Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Oh The Times They Doth Change Too Much

Bob Dylan's 'Modern Times'

That title is loaded with mischievous irony. 'Modern Times', like 'Love and Theft' before it, is very self-consciously unconcerned with the contemporary musical landscape. With its 30s and 40s swing croons and rockabilly stompers, it's a deliciously entertaining refashioning of great American musical traditions. Given its coupling of wry, frequently very funny blues pieces with hauntingly evocative major songs, it's easy to see why Columbia Records are presenting it as the conclusion of a great trilogy that began in 1997 with 'Time Out Of Mind'. To understand latter-day Dylan, however, it's necessary to go back a bit further. After the creative low of 'Under The Red Sky' in 1990, Dylan was crippled by writers' block, and retreated into a songbook of folk and blues standards with two excellent albums of reinterpretations, 1992's 'Good As I Been To You' and 'World Gone Wrong' the following year. It is this exuming of his earliest inspirations that seems to have inspired pretty much everything he has recorded since, from 'Time Out Of Mind' and its spidery intimations of mortality, to Love And Theft's gleeful ransacking of the past. Though he was much lambasted for those albums at the time, seen from the vantage point of hindsight, they make perfect sense. It's therefore also not hard to appreciate why the unconverted will probably remain nonplussed by an album like 'Modern Times', not least because of the profound tedium of much of the huge volume of writing about Dylan these days. His most anticipated album since Blood On The Tracks, another masterpiece, yadda, yadda, yawn, yawn....Many of the reviews seem so preoccupied with the mythical influence of Dylan himself that they've failed to engage much with the album.

The bulk of 'Modern Times' is entirely amiable and unassuming, mostly 12 bar blues compositions played with unforced clarity and enthusiasm by his regular touring band. The crisp guitars of Stu Kimball and Denny Freeman duel with the vigour and dynamism of Scotty Moore and Carl Perkins, whilst Tony Garnier's solid upright bass pulse and George Receli's expressive drumming, mostly with brushes, are superb throughout. At its worst, there's some bizarrely cheesy cabaret-style crooning on 'Beyond The Horizon', which would be a lightweight song from a much lesser artist. At the better end, there's the gently rollicking opener 'Thunder On The Mountain', one of many songs featuring Dylan's excellent piano playing (considerably more nuanced and subtle than it was in the days of 'New Morning') and the massively entertaining 'Someday Baby'. Here, the words roll and tumble from Dylan's cracked voice with controlled relish.

There are some endearing rewrites of old standards. Indeed, the bulk of 'Modern Times' is a collection of references to a variety of source material, and it becomes easy to see why the archivist Dylan is now presenting an old time radio show, perhaps exactly the sort of programme Matt Ward was lamenting the loss of on his 'Transistor Radio' album from last year. 'Rollin' and Tumblin' doesn't veer too far away from its Muddy Waters template, and 'The Levee's Gonna Break' will be recognisable to anyone familiar with Memphis Minnie or Led Zeppelin. Even the much more substantial 'Nettie Moore' is in fact directly inspired by a nineteenth century American folk song of the same name. He even references Nina Simone in a particularly sly verse during 'Spirit On The Water': 'They brag about your sugar/Brag about it all over town/Put some sugar in my bowl/I feel like layin' down'.

Lyrically, he seems to be deploying similar deliriously funny wordplay to that used on the best parts of 'Love and Theft'. There are some superb moments, right from the outset. The opening verse of 'Thunder In The Mountain' proclaims 'Today's the day, gonna grab my trombone and blow/Well there's hot stuff here and it's everywhere I go'. Elsewhere, the song features some of his most inventive rhyming couplets - 'I've been sittin' studying the art of love/I think it will fit me like a glove' or, even better, 'Gonna recruit me an army, some real tough sons of bitches/I'll recruit my army from the orphanages/I been to St. Herman's Church, said my religious vows/ I've sucked the milk from a thouuuuussssand cowwwwwws!'. There are again delicious references to the twilight years ('you think I'm over the hill/You think I'm past my prime/Let me see what you got/We can have a whoppin' good time'), reflective ruminations on regret ('I laugh and I cry, and I'm haunted by/Things I never meant or wished to say') or some blackly funny confessions ('some young lazy slut has charmed away my brains!' or, much better, 'I want to be with you in Paradise/And it seems so unfair/I can't go back to paradise no more/...I killed a man back there!').

Amidst all of this riotous worplay, many claim that there it's not possible to detect much of the preoccupation with mortality and weariness that characterised 'Time Out Of Mind'. This isn't quite true. 'When The Deal Goes Down' comes with a lot of waltz, more than a hint of schmaltz, and some slightly clunky lyrics that echo 'Every Grain Of Sand' in their references to Biblical texts and psalms. Somehow, despite all this, it's quietly moving, perhaps because of the inference that 'the deal' in question is dying and the repeated refrain of 'I'll be with you when the deal goes down' is the ultimate pledge. There's also a sense of finality pervading in two of the album's best tracks, the love lament 'Nettie Moore' where 'the world has gone black before my eyes' and the epic finale 'Ain't Talkin', with its series of barren, apocalyptic landscapes.

It is these tracks, plus one other ('Workingman's Blues #2') that will ultimately secure this album's reputation within the Dylan canon (and certainly not the inspid 'Beyond The Horizon', where even the most avid Dylan fan may have to reach for the skip button). 'Ain't Talkin' is a close relation of 'Highlands', the 17 minute closer of 'Time Out Of Mind', although at just nine verses and almost the same number of minutes, it's a good deal more concise. Its tormented, existential journey is composed brilliantly (even though the central image of the 'mystic garden' is perhaps a bit icky), particularly as it gathers intensity towards the end ('the sufferin' is unending, Every nook and cranny has its tears/I'm not playing, I'm not pretending/I'm not nursin' any superfluous fears'). It's also musically fasninating, with eerie guitar arpeggios set against multi-instrumentalist Donnie Herron's mournful violin. 'Nettie Moore' is a song in the grand folk tradition, brilliantly arranged, with neat contrast between crisply phrased vocals in the verse, and a more langorous, explicitly romantic chorus.

'Workingman's Blues #2', with both title and theme cribbed from Merle Haggard, is a thornier song. It will certainly be claimed by those still besotted with protest-era Dylan as a conscious return to leftist roots, not least because of some vaguely Marxist lyrics ('the buying power of the proletariat's gone down/money's gettin' shallow and weak' or 'they say low wage is our reality, if we want to compete abroad'). I suspect, particularly given Dylan's long standing reluctance to espouse any specific particular political creed, that the concerns here are more personal than political, especially when the lyric is taken as a whole. Either way, it's one of the most brilliantly sustained lyrics in the latterday Dylan catalogue, with a lingering melody and some stately, elegant playing from the band (again including Dylan's surprisingly intricate piano). It has some truly majestic lines, and my favourite verse on the whole album: 'My cruel weapons have been put on the shelf/Come sit down on my knee/You are dearer to me than myself/As you yourself can see/While I'm listening to the steel rails-a-hum/Got both eyes tight shut/Just sitting here trying to keep the hunger from/Creeping its way inside my gut'). As ever, the delivery of this brilliantly manipulated language enhances its impact. Many fans will note that this is the first time Dylan has deployed the dreaded 'upsinging' device on a studio album. Whilst it has long been the achilles heel of his live shows, here it is deployed with sensitivity and conscious control - the little flick up at the end of some of the lines adding emphasis.

'Modern Times' perhaps suffers a little from predictability, given how well it sits with its immediate predecessors. As Michael Gray has observed in his excellent 'Song and Dance Man' book, it's actually very rare that Dylan offers anything as audience-pleasing or as straightforward as a sequel or follow-up. There's very little evidence that Dylan has kept up with any contemporary trends, as his ranting interview with Rolling Stone magazine's Jonathan Lethem more than suggested (Dylan was fiery in his denunciation of modern production techniques and claimed there had been no decent records made in the last 20 years). Perhaps that's why the strange Alicia Keys lyric stands out so much on 'Thunder On The Mountain' - 'I was thinking about Alicia Keys, couldn't keep from crying/When she was born in Hell's Kitchen, I was living down the line/I was wondering where in the world Alicia Keys could be/I looked for her even clear through Tennessee'. It's brilliantly unexpected. For the most part though, 'Modern Times' presents Dylan as more plunderer than pioneer, but it's no less enthralling for that. It's worth remembering that this is a writer who has always bent source material to his own wildly inventive purposes, and in reconnecting with the American songbook, he has ironically made himself relevant again. In his wilderness days in the 80s, Dylan seemed very conscious of the need to update and modernise, hence perhaps the deployment of Arthur Baker to produce 'Empire Burlesque' or the use of Sly and Robbie as rhythm section on 'Infidels'. Now, abandoning such surface concerns, he has recovered his very core, becoming in essence a travelling minstrel singer - full of wit and wisdom, but gradually shedding the star's mystique.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

The Art Of Songwriting

I'm becoming very bored with the current focus on singer-songwriters, and the rather lazy clustering of musicians with completely different styles, intentions and of wildly varying quality. Can there really be any benefit in comparing King Creosote with Paolo Nutini? Frankly, James Blunt, the aforementioned Nutini, KT Tunstall, James Morrison and the rest can all piss off. Still, I'm going to do something a bit similar myself, because when auteurs do produce something interesting that goes somewhat against the grain, it's worth taking note.

Whatever your position on Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, it's not difficult to accept Will Oldham as one of modern music's true originals. It's not so much that his music breaks radical new boundaries - in fact, these days, he seems quite comfortable to operate in increasingly traditional idioms. It's more that his whole landscape, particularly his use of language, is completely singular. Any Will Oldham song immediately has his own unique stamp on it - however old and familiar the chords may be, nobody else could have written it. Nobody else would have written those dark but hypnotic words, or phrased the lines quite so adventurously. This is why the likes of 'Riding' and 'I See A Darkness' strike me as some of the major songs of our time, and however few records Oldham sells during his lifetime - he has created timeless music, the influence of which will likely be felt for many years to come.

Not content with having released one excellent album already this year (the underrated covers collaboration with Tortoise), Oldham is back with the latest instalment in his BPB guise. If it seems underwhelming on first listen, it's because it's his most consistent album so far - at least in tone and mood. The prevailing atmosphere is languid, mournful and lyrical. It's not an easy album - its songs demand complete and total attention throughout its longer-than-usual duration. Given patience though, it reveals an enveloping and carefully constructed mood.

'The Letting Go' is most impressive in the way it presents some subtle developments in Oldham's approach. It's perhaps easier for songwriters to fall into a stale rut than it is for bands - there's less creative input in terms of numbers, and once a writer has developed a style it's tempting to stick with it. If anything, Oldham has suffered from the reverse problem in recent years - making a series of rather stubborn and contrary records that presented him as a somewhat obtuse and confusing character. Both the stark 'Master and Everyone' and the chintzy Nashville reinterpretations of his earlier work on 'Greatest Palace Music' yielded some fascinating moments - but neither satisfied across the length of an entire disc. 'The Letting Go' changes all that. It achieves this by merging the delicate acoustic plucking of 'Master and Everyone' with his lushest arrangements to date. From the opening bars of 'Love Comes To Me', with its string flourishes and graceful electric guitar runs, it's clear we're in new territory. The sound in sensuous and romantic in the broadest senses of both words, but without losing the grimly morose and blackly humorous weltanschaung that has long been Oldham's trademark. Decamping to Iceland to record with a string group seems to have invigorated Oldham, just as collaborating with Matt Sweeney inspired him anew on last year's 'Superwolf'.

The dynamics are carefully regulated throughout and, as a result, the ensemble (this somehow seems a more appropriate word than 'band' to describe this operation) can reap magic from very subtle moments. The opening tracks are kept rolling gently by minimal, heartbeat percussion, and the gradual, swelling crescendo on 'Strange Form Of Life' works marvellously. Other unexpected elements include the use of drum programming on the superb 'Lay and Love' , soem military style drumming on 'No Bad News' and a close connection with the blues on the outstanding single 'Cursed Sleep' and on the brooding, apocalyptic 'Seedling'. 'Cold and Wet' even achieves something akin to the swing-era stylings Dylan resurrected on 'Love and Theft' (and reportedly returns to on a couple of songs on 'Modern Times').

For all the intricate arranging, the real star of the show here is actually singer Dawn McCarthy, whose presence is striking throughout the whole album. Oldham is by no means the easiest singer to harmonise with, as his vulnerable and slippery voice often drifts away from defined melodies. Still, McCarthy has achieved something close to the Emmylou's grace against Dylan's grit on 'Desire'. The combination is sublime and adds yet another new string to Oldham's bow.

Oldham has achieved a more direct simplicity with many of his lyrics here, although his poetic language still owes more to John Donne or Walt Whitman than any contemporary songwriter. His unpicks the erotic life with unflinching relish. On 'Cursed Sleep' he sings of 'trembling electric' in his lover's arms, and being 'so enslaved by her sweet wonder'. On 'Lay and Love', there's a magnificent verse capturing the dangerous contradictory impulses of attraction: 'From what I know, you're terrified/You have mistrust running through you/Your smile is hiding something hurtful/It makes me lay here and love you'. There's a perfectly encapsulated longing on 'Strange Form Of Life' with 'the softest lips ever/25 years of waiting to kiss them'. Most of these songs look back to a traditional folk structure, mostly bereft of choruses, and with repeated lyrical devices at the end of each verse. It's refreshing to hear such brilliantly sustained lyrical ideas running through each song.

It's particularly impressive that Oldham is still looking to forge new songwriting paths well into a long and established career. Whilst there is nothing here that goes against the grain of what we might reasonably expect a Bonnie 'Prince' Billy record to sound like, the way in which that sound has been refined and improved here is striking. The well of inspiration has certainly not yet run dry and 'The Letting Go' is a quiet, stately masterpiece.

Equally impressive is the first proper full length from Cortney Tidwell, who made a huge impression with her debut mini album late last year. 'Don't Let Stars Keep Us Tangled Up' is deliciously expansive, with its rich, reverb-laden sound, at turns serene and spectacular. In her chameleonic vocal performances, Tidwell seems to have amalgamated the influence of a broad spectrum of female legends (Kate Bush, Liz Fraser and Bjork are her most obvious reference points). A harsh critic might suggest that, in a similar fashion to Beth Gibbons on her otherwise outstanding collaboration with Paul Webb aka Rustin Man, Tidwell occasionally comes too close to simply emulating particular vocal styles without necessarily finding her own voice. This is however particularly picky when everything about this album - vocal delivery, arrangements and particularly the sound, has been so carefully considered. Lambchop's William Tyler offers spacious, unconventional guitar and Kurt Wagner also provides guest vocals on the supremely relaxed, but compellingly strange 'Society'.

Tidwell always veers towards the unexpected. Opener 'Eyes Are At The Billions' opens in a sea of tranquility, but suddenly swells into something tremendously grand. Her vocal delivery is articulate and peculiarly theatrical, stretching and extending phrases beyond their natural rhythms. There are hints of country music conventions, such as the lush pedal steel guitar on 'Pictures On The Sidewalk', but the style of delivery rarely fits comfortably with such notions. The songs veer from sweetly melodic sections into passages of mysterious and enigmatic calm.

Her vocals are most impressive when layered over each other, such as on the languidly paced but nevertheless slightly discomforting 'I Do Not Notice', where numerous Tidwell's are pitted against each other in a delicately combative round. On the elegant, angelic 'La La', Tidwell provides an entire choir of harmony vocals to soften the corners of her lead delivery. The effect is simply sublime. The music is always hauntingly evocative, although it defies categorisation.

Closer to home, my former University and musical colleague Jeremy Warmsley releases his debut album 'The Art Of Fiction' through the much feted Transgressive label in October. Many of the tracks here have been released before (although often in different versions), but the whole album has been sequenced with meticulous care. Though it veers through an impressive array of styles, it has a smooth and almost uninterrupted flow that allows it to work as a complete whole, despite its musical schizophrenia. Jeremy clearly can't decide whether to be a bedroom auteur with some beats and a laptop, or to opt for the most ostentatious of live instrumentation, with strings, horns, acoustic piano and group vocal arrangements. Mercifully, it's a decision he doesn't have to make, as he's equally comfortable in both worlds, and has a good ear for manipulating sound. Given the genre conventions increasingly imposed by pigeonholing lifestyle-based publications, radio stations etc, it's refreshing to hear a songwriter with little respect for artificial boundaries. Jeremy has no qualms about merging the compositional rigour of Steve Reich with, say, the quirky pop genius of an Andy Partridge or Green Gartside. So, the opening 'Dirty Blue Jeans', with its relentlessly driving rhythm and with strings playing the parts normally expected from a guitar, contrasts neatly with the more electronic leanings of '5 Verses' or 'The Young Man Sees The City As A Chess Board', but all are clearly the product of the same questing spirit.

Strangely, Jeremy may be at his best when at his most whimsical. '5 Verses' is familiar now to anyone who has followed his work over the last couple of years, but its sweetly observed lyric capturing the complete arc of a relationship is clever, and it comes with the real benefit of an infectious melody, despite its rejection of the conventional verse-chorus-verse-chorus pop structure. Similarly, the wartime tragedy of 'I Promise', the point rammed home with military drumming, shows Jeremy's penchant for the kitchen sink epic (and there's nothing wrong with that).

There's real ambition on display here, both in the album's excellent first half and also in its slightly less coherent second section. Early single 'I Believe In The Way You Move' has been dramatically improved here, now sounding at once tender and grand, with its ornate arrangement. Even more striking is 'Jonathan and The Oak Tree', which lurches through a number of radically different sections, rather like a potted pop symphony. It's both confounding and compelling and one of the album's standout tracks. I'm not quite sure what the central point of 'Modern Children' is, but it's full of quirky sounds and carries one of the album's most infectious choruses. This is coupled with a verse where the vocal line emphasises rhythm over melody, possibly betraying the influence of a Bloc Party or a Gang Of Four. The juxtaposition is effective.

Elsewhere, there's an occasional tendency towards abstraction that doesn't always quite work ('A Matter Of Principle' and 'If I Had Only' are perhaps slightly meandering), and a slightly narcissistic bent to the lyrics that might limit the appeal of some of the songs, from the young man trying to make his way in the big old city (the only university graduate without debt too! How fortunate!) in 'Dirty Blue Jeans' to the character looking to be 'the face of a generation' in 'The Young Man Sees...'. There's a lot of relationship dissection, self-aware pronouncements and candid admissions of lust, but sometimes this seems more insular than it is universal. For all this, it's difficult to see whether the conclusion of the eerily beautiful 'I Knew Her Face Was A Lie' (one of a handful of tracks to benefit significantly from the virtuosic piano playing of improv master Tom Rogerson), whereby Jeremy proclaims he's happy to be 'in a single bed on my own', is genuine, mockingly ironic, or just plain unlikely. Perhaps '5 Verses' remains a standout for its deployment of the wryly detached third person vantage point. There is however a clear counter-argument to all this - it's refreshing that this is not yet another sentimental/sensitive troubadour.

Still, this is no major obstacle when there are such rich musical pickings here, and it's important not to overlook the fact that Jeremy is already achieving the results to match his vaunting ambitions. Given that this was originally a loose collection of songs for EPs and singles, it's impressive that it's all been drawn together so coherently, and it's testament to the strength of his songwriting vision and dab hand at production. It's also continually inspiring that music of this quality can now be made easily in the home.

Friday, August 18, 2006

What The World Needs Now Is....

...Love, sweet love? Well, it would certainly help - but does the world really need another 'best of' compilation from R.E.M.? In fairness, '...And I Feel Fine' does focus squarely on the group's IRS years (up to and including 1987's 'Document') and this early period in their history has so far only been served by the less than comprehensive 'best of REM' and its inferior predecessor 'Eponymous'. The main motive for this release does seem to be the acquisition of R.E.M.'s IRS catalogue by EMI, and with the band currently on hiatus pending the writing and recording of a new album, the timing seems convenient for the industry. Although the IRS albums themselves seem to have been endlessly repackaged and recycled, there hasn't actually been a decent compilation of this music for over ten years.

CD1 is all familiar material, including debut single 'Gardening At Night', which whilst relatively insubstantial, certainly provided signifiers of the relentless backbeat-meets-Byrdsian twang that the band would refine to near perfection on their first three albums. Unlike, its predecessor, its arranged out of chronological sequence, so the development in the band's sound (and Michael Stipe's concurrent growth in confidence as a singer) are lost in favour of a comfortable flow. Some notable omissions from earlier compilations are now welcome inclusions, notably the punchy, strident opener 'Begin The Begin' and some of the more mysterious and elusive moments from 'Fables Of The Reconstruction' ('Feeling Gravitys Pull' (sic) and 'Life And How To Live It', the latter being one of my current favourite REM songs).

Listening to this material in a fresh context, it's striking how fully formed the band were at a remarkably early stage. Listening to 'Radio Free Europe' and 'Sitting Still', it's striking how taut and metronomic the band are. Mike Mills' simple but effective counter melodic bass parts, combined with Peter Buck's predilection for neat arpeggios, differentiated them from the distorted sturm und drang of less interesting indie bands of the period. It's worth noting how they have always avoided tedious chugging rhythms with all band members essentially regurgitating the same stale ideas - today's crop of stadium straddling bands, particularly Coldplay, could do with taking note.

As the confidence grew, the approach to production got bigger and more ambitious. Listen to how the relentless pulse and thunderous drums of 'Finest Worksong' actually seem to emulate the sound of heavy industry. Where the message and political inspirations in the songs were initially shrouded in enigmatic allusions, both lyrics and music became more direct, with 'Cuyahoga' and 'Begin The Begin' two of the most inspirational moments from 1986's outstanding 'Life's Rich Pageant'.

Inevitably, the big selling point here will be the bonus disc, full of the usual outtakes, offcuts, live recordings, demos and scrapyard pickings. All four members of the band (including the now departed Bill Berry) get to pick a personal favourite that missed the cut for the first CD. Mike Mills' selection is 'Pilgrimage', a most welcome inclusion as one of their best early recordings, mixing an infectious chorus with an inventive and minimal verse. It also neatly demonstrates the band's talent for arranging vocal parts, with the voices of Stipe and Mills integrating effortlessly.

Other curios on the disc include the original version of 'Bad Day', which sounds even closer to 'It's The End Of the World As We Know It...' than the re-recorded version for the 'In Time' collection. There's also the early version of 'All The Right Friends', which the band also re-recorded for the soundtrack to Cameron Crowe's thoroughly ghastly and pretentious movie Vanilla Sky. The live recordings are of course welcome, particularly the more obscure selections not available on the regular albums. More superflous are the early demos, particularly a horribly sluggish take on 'Gardening At Night', where Stipe either seems to be abandoning all microphone technique, or simply forgetting the words. It really is peculiar to think that the band saw this as fit for release., although it at least elucidates the extent to which songs can be refined and improved between initial idea and finished product. Equally, the hib tone versions of 'Radio Free Europe' and 'Sitting Still' are simply carbon copies of the finished versions, but with much poorer sound quality.

If we accept that this endless repackaging is an inevitable biproduct of a music industry relentlessly keen to cash-in on every conceivable acquisition, then what we really need is a proper boxed set collating both the IRS and Warner Bros years, along with more rarities (how about a live recording of 'I'm Gonna DJ', the relatively insubstantial but highly entertaning song performed during encores on last year's world tour? Or some of the group's excellent covers perhaps - they did a killer version of Leonard Cohen's 'First We Take Manhattan'). Still, in the meantime, this will provide a reminder of the band's greatness for those disillusioned by the slick and plodding REM of 'Around The Sun' and the worst parts of 'Reveal'. For those still looking for a neat introduction to the band's early years, this is a great place to start.

Equally, I wonder whether the world really needs another epic psychedelic rock outfit with squawking guitar solos. There's a lot of very substandard MC5-inspired tosh around at the moment (Wolfmother instantly spring to mind), but there's something a little different about Comets On Fire. Their latest album 'Avatar' brings Ben Chasney (aka Six Organs Of Admittance) into the fold, and his dexterous guitar work provides some nimble and subtle balance to the exhuberant squall. In fact, this album covers many more bases than might reasonably be expected, with hints at Bert Jansch-inspired folk leanings, and even some slightly soulful arrangements. In fact, the penultimate 'Sour Smoke' (or at least that's what I think it's called - lyrics and tracklisting are both printed in frustratingly illegible scrawl) is positively groovy. Better still, the opening 'Dogwood Rust' hints that the band have absorbed the questing spirit of free jazz improvisers as much as the indulgent fretwork so common in this variety of music. The result is that the whole band sounds completely liberated - with thrilling and comelling results. With 'Lucifer's Memory', they opt for something more calm, almost sedate in fact, and achieve something akin to the quirky lilt of Kevin Ayers' 'whatevershebringswesing'. Naturally, there's not one track here that doesn't extend its welcome by a couple of minutes - but freeform rock groups aren't usually well known for careful editing. 'Avatar' works because it feels as exciting for the listener as it must have been for the musicians making it.

I've also just received the new album from Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, but I need to listen to it a bit more first, as it's surprisingly long and dense.

Lots to look forward to in the next few days - M Ward at Bush Hall on Sunday, Quasi at the Luminaire on Monday and Hot Chip doing a free instore at HMV Oxford Circus next Thursday, where new material is promised.

Monday, August 07, 2006

A Little Rain Never Hurt No-One

Well it certainly blessed us with a fantastic Grand Prix (just when it was most needed), and the rain in London this weekend has mercifully lowered the temperature. I was not designed for tropical heat!

Musically, I have caved in to a somewhat guilty pleasure this week. There's always one chart R&B album that I can't resist in any given year, and the spectacular 'In My Own Words' from the unfathomably smooth Ne-Yo is my album of choice for 2006. It's almost absurdly cheesy, and Ne-Yo himself is ludicrously self-confident to the point of self-parody. He clearly sees himself as something of a ladies' man, but with the earthy morals to know that he will have to commit when he settles down. Most hilariously of all, he has spectacularly resurrected the use of the word 'sex' as a verb. In one brilliant lyric he says 'Maybe it's the wrinkle over your nose, when you make your angry face/that makes me want to take off all your clothes/and sex you all over the place'. Perhaps even better is 'When I'm sexing her, I call your name/And I know it's wrong!'. The boy is clearly too young to remember Color Me Badd.

Ne-Yo's vocal style is a refined take on the smooth and seductive approach of R Kelly, and it's refreshing to hear some modern R&B that actually places more emphasis on melody than vocal acrobatics. This is particularly true of the excellent singles 'So Sick' and 'Sexy Love', with their minimal arrangements but slick production and infectious choruses. Ne-Yo's feel for mid-tempo sultry soul is surprisingly well judged, as on the superb 'When You're Mad' and 'Get Down Like That'. There are inevitably some rather horrific token ballads, clustered towards the end, which means the quality control drops a little. Still, this is a minor quibble with an album that is shameless, entertaining and easy on the ear.

On a much more serious note, the dependably prolific Lambchop return with 'Damaged'. Much has already been written about Kurt Wagner's recent cancer scare and how it may have influenced the bleaker tone of this record. It certainly abandons the rather summery sound of the double 'Aw C'Mon/No You C'Mon', but that doesn't necessarily mean it can be summed up as 'Nixon Mk II'. Actually, it rather successfully marries the smoother production values of the 'C'Mon' set with the rigorously controlled dynamic restraint of 'Is A Woman'. This rather brings home exactly how fickle the world of music criticism can be. When 'C'Mon' was released, I remember a whole batch of reviews bemoaning 'Is A Woman' for its supposed tedium, and hailing the double set as a return to form. Now critics are hailing 'Damaged' as the band's best record to date for its mysterious calm!

I don't think this is Lambchop's greatest achievement by any means. Its biggest flaw is that it simply isn't as rhythmically interesting as their best work. Wagner's unusual rhythm guitar style, a subtle but significant feature of both 'Nixon' and 'Is A Woman' has now been backgrounded in favour of the more sedate pluckings of William Tyler. Perhaps aiming for a classic southern soul sound, the tempos are mostly slow, and some of the tracks plod a little too politely. There's nothing as unexpectedly groovy as 'd scott parsley' or their cover of Curtis Mayfield's 'Give Me Your Love' to pierce the ethereal bubble created by these songs.

That being said, there are definitely major songs here, and Wagner has continued to refine his unique (to some, probably frustratingly obtuse) vocal style into something fascinating and powerful. The result is that this music is paradoxically both elusive and elucidating. Wagner continues to find great emotional resonance in the small details of everyday life, whilst easily graspable songwriting conventions (melodies, hooks etc) are frequently underplayed. This is most clearly sensed in the opening 'Paperback Bible', inspired by a radio 'swap shop' show where listeners are invited to share their unwanted items. Wagner's musing on the strange items put up for auction is beautifully developed. The song is ushered in by a pitchless wave of noise, and Wagner's delicate vocal requires the band to create their most reverently hushed atmosphere. It's a remarkable song.

The album peaks in the middle with a trio of superb songs. 'A Day Without Glasses' is sublime, with Paul Niehaus' steel guitar pushed to the foreground. 'Beers Before The Barbican' and 'I Would Have Waited Here All Day' are two of Wagner's most brilliantly sustained lyrics - chorusless prose-poems of considerable power and density. During 'Beers...', Wagner muses just-the-right-side-of- sentimentally on a former lover's qualities ('Your dress is perfect/Your shoes are strictly you/Your speech is articulate/And your eyes were too' - note the sudden change of tense, as if he suddenly realises this relationship is consigned to the past), before zooming in on a mutual experience taking acid. The whole song seems written in the form of an unsent letter ('I know I'll never send this/but you know we never talk of heavy things/if we get a chance to see each other in the future/I am sure we'll find a way to deal with it') and is deeply affecting. 'I Would Have Waited Here..' is a gospel lament, originally written for Candi Staton (her brilliant 'His Hands' album was produced by Lambchop's Mark Nevers), for which Wagner does not reverse the genders (retaining the 'you'll be drying off your dick' lyric that caused Staton to reject the song). It's a deceptively simple song about waiting for a lover to return home, but its lyrics cloak a wealth of sadness ('The afternoon is a study in stagnation/Seems I haven't moved an inch'), ending with the payoff 'it's been a lousy day'. It's Wagner at his very best.

This is a better record than the 'C'Mon' set, with more considered arrangements. The strings are carefully incorporated into each song this time, rather than overpowering the group dynamic with excessive flourishes. Kurt Wagner also remains one of the most inspired and original songwriters currently at work. It is, however, a more oppressively rigorous record than 'Is A Woman', and the thunderous drama of the closing 'The Decline Of Country and Western Civilisation' makes for a welcome surprise. It repays close attention (it could otherwise blend comfortably into the background), and repeated listens. Incidentally, the whole package is a thing of great beauty, the deluxe edition presented in a fold out digipack with a lovingly designed lyric booklet with artwork as mysterious and beautiful as the songs themselves.