Music Banter

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.

This article has three openings. Choose which one you like, according to taste, then read the rest.

Opening 1:

Poor Courtney Love. She’s a tragic footnote in the story of one of music’s cultural icons, the late lamented lionised Kurt Cobain. She’s a woman in a man’s world whose junkie husband ran out on her in the worst possible way, and whose life has been a struggle ever since. People like Michael Stipe and Billy Corgan reached out to her to try and keep her together with varying success as she struggled to remain true to her artistic muse in the face of the most difficult set of circumstances any female rock musician has ever faced. Still, the very fact that she’s still on this planet is a testament to her tenacity, the power of the human spirit. She’s flawed, sure, but she’s beaten the odds to even be here. This album happened against all the odds. For that she is to be commended.

Opening two;
My god, what a bitch Courtney Love is. A fucking obnoxious monster who destroys everything she touches, ruined her husband’s life and causes chaos in her wake. She’s a disaster area, a piece of human wreckage who squats on her wonderful husband’s legacy like a shit stain on the Mona Lisa. She’s an embarrassment, a modern day Nancy Spungeon who is wedded to her own pathetic drama, and her life is a cautionary tale for musicians, celebrities, and women anywhere. Her life is a mess, and thank goodness her daughter has finally been taken into care. The only surprising thing about her is that she isn’t dead right now.

Article Opening 3;
Courtney Love was actually a musician, once. the frontwoman of Hole, she was a captivating, mesmerising stage presence, a tattered angel in a torn baby-doll dress, spitting venom and sparing no-one, not even herself in the bravest act of truth-telling to come along onstage for a long, long time. She’s the woman who wrote ‘Doll Parts,’ ‘Celebrity Skin,’ ‘Miss World,’ and ‘Jennifer’s Body,’ which still sound as awesome as they ever did. She was a musician worthy of being discussed in the same sentence as PJ Harvey, Bjork, or Patti Smith, and she has been an inspiration to a series of female performers ever since.

Pick up reading here
And now she has a new album out. Of course, it’ll be judged not just on the music, but upon which version of Courtney Love you believe in.

Let’s be honest, none of us actually know her. We know what we see, and what we read, in the press. This isn’t going to be a rant about the media, it’s merely an old philosophy student’s acknowledgement on the limits of knowledge. I don’t know what Courtney Love is really like. You don’t either. We project our picture of her across her music in a way that we do with everyone. Everyone who makes public statements is doing so with one agenda or another. She can come across as a bitch. Fair enough. I don’t pretend to know that for certain.

But what does it sound like?

It sounds like Hole. Maybe the drumming isn’t as good as Patty Schemel’s was back in the day, and Eric Erlandson isn’t on board, but let’s be fair- this band is defined by Courtney Love. It always was. There’s a bunch of other musicians on this album, but there’s no doubt whose vision is being carried out here.

And, well, it’s not bad. It’s a bit slick in places, closer to ‘Celebrity Skin’ than ‘Live Through This’ or ‘Pretty on the Inside’ in its sound, but she’s still got it. Her voice is still the powerful instrument it always was. Listen to ‘Loser Dust’- she’s yelling like she always did, shredding her throat in that way you get from no other singer since…. some guy in some Grunge Band.

Lyrically, the same themes are here- the girls who let themselves be used, the superficial lure of glamour and excess, and just how desperate those moments when you wake up alone can be. ‘so you’re lying in your underwear/in someone else’s bed/and the silence is so dangerous..so I have another cigarette/ and I try to forget’ is the same story as ‘When I wake up in my Make-up/it’s too early for an address,’ still being told.

‘Samantha,’ with her refrain of ‘people like you fuck people like me’ is another girl caught up in destructive behaviour, pitied and reviled in equal measure.

You know she’s talking about herself. You also know that the biting contempt in her voice is directed inward more harshly than anyone else ever could.
She also still rocks pretty hard: Skinny Little Bitch is one of a couple of songs on the album which seem designed to make a bunch of young folk jump up and down and bang into each other. It seems to be working, too, if this live video is anything to go buy;

She isn’t always successful; on Letter to God, she asks how on earth she got to where she is:
‘I never wanted to be the person you see… I always wanted to die but you kept me alive/can you tell me who I am?…I never wanted to be/some kind of comic relief’ It’s groaning under the weight of The Myth of Courtney Love. She’s sick of it. She wants to escape it. But here’s the rub- she seems in love with the attention it gives her. Plus it doesn’t have much of a tune.

Long Ride Home, the last song on the album, is just her and a guitar. I may be nuts but it sounds like Bob Dylan, I swear it. And strangely, the comparison’s apt- the two are both so completely in thrall to their own mythology that no sound they make, no word they speak is judged in and of itself. Dylan, you could argue, is more in control of that, but Courtney isn’t going down without a fight.

‘It’s a long ride home and my head is bowed/and you’re no comfort to me now/and it’s fully loaded/and it’s set on stun/at least I know that I have won/and my wig’s on crooked/and I got no shoes…I don’t care what it takes my friend/I will never go hungry again.’

This is the song that seems to be most directly about her. She knows how fucked she is, and she knows it’s a long way back up from where she’s been. It’s a fitting final statement of who she is, and where she is. Maybe she’s a little wedded to her own mythology, but this is her story, it’s who she is. She can’t let it go, she doesn’t dare. It’s all fucked up, but she’ll find a way to go on.

I like Tunng. It’s a really good word. It sounds good to say, like ‘tongue,’ but somehow more visceral- you savour the sound as it comes out of your mouth. I may just sound nuts but I do genuinely like language that much. t’s fun. It feels good to make those sounds.

Much like this band. I saw them about a year ago when they were touring with the wonderful Tinariwen as part of some grand and worthy cultural experiment about combination of cultures, which was actually about having a grand good time. It was one of the most genuinely diverse line-ups I’ve ever seen. There was usually about six people on stage at a time, with Tuareg instruments, electronic beats, pottery drums, guitars and banjos were all mashed up together in a wonderful, riotous mess. I guess they’re folktronica. The thing is, out of all the bands I’ve heard called that, Tunng are the one who seem to have understand that if you’re going to use all these other instruments, you’ve got to give them heart. I think they’re fairly unique in this, though I would also say bands like Found, Lemon Jelly, The Acorn and perhaps at times the Guillemots are wandering through the same musical landscape.

And so to the album- it’s called ‘And Then We Saw Land’ and it’s their fourth. It’s probably a progression from their early works, realising the potential they displayed. Yeah, all of that most likely. I don’t actually know, to be honest, I’ve only heard this album. Most people writing reviews probably won’t admit that. That either makes me refreshing or unprofessional, take your pick, maggots.

but my goodness, this is a beautiful assortment of songs which lodge in the brain, in very different ways. Opener ‘Hustle’ fades up with a strange, pulsating synth sound which gives way to a jaunty acoustic guitar figure and a song which seems to be about someone being gone, but that not being such a bad thing after all- ‘And I will Hustle, Hustle, Hustle to be free,’ singer Sam Genders intones, joy in his voice. Things have been bad, but they ain’t going to get him down.

And so it is throughout the album. There’s undercurrents of melancholy here and there, sad little recollections of regrets and missed turnings (I think that this album may have been written during a break-up, but not a particularly bad one) which are there, but are somewhat overshadowed by the sheer joy of life, and of finding out what’s next.

Standout tracks for me are ‘Sushimi,’ a big, epic chant-along with fantastic drums on it, ‘The Roadside,’ which a naggingly catchy hymn to movement and progression, and ‘don’t look down or back’ which sounds like the feeling of waking up on a summer morning., and talks about a girl waking up alone and coming to terms with it.

Yes, this is a complex beating heart under that cheerful exterior. Tunng have cried and felt so sad, but they never forgot how to dance.

I LOVE Post-Rock. I LOVE Godspeed You Black Emperor! I love Cellos, I love apocalyptic violins and drums and guitars which sound like they’re being recorded in a Cathedral. I love the noise, I love the slow build-up of tension in a fifteen-minute feedback epic, I love the absurd, over-the-top drama, passion and sheer excitement of this music.

All this in mind, you might be forgiven for thinking that I’m not exactlygoing to be entirely objective when reviewing this latest piece of music- A Silver Mount Zion’s ‘Kollaps Tradixionales.’

Oh, but you’re wrong. I’m cold and objective. Like ice. I clinically examine all the music I listen to and dissect it with an objectivity which is both breathtaking and chilling in its coldness.

Oh, hang on, no, that’s a lie, isn’t it?

I had all kinds of excitable emotions when putting this album on. It was going to rock my world, it was going to transport me, I was going to hear the future of music, it was going to be brilliant.

And it was… ok.

It’s a Silver Mount Zion doing what they do- orchestral stuff, mournful dirges played out on the violin to a backdrop of distorted, angry guitar whilst drums clatter and rumble in the background. And it’s what they’ve done before.

There is a little progression- the songs are a little more riff-like than in the past at times. This is most notable on the second track, ‘I built myself a Metal Bird,’ which sounds a lot like Sonic Youth’s ‘Tunic’ would have if they’d had a string quartet in tow. That’s a pretty cool thing to sound like, by the way. I don’t want to sound like I don’t like this record, as I can already feel it growing on me on the third listen. There’s something refreshingly primal about their sound- the way it seems to have been conceived with no real thought about how things are supposed to work.

So what’s my problem?

There’s a lot of answers to that, but I suspect it boils down to two things. First, familiarity. Much like the aforementioned Sonic Youth, there’s a point at which a music which sounds unique and spectacular starts to get a bit, well, samey. We’ve heard this whole end-of-the-world-music-with-strings thing before, and it’s no longer a gimmick. Can its charm survive if it was simply the norm, as conservative and expected as guitar bass drums and vocals? After all, if Post-rock is to be what its title implies, that’s what’ll happen. Certainly, there’s a lot of bands out there happy to do this- to take the musical blueprint that Efrim Menuck and his various cohorts have laid down. Listen to Gifts from Enola, the Evtaporia report, Explosions in the Sky, Lipsync for a Lullaby and a thousand other bands and you’ll see what I mean. With those bands it feels ok- they’ve got their own take on things, and somehow for lesser lights your expectations aren’t as grand. They’re meant to look like reflections of the originators, as that’s what they are.

For these lot, though, the bar’s a little higher. They came up with this shit. They began it. They epitomize it. You don’t listen to them to be reminded of a band who blew your mind, you want it blown in other ways.

Another minor gripe is Ephraim’s voice, too- it’s kind of a three-way cross between Húsker Du’s Grant Hart, Win Butler from Arcade Fire, and that shouty guy out of Modest Mouse. Not exactly melodic. It’s over this record more than the others, and for me it actually kind of spoils the opening 15-minute epic, ‘There is a Light.’ It’s a shame, because I find myself wondering about the possibilities of this music. I imagine how this band would sound with a vocalist like Thom Yorke, Wayne Coyne, or even a darker, deeper voice like Nick Cave. Actually, if he teamed up with Warren Ellis’ Dirty Three, that’d be amazing, but I digress.

The point is that on this record, they seem to have fallen into that all-too-familiar trap which means that independent and ‘alternative’ (whatever the hell that debased term means any more) means singing out of tune, being deliberately abrasive. It’s a shame, because to my mind that one musical decision takes the gloss off something which could otherwise have been absolutely transcendent.

So, a good album, but not a great one. And perhaps one whose flaws signpost the way forward.

Here’s the first album I was really waiting for in 2010- Midlake’s ‘The Courage of Others.’

I fell in love with Midlake a year or two back when I heard ‘Roscoe’ on Mark Radcliffe’s show- it’s a wonderful piece of folk-rock, exhibiting both grace and charm, and an unexpected, meandering way with melody that kind of takes you by surprise and sweeps you off your feet. The album it came from, ‘The Trial of Van Occupanther’ was like that all the way through, and contained all sorts of wonderful lyrics about how good it would be to live in 1891, or to lose all you had and start again. There was a quiet, whispering pastoral spirit at work in the songs, and it spoke of a desire to retreat from the modern world of ‘hundreds of chemicals’ to the hilltops and the village, which ‘used to be all one really needs.’ It’s exactly the sort of thing I love, and it’s one of my favourite albums of the last few years.

The pre-publicity around this album was that they were referencing british folk-rock bands of the ’70s like Fairport Convention. Span and Pentangle, and I fucking love those bands. Give me a Cardigan, a violin reel and a lyric lifted from a fifteenth-century madrigal about elves and I am there, dude. I was kind of salivating about this one.

And on first listen, does it live up to my expectations? Well, kind of.

It’s sweet, sweeping, big, and is stretching out, trying to find that epic sense of space that the best albums have, and the influence of those referenced bands is certainly there. In ‘Winter Dies,’ for instance, there is a long instrumental section where you can hear the band stretch out, and they’ve clearly decided to show us what they can do as musicians.

The next song, ‘Small Mountain,’ calls forth images of Led Zeppelin’s more floral moments with its arpegiatted guitar and flute intro, and is charming and mellow. When the song kicks in, however, it doesn’t quite hold your impact. This pattern is repeated a lot throughout the album- a charming introduction gives way to a slightly underwhelming song. There are some exceptions- ‘Core of Nature’ is a highlight for me, so far, with it’s talk of a retreat into ‘woods which I walk through alone’ it harks back to the themes and musical ideas of previous album. It’s songs like this one which show that perhaps their next album will be a better version of this idea- if I’m being optimistic about this record, I would say that perhaps they are reaching for something which
they fell short of this time, but will maybe be able to reach next time.

There are plenty of reasons to be optimistic ‘Rulers, Ruling All Things’ is fantastic, just slightly missing the mark but still lovely in its glitter Tim Smith’s refrain of ‘I only want to be left to my own ways’ set above a huge, echoing cavern of flute music and twinkling sounds. It’s nice, but- you just wish the melody was a little stronger.

That’s the story of the album. Somehow, there isn’t quite the same immediacy in this collection of songs that ‘Van Occupanther’ had- the songs aren’t quite as strong (you feel that a lot of them started off as jams, rather than musical ideas the singer brought to the band) and just a little too often they tend to favour atmosphere over impact. It’s pleasant enough, but it feels just a little less focussed than the last record.

I can see this will be brilliant when summer rolls round- I’ll sit out under a tree with my mp3 player and listen to this with a book and perhaps a bottle of real ale, and I will glory in my folkishness. I’ll also have probably backed off my original high expectations and would write an entirely different review of this album. For now, though, I think I’ll view this as a qualified success, and something of a missed opportunity. For all my criticisms, it’s still my favourite new album of the year so far.