Music Banter

http://www.myspace.com/burntisland

I never went to BurntIsland when I was young. I lived near it, though, in Aberdour, a tiny little village just along the Scots coastline from the place. I was aware of it. In my mind, Burnt Island was a romantic name, a strange place just out of the orbit of my child’s world. I imagined it, rather predictably, as a scorched place, an abandoned island scarred by volcanoes, or some kind of disaster. I dreamed of fields full of charred ash, survivors of a nuclear holocaust clambering from the basements of ruined houses, of lava and firestorms. It was a mysterious, and distant place.

What’s that? Why yes, I was an unusual child.

What’s my point? Well, my point is that Burnt Island is a fantastic name. That’s what initially caught my attention with this Glasgow-based five-piece. What a fantastic name, I thought. Someone has really caught the potential in that idea.

Of course, that’s not really enough to keep my attention. After all, I’m not sitting writing a review of Doctor Colossus and the Fifty-Foot Spider Monkeys, am I?

No, what’s keeping me pressing repeat on this band’s tracks are the wonderful, weary worlds of sadness that singer songwriter Rodge Glass conjures up in his songs. Just when I’d started to get sick of maudlin Scottish guitar-based singers with maybe a female vocalist and some violin for that folky tinge, here’s another one coming along to remind me of why I liked that kind of thing in the first place.

Glass sings songs which seem to speak of long struggles with sadness, difficult journeys through life which kept on going wrong. ‘A supposedly fun Thing’ starts with the line ‘that’s it I’m leaving home.’ It’s about the end of something, a time spent with someone which started well but didn’t live up to its promise. ‘yeah we did some things/yeah we went some places’ he recalls, but then goes on to detail that crushing sense of disappointment when you get to the end of a relationship- and yes, it’s obviously a relationship- which just petered out. It’s lovely, searing, and unflinchingly true.

‘Music and Maths,’ their album’s title track, is another slow-burner, starting from quiet piano chords and building to a stirring chorus. ‘I watch my children grow up and I wonder,’ he sings and you feel the weight of adulthood. ‘reach out for the easy life’ he sings, with a chorus singing along, but then the song refuses to boil over, won’t cop out with some kind of loud, redemptive chorus. Instead, it just gently subsides into a question ‘He sees the future that I have planned and he crumbles/says dad will I even notice it when it arrives?’ It sounds like Glass is struggling mightily with the notion of being a parent, and doesn’t know if he’ll be able to provide any kind of future for a child. Not exactly rousing stuff, but it’s saved from what could be overbearing, with the starkness of the images he raises. It’s not really self-pitying music, this; Glass’ songwriting voice is a lot calmer than that.

In ‘Man on Fire’ Glass is talking about life and a listless sense of feeling lost. ‘the same dreams/the same regrets… I call it home/It doesn’t have a floor for me to sleep on/the mountains do not stir up feeling in my chest/the roads do not lead anywhere I want to be’ speak of a quiet desparation, but somehow the beauty of the music is enough to render this soft confusion into a kind of quiet dignity.

So, in the end, it’s like life. Flawed, imperfect, but what did you expect? This isn’t happy music. But it is beautiful nonetheless.

Burnt Island’s album ‘Music and Maths’ is currently on sale through www.chaffinchrecords.com. Go buy it. Just don’t listen to it at 3am.

Hmm.

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Things have got quite dusty in here.

Sorry about that. I’ve been away, getting married. Long story, the stuff of legend. Honest.

You know what, though- weddings are actually fairly bland affairs. The whole point of them is their normality. ‘Ah yes,’ you say to yourself as the bride’s father gets up to make a speech, ‘here’s this bit, and then that bit and that. I know exactly what’s coming, life is ordered and these people are settling down.’

So move along, nothing more to see.

I’m easing things back in with a review of an album by someone I once rather uncharitably referred to as ‘Swansea’s answer to John Denver,’ before going on to talk vaguely of ‘happy-clappy acoustic singalongs’ and ‘toe-curlingly bad versions of biblical psalms,’ without really directly referring to him as such. I looked at it and went ‘well, it’s fine, isn’t it? I’m not really talking about Rich, and it’s not as if he’ll read this.

Then something strange happened. Rich read my post and strangely, instead of threatening to punch my stupid face in, he did something I didn’t expect at all.

He sent me his album to review.

It’s called ‘The Essence of My Life,’ and it was waiting for me when I got home from the states after my wedding. As I slept off jet-lag and tried to stave off the thought of the horrors that awaited my poor wife in her marriage to me, I popped this on and gave it a listen.

It is exactly the kind of album I would have expected my old mate to come out with. I should say as well that I find it entirely impossible to be objective about it as music in itself. At least I’m honest, eh? Richard Craine is an old pal of mine, and this makes me smile when I play it because it’s so reflective of his personality.

Of course, I think he’s a person well worth getting to know.

Yes, but what does it sound like?

Err, Bristol’s answer to John Denver? Guess you want more than that?

Actually, he’s more like a British James Taylor putting on an American accent. John Denver ain’t in there, not really.

The songs on this album are simple and direct. Rich relies on his skill on an acoustic guitar, and his clear, strong voice to tell short, intimate songs which are well-observed, candid and deeply personal. About half the songs have a full band on them, or the odd little embellishment here and there from a musician, but mainly, it’s just Rich and his guitar.

‘River Stroll’ is a good example of this approach- it’s a quiet and reflective song, bass and simple percussion underpinning Rich’s playing as he sings openly and honestly about realising how happy you are with someone whilst out on a walk along a riverbank. It’s sweetly touching, and utterly unbothered by the hovering demons of cliche. Dubstep, this ain’t. I don’t think Rich’s bothered much about that.

Another stand-out for me is the title track,The Essence of My Life where he’s simply and honestly telling the woman he loves that things were rubbish before she was around. ‘there was no reason in my mornings till you there/now I just lay here… watching the sunlight in your hair.’ Not exactly uncharted territory, lyrically, but that isn’t the point, is it? Love is not a new thing to the world. To you, however, it’s new. It’s powerful, it’s wonderful. Love transforms your life, if you let it. There’s nothing wrong with admitting that.

Another highlight of the album for me is a song I played live with him a few times. ‘Mistrust Mistreatment and Misunderstanding’ skirts that fine line between genius and disaster. You see, it’s an upbeat country shuffle concerned with the three women who always seem to follow him around. Ah, I hear you say, a reference to the three blind Muses of Greek Myth, a reference gleaned from his Classics education?

Not quite. These three women are Miss trust, Miss treatment, and… oh, I think you get the picture. The song is an account of the trouble they cause him. It’s a terrible pun. Terrible. That’s what makes it so wonderful. I love it.

Love’s Just one of Those Lies is a great song, too. It’s a quiet dissection of the coldness beating beneath the heart of every supposed nice guy after too many disappointments in love, when eventually you’re just going through the motions because to stay cold and heartless is easier. As a nice touch, this is the one song on the album where he gets his wife (the very talented Mirelle Mathlener) to do backing vocals. Ah, domestic bliss.

‘Memory River‘ is more of the same- a look back at the past where all there is regret, the sting of missed chances and the ticking of the clock. ‘I never learn to be once bitten twice shy, I just get more desperate when I hear goodbye,’ and I think we all know how that feels.

Elsewhere, he tells us that ‘I live in confusion/not far from desparate/in a state of loneliness/too far from love’ and basically tells us that whilst he seems all confident and happy, it’s all just done with smoke and mirrors. Makes me want to give him a big old hug.

Richard Craine’s website is here:

http://www.richardcraine.com

Why not email him and ask him about the birthday card he and I made for his girlfriend in 1998? If you’re lucky, he might still have the photograph we used. If you’re really unlucky, he might send you a copy, hopefully with the guitar sticker still attached.

I’m also going to include this youtube video, mainly because I want to draw attention to this remarkable beard:

Ladies and gentlemen, Richard Craine. The Man. The legend. The Visionary. A man who I am privileged to know.

Lady Gaga’s been mildly amusing every now and then. I think there was a point in time when I quite liked her, though I was suspicious of the way her early releases and videos seemed to be rather deliberate syntheses of whatever was popular. I wasn’t convinced, though, and as time went on I found her more and more irritating. I noticed people started to talk a hell of a lot of absolute god-damn nonsense about her. I particularly liked the website that claimed she was an Illuminati Sex Puppet, but then this malaise started to infest my friends.

‘Oh, but she’s amazing,’ friends of mine would say. ‘She’s like a modern-day David Bowie, she’s just using whatever’s out there, like a cultural magpie.’

Oh, piss off and die, I would say. She’s not the modern David Bowie, she’s the modern Madonna- a cynical, ruthlessly ambitious pop star making chicken salad out of chicken shit and dressing it up so she can sell it to us. She knows that the best way to get attention and commercial success if you’re not actually that good musically is to find a way to appear shocking, say a few provocative things that you know the press will repeate Ad Nauseum, and then let idiots buy into the buzz.

‘Oh, but it’s like performance art,’ my friends (who had all finished Art History degrees) said. ‘It’s not really about the music, it’s about the aesthetic.’

Fine, I said, I’ll watch her videos with the sound turned down.

And that’s what I did for Alejandro. I heard about thirty seconds of the actual song, and it sounds ‘la isla bonita’ re-written by a group of concussed nine year-olds if you ask me. Still, I imagine it’ll sound good if you’re in a coma. The video is horrendous, too. I was going to go through it and dissect it but then I read This article in the Guardian which does it perfectly, so I thought no, let’s not be cynical, let’s be constructive. Let’s find a way to improve things.

If you’re like me and you want to appreciate the Lady Gaga ‘phenomenon’ without having to listen to excruciating mid-90s Europop, then here’s what you can do.

Here’s the video:

Switch that on. Turn the sound off. Oh, and fast-forward through the first thirty seconds that look like a couple of fetish models hanging out on the set of Pan’s Labyrinth to when stuff actually starts happening.

Now load up this video.

Play the two together. Of course, you may need to restart the second a few times, because it’s only twenty-seven seconds long, but I promise you the results will be a lot better than actually listening to her music.

I’ve just got done listening to Tom Ravenscroft’s Six Music show, which is a breath of fresh air, musically speaking. It’s a little bit of everything, from strange shouty punk to interesting techno, to mad women singing god knows what in a foreign language. there’s also lots of really strange band names- Gay Against You, The Babies, and a song called ‘Curious Oven’ are particular notables. There seems to be no agenda, no theme or plan apart from finding things the DJ finds interesting and wants to share with the world. Ravenscroft himself is a pleasant, articulate speaker, albeit one with a slightly flat voice. He also sounds just a little bit nervous sometimes, but it’s endearing rather than annoying. It’s refreshing, unpretentious. We’ve all heard slick DJs a million times before, and it’s nice to hear someone who isn’t that- he’s just someone who likes music, and that’s something we’ve not heard since….

since….

Oh, it’s an unfair comparison, isn’t it? Still, in some ways it’s a valid one. More so, since he read out an email from someone and misread it as ‘dear John’ before correcting himself. Bet that mortified the poor guy, but then again, I bet every email he got mentioned his dad in some way or other.

Just in case you’re one of the few people in the universe who might not know what I’m hinting at, I’ll show you a picture of his dad.

in fact, have two:

Yes that’s right he’s JOHN PEEL’S SON. JOHN PEEL JOHN PEEL JOHN PEEL JOHN PEEL’S SON DID YOU KNOW TOM RAVENSCROFT IS JOHN PEEL’S SON HE’S A DJ AND SO WAS HIS DAD DID YOU KNOW JOHN PEEL TOM RAVENSCROFT JOHN PEEL JOHN PEEL JOHN TOM PEEL RAVENSCROFT JOHN PEEL’S SON JOHN PEEL JOHN PEEL JOHN PEEL. JOHN PEEL JOHN PEEL JOHN. PEEL. JOHN PEEL’S SON HAS A RADIO SHOW, JOHN PEEL JOHN PEEL JOHN PEEL. JOHN PEEL JOHN PEEL JOHN PEEL TOM RAVENSCROFT IS JOHN PEEL’S SON OMG WTF JOHN PEEL JOHN PEEL JOHN PEEL JOHN. PEELJOHNPEELJOHNPEELRAVENSCROFTWASHISREALNAMEYOUKNOW.

It’s an inevitable comparison, really, and to be honest it’s initially a little bit spooky, listening to Ravenscroft’s show. You hear that voice, that musical grandfather’s voice, speaking through him, in the same way it spoke through a lot of other people. It’s creepy. I’m reminded of the way that at my gran’s funeral, I was told by some people I’d never met that I really reminded them of her. Good for a man in his mid-twenties to be told he looks like a septuagenarian scots lady, but heritage is heritage I guess. You have to accept it with a smile and try to be yourself, whilst allowing that these people live on in you.

Plus, anyway, it’s not just Ravenscroft who carries this legacy. All of british music does. Six Music has, let’s be fair, been made in his image, and he’s in every real fan of music. I remember countless times I met some indie fan or other, and you could hear Peel-isms in the way they talked about music. I heard it in Mark Radcliffe, in people who ran second hand music-shops, and in the way I talk when I’m trying to sound knowledgeable. It’s in all of us. Peel re-wrote the rule book on how to be a music DJ, and made it ok to sound like a human being rather than a polished automaton. Every good DJ in the world is in his debt.

So anyway, is Ravenscroft’s show actually any good? Yes, it’s really good. It’s good because of the music, and because of the lack of ego displayed by Ravenscroft himself. You should listen to it. You’ll hear something that you’ve never heard before.

So, ageing president-botherer and shades-wearer Bono has gone and hurt his back, forcing the rescheduling of a huge swathe of U2 tour dates whilst he undergoes rehabilitation. It sounds like it was a pretty harrowing injury, from all accounts: the doctor who treated him is quoted as saying that the injury was a herniated disc, which caused a partial paralysis of the lower leg. Other details which came out suggest that there was some kind of fall during rehearsal, and that he was immediately rushed to hospital.

Now, you might be expecting a bit of a dig at wrinkled rock stars and bad backs, but as it happens I’m in slightly charitable mood. I’m also recovering from a very minor back injury myself (an unfortunate accident involving my fiance and a trampoline, which sounds fantastically salacious when I type it down, so it’s staying unexplained!) so I can quite imagine the pain poor old Bono’s in.

Still, it does serve as one of those strange reminders of mortality, and the passing of time. When someone you remember as the rock and roll firebrands of your youth is sidelined with an injury like this, it does make you think about how time claims us all.

Bono, in his younger days, was a classic rock and roll show-off, running about the place, diving into the audience and generally doing whatever he could to grab everyone’s attention.

Here’s U2 live in 1983: check how Bono climbs up onto the camera boom. Whether or not you like U2 or see them as blustering rock dinosaurs, you have to admit that seeing someone do something like this would be a pretty cool thing to see a singer do at a gig:

You see, live music’s about seeing something unusual, some crazy unexpected event that isn’t in the script. The best frontmen are always doing things that mean you can’t tear your eyes away. Maybe in future, this might just mean that Bono won’t be quite so keen to do something like that. That’d be perhaps the moment in a rock star’s life where they maybe accept that they’re growing old.

In some ways, I’d like to see that- ‘Get On Your Boots’ was just embarrassing, like seeing your dad dance at a wedding. Whilst I do think rock stars have the right to grow old disgracefully, there is something to be said for self-knowledge. If this marked the moment that Bono stopped trying to be a rock and roll wild child and matured into something different, well, that might be very interesting.

Get well soon, Bono. And don’t be afraid to act your age.

Pitchfork seem to think this piece of news makes perfect sense, but I really can’t let this one pass. Liam Gallagher is the producer on a film about the Beatles. Excuse me, what?

LIAM GALLAGHER is a film producer now. This Liam Gallagher:

What the hell?

Ok, the Beatles thing, makes sense, I get it, but seriously, Liam Gallagher, in charge of money. Liam Gallagher, hiring actors and setting budgets, running production meetings and being the behind-the-scenes genius behind a film. Liam Gallagher? Monobrow caveman frontman of Oasis, the most famously thuggish band of rockstars in the last twenty years?

Fucking hell. Times have changed.

Surely this can’t be true. The man’s a cartoon neanderthal. A lumbering, monosyllabic chimp of a man. Can you imagine being in a production meeting with him? I can’t imagine that there’d be much talking being done. Just menacing stares and demands that people ‘fooking get on with it, yeah?’

I guess if you’re incredibly rich and a bit intimidating, then you get to indulge in vanity projects like this. Plus, since Oasis split there isn’t really much else he can do. He’s already spent the best part of two decades creating a pale image of the Beatles, why not carry on in a different medium?

I suppose if Adam Sandler and cuddly alcoholic Jew-hater Mel Gibson can be producers, then it’s only fair to let Liam have a go. After all, maybe I’m being harsh and snobbish, looking down on a working class lad made good, incapable of believing a football fan could be intelligent and talented.

Bollocks to that. I know plenty of laddish football fans. I have no problem with believing that they are intelligent and talented. I do have a problem with believing that Liam Gallagher is intellgent and talented. After all, if even Peter Kay notices that you’re a bit of a knobhead, well, there’s something really wrong:

Plus, let’s be fair, I might be getting the wrong end of the stick here. Consider the fact this film is supposed to be based on Richard Dilello’s Beatles 1972 biopic ‘The Longest Cocktail Party.’ Are we really sure Liam Gallagher has read a book?

I don’t know why he’s doing this. Presumably to prove he’s got more to him than we, the sneering masses, understand. Screw that. You’ve just reached Ozzy Osbourne ‘I’m doing a musical about Rasputin’ territory. It’s embarrasing. Go home, Gallagher. Go get yourself a house, a very big house in the country and just bugger off.

After my post last week about Mia’s controversial video slaughter of ginger innocents, I thought it might be worth showing a video which I find a lot more shocking, by a band I’ve recently come to love. The band is Xiu Xiu (which is apparently Japanese for ‘There, There’), and the video is for their recent song ‘Dear God, I hate Myself.’ I’m just going to put one picture of it up here, and then a link. You can decide if you want to watch the whole thing.

And here’s the video in full, if you still have an appetite for it, so to speak.

There you are. How you feeling? Hungry?

This isn’t people getting blown up, or shot in the face, but to me it’s more hardcore, more explicit, than that MIA one. This might be because I’ve had a girlfriend who was bulimic, and I never really liked to think about those moments after meals when she locked herself away. My own personal baggage aside, there’s something absolutely car-crash mesmerising about this anyway.

This is someone actually making themselves sick for the sake of art. It’s unsettling, strange, and feels a little wrong. Just to watch it puts you on edge. That’s the point of it, of course, and I think that for this band, that’s what they want. I also think that the performer, percussionist and multi-instrumentalist band member Angela Seo, is being very brave doing something like this. She’s not spoken much about her reasons for doing it, but she she’s made it very clear on the band’s blog that she was in complete control of what she was doing, though of course some have called this exploitative.

I find it mesmerising- it matches the music, which with its combination of haunting, pained vocals, catchy melodies and aggressive, unpleasant casio-keyboard bleeps, is a wonderful piece of unpop- a tuneful self-mangling which makes me love them all the more.

School of Seven Bells, who I’ve previously discussed on here, back when this blog had no pictures or nothin’ have a new record in the can, so it seems. It’s going to be called ‘Disconnect From Desire’ and it’ll be out in July. They’ve given Stereogum an exclusive on one of the new tracks, Babelonia.

Like some kind of musical blog-parasite, here I am reposting that link. From that page there’s a widget where you can download it, if you’re happy to give them your email address. I would, if I were you- the more spam I get sent about these guys, the better.

In a lot of ways, the track is more of the same- the same sort of blissful grooving guitar, pristine female vocals and sense of inexorable, gliding momentum. It makes me think of looking out of train windows, and watching the countryside spin past, which is exactly what this kind of music should do.

The obvious touchstones you expect from this band are there- the guitars still sound blessed by the hand of Kevin Shields, but there are other bits and bobs thrown into the mix- the ‘chorus’ melody sounds quite like the sort of thing Stereolab would have done, only it’s behind a few strange layers of effects. It’s all very nice. There’s also a few bleeps and such at the start of the track that are a nice opening touch.

Overall, then, School of Seven Bells haven’t done much here to progress, or take their overall sound much further out there- they’ve simply plowed their furrow, and made a piece of music that’s a little slicker than something on ‘Alpinism.’ Nothing that remarkable about it, but it’s well-done and a good sign of more pleasant, blissful listening times to come, when their album comes out in July.

So there’s been a lot of controversy recently regarding singer MIA (right) and the bloody, graphic video for her new single, ‘Born Free.’

Placed onto Youtube then removed a day later, it’s a ten-minute, Hurt Locker style hi-def depiction of a group of American soldiers rounding up young ginger people, driving them away in armoured vehicles to the desert, and forcing them to run across a minefield at gunpoint. It’s pretty gruesome- a small child is shot in full-facial close-up, and there is absolutely nothing left to the imagination when the inevitable explosions start happening.

It’s still up Here, and it’s compelling viewing.

But is it offensive?

To some, yes, absolutely. That kind of violence is shocking and terrifying, and yes, it is happening in the world today- there’s some suggestion that with these ginger people in there, MIA’s making reference to the Tamil Tigers, who she’s previously caught flack for supporting. It’s a fairly clear message, too- pretty much, it’s ‘Racism is bad, m’kay?’ It can’t help but make you think about the fact that things like this are well within the human capability for violence and hatred.

That’s all well and good, but I have a problem with the opening of the video- there’s a bunch of other shocking images in there, seemingly at random- the old man smoking crack, the overweight couple having sex. It’s unclear why they’re there, apart from the fact that, well, it’s unsettling and unpleasant. And that’s kind of a shame. We don’t need to be beaten over the head with outrage, surely? It’s almost as if they’re just throwing as much at the camera as they can, to see how far they can push it.

It’s odd, too, that to me the music itself is really only a secondary consideration in this. It’s not the main event, it’s the soundtrack. That’s reinforced by the way that the track fades in and out where the narrative of the video deems it appropriate. Now, that might be interesting, but isn’t Mia supposed to be a recording artist, not a film-maker?

And if I’m going to be brutal about the track, it’s not that good. It’s atmospheric, and angry, but it’s not really as good as the song it samples, or indeed strong enough to stand up as a good song on its own. I may be a little bit of a luddite about this, but it’s about the music.

In this instance, I can’t help but think that music is a bit of a distant second priority.

Seriously, this is batshit crazy.

We’ve all heard religious music, I think. I’m not talking about the really good choral stuff, I’m talking about what one could quite easily call Chaplaincy Rock. One earnest singer with an acoustic guitar, banging out some happy-clappy song about being ‘safe in the arms of Jesus’ or something. I knew a guy like that at my university (Richard Craine, Swansea’s answer to John Denver!), and I even drummed on a few biblical epics he recorded, because he was an absolutely lovely bloke.

Still, musically, you know the drill. It’s fairly standard stuff, yer christian folkster. If you were to see this image, you’d have a fairly clear picture of what to expect:

Just another happy-clappy acoustic guitar singalong, right? Maybe a few quotes from the bible, toe-curlingly bad adaptations of ancient psalms, something like that?

Well, not exactly. Have a listen, and see what you think.

I can’t help but find this utterly unique. This is two Australian nuns with a guitar and a drum machine, and more echo than the Edge in a cathedral. It’s strangely eerie, and actually just a little bit beautiful.

‘Fire’ itself is a sort of minimalist evocation of the joys of celibacy. Not sure I see the appeal, myself, but it’s led to this strange wonder, so fair enough. The rest follows in the same vein, and is, well, quite lovely actually.

I love this kind of thing-music which is strange, and naive, and breaks the rules, because the people making it didn’t really know much about what the rules were in the first place. In its own way, Sister Irene O’Connor is almost as innovative as people like the Durritti Column, or any number of bizarre post-punk acts that cropped up in the aftermath of new wave, in that bold time when the rulebook had not so much been torn up as gobbed on, used to wipe blood off the floor, set on fire and then torn up.

That’s right. Two Australian nuns with a guitar and a drum machine. Punk as fuck.