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.

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.

And here’s another ‘A and B’ band, fresh from the wilds of Scotland- the Moth and The Mirror.

They’re a five-piece, and feature the sort of folk-tinged indie pop that’s become popular since the days of Idlewild and Travis- a bit of crunchy indie guitar here, some impassioned Scottish vocals there, a little bit of Violin, xylophone and perhaps the occasional banjo or woodwind section scattered across their songs. It’s nicely done, well arranged, maybe a little tastefully competent here and there, but they do know how to rock out from time to time as well. If there’s a musical agenda, it’s all about showcasing the songs and the singer.

Stacey Sievwright (pictured, right)is a good lead vocalist, her voice sweet and strong with a little hook of yearning in it. ‘Soft Insides’ shows this off to great effect, where the terribly sad line ‘You hold someone/they don’t hold you back’ gets me every time I hear it. She’s tugging at the heartstrings without histrionics, and her willingness to just let her voice carry the song without too much in the way of histrionics or affectation (or overly-accentuated, more-Scottish-than-thou vocals which just end up making ever band north of the border sound like Roddy Woomble)

The songs are good, too-Current single ‘Fire’ has the great yearning, catchy hook- ‘Thoughts of you/Keep Me Warm’ sung over and over like a mantra, like someone clinging to hope.

And there is an optimism running through them- on ‘Everyone I know’ you they start out sounding a bit doomier, all chiming guitars and thudding new wave drums, Sievwright’s lyrics talking about ‘Blue Eyes Turning Black’ and ‘I don’t have the heart for this.’

By about a minute and a half in, she’s singing ‘you’ll be ok’ over and over again.

That seems to be the key to her as a songwriter, and to this band as a whole. Their songs tell you that life is a grind, a hard, hard slog, and whilst things may be fragile, they know you have to cling on to that determination to keep things together, to keep forcing on. That’s sweet, and it’s powerful, and long may their struggle continue.

Here’s a Sparrow:

Here’s a Workshop:

Two very disparate things, you might think. I would think so, too, but apparently if you combine the two of them you get a sound like a sort of Country and Western desperation. Or so this Glasgow-based three-piece think, anyway. I’m not going to whinge about terrible band names, as this one isn’t all that bad, really, and anyway, everyone knows that the worst band name in the world is ‘The Beatles,’ so it doesn’t really matter, does it?

What do this lot sound like, then?

Well, here’s their Myspace.See what you think.

Oh, you actually want ME to tell YOU, do you? Lazy bastards. Well, if I must. Just don’t go disagreeing with me afterwards.

They sound like a Scottish Howling Bells, mainly- countrified, spaghetti-western guitar, raggedy drums and a sneering, crooning female singer whose lyrics speak of relationships which were more like battlegrounds, where both sides dished out plenty. The protagonist of the songs is no wilting victim- on one song she sings about wanting to break her man down and build him up again exactly the way she wants him. On ‘Gun’ she crows ‘Now you’re safe in jail/and I’m set free to sail’ but it’s not a ‘you can’t touch me any more’ vibe you get, it’s more a kind of ‘I set you up for the fall and now you’re doing time for the crime committed together’ sort of affair. What I’m saying is, don’t mess.

They’re not bad at all- a little derivative of the aforementioned Howling Bells, but that’s no bad thing. They sound like they’d be pretty good live, too. By the look of the gig list on their Myspace, pretty much all of Europe is going to get the opportunity to decide if I’m right. Not that all of Europe, or indeed any of it cares about my opinion, but you get the point, I hope.

Oh, and apparently they managed to convince Tom Robinson to say the word ‘manboob’ on National radio, which has got to be good for something, doesn’t it?

This is about a musician. A pop musician, albeit a rather strange one His name is John O, and he looks like a pipe-cleaner model of Billy Corgan caught fooling around in Grace Jones’ make-up cabinet. He’s also written the best pop song you’ll hear all year.

I’ve had this man’s song ‘Wait and See’ in my head for days. My immediate reaction to hearing it is to click ‘play’ again. Now it’s your turn. This is brilliant, slightly old-school alt-pop which recalls all kinds of old songs, but which manages to transcend its influences, rather than be weighed down by them. Musically, this song’s got a lot of the Smashing Pumpkins’ ’1979′ in its DNA, and John O even cheekily puts in a line about hanging out ‘with the freaks and ghouls.’ Somehow, he can get away with it.

This song is just amazing. It really is. this man’s music and his lyrics are so good, so direct, they just utterly blow me away. Seriously, check this out:

‘falling into something different/how should I know/whether I should
trust my instincts/ further than I can throw?’

In other words, his life’s confusing as hell, he doesn’t know what he feels, and he’s wise enough to know that he doesn’t have a clue about what’s coming next. Now that is so wonderfully observed, catching the dilemma of adolescence and the sense that you’re catapaulting into a future where you may well be an entirely different person before you even know it, and that all sorts of things which are really important to you are going to be lost along the way. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone, but he knows he will. This song is a warning to a lover, telling them to get away from him whilst they can, to carry on with their life; ‘for your heart’s sake/don’t you wait around for me to decide what I want to grow up to be/I’ll just let you down.’ It’s so tortured, twisted and human that I just want to hug him and thank him for reminding me that everyone feels like this.

Plus it’s got an absolutely kick-ass video, so ridiculous that it’s deeply deeply cool. John O strides out of his house past some Pumpkins (LOOK, I GET IT, OK! JEEZ! YOU LIKE THE SMASHING PUMPKINS!) wearing a halloween mask, and then strides through a Leafy Canadian suburb with a bunch of goths behind him, doing a wonky, awkward dance that reminds me of the kind of thing my sister and her friends used to make up when they were seven. The best thing about this is that it’s delivered stoney-faced, as if they’re doing Swan Lake at the Sydney Opera House. I particularly like the hostile expressions on the faces of the two on the right. Of course, as it goes on, you see them start to smirk. It’s awkward, strange, clumsy and utterly brilliant. In other words, he’s captured exactly what it feels like to be an adolescent.

I don’t really rate most of the other songs on his Myspace, and I don’t know if he’ll develop into anything, but I really don’t care. I’m in love with this one song. It’s the best piece of pop I’ve heard in a very long time, and pop is about crystallised, perfect moments that life forever. Diamond Rings, for this one moment in time, I salute you.

I like the 80s. They were an interesting time for music. Innovative and creative bands were forging ahead in a post-punk landscape, ripping up the rule book and starting again (thanks, Edwyn Collins!), and creating bold and strange new music in the bleak wastelands of Thatcher’s Britain, and for that matter Reagan’s America.

Sure, the charts were full of shit like A-ha, Duran Duran, Huey Lewis and the News and Simply Red, but my god, there was gold on the fringes.

The ’80s were when The Smiths, PIL, Jah Wobble, Husker Du, the Pixies, Soft Cell, Cabaret Voltaire, Gang of Four, REM, U2, the Cocteau Twins, the Cure, Talk Talk, Throwing Muses, Billy Bragg, Wire, Echo and the Bunnymen, and a million other weird and wonderful bands made their most interesting records, or indeed all their records, during that time.

A lot of it was wildly uncommercial, but that was a good thing. No-one (apart from U2!) was trying to be liked by millions. Instead, they were trying to be loved by hundreds. I’m not sure which is harder, myself.

Whilst the limited ambition of 80s Indie would eventually prove to be self-defeating, it did mean that a lot of things were entirely new, and entirely unique.

That’s what makes it a little strange when someone does the same things again, as Manchester artist Lonelady seems to do.

She’s a one-woman show, and her entire aim in life seems to be to synthesise every single thing which happened in the ’80s into one whole- there’s angular early REM/Gang of Four textures on ‘Intuition,’ and ‘Early the Haste Comes’ whilst Joy Division drum-machine beats underpin. then, in the chorus you get that chiming sound that Echo And The Bunnymen used ‘Seven Seas.’

I could go on- it sounds like you’re listening to the aural equivalent of a Jigsaw Puzzle, playing Spot The Influence. My favourite so far is that high-pitched synthesiser percussion noise Prince used in ‘Sign of the Times’ on ‘Nerve Up,’ but I keep spotting more things each time.

I’m not a huge fan of her delivery, either- she has quite a good voice, but she’s fallen into that ’80s trap (of course!) of making her voice quaver and shiver in an attempt to portray emotion, as opposed to actually just singing and letting it be heard for itself.

My favourite song of hers so far is ‘Immaterial’ which sounds to my mind just like Throwing Muses, all off-beat guitar arpeggios and strange Kristin Hersch-esque vocal loops:

That’s all well and good, but it just makes me want to dig out my copy of ‘House Tornado’ or Kristin Hersch’s ‘Strange Angels,’ if I’m honest.

To be fair to her, I’m also a fan of ‘Marble,’ which manages to get away from these influences a little, the icy synths and interesting angular guitar shining over an echoing drum-machine beat, but somehow a little less familiar sounding. She also seems less afraid to actually hold a note, too. The whole thing still sounds a little like a demo, however.

She’s about to go on tour with a live band, so maybe she’ll find her music evolving into something interesting, but for now she’s got a lot more work to do to become more than the sum of her influences. The first thing to do, if I was to offer a word of advice, would be to be a little less faithful to them.

Charity records are, by and large, arse. They’re written in a hurry, and are full of over-wrought musical clichés and tortuous, more-virtuous-than-though lyrics which are designed to try and wring out the maximum amount of cash for whatever worthy concern it is.

The other problem, of course, is the ridiculous circling of egos that you get on records like this, with each star performer trying to out-do the other. Witness this rather embarrassing argument between the Darkness and Bono on the re-recording of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ two years ago. I’m a big U2 fan, much to my own puzzlement sometimes, but that really leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.

The music is often terrible, too; a blanded-out, hastily-produced piece of anonymous pop dreck is usually your lot when a charity single is crafted. Here’s a recent example; We Are the World, an already dull track, stripped of all soul and grace by the inevitable sickening celebrity-fest for Haiti.

Of course, I’m not suggesting for a second that the cause involved is anything other than wholly worthy. As if you didn’t need reminding of how terrible the whole situation is, here’s a very moving article from Arcade Fire’s Régine Chassagne, who has family connections to Haiti.

So we should all give money, and help out in any way we can.

That caveat aside, here’s that actual rarity- a charity record that manages to be fantastic! Shane Magowan, Nick Cave, Bobby Gillespie Chrissy Hynde and others do a storming version of ‘I put a Spell on You’ which is both visceral and moving. It’s great, really primal stuff. Oh, and that’s Jonny Depp playing guitar at the end. He’s pretty good.

The whole thing is in aid of Concern, a Charity who are currently active in Haiti. You should listen to this song. And then go give them some money.