths and splashes of feedback grind. It is scruffy and frayed, a Fuck Buttons remix of an indie-pop song - squiffy casio exhortations failing to completely obscure the hooks and melody.
Their debut was released earlier this month on Absolutely Kosher (also home to Sunset Rubdown, Frog Eyes, The Wrens, Xiu Xiu) and have a hand-painted limited edition cassette on the way. It's also on iTunes, and the tracks can be heard on their myspace and website.
Sam Amidon
is a New York folk man with a voice the now-sadly-defunct Stylus likened to "a more assertive Kermit The Frog", which isn't far wrong. Some of his stuff, like his ill-advised cover of "Head Over Heels" by Tears For Fears, crosses into wet-tissue feyness and I have to listen to some strident disco to get the wobblyness out of my head. However, "Saro" is easily one of the years best songs.It's a rendition of an old folk song, so Amidon can't really take the credit for the awesome vocal melody. It's absolutely effortless and timeless; and like all great melodies sounds as if it's been hewn from the natural world rather than forced out of a mind. Particularly affecting is the way the line "for to be alive" falls, a beautiful little moment. To give Amidon his due, its a very moving performance, managing to convey both a resignation to lost love, and the awful time it took to get there.
Sam Amidon - Saro
Sam's album featuring this track, All Is Well, is out in February, and was produced by Valgeir Sigurðsson, who has worked with Bjork, Bonnie Prince Billy, Mum, Sigur Ros, CocoRosie and, er, Kate Nash.
At the other end of the melodious prettiness spectrum we have HEALTH. They recorded their record (and are regulars) at the not-really-underground-anymore underground L.A. club The Smell, which has also nurtured such experimental-hipster-punk luminaries as No Age and Mika Miko. The Smell has a habit of putting on bands with silly names, try these on for size: Heavy Face, Vomit Bomb, Disposable Thumbs, Child Pornography, Bipolar Bear, Pocahaunted, This Moment In Black History, Good For Cows, Toxic Loincloth, Stay Fucked, Mattress, Moth Drakula. Lovely.
Anyway, HEALTH (why the block capitals? Smell-brand silliness again) may look nu-rave and even sound it on the Crystal Castles remix of their "Crimewave", but they actually play a brand of punk that fans of Liars and Black Dice will dig, garage rock meets noise bursts meets electronic noodles with tribal drumming and eerie vocals. I love "Perfect Skin", in which titanic chords call on the po-faced monolithic riffage of metal to slowly lay waste to the landscape. The way they fall fractionally off the on-beat is just great. Turn this one way up.
HEALTH - Perfect Skin
The cold has set in good and proper up north. I get wrapped up to go outside - hats and coats and scarves. The last two days, Sheffield has been draped in a thick grey misty rain that settled as fog this morning. It was cold, and everywhere sounded empty, voices echoing hollow in the morning chill. This is the weather for blues, for the down and out blues infront of wide log fires - since I don't have a log fire, I'll settle for the blues.
Bessie Jones was the principal in a special form of gospel singing called the 'ring shout' which was practised on the St Simon's Island where she lived with her husband. This song was one she'd learnt as a girl, along with lots others from her grandfather - an African ex-slave. This one she made up "when she was young and still 'out in the world'(not a church goer)"
Alan Lomax discovered her in 1959, and she later convinced him to record her music and her biography. 'Beggin' The Blues' is featured on the 2CD Alan Lomax Songbook, it was recorded in 1961 and as a result, the recording is pretty much spotless. Lomax captures her voice in sharp focus and almost unbearably close-up. She sings completely a capella here - her voice is rich and powerful but tied down and softened for this personal lament, tarnished by a beautiful lilt that carries off the last syllable into a dark blue wilderness.
Recently I have been enjoying the pleasures of rediscovery, spending half an hour here and there rooting around in a shoebox full of electronica and avant-rock promos from the last three years. I keep chancing upon albums buried in my memories, blurred undeservedly into a generic subset of mediocre strings and electronic mutterings.
The Life Force Trio are one of the things is listened to the most. This one track (in tribute to Alice Coltrane) stood out the most and I am glad to find it again. Unfortunately the album has terrible artwork and an even more hideous title: The Living Room. Well done guys, you really convinced us all that your good album was actually some flaccid lounge bullshit. (No points for imagination either - it was recorded in a living room)
They were conceived by Carlos Nino, who was also part of AmmonContact and Hu Vibrational among others. As far as I can tell, they've only ever released this one full length on Plug Research, with a guest appearance forDwight Trible and a 7" here, 12" there.
'Alice!' is six minutes of strings gliding; soaring like starlings over the high notes; caressing and adorning the helpless looped melody as it falters, is retrieved and heaps around and upon itself - a beautiful tangle of wind, string and the carefully disguised hum of programmed monotones.
Alice! - The Life Force Trio
This track is from a compilation released about two years ago called Back to California. It's the only track I really listen to, but I'm glad I found it, even if the rest are twangy white man country. But this one song, it never fails me.
'Trouble' is originally a Lowell George track; this version is by Nicolette Larson and was recorded live. What makes it more exciting is Van Dyke Parks on piano; you can hear him counting her in. She's most famous for being Neil Youngs woma' for a while, and recording a cover of "Lotta Love". She died in 1997 from a cerebral edema at the age of 45.
It always picks me back up, every little bit, one play is never enough. The gutsy drawl of Lawson adds bite to the lyrics, which carry the perfect sentiment. Parks' piano follows her voice, tracking the parts where she drags the heavier parts from the pit of her stomach, and when they linger on her tongue and in her mouth.
I find it impossible not to join in as she bawls: "You're an island and oooon yourrr own!", or the determined but soft drawl of "and your eyes are tired; and your feet are too; and you wish the world were as tired as youuuu"
I listen to it when I feel exhausted, and feel guilty for being so pathetically tired, because I've just worn myself out doing things I like and nothing I don't. Drag yourself out of bed to this, your day will be all the more productive. I think I'll need it tomorrow, so I'm gonna write a letter, and I'll send it away, put all the troubles in it I have todayyyyy...
Fabric has never had a month like this one for its ongoing CD series. James Murphy and Pat Mahoney (ie LCD Soundsystem) take the FabricLive commission, while Ricardo Villalobos handles Fabric. Both are absolutely sensational.
First up, the James Murphy, which is a set well versed in the arts of a good mix: breathing spaces, the sense of a journey, and unending shit-hot tunes. The first 25 minutes are shameless, joyful booty-shaking funk, before shifting into another gear with the more spacious, Chicago sound of the middle section. It then gradually slows down the groove, taking in early electro and classic disco before blissing out in some a capella Love Of Life Orchestra.
What's really interesting (to me anyway) is seeing how influential this whole period has been on a whole range of DFA acts. The rolling, hypnotic synth in Junior Byron's "Dance To The Music" is the roots of the similarly repeating line in LCD Soundsystem's "Get Innocuous!", while the voluptuous basslines of G.Q., Baby Oliver and Chic are potential progenitors for The Juan Maclean's most addictive moments. The shuddering, mildly acidic effects used by Babytalk have been updated by Hercules And Love Affair, and the timeless one-note hopscotch jangle of funk rhythm guitar has been passed down to The Rapture to reignite four-piece guitar music. Indulge my trainspotting below:
LCD Soundsystem - Get Innocuous!
Junior Bryan - Dance To The Music (Dub)
The Juan Maclean - By The Time I Get To Venus
Baby Oliver - Primetime (Uptown Express)
And this is just so euphoric:
Donald Byrd And 125th Street, NYC - Love Has Come Around
The Villalobos mix is all his own production, thereby blurring the edges between artist album (often a bad idea in techno anyway) and club set. As with all his production, it's a subtly uplifting, terrifying experience, the music crawling inside you for better and worse. Its chief strength lies in the way elements of tracks are bled across the entire record - for instance, the addictive melody of "4 Wheel Drive" is brought in over the previous two tracks, leaving the notion of distinct tracks redundant in favour of a throbbing, dangerously organic whole.
So of course, it's almost absurd to try and blog this because its pleasures are only fully revealed during total immersion. But here's the 12-minute track that comes at the heart of the set, "Andruic & Japan". A quick, metronomic pulse beats against rumbling, unpredictably violent drumming and a drunkenly free-associative train of thought from some woman. It's totally unhinged, truly gone mad in the disparity of its elements. And it features a truly heartstopping moment when a vocal stab suddenly invades the shaking structure. I won't say where, but for me it ranks with "KICK OUT THE JAMS, MOTHERFUCKER!" in terms of all-time vocal thrills. The best moments in minimal techno are these, when you have earned those unexpected, adrenal bumps in the road after minutes of smooth cruising.
I can't get enough of this song, it never gets old. I first heard it in Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise.
Stranger Than Paradise starred jazz musician John Lurie, former Sonic Youth drummer-turned-actor Richard Edson and Hungarian-born actress Eszter Balint.
Both the song and the film have really stuck to some part of me, I see lots of things that remind me of it. It's possibly my favourite Jim Jarmusch, I like its simplicity and it's minimalism. It's shot in a series of long takes; tracking shots with nothing but the visual and aural scratchy white noise of the old recording equipment.
Stranger Than Paradise was responsible for me buying a Screamin' Jay Hawkins album. Just for this one song that's played over and over, round and round. The version here is unfortunately a lot cleaner, not so soulfully gritty, without the grainy black and white of the film woven through the recording.
'I Put A Spell On You' is a recurring feature of the film. It echoes cracked and tinny from Eva's stereo, a unifying thread to a film with no purpose or formula. The camera follows her tramping around New York, or dancing sloppily around the kitchen dressed in baggy cardigans and mens trousers, smoking cigarettes lazily.
The version I've posted is a slightly different version of 'I Put A Spell On You'. The Jim Jarmusch version has more parp, more oom-pa, the squawk of sax. This one is smoother, has more of a slow grind; a drive towards the chorus peaks and the slapstick animalistic shrieks and brays that constitute the breakdown.
I don't know which I like better, but the Jarmusch version does not appear to be readily available. This one is still great. Decide for yourselves...
Screamin' Jay Hawkins - I Put A Spell On You
"Ooooooooohhhhhh..................spell"
“It is important to stress that the joik itself, and certainly my version of it, is a matter of receiving an expression, and mediating the inner voice that a human experience has in itself. A strange fact is that sometimes the joik comes first, and then you realize to what feeling or experience the joik pertains afterwards." - Lawra Somby
Adjagas are a Norwegian duo, Sara Marielle Gaup and Lawra Somby. They are 'Sami joikers': people who make a weird 'yulk' type noise while they sing, and are from Sapmi, a cultural region which covers parts of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia.
Somehow, on its release in the early part of this year, it managed to turn heads, receiving glowing reviews in pretty mainstream publications (e.g. Q, The Sun, Time Out and the Metro).
Adjagas is Sami word for the state of mind somewhere between sleeping and waking; the ethereal vocal sounds flow like muttered dreams, like the peaks and troughs of soundwaves. A Joik is like a vocal flick with the back of the throat, a sort of spasm that sometimes goes unnoticed.
What seems to have captured people's attention is their less traditional approach to joiking; they use a more accessible backdrop and allow a small influx of electronic elements. Lawra says "We wanted to create new joiks, not just present traditional ones in a novel musical context." I hardly know any old yoiks, but Adjagas sound contemporary, not so stringently traditional as other 'famous' joikers like Mari Boine. (Stream a Knife remix of Boine here).
There is something entirely otherworldly about Adjagas that remains connected by small delicate threads to this dimension; the echoing strum of a banjo or an acoustic guitar and the subtle influx of modern electronics put it in context, where the vocals carry it away into distant snowy lands.
Adjagas are remarkably accessible, a beautiful soporific venture into something off the beaten track of the very American folk revival we're in the thick of.
I've still not made up my mind about the new Interpol record, which has me simultaneously battling an impulse to unconditionally love it and a desire to take the easy "they've lost it" route. It's hard to listen to your favourite bands with ears clean of past brilliance. Perhaps it's just a bit middling. It certainly contains some of their worst work in the noisily bland "Mammoth", and opener "Pioneer To The Falls" which is much, much less than the fleshier progression from "Untitled" that it aspires to be.
Yet there are things I like about it, like the bilious, nasty chrous line from "The Heinrich Manouever", and things I love, in particular "Who Do You Think?", with its elliptically rendered lover's tiff set to a sashaying backbeat that shakes off the cloying grey that clouds some of the album. And while some have groaned at Paul Banks's lyrics on this record, including me, sometimes they can be really evocative. You could argue that some of his deliberately poetic moments verge on facile; I happen to really like their honest reach towards beauty, images such as "the coast of hypnotic" and "follow the speed in the star-swept night". He also makes some nice puns, like "I only call them when I know I don't see them", the classic phrase retooled to soothe a jealous, paranoid girlfriend.
But where I think he really succeeds is at expressing the hopelessness of mechanically rebuilding love. In "No I In Threesome", for example, he declares romantic banalities by rote - "through the storms and the light / baby you stood by my side", "I see your lips are on fire" - before invoking the clichéd, euphemistic entreaty "Babe, it's time we gave something new a try". Rather than this being parodic or po-faced, it occupies a space between the two. He takes the inadequacy of American relationship vocabulary, all embarrasingly bald emotion and unsexy practicality, and wears it with a wry, defeated smile.
Anyway, what struck me originally about the album before I got to intellectualising it was the similarity of closing track "The Lighthouse" to "A Crimson Grail" by Rhys Chatham. (Chatham's work is subtitled "for 400 electric guitars"; Chatham recruited 400 axemen to perform it in and around the Sacre-Coeur in Paris - heavy). "The Lighthouse" creates a shifting, tidal guitar sound through some freely strummed chords before some symphonic low end kicks in; "The Crimson Grail" does the same but dispenses with the "kicking in" part in favour of constantly ebbing religious might.
I think that considering Carlos D's new-found affinity with classical music, "A Crimson Grail" may well have proved the ultimate rock band-to-philharmonic gateway drug. Spot the difference:
I've been a bit of a grandad recently in terms of pop music - poking around on blogs means that you know the new Sunset Rubdown inside out but you have no idea what's at number one. So this video of Chris Brown and Rihanna at the VMA's is totally stale and happened weeks ago, an eternity in blog years, but fuck it, I'm posting it anyway because it rocks my world and I've only just seen it.
Rihanna looks incredible, sings a bit out of tune, but it's "Umbrella" so it's still great. This video is really all about Chris Brown's dancing, particularly to "Wall To Wall". Those of you who know me will know my dancing is a poor drunken acme of this boy-genius. The robo-Chaplin stuff at the beginning is pretty awesome (though clearly David Elsewhere-inspired); his Michael Jackson impersonations at the end are foolishly ambitious but he just about pulls it off.
But it's the sequence from 1:10 to 2:50 (and 1:30 to 1:50 in particular) that has me itching in frustrated dance dreams, hampered by my indie-boy frame and white, white skin. I could watch this slicker-than-slick choreography all day and not get tired of my vicarious thrills. Chris Brown is the whole package. Check:
The song itself is very good too, and strangely became a total flop in America, a disappointment considering last summer's successes with "Run It" et al. Still, if you can move like that, you can die happy.
Jens Lekman is a lovely and peculiar creature. On the eve of the release of Night Falls Over Kortedela, Play It As It Lays is using him as a vehicle to compensate for our relative abscence in the last fortnight. (Which was due to attempts at fortune making in the big smoke. Result: partial success.)
To celebrate my own proper return to Sheffield and a rekindling of my love affair with Secretly Canadian I, Jen, present a Jens super-post of sorts, two brand new tracks, two hidden treasures and a classic from the Scando I love the most. (Well, nearly the most).
'No Time For Breaking Up' was the very first Jens Lekman track I ever heard. It's a little unusual for him, there's no airs of the cabaret, the glint of a showtune, or the parp of some excitable brass sections. It came on a free CD fom the late Comes With A Smile magazine.
It opens with the sound of Christmas - bells and a choir welcoming in the glorious melancholy of Lekman at his most moving. It's a slow burner, a sombre plea; quite beautiful, sparse and careful.
The next two tracks are from his new album Night Falls Over Kortedala. The first is the penultimate track, 'Kanske Ar Jag Kar i Dig', which opens with some gorgeous barbershop style harmonies and fingerclicks. The slow jaunt of the track is irresistible, doused in cheese; in ooohhs and aaahhhs and Lekmans delicious croon. My favourite part: "My words are c-c-c-comin out all wrong". Perfect.
On the fourth track 'And I Remember Every Kiss' the majestic arrangements and Lekmans voice smacks of a Scando Scott Walker. His voice is smooth and thick - chocolatey almost. He drapes it in great velvety swathes around simple lovelorn lyrics, splashed with a lovely bit of accent.
The fifth track is from the Secretly Canadian compilation released this year, on which Secretly Canadian artists covered other Secretly Canadian artists. Lekman's rendering of Scout Niblett's 'Your Beat Kicks Back Like Death' is full of dinky percussion, whistles and maracas. Niblett's vocals put the original in sharp heavy relief, just her imperfect voice and a basic drumbeat. Lekman turns the statement of mortality into something positive, the choir singing together with arms outstretched.
There's something I find very captivating about Scandinavian oddballs such as Lekman, especially when he's such a softie. If you still need convincing, then get a load of 'You Are The Light' - the perfect pick me up, sung in slightly warped English - "Yeah I got busted, I painted a dirty word on your old man's Mercedes Benz cos you told me to do it". It is perfectly endearing in your ears, if not on paper.
Jens Lekman - No Time For Breaking Up
Jens Lekman - Kanske Ar Jag Kar I Dig
Jens Lekman - And I Remember Every Kiss
Jens Lekman - Your Beat Kicks Back Like Death
Jens Lekman - You Are the Light
Jens has presents for you here. To say thanks, and to stop him threatening to quit again, buy something of his here. There's much more on his website, including a very readable news blog.
One of this year's absolute best albums has to be Arve Henirksen's Strjon, released on the peerless Rune Grammofon label. Arve Henriksen is a Norwegian jazz trumpeter whose tone is absolutely unique - breathy sighs give way to the occasional burst of brilliant purity, tortured moans lie alongside pretty delicacy. I can't recommend enough the experience of listening to this outside at night on headphones, and all the way through. It is an album absolutely in tune with the natural world, the creaking seismic fact of the physical earth alongside the foggy unknowns of spirit and fate. Played amongst the elements it really blooms.
"Black Mountain" opens the album after a short introduction and is atypical of Henriksen, but is certainly one of the highlights. Electrical bursts and tones invade the space with terrifying unpredictability, while underneath it all rides a mother of a bassline, like a minimal techno record found staggering weakly around after days alone in the tundra. In a perfect world Carl Craig would slap a pitch-black 4/4 beat behind this for the ultimate in introspective dance music...
"Green Water" is more familiar territory, a meandering trumpet line soaring over traditional piano and synth washes laid deep in the mix, plus gamelan stabs that coalesce to form a clanging groove, before dissipating into the mist again.
"Wind And Bow" is a stunning close-up of Henriksen's trumpet, the most intimate track on the album. Headphones an absolute must for this one to pick up every smeared note and tremor.
These are just to give a flavour of the different types of sounds on this record, and like I said, it really bears listening to in one sitting; its progression from oppressive dislocation through tentative curiousity and quiet understanding to ultimate sublimation into the elements is moving and wholly satisfying.
Arve Henriksen - Black Mountain
Arve Henriksen - Green Water
Arve Henriksen - Wind And Bow
And yes, he's playing an "ice horn" in that photo. Brilliant.
Skipping across the music video channels over my cereal this morning I was agog at the sheer lameness of some of the trumpeted indie bands out there - I Was A Cub Scout ripping off the pacy emo-motorik (emotorik?) of Bloc Party, without any tunes, and Air Traffic were like Keane attempting the martial bits of Arcade Fire, without any tunes. Truly desperate.
Cue L'il Mama over at MTV Base. She doesn't need any "angular guitars" or played-out synths or doe-eyed Bambi-pamby vocals. In fact, she doesn't need any fucking instruments at all, just some clapping and some E-number-amped flow. The lyrics don't try to articulate why the girl left me or what's wrong with the state of things, they're about how great lipgloss is. She can dance too. An infinite number of Wombats clapping an infinite number of hands together could never come up with something this catchy, let alone be able to jack to it afterwards.
Lil Mama - Lipgloss
Of course, there are precedents for this sort of production, not least of all this all-time classic:
Clipse - Grindin'
Still absolutely fresh after five years. The funk holy grail is surely to reach the point, as these tracks reach towards, where a single rhythm barely coheres yet is still totally danceable. Any suggestions on the ultimate examples?
Las Malas Amistades are a bizarre musical anomaly. Signed to Honest Jon's they eke out what might be described as an 'individual' sound for themselves. Their latest offering is much the same as the first, only they move from the garden (Jardin Interior) onto the patio (Patio Bonito). Patio Bonito is a much more upbeat jaunty affair, with more fake trumpets, maracas and fiesta castanets.
At times they are just straight up weird, singing jolting out of key ditties on out of tune guitars, and third world keyboards with a stuck demo button. As much as I enjoy this, I'm aware it's a bit indulgent of me. However, at other times they sound like the soundtrack to a Wes Anderson film, the tinny samba beats on the cheapo casios placed in their element next to underdeveloped wah-wah synths and off-kilter vocals that just won't settle on a melody.
It's rare that any of the tracks hit the two-minute mark, often breaking off after one, but this works on their side, the ridiculousness not indulged too much - just the toes dipped quickly into a wildly individual and anti-intellectual musical experiment.
Las Malas Amistades - Hay Zombies En La Playa (I would like this to be my theme tune as I walk jauntily down the street with headphones on.)
Las Malas Amistades - El Mismo Pesimiso
Las Malas Amistades - Estrella De La Cancio
Read more and look and the cut and paste artwork here, make sure to flick to the blog, its not in English, but the artwork is super, I selected some for this post: bearded children (entitled 'crimino'), humping motorbikes, what to pick? I chose the gnomes on the settee.
NB: Malo in your face is in reference to track 2 from Jardin Interior, the lyrics for which are all about things that are bad, 'malo'. They translate to (courtesy of the sleeve, not google):
bad like a dog with a limp
bad like a kid with messed up hair
bad like a borrowed shoe
....and ends with the lines...
bad like a loan left hanging or like synchronised swimming.
In between listening to a luscious stack of new CD's (more from which soon on these pages), I've been enjoying drifting around work and Sheffield's pavements to various mid-90's Chicago bands, a scene which I can't get enough of. Jazzy beard-stroking guitar pop, full of melodious noodling and genuine warmth, with a playfulness that belies its intellectual image. The Sea And Cake's Oui has been heavily repeated as has Tortoise's TNT, plus the most simple and most skronked-out ends of Jim O'Rourke's spectrum. And above all Camofleur (1998) by Gastr Del Sol, an outfit made up chiefly of O'Rourke and David Grubbs, but which also featured Chicago legends like John McEntire back in the day.
Camofleur is a beautiful album, well worth buying for its invaluable whole-album listening experience. (I'm aware of how Chicago jazz-rock geek that sounds, but it's true). It's a blend of delicate chamber strings and piano, squiffy O'Rourkean polyrhythms, soft electronic effects and glitches, hypnotically repetitious guitar patterns, and careful, naive singing from Grubbs. What makes it unique is the way is hovers ecstatically in the space between the stricture of pop songwriting and the loosened world of free jazz and musique concrete, the aural equivalent of the gorgeous period between dreams and lucidity.
"Each Dream Is An Example" is my current favourite, setting a very traditional piano motif against fizzing electronics and muffled horns, before emerging suddenly into a new space at 2:50, a clearer, balladeering tone taking over, with chiming backing vocals from Edith Frost. Grubbs sings about the nature of dreams while simulataneously allowing dream logic penetrate the song - its soft 45-degree turns into new musical ideas without warning are the same turns our subconscious takes as we dream, at once nonsensical and natural, as it makes its wandering path through recent history. The lyrics make these synaptic rambles as well - the lucid "compress the days' events" segues into "the loss of a spouse is spice for lice", a line that I love for its silly somnabulent word games. (If you listen closely you can hear Grubbs smile as he sings this, imperceptibly heightening the loveliness of it all). Gastr Del Sol manage to create something that truly deserves the descriptor "dreamlike", music that is blithely absurd and skipping across the face of waking life.
Gastr Del Sol - Each Dream Is An Example
Thanks to Ian for lending me this and a bunch of other Chicago-based genius. Camofleur is out of print but you can get it on this listing at eBay for not that much. Maybe I'll burn you a copy if you ask me nicely.
Miho Hatori appeared in the Steel Press promo box a long time ago, when all we knew was cold and shadows. luckily, that day I was feeling optimistic, feeling I should make more of an effort to listen to all the bullshit we get sent, as some of it may turn out good. This one time, one and only time mind, it turned out good.
Ecdysis was released on Rykodisc last year, with some truly terrible artwork (above). It's quite patchy, making use of a hotch-potch batch of instruments with no connecting thread. It does, however, have this truly lovely stand-out track, "Barracuda", which I need to post before the sun goes in again and it gets all inappropriate.
Hatori's voice sweeps shallow and soft, tarnished with a strong accent. But don't get me wrong, this isn't some sort of insipid Beach Party job. The club-style organ is jaunty - off the mark, and the maracas and flashes of brass (listen carefully) in the back all sound as if played by some smooth-ass guys who dropped in from a tiki party. There's little bits of harmonica or something; some of those crazy wooden percussion instruments you get in primary school. It all adds up to something really catchy, floating along all top-heavy - hardly there without the plastic um-pa of that organ - it gets me every time.
Miho Hatori - Barracuda
Bird By Snow were a band that often played gigs in people's houses or on the beach when I lived in Santa Cruz, and it's good to see that they've grown to the point where they release their first CD in Europe this week, entitled Sky and released on Swedish label Kning Disk. They share the same underground Californian psychedelic folk sound as bands like Whysp and Little Wings (and more famously Vetiver and Devandra Banhart), a kind of tousled organic intimacy that forms a dusty niche away from the sheen of modern life. You can definitely hear the influence of Phil Elverum's Microphones/Mt. Eerie, the latter of whom Bird By Snow has supported in the past. This track has a fantastic slowly loping groove to it, overlayed with wheezing accordian and shamanic repeated vocals.
Bird By Snow - The Sound And The River Within The Sound
Takes me right back to magical SC, where I often used to share my walk to lectures with a family of deer, and bought incredible paintings by homeless hippies on walks back from the beach. Despite relocating to the Bay Area and travelling all over the world, Bird By Snow seems to have retained some of that Santa Cruz acid-hippie ethos:
"Open eyes wide, and take in “Sky,” bird by snow’s outrageously lush follow-up LP. Cloudy or clear, day or night, let us be absorbed in the one-always-giving moment, and know the sky not as vacuous hole, but as container (whole)."
You can buy Sky from the label website or from Bird By Snow's website, including the original LP version in mouth-watering gold sleeve with transparent blue vinyl and luxury booklet:
What a beauty. There's also a free live album from a gig on an island in the Baltic Sea you can download.
On a trip round the shops in Birmingham I was becoming more and more frustrated at not finding any clothes I liked that weren't horribly expensive, until this came on my iPod and I remembered that good music is the only thing truly worth spending your money on.
"Come Maddalena" is taken from the soundtrack to the 1971 Italian drama Maddalena. The film concerns a nymphomaniac who, desperate for a solid relationship, confides in a priest; the priest is also full of moral and spiritual doubt and finds himself confiding in her. Sounds like some hot and heavy Italian confiding, though I wouldn't know as it's very obscure and unavailable on DVD. We do have Morricone's score though, and this is the dizzying highlight (it also features the more famous "Chi Mai"). Beginning with some restless jazz drums (representing Maddalena, we presume) against some keening church organ (you guessed it), it builds and builds, gathering breathy sighs, dramatic harpsichords and urging cellos, until it reaches its chorus motif, a stunningly strange blend of traditionally filmic string landscapes and an incoherant babbling female choir. The strings are the laser-guided soul massage you get with the likes of Scott 4 or Agaetis Byrjun, and the vocals sound like Julie Andrews communing with the spirit world.
Ennio Morricone - Come Maddalena
Needless to say, the prospect of trawling through Gap for jeans after that aural daisy-cutter seemed like very small beer, and so I drifted home and blew money on records online, some of which I'll no doubt post in the coming days.
And if life for you is merely inert space punctuated by the fleeting joy of reading my words, you'll be glad to know I've written something for the "Death Issue" of Sheffield's premier intellectual fold-out fanzine NON. It's a piece about Joan Didion's The Year Of Magical Thinking; Didion's novel Play It As It Lays is where we got the name for our blog, fact fans. Pick up NON for free at the Showroom, Rare And Racy, Syd and Mallory's, lots of other places.
News of Edwyn Collins's recovery from a life-threatening stroke/superbug combo was warmly received chez play it as it lays, and he's continued to shun the gates of Hades by recording a new album despite having only recently learnt to speak again, and without having regained the use of his right arm. His new single "You'll Never Know" is a charming wee number, effortless white soul crooning utop elderflower backing; like Jack Johnson but with a sage, bruised vulnerability that add crucial drops of bitter to the sweetness. Guaranteed to softly uplight a corner of a late summer's day. I sadly don't have the skills to give you an mp3, but listen to it with the video over at Partizan.
Don't turn in disgust at an mp3-less post just yet though, as I've got this overlooked little gem from Collins's 2002 album Doctor Syntax. "Jonny Teardrop" is full of the kind of sassiness usually meted out upon society by the Pussycat Dolls, the Latin shuffle bringing to mind moustachioed guitarists lustfully gazing at tango dancers crazed by rhythm. Collins goes one further and sets his twisted love story in a dusky mermaid's cocktail bar - the echoes and muffled, clanking piano combined with the liquid vocal and coral guitar make for unique underwater R'n'B. I'm still holding out on the heavenly J-Lo/Collins collabo that will make my musical year.
Edwyn Collins - Jonny Teardrop
An Electric Storm was originally released on Island in 1969 by ex Unit Delta Plus members and BBC Radiophonic workshop supremos Tony Vorhaus, Delia Derbyshire (composer of Dr.Who theme tune) and Brian Hodgson. Island have finally got around to reissuing it on CD for the lazy crate-diggers (me). It's a lesson in the beginnings of electronic music - the commercial side; the TV soundtrack side - the other end of the spectrum from the minimalism of composers like Terry Riley.
The album is a gloriously off-kilter, a squiffy mixture of pulsing heartbeats, hollow tappings of triffids and exotica instrumentation: bamboo sticks, marimbas and bongos. Glittering synths and warped vocal echoes are dripping in reverb, yet it retains the hooks of melodies whilst the whole album swells with guttural groans and orgasmic moaning.
It's difficult to choose what to post, "Here Come The Fleas" has a sense of humour; "Firebird" is pure 60s pop with some clever tape tricks; "My Game Of Loving" has a full 2 minutes of orgasmic moaning; "The Visitations" is fantastically frightening but 11 minutes long. After around 15 minutes of deliberation, I've decided to fall on a middle ground. Anybody who wants to hear John Whitman, Annie Bird and Val Shaw climax properly can pay to perv and buy a copy. It's really quite unfortunate that I can't post the whole album.
White Noise - Love Without Sound
White Noise - Firebird
Geek Post: (for people who will have the oppurtunity to use such fascinating anecdotes)
Deerhunters recent album on Kranky, Cryptograms, floated around on le blogosphere quite conspicuously for a while, and now seems to have vanished into relative obscurity. The vinyl version of the album I waited a good few months for comes packaged in flourescent pink hypnotic sleeve, along with the EP, Fluorescent Grey (not so exciting artwork above). Boy, were those few months worth it for the trippy artwork in 12". This should not have been overlooked...
Flourescent Grey is much more off the radar than the full-length Cryptograms, but both stand up to as much scrutiny as you can muster. Cryptograms is part intense slurred post-rock, part raw guitar songs, due to the two-part recording time: the first attempt was abandoned because of frustration over the way the mikes were capturing the sound. The second bout - taken up months later - is more controlled, less agitated withedges more defined; sharper. Fluorescent Grey swings somewhere in the middle of these two, four tracks of scuffed lines carrying a decided structure.
This is the title track from said EP. It spirals around a cyclic sagging melody, guitars that fall a little behind the pack, giving a wonderful drawl to the whole track. Layers build and levels rise; lucid - patiently, patiently...
Deerhunter - Fluorescent Grey
Check out the artwork and the pitchfork review here and their blog here, which has mp3s of other people and stuff, including a Psychic TV cover of a Neil Young track, something that only induces confusion in me.
The words "icy electro" usually fill me with dread - probably going to be some dead-eyed coked-out tunelessness in thrall to the worst things about the 80's. And italo-disco, I've tried to love you, I really have, but most of you is just shit. The Cheese-String basslines, the serious ethereal vocals, the bongo/twinkle percussion - it all sounds like the soundtrack to a gay John Carpenter film. So Glass Candy, equipped with icy electro lead singer and italo-disco trumpet sounds were prodding my "bullshit" knee-jerk.
But they've actually nailed one of the hardest conundrums in pop, namely to imbue tundra-like sonics with humid soul. It takes alchemical genius to fuse such base matter into gold. Ida No's vocals are perhaps the best thing about "Candy Castle" - her tone is reminiscent of Miss Kittin's still-breathtaking performance on "Madame Hollywood", showing a flickering vulnerability behind an impassive cocaine screen. It's a very traditionally cool performance, but its yearning, unironic vocals and teary-eyed diva edge elevate it above mere hipster posturing. Her backing is Moroder-grade purity, keening strings layered above syncopated pulses and prowling low-end. It's apt that they've covered Kraftwerk's "Computer Love", which is pretty much the benchmark for this kind of velveteen-mercury electropop.
If you want more Candy then you can visit their
myspace which has three more new tracks to download for free. And fansite Crystal Migraine has some older tracks to download as well.
I finally got hold of a copy the most recent Pan Sonic album, Katodivaihe in a music video exchange in London a week ago, it was pretty cheap too, so I was pleased. After copying said album to my ipod, it didnt get listenend to for at least two days, until I remembered it was there on a rather busy rush hour train. The passengers had no idea that I was stuck in some super-urban Orwelian world of doom, everything turned concrete grey, the skyline jagged, the sky forboding. The bass on this thing is just mental. It sounds like the apocalypse.
"Lahetys/Transmission" sounds, literally, like atom bombs equipped with subwoofers, dropping and mushroom-clouding into an industrial wasteland of grinding beats and metal against metal. "Koneistaja/Machinist" flips out a chainsaw to an early Warp-ish beat. For the whole length of its fourteen tracks alien insects swarm around industrial grooves, offset to a crushing bass. Sick.
If you have decent speakers it works just as well, but coccooning yourself in the swelling sub bass of Katodivaihe via the medium of headphones is preferable. Also, walking round dark city centres alone at night will enhance the experience. If you can do neither, turn it up and shut your eyes.
Pan Sonic - Lähetys/Transmission
(I also apologise for the terrible metaphors used in this piece, mostly the one about sub woofers and atom bombs, they are however, entirely appropriate.)
Electric blues I believe to be generally soulless, the opposite of blues. Generally I find it to be blues for the masses, the pain and suffering removed from its heart and played without involvement - cheery almost - so that folks don't have to be moved. They can sit and clap along in their comfy seats, sat boozing in comfy bars.
However, Howlin' Wolf (a big exception I know) gets away with it. He doesn't sing with the aching and the poverty that the Delta blues men do, he doesn't sing with every inch of his being dragging him to hope for something; he sings with gall and grit, choking on the rasping anger trapped at the back of his throat. Boy, is he angry; he's angry at the women folk - just cant find a decent lady, and that sure makes a feller mad. So leave the late John Lee Hooker stuff alone, put down that BB King. The Wolf spits it, spits it evil...
There's books written and waiting to be written on The Wolf, he'll crop up here again in an earlier guise, but for now, we'll see what he can do with an electric.
The first track is from Alan Lomax's Blues Songbook. Alan Lomax was a Harry Smith type figure in a way, he recorded and catalogued a lot of blues men - he was the first person ever to record last weeks blues man (Mississippi Fred McDowell). The track featuress a backing band, Hubert Sumlin, Eddie Shaw, and an unknown bassist and drummer. Check...
Howlin' Wolf - Dust My Broom
Howlin' Wolf - Evil
Cee-Lo – Cee-Lo Green Is The Soul Machine
Van Morrison – Astral Weeks
Kraftwerk – Minimum-Maximum
The Strokes – Is This It?
The Velvet Underground – The Velvet Underground
Mississippi Fred McDowell – Amazing Grace
Terry Riley – A Rainbow In Curved Air
David Bowie – Ziggy Stardust
B. Fleischmann – Welcome Tourist
Candi Staton - His Hands
