This is just a repost of something found on Pitchfork, but it’s a reason to be cheerful, anyway. Stereolab were one of the most unusual and often impenetrable bands of the mid-nineties- if you put some of their music on for a friend, you’d either get a reaction of total bafflement or utter love. motoric Krautrock beats, weird analogue keyboards making the kind of thing robots would do if you told them to make lounge music (as opposed to Daft Punk, which is what robots would do if you told them to make disco music), and serene gallic-toned harmonies with lyrics which contained such gems as ‘originally the institutions were set up to serve society, now society serves the institutions.’ On the quiet, they were like the Manics, chucking provocative Marxist rhetoric into (sort of) pop music, and rendering it indecipherable as they did so. They were awesome.
They’ve been ploughing their own particular furrow for what seems like forever now, and announced recently that enough was enough, at least for the time being (although frontwoman Letitia Sadler will be putting out more solo stuff soon).
Fantastic. I’m imagining it’ll be as charming, quirky and impenetrable as the band I’ve come to know and love over the years. I also hope it’s not the end for them- it’s harder and harder for bands to sustain themselves, and some bands really shouldn’t. Stereolab have managed to settle into that comfortable territory between ‘groundbreaking/unique’ and ‘instantly themselves no matter what record of theirs you put on’ that, say, Sonic Youth have also managed. It’s hard to know when diminishing returns set in, and I’m hoping that maybe this will just be a fallow period which allows them to return refreshed and invigorated.
In the mean time, here’s a reminder of exactly what got us interested in them in the first place:
How I loathe the Kings of Leon. Apparently, they’re good, because they sing in their own accents and they’re the sons of preacher men. Yeah, they’s good ole’ Southern Boys Who done gone and made them some purdy rock music. Whatever.
Even if this irritating, clichéd schtick isn’t put on, the resultant sound made by lead singer Old Pappy Wilkinson Haystacks the Third and his merry band of Uncle-brothers is one of the most irritating and pointless excuses for music to achieve success in recent years. His voice. My god, his awful, awful voice. You know how people listen to, I don’t know, Xiu Xiu, or Bjork or something and just say it’s weird noises with no musicality? That’s exactly how I react to this man’s voice. It’s almost indescribably terrible and I just cannot understand how otherwise intelligent people who can do things like remember to get dressed in the morning would like this band’s music.
I have traced the original inspiration for it, however. Just look at this Jack Dee video from the mid-nineties, and listen from about 3.26:
He’s talking about an old teacher of his, but I think you’ll agree that the sounds he’s making are scarily close.
Anyway, I hate them. They’re shit and if you like them you simply don’t understand and there is something wrong with your ears.
The world, however, seems to have a LOT wrong collectively with their ears, and the Kings of Leon are bafflingly successful.
Luckily, it seems the pigeons of the world have seen fit to redress the balance, subjecting them to the physical equivalent of what they’ve been shovelling our way, musically, for ages, by crapping on them from a great height until they stopped playing.
Brilliant, just brilliant. Of course, I’m not saying that rock and roll venues should be full of pigeons crapping on bands, but this petulant behaviour from a bunch of supposedly rough tough country boys just makes me laugh. Let’s not forget, too, that not one but TWO support bands had already made it through their sets. Kings of Leon- bunch of wusses.
Still, it could have been worse. Kings of Leon could have actually played a full set.
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.
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.
the fact she looks horrendous in this photograph is presumably ironic
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.
t-shirt self-promotion: you're doing it wrong
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is just a repost of something found on Pitchfork, but it’s a reason to be cheerful, anyway. Stereolab were one of the most unusual and often impenetrable bands of the mid-nineties- if you put some of their music on for a friend, you’d either get a reaction of total bafflement or utter love. motoric Krautrock beats, weird analogue keyboards making the kind of thing robots would do if you told them to make lounge music (as opposed to Daft Punk, which is what robots would do if you told them to make disco music), and serene gallic-toned harmonies with lyrics which contained such gems as ‘originally the institutions were set up to serve society, now society serves the institutions.’ On the quiet, they were like the Manics, chucking provocative Marxist rhetoric into (sort of) pop music, and rendering it indecipherable as they did so. They were awesome.
