How Did We Get Here And Where Do We Go Now?

The Bug – London Zoo (Ninja Tunes, 2008)

It’s tempting to caricature Kevin Martin as something of a musical chancer, given the length of his career and his tendency to latch on to certain musical scenes. ‘London Zoo’ has been marketed, somewhat inaccurately, as another chapter in the story of dubstep. Actually, it seems like a natural progression from Martin’s first album as The Bug, which had more in common with the heavy and insistent rhythms of dancehall. Like its predecessor, ‘London Zoo’ makes fruitful use of an exciting cast of guest vocalists and toasters.

The vocal performances on this outstanding record have so much urgency and conviction that they simply compel the listener to pay attention. Longstanding Bug collaborator Warrior Queen returns to command attention through the sheer force of her vocal personality and Roots Manuva cohort Ricky Ranking provides the album’s concluding and most resonant imagery on the apocalyptic ‘Judgment’. It’s simply impossible to ignore the righteousness of Tippa Irie on the opening ‘Angry’, striking at everything from the American government response to Hurricane Katrina to suicide bombing at home.

Even more brutal and uncompromising is Spaceape on ‘F**kaz’ (hard to believe that this piercing directness comes from the same vocalist who made the more ambiguous ‘Memories of the Future’ with kode9). He finds faults on all sides of arguments, attacking both the selfish oppressors who would deny people opportunity for improvement and the head-in-the-clouds liberals who don’t understand the problems they are trying to solve. ‘Look at the state of your own home!’ he chides, with genuine bile and justified rancour. Eventually, he arrives at the crucial question that sums up this album’s sustained mindset: ‘How did we get here and where do we go now?’

Yet it’s Martin’s pitch-perfect production, bolstering the sense of anger, frustration and confusion in the vocal performances, that makes ‘London Zoo’ such a well-realised document. The music lacks melodic and harmonic sophistication – but the sheer relentless force of its rhythms make it compelling. The sounds that Martin conjures are appropriately doom-laden – with a plethora of clanks, gunshots, echo-laden percussive hits and colossal deep bass pulses.

‘London Zoo’ achieves what Bloc Party’s ‘A Weekend In The City’ only tentatively hinted at – a bleak, angry and downright terrifying vision of modern London in terminal decline (‘the people are turning so mad, the place is turning so bad…the streets are filled with blood red’). Is life in this bustling, diverse and brilliant city really this oppressive? Maybe it is for many people, in ways that I can only struggle to imagine.

Perhaps ‘London Zoo’ can be criticised in much the same way as I approached a stylistically different but thematically very similar album – Chris T[T’s ‘Capital’. It is perhaps guilty of being more than a little negative and charmless. Yet my concluding remarks about ‘Capital’ erred towards the generous, in that I accepted why the current climate makes it difficult to avoid an apocalyptic, downbeat tone and that maybe such fiery urgency is necessary in order to create something positive. Maybe it’s simply not the job of rappers, producers or songwriters to offer solutions – here Kevin Martin’s extraordinary cast seem to aim more at simply documenting their fears and experiences. By way of some levity, there’s a sense of personal angst as well as anger here – the performers occasionally questioning their own sanity as well as the world gone mad around them.

This is an outstanding record that deserves to be spoken of in the same breath not just as musically similar works such as Massive Attack’s ‘Blue Lines’ or Tricky’s ‘Maxinquaye’ but also with the classics of questing social consciousness – Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On?’, Stevie Wonder circa ‘Innervisions’ and, perhaps most potently, Sly Stone’s articulate paranoia on ‘There’s A Riot Going On’. Was this simply too confrontational and unsettling for the Mercury judges? Maybe it can be argued that Burial has already crafted a similarly uncomfortable portrait of urban claustrophobia without deploying the armoury of language and rhetoric. Nevertheless, ‘London Zoo’ is heavy, portentous and vehemently dystopian and it must not be ignored.

Only In Dreams

Leila – Blood, Looms and Blooms (Warp, 2008)

As well as being a sometime keyboard player for Bjork, Leila Arab has been responsible for one of my favourite albums of the 1990s, the skeletal, deceptively simple ‘Like Weather’*. That remarkable debut and, to a lesser extent, its follow-up ‘Courtesy of Choice’ married idiosyncratic, mostly untutored vocal contributions to esoteric and imaginative bedroom productions. Yet Leila never really became recognised as one of electronic music’s pioneers, and the gestation between ‘Courtesy of Choice’ and this third album has been a lengthy eight years.

The press spin on ‘Blood, Looms and Blooms’ has emphasised that Leila lost both her parents during that eight year gap and the critical focus on this album has emphasised its concurrent darkness and sadness. I’m not really sure that it’s all that preoccupied with death, but it’s certainly fair to argue that it’s a lot less warm and inviting a record than ‘Like Weather’. Indeed, the presence of Terry Hall and Martina Topley Bird as guest vocalists immediately invites comparisons with Tricky’s Nearly God project, with which this record shares a rather introspective and claustrophobic sound.

Leila’s solo set in support of Bjork at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire left me rather cold and baffled. Not only bereft of the contributions of her vocalists, it also seemed stripped of any of the melody or thematic development that characterises her recordings. Instead, she opted to bathe the audience in a rather oppressive sonic fuzz that occasionally teetered on the unmusical and was largely uninvolving.

Luckily, the approach is less confrontational on ‘Blood, Looms and Blooms’ and this album largely plays to her strengths, albeit sometimes with disorientating and unsettling effects. This is the most mysterious and elusive of Leila’s albums so far – basking in its rather creepy, fantastical atmosphere. The arrangements are both strange and seductive, particularly when Leila leaves enough space for her singers to weave their enchanting webs. It mostly sounds like a dreamworld – sometimes dizzying and intoxicating, frequently unnerving and peculiar.

Even the chiefly instrumental works are disarming in their impact. ‘Mettle’ begins playfully, but its underlying menace bubbles to the surface with alarming rapidity, the incorporation of heavily distorted guitars proving surprisingly effective. The brilliantly titled ‘The Exotics’, with its wordless, mock-operatic vocal interjections, using voice as instrument rather than linguistic vehicle, swells like the soundtrack to a malevolent fairground carousel.

Better still, Leila’s longstanding vocal collaborators have all developed and enhanced the qualities that made them such inspired discoveries in the first place. Roya Arab proves eerie and versatile on ‘Daisies Cats and Spacemen’ and Luca Santucci powerfully conveys the sense of disturbed sleep on ‘Teases Me’. So much so, in fact, that the appearance of Martina Topley Bird on ‘Deflect’ seems comparatively straightforward and lacking bite (emphasised by the uglier, more invasive presence of excoriating electric guitars).

The cover of ‘Norwegian Wood’ seems to have divided opinion somewhat, but I think it’s a major highlight of this set. First of all, it’s an appropriate choice of song, despite its potential over-familiarity. Leila’s clever layering of Luca Santucci’s vocals results in a novel and fascinating new interpretation of Lennon’s melody. Any cover version should aspire to re-imagining a song and investing it with new life and meaning, and that is precisely what Leila and Santucci have done here. This version is laced with fear and foreboding, entirely in keeping with the album’s overall mood and themes.

There are a small clutch of mis-steps here, not least ‘Little Acorns’, where the light-hearted playfulness feels a little forced and incongruous. The beats on this track also sound a little dated and could easily have been transplanted from a Bentley Rhythm Ace record. Mercifully, the rest of the album sounds as potentially timeless as music reliant on technology can feasibly sound. ‘Young Ones’, essentially a skeletal piano recital, might assist the album’s dreamy mood, but it feels a trifle superfluous. Perhaps ‘Blood, Looms and Glooms’ is just a fraction overlong – and some more rigorous editing might have marked it out as Leila’s most ambitious and successful record so far. It’s still a terrific record in spite of this though – very different in tone and shape from its predecessors, but sustaining their inventiveness and intrigue.

* Long gone are the days when the NME could still be an influential pointer in the direction of albums such as that!

The Problem of Evil

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)

One can usually rely on Anthony Quinn, The Independent’s regular film critic, to write a pithy sentence that sums up what so often goes wrong with movie criticism. ‘The Dark Knight’ (the second of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films) is, according to Quinn, a film with a ‘schizoid personality’ in which high-minded art and blockbusting entertainment are constantly fighting against each other. No, no, and thrice no! What Nolan has achieved here is to prove once and for all that intelligent cinema and populist moviemaking needn’t be two mutually exclusive extremes. That he does this so brilliantly and effortlessly with this film has made me rethink my fears that this once promising director might never make a film as original and effective as ‘Following’ or ‘Memento’ again. If he can work this much magic through merely reinventing a franchise, let him make an entire career from doing so.

Excellent though it was, ‘Batman Begins’ basically elaborated the origins of Bruce Wayne’s invention of Batman that were hinted at in Tim Burton’s film from 1989, albeit with added ninja training. When I first heard that this film would again feature The Joker as its central villain, I feared that it would end up being a straight remake of that more fantastical film. Burton gave the Joker a human identity in the character of Jack Napier, who in falling into a giant vat of acid in the Axis Chemical Factory, became hideously disfigured. This version of the Joker, performed with a combination of maniacal glee and hints of psychological vulnerability by the late Heath Ledger, is a much more complicated beast. Perhaps scarred and traumatised by his father, he has deep-rooted troubles, but his back-story undergoes subtle modifications every time he enthusiastically relates it. He terrorises simply for the fun of it and poses elaborate moral problems for the film’s central characters. With ‘The Dark Knight’, Nolan actually tears up every rule that has ever informed the superhero genre, crafting elaborate situations and personal stories that deeply involve us in the film’s action and themes. By the film’s devastating conclusion, the whole moral compass on which the Batman legend is founded has been audaciously distorted.

Another notable contrast with the Burton films is in appearance. Burton made his Gotham City look like a richly imagined gothic nightmare – Nolan’s Gotham looks more like a convincing modern urban landscape. Whilst the film mostly avoids recognisable landmarks (save for a breathtaking sequence filmed in Trump Tower), it was shot on location in Chicago, and its dizzying aerial panoramas, convoys and chase sequences demonstrate the visible influence of Michael Mann. In fact, in appearance, this film probably most closely resembles later Mann works such as ‘Collateral’ or ‘Miami Vice’. It’s therefore not just the banal day-glo comic book capers of the Joel Schumacher movies than Nolan has succeeded in banishing. He’s also managed to break free from the more credible Burton vision too and, in doing so, has crafted an intriguing and distinct style far removed from any of the previous instalments in the franchise, even his own. The audience for this film will find themselves immediately immersed in a completely fresh world, depicted in a surprisingly vivid and effective cinematic language.

As if to stake its claim to standard action movie terrain, ‘The Dark Knight’ begins with a dramatic and impressively novel bank heist, notable for its succession of domino killings that enable the Joker to be the only participant to leave alive with the money. But this showpiece introduction really only hints at the evil to come (at this stage the Joker is still a player in a Mob crime game) and the movie immediately veers on a tangent to address its first philosophical question. The Gotham City of this movie is one in a state of confusion leading to crisis. The very nature of vigilante justice is being questioned – why has ‘The Batman’ (initially that definite article is crucial) become the self-appointed guardian of the city? Can he in fact be blamed for the deaths of innocents and policemen? Why can other ordinary citizens not replicate his success? (The usually malevolent Cillian Murphy makes an amusing and understated cameo as one who tries and fails).

As the plot twists and turns through an epic 152 minute running time (which turns out to be not a minute too long – every unexpected development is justified), we’re introduced to myriad thorny psychological issues. There’s the love triangle between Bruce Wayne, District Attorney Harvey Dent (played with handsome righteousness by the perennially underrated Aaron Eckhart) and his assistant Rachel Dawes (the increasingly ubiquitous Maggie Gyllenhaal). Then there’s the cumulative self-doubt afflicting Bruce Wayne as Batman: Can he commit the necessary evil in order to achieve the common good? Is it even right that he should do so or does Gotham really need its ‘White Knight’ – protection with a human, democratic and accountable face in the form of D.A. Dent? In between these three is Gary Oldman’s Lieutenant Gordon, totally driven in his commitment to dealing with the criminals, but in denial about the corruption in his ranks.

Mapping out a plot summary is pointless, given that this film is not really about its narrative, relentlessly driving though it undoubtedly is. It is instead about the complex nature of moral questions and it paints a daringly intricate and nuanced picture where good and evil seduce each other rather than simply fight it out. The philosophical problem of evil is that we can’t understand what is good without first appreciating what is evil. In Gotham City, it’s clear that this also works in reverse. ‘Of course I don’t want to kill you’, says the Joker to Batman. ‘You complete me.’ The battle of good and evil here is not a simplistic conflict with an inevitable outcome – instead, as the Joker puts it so eloquently, it’s ‘what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object’. It’s never entirely clear which is which.

Thrown into this potent mix is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, the nature of which would be far too great a spoiler to reveal. It’s enough to say that it throws the movie on to a major new trajectory, with one of its characters corrupted on a path of targeted vengeance and its supposed hero questioning all his prejudices and preconceptions. What we’re left with is a superhero movie where the superhero is perched on the precipice of abrogating his responsibility – or at best keen to create the conditions where such a renunciation is the best outcome. Then there are the supporting characters – who all play quite significant roles. Morgan Freeman’s Lucius Fox designs innovative technology for Wayne Enterprises but eventually finds his personal principles deeply compromised. Alfred the Butler, played with insight and economy by Michael Caine, hides some crucial but inevitably dispiriting information from Bruce Wayne. Presiding over all this psychological and political mayhem is Ledger’s Joker – a man who consciously chooses chaos, has no rational plan and relishes his own insanity. In some senses, Christian Bale’s Batman is simply a cog in a much bigger machine.

The film’s conclusion is every bit as complicated as it appears – and both the forces of good and evil can lay claim to some kind of victory. But whilst the positive view of the human community holds sway, the individual bastions of moral virtue have all been called into question and been demonstrated to have significant flaws. Some of the lines from the surprisingly poetic script stick in the mind. Alfred claims that ‘some people just want to watch the world burn’ – although in the case of the Joker, he seems to want to ignite the flames too. The Joker himself claims that ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stranger’ and, as part of the final confrontation, Harvey Dent pronounces that ‘you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain’. It’s a doom-laden proposition that neatly encapsulates the doubt, ambiguity and uncertainty at the core of this film’s unique vision. This film makes the pseudo-philosophy of The Matrix look like a pretentious sham. I need to watch it again – but I suspect it may turn out to be the closest the superhero genre has come to producing a masterpiece.

Even worse than Anthony Quinn’s simplistic assessment is an extraordinarily dim-witted and pretentious article published today on The Guardian website by David Cox, complaining that the film has nothing to say about terrorism and cannot be a fable for our times. On all the key questions, Cox moans, the film is ‘determinedly ambiguous’. Aside from the fact that even Cox himself concedes that this is entirely the point, is it really the job of thriller film-makers to determine what is right and wrong in the current global political climate? The film asks moral questions of its audience as well as its characters, and credits the viewer with enough intelligence to make their own judgments as to whether the use of blanket surveillance, physical abuse and a form of extraordinary rendition are justifiable methods to deal with an unreasonable evil that knows no bounds. After all, in the times we live in now, these are issues we need to consider, rather than merely sleepwalking into allowing our democratically elected leaders to make all the assessments themselves, without being held to account. Ludicrous though it may sound, perhaps this morally complex and inconclusive fantasy might be more provocative than all the sanctimonious preaching Michael Moore can muster.

Mercury Shortlist Announced

So here it is then:

Adele - '19'
British Sea Power - 'Do You Like Rock Music?'
Burial - 'Untrue'
Elbow - 'The Seldom Seen Kid'
Estelle - 'Shine'
The Last Shadow Puppets - 'The Age Of The Understatement'
Laura Marling - 'Alas I Cannot Swim'
Neon Neon - 'Stainless Style'
Portico Quartet - 'Knee-Deep In The North Sea'
Robert Plant And Alison Krauss – 'Raising Sand'
Radiohead - 'In Rainbows'
Rachel Unthank And The Winterset – 'The Bairns'

I proved right on Portico Quartet. Sorry to the good people at the Vortex, who I love dearly - but I simply do not think the hype around this band is credible. Their much vaunted minimalism is nothing new, and the quality of the musicianship and improvising is well beneath some of the other more exciting British Jazz acts. Very disappointing to see them nominated above Gwilym Simcock (the only young British jazz musician of truly international standing right now - is it not a travesty that he is not recognised by the industry here?),Outhouse, Finn Peters, Neil Cowley, Empirical, John Surman et al.

No Portishead?!?!?!?! No Robert Wyatt?!?! No Elvis Costello (another one I neglected to mention in the earlier post, silly me)?!?! Good for Robert Plant and Radiohead, but otherwise the list once again emphasises marketeable youth over established maturity and artistry. Have Laura Marling and Adele even come close to making the best British releases of the past twelve months? No, of course not.

Good to see Burial and Elbow on the list. I wonder whether Burial might actually win it - such a decision would go some way to restoring the award's credibility. Laura Marling as an outside bet, but I fear it would curse the young girl's career far too early!

This list does not even begin to reflect the diversity and quality of contemporary British music. However, I'm grateful for the small mercy that Adele is the only one of my major objections to make the list!

The Mercury Rises Yet Again

Oh dear, is it that time of year again already? Here are the NME’s possible shortlisted albums, many of them predictably ghastly:

Adele – '19'
Babyshambles – 'Shotter's Nation'
British Sea Power – 'Do You Like Rock Music?'
Burial – 'Untrue'
Coldplay – 'Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends'
Duffy – 'Rockferry'
Elbow – 'The Seldom Seen Kid'
The Enemy – 'We'll Live And Die In These Towns'
Estelle – 'Shine'
Foals – 'Antidotes'
Future Of The Left – 'Curses'
The Futureheads – 'This Is Not The World'
Hot Chip – 'Made In The Dark'
Jamie Lidell – 'Jim'
Johnny Flynn – 'A Larum'
Kate Nash – 'Made Of Bricks'
Kids In Glass Houses – 'Smart Casual'
The Kills – 'Midnight Boom'
The Last Shadow Puppets – 'The Age Of The Understatement'
Laura Marling – 'Alas I Cannot Swim'
Lightspeed Champion – 'Falling Off The Lavender Bridge'
Los Campesinos! – 'Hold On Now Youngster'
MIA – 'Kala'
Mystery Jets – '21'
Neon Neon – 'Stainless Style'
The Pigeon Detectives – 'Emergency'
Portishead – 'Third'
Radiohead – 'In Rainbows'
Spiritualized – 'Songs In A&E'
These New Puritans – 'Beat Pyramid'
The Ting Tings – 'We Started Nothing'
Tricky – 'Knowle West Boy'
Wiley – 'Grime Wave'
The Wombats – 'The Wombats Proudly Present... A Guide To Love, Loss And Desperation'

Some albums I wouldn’t object to seeing nominated:

Outhouse – Outhouse (have Loop paid the entry fee?)
Finn Peters – Butterflies
James Blackshaw – Litany of Echoes
Portishead – Third
Radiohead – In Rainbows
Neon Neon – Stainless Style
Robert Plant and Alison Krauss (this and the above are one half British!)
Hot Chip – Made In The Dark
Burial – Untrue
Leila – Blood, Looms and Blooms
The Bug – London Zoo
Elbow – The Seldom Seen Kid
Polar Bear – Polar Bear (not released until 28th July so possibly ineligible)
Django Bates – Spring is Here, Shall We Dance (he’s based in Copenhagen, but still British!)
Wild Beasts – Limbo, Panto
Alexander Tucker – Portal
Gwilym Simcock – Perception
Chris T-T – Capital
Neil Cowley Trio – Loud…Louder…Stop!
Robert Wyatt – Comicopera (I think this was too late for last year….)
Sylvie Lewis – Translations
Boxcutter – Glyphic
Empirical – Empirical
Paris Motel – In The Salpetriere
Kevin Ayers – The Unfairground
PJ Harvey – White Chalk
Voice of the Seven Woods – Voice of the Seven Woods
Acoustic Triangle – 3 Dimensions

Updated: Some other albums I should have mentioned

Autechre - Quaristice
Benga - Diary of an Afro Warrior (the less predictable but equally worthy dubstep option)
Jonny Greenwood - There Will Be Blood (would be intriguing if this were nominated over Radiohead!)
Philip Jeck - Sand
The Long Blondes - Couples
Sian Alice Group - 59.59 (go on, nominate this over Spiritualized!)
Super Furry Animals - Hey Venus (bit underrated, this, I reckon)
John Surman/Howard Moody - Rain on the Window
School of Language - Sea From Shore (no-one has noticed this!)

Unfortunately, I’m predicting that the token jazz nod might go to the vastly overrated Portico Quartet.

Things I definitely do not wish to see nominated: Predictable bland indie tripe (hello Wombats, Pigeon Detectives, The Enemy, Babyshambles, even Foals), disappointing comebacks (Spiritualized), overrated singers (Adele, Kate Nash).

If the list is inevitably going to reflect the mainstream primarily, then I would happily back Portishead or Radiohead as worthy winners.

Here are the albums I think are most likely to be nominated: Laura Marling, Duffy,
Burial (if kode 9 entered it), Portishead, Radiohead, MIA, Ting Tings, Foals, Last Shadow Puppets, Adele, Portico Quartet or Empirical

'Just a man still workin' for your smile'

Leonard Cohen, London O2 Arena, 17/07/08

There has been much speculation about the motivations for Leonard Cohen’s World Tour being purely financial, with the great singer-songwriter having been duped out of a substantial sum by a duplicitous accountant. The extortionate ticket prices certainly bolstered such arguments, although one can hardly blame Cohen if his promoters exploit a market currently riding high on inflated prices. There’s no hint of money-grabbing in the performance itself though – which at two and a half hours of consistent quality is warm, spirited and generous.

Cohen may be 74 years old but he bounds on to the stage in the sprightly manner of a mere whippersnapper. ‘It’s been a long time since I was last on a stage in London’, he admits, before quipping ‘it was fourteen years ago, I was sixty years old, just a kid with a crazy dream…’ His wry and ironic sense of humour, so often missed by those who caricature him as dour and miserable, is in full bloom tonight. He apologises for ‘not dying’ and claims that, although he spent much time studying the major philosophies and religions, ‘cheerfulness kept breaking through’.

He is a consummate gentleman throughout, addressing the audience as ‘friends’, and frequently removing his splendid fedora in appreciation of his musicians’ individual contributions. If the vast and frankly unpleasant O2 Arena is hardly the most suitable of venues for this kind of subtle and nuanced performance, Cohen makes light of it. ‘It’s good to be gathered here’, he says, ‘on just the other side of intimacy’. Nevertheless, I still felt fortunate to have a seat in the second row of the stalls rather than being stuck in the top tier of the back corner, as I had been for Bruce Springsteen last December.

From the gentle, swaying opener ‘Dance Me To The End Of Love’ to the concluding ‘I Tried To Leave You’, it’s clear that Cohen still cares about all these remarkable songs. He doesn’t mess with the arrangements quite as much as Bob Dylan does these days, but he frequently alters phrasing and dynamics to suit his deepened voice. That being said, this is not the hushed whisper of the ‘Dear Heather’ album, which frequently allowed his chorus of ‘angels’ to do most of the work. Instead, it’s a committed and strong instrument that powerfully communicates the weightiness and insight of his words.

Cohen has never been the most energetic of performers, but tonight there’s a physical quality to his delivery that enhances the effect of these songs. Sometimes he’s down on one knee, serenading the seated Javier Mas, whose Spanish guitar and bandurria statements provide many of the highlights of these tasteful arrangements. Sometimes his eyes are tightly closed, as if searching for a new and deeper meaning in these well-worn songs – sometimes he is clenching his fist in pure determination.

The two sets mostly favour the period from his mid-80s reinvention onwards. The material from ‘I’m Your Man’, despite the album’s deliberately stilted production, still sounds remarkably fresh, sometimes even jovial (particularly in the case of the title track and ‘Tower of Song’). By way of contrast, the songs from ‘The Future’, many of which have a biting political edge, sound frighteningly prescient and immediate, even though that album first emerged way back in 1992. In fact, these songs are crucial to the ebb and flow of the set, as they provide a little energy and bombast to punctuate the otherwise languid and reflective mood. Critics of Cohen’s albums from ‘Various Positions’ onwards have tended to find the cheesy programmed arrangements with budget instrumentation too substantial an obstacle. How hilarious, then, that ‘Tower of Song’ genuinely seems to be built from a preset beat on a Technics organ! The line about being born with a golden voice gets a predictable cheer but even better is Cohen’s concluding joke about discovering the meaning of life in the song’s refrain (‘do-dum-dum-dum-de-do-dum-dum’).

There are selections from his classic, more folky years though, some very predictable and unavoidable (‘Suzanne’, ‘Bird on a Wire’, ‘So Long, Marianne’), others more surprising (a fervent version of ‘Who By Fire’ and a mesmerising ‘The Gypsy’s Wife’). These songs are served well by these delicate and refined full band arrangements, and Cohen’s delivery sometimes adopts a more soulful hue as a result, particularly on a slow and impassioned ‘Bird on a Wire’. The band’s contributions are elegant and complementary, from Bob Metzger’s lyrical guitar flourishes to Dino Soldo’s audacious blasts of high-end saxophone and harmonica.

Crucial to any Cohen performance will always be the interaction between his full-blooded recitations and the softer, enchanting tones of his female backing singers. His regular collaborator Sharon Robinson has a voice full of feeling and sensitivity, thoroughly deserving of its highlighting on ‘Boogie Street’ and ‘I Tried To Leave You’, whilst Britain’s Webb Sisters do an admirable job of providing the sweet, honey-drenched choruses.

The greatest appreciation is reserved for ‘Hallelujah’, a deeply moving song that has grown in stock through interpretations from artists such as Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright, John Cale and kd Lang. Cohen is transparently touched by the belated recognition, as he is by the audience remaining on their feet throughout the three encores. He thoroughly deserves the appreciation though – this is a performance that exceeds all expectation and breathes yet more life into these outstanding songs. The audience clearly do not want it to end and neither, it appears, does Cohen himself. He makes old-age look like something to embrace rather than fear.

All The Fun of the Fair

I’ve been trying to avoid these kind of hastily cobbled together summary posts, juxtaposing releases across a wide range of genres. However, as I’m going to be away with little blogging time from this Thursday, there seems little choice if I’m ever going to get through my mountainous backlog. So here are some musings on some randomly selected new releases…

Flying Lotus – Los Angeles (Warp, 2008)

Here’s one of the most interesting records I’ve heard so far this year and certainly the best album to emerge from the Warp staple in quite some time. It’s from an artist commonly referred to as a hip hop producer but who actually turns out to be something less tangible and more slippery than that (as befits someone who can count the late Alice Coltrane as his great-aunt).

‘Los Angeles’ is an unbroken suite of short, piecemeal ideas that converge into something rather magical and mesmerising. In this sense, it’s probably most closely reminiscent of Scott Herren’s work in his Prefuse 73 guise, although it’s a good deal less scattershot than his albums. The rhythms are simultaneously wonky and crisp, whilst the hazy ambience and overall emphasis on disorientation make the album sound drunk, albeit in an entirely satisfying way.

Fly Lo crafts a simmering, dense and absorbing conflagration of effects and the overall sound is both tempting and sinister. ‘Hot’ is particularly effective in channelling the inspiration of classic hip hop, but refracted through a heavily distorting prism. The mesh of competing rhythms is a mile away from the pounding formula of generic hip hop. FlyLo has produced a music that is more esoteric and prickly.

‘Los Angeles’ might be a soundtrack to the seedier, darker underbelly of life in that most infamous of cities. Much of it sounds ominous, perhaps even slightly bleak, although the album as a whole seems to journey towards something slinkier and lighter. Initially, though, the predominant sense seems to be of something surreal and cinematic – perhaps even Lynchian, were that weird and wonderful director ever to embrace Electronica. The interjecting sampled voices operate in similar terrain to the wonderful sound world created over here by the likes of Burial.

Perhaps this music’s strange terrain is most neatly encapsulated on the uncomfortable but irresistibly compelling ‘Testament’, where Gonjasufi’s pinched vocals deftly bolster the music’s sense of menace and dread. Digested as a whole, this is eerie music, haunted by vaguely recognisable spectres from the past, but pointing to an even stranger future.

Thank You – Terrible Two (Thrill Jockey, 2008)

Thanks must go to Alax of Tapedeck and Meal Deal fame for pointing me in the direction of this one. Thrill Jockey have marked themselves out as one of the most trustworthy of American labels, unafraid to dip more than a big toe into adventurous musical waters.

Unsurprisingly, then, this Baltimore trio ratchet up a pretty relentless and intense noise, at least in part reminiscent of the full-throttle unresolved tension mastered by This Heat in the late ‘70s. Their press release describes them as an ‘athletic rhythm/action unit’ which, for once, would appear to be a reasonably accurate and considered description.

Whilst much of ‘Terrible Two’ appears to be based on unrestrained jamming, the whole package coheres through returning to repeated and easily identifiable touchstones. All of these lengthy tracks are predicated on increasingly untamed combinations of frantic drumming, furious bursts of high pitched guitar strafing and, perhaps most imaginatively of all, interjections of organ dissonance, the combinations of selected notes totally disrespecting conventional harmony.

It’s difficult to know whether there is any kind of compositional logic behind this frazzled, seemingly unstoppable assault, or whether it is simply the result of spontaneous collective inspiration. Either way, this is a memorable experiment, both quirky and confrontational. The best and most ambitious tracks (‘Empty Legs’ and ‘Embryo Imbroglio’) come with real fire and aggression, whilst the closing title track provides a more enigmatic and brooding counterpoint.

James Blackshaw – Litany of Echoes (Tompkins Square, 2008)

The virtuosic, densely layered modern ragas that guitar prodigy James Blackshaw creates are powerfully mesmerising. Part-composed, part-improvised pieces (but by Blacshaw’s own admission with an emphasis on the former), they have a unique ability to reel the listener into a world that sounds unfamiliar and unconventional. Far more than just another guitarist in the Takoma tradition, Blackshaw has already, at the tender age of just 26, made great strides to expand and develop this music. There is little that is archival or retrogressive about his approach.

It’s even more refreshing then that the first sound we hear on his latest work is a different kind of instrument altogether. Blackshaw begins ‘Gate of Ivory’ with an ostinato motif on the piano, and the instrument reappears again elsewhere on ‘Litany of Echoes’, sometimes subtly enmeshed with his guitar work and again as the focal point on the concluding ‘Gate of Horn’.

The tracks in between are lengthy explorations that gradually reveal their depth and resonance. In some ways, the work of Fran Bury on violin and viola is almost as significant as Blackshaw’s by now familiar artistry here, and she makes a major contribution to the tone, mood and harmonic logic of these pieces. Blackshaw and Bury gradually and doggedly develop their themes to their logical conclusions and the results demonstrate a singular discipline and focus.

If this music only amounted to a combination of mental stamina and virtuosic technique, it wouldn’t necessarily be all that interesting or immersing. It’s the overall effect to which Blackshaw services his talents that makes this music so potent. The density of these ‘sheets of sound’ makes these pieces sound vibrant and full, even though there are only two musicians working on them, and Blackshaw only uses minimal overdubbing.

It’s also intriguing that there is no producer credit on this album’s inlay. If Blackshaw did all the recording and engineering work himself, then he has an intuitive ear for capturing sound as well as for composing and performing. There is little in the way of additional effects deployed here – just a reverberation that sounds natural and unforced, which matches the unhurried pacing of the material.

With the developments in arrangement and instrumentation matching the greater ambition of the composition and playing, this stands as an even stronger whole even than last year’s remarkable ‘Cloud of Unknowing’. With that record, he perfected the art of solitary creation – an entirely solipsistic, individualist method of working based on what attracted him to the work of John Fahey and away from predictable indie bands. With ‘Litany of Echoes’, however, he has brought interplay and chemistry back to his music, albeit in a very formal and appropriate way, bolstering rather than diluting the sheer mastery of his craft.

Alexander Tucker – Portal (ATP, 2008)

I was almost dissuaded from investigating this album after enduring part of Tucker’s moody collaboration with Stephen O’Malley at the Maximum Black gig at The Forum some months ago. Maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood, but it struck me as having all the hallmarks of the really bad category of freely improvised music – wholly based on repetition and droning and coming across as rather flat, uninvolving and lacking real feeling. Compared with the musicality of The Necks or the looser passages of Outhouse’s compositions (or indeed the relentless explorations of Thank You – see above), it seemed rather reductive and tedious.

Tucker’s solo work is rather different though, tied closely to a British folk tradition and occupying what is actually a more adventurous space. Tucker takes the basic template of folk music – lyrics which tell elaborate stories, delicately plucked acoustic guitars, and moulds them into something more liberating and free through the use of layered guitar effects.

Best of all on ‘Portal’ is Tucker’s experimentation with string arrangements and treatments. These work well, adding to a sense of mystery and making the overall flavour of the music seem more surreal and less earthy. Tucker’s drive not merely to modernise folk music, but to develop new processes and means of crafting it, is something that should be lauded. His construction of dense sound collages from loops, sampled performances and treated vocals makes this music sound otherworldly and unusual.

Tucker is always striving to avoid the over-familiar and the safe – on ‘Portal’ he has developed a music that is nuanced and calm, but also sometimes chilling and harrowing (particularly on the punishing ‘Omni-Baron’). Whilst individual tracks don’t stand out particularly, the overall sound of ‘Portal’ subtly embeds itself in the listener’s consciousness.


Neon – Here to There (Basho, 2008)

Two interesting things seem to be happening in the UK jazz music scene at the moment. One is for artists to make more of the intersections between their classical and jazz backgrounds, and to reject the false dichotomy that is too frequently imposed between the two traditions. The second is for established musicians to enter into fresh collaborative arrangements with much younger players. The classical percussionist-turned-jazz-master Paul Clarvis has done this very fruitfully with Blink and now one of British jazz’s most revered figures, saxophonist Stan Sulzmann, has had a rare meeting of minds with prodigious Pianist Gwilym Simcock and the excellent Percussionist Jim Hart, a player mature beyond his years.

Whilst bassless trios are becoming increasingly commonplace (Blink, Tim Garland’s Lighthouse Trio etc), Neon is an even more unconventional set-up, also lacking a drummer. As a drummer listening to this record, I’m struck by the percussive interplay between Simcock and Hart, which is both playful and precise. Simcock displays the remarkable lightness of touch and technical skill for which he is justly renowned whilst Hart’s accompaniments, which vary between the light and spacious and rapid flourishes, are suitably instinctive. Sulzmann remains a muscular and inspired soloist, with a more lyrical soprano sound, although his tenor tone sometimes seems slightly grating here – it’s unclear whether or not this is a quirk of the recording.

Sulzmann contributes most of the compositions here, and they are both nimble and lucid. The best of these might well be the languid, haunting title track which is sequenced perfectly at the heart of the album. Yet Simcock and Hart, as well as being supreme improvisers, are also excellent composers. Simcock’s delightful ‘Spring Step’, which he has also been performing with his own group, is one of the highlights here, whilst the unpredictable lurches of Hart’s ‘Deviation’ demonstrate his considerable imaginative flair. All the pieces demonstrate both the group’s meticulous orchestration and fluid interaction. ‘Here to There’ is a document of the considerable talents of the group’ individual members, but is also a collective enterprise of laudable generosity and mutual benefit.

Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes (Bella Union, 2008)

I’ve already written a fair amount about Fleet Foxes and their ‘baroque harmonic pop’ songs, having lauded their Sun Giant EP and written enthusiastically about their endearing performance at Meltdown a couple of weeks ago. It’s arguable, therefore, that not much needs to be added about this excellent album, which represents an extension of their My Morning Jacket-meets-CSNY formula. It is, after all, far too early in their burgeoning career for a radical change of direction.

I had initially felt that those hailing it as a modern classic might have been jumping the gun a bit, and I’m instinctively wary of that kind of grandstanding hyperbole. In this case, this is mainly because the quasi-spiritual, nature-obsessed lyrics rather strip it of any cultural relevance. Still, much like The Decemberists, if one yields oneself to Fleet Foxes’ peculiarly arcane world, they quickly repay the investment of effort.

Two characteristic elements of this set strike me that I perhaps didn’t emphasise enough in earlier commentaries on the band. Most of the songs carry the listener on a vivid journey, in strikingly linear progressions that mostly avoid verse-chorus-verse conventions. This is not to say that the songs are without hooks or melodies – far from it – it’s just that they are generally unhindered by structural conventions. Secondly, whilst it would be easy to pigeonhole the group as some sort of cosmic American folk band (particularly on the evidence of ‘Tiger Mountain Peasant Song’), there’s a strong streak of soul that occasionally permeates the music here. Listen to the way ‘Ragged Wood’ suddenly and unexpectedly bursts into life in its final two minutes, or the mellotron shadings of the exquisite ‘Your Protector’, one of the most stirring tracks here.

Perhaps this is why Crosby, Stills and Nash still seem the obvious reference point for this music. There’s not much of Neil Young’s electric sturm-und-drang here – the music is mostly more intricate and meticulous and less furious. There is, however, plenty of the kind of harmonic texturing, hints of blues and soulful undertows that characterised the writing of David Crosby and Stephen Stills. Perhaps this is not the most adventurous of reference points – but then there aren’t many other bands drawing so positively on that late 60s folk rock spirit at this point.

No doubt much will continue to be made of the vocal resemblance between Foxes frontman Robin Peckold and Jim James of My Morning Jacket, but neither can really help the vocal resemblance. This excellent debut doesn’t follow quite as closely in MMJ’s footsteps as the first Band of Horses record did though, channelling the folk dimension a little bit more than the southern rock that informs James. If they develop their flair for arranging, they may yet carve out a distinctive niche of their own. This very promising album certainly shows they have the quality and the appeal to do so. There’s rich imagination in the group’s arrangements and their transcendent vocal harmonies.

Ry Cooder – I, Flathead: The Songs of Kash Buk and The Clowns (Nonesuch, 2008)

This is billed as the final part of what has now become Ry Cooder’s ‘California Trilogy’. The project seems to have reinvigorated him as an artist and, perhaps more significantly, as a songwriter. He had been in danger of becoming more renowned as a patron for the Buena Vista Social Club performers than as a master musician in his own right. Whilst his guitar playing is never likely to fall out of favour, his songwriting had perhaps been neglected until these unique and carefully constructed albums emerged.

The remarkable ‘Chavez Ravine’, as much an anthropological study and dissection of social and political history as a songbook, changed all that. The more whimsical ‘My Name Is Buddy’ narrowly missed out on my albums of the year list for last year due to being a little overlong and one-dimensional, although its social conscience was admirable. I’m just not sure that we needed the anthropomorphic animals-as-humans dimension.

The previous albums examined weighty themes from a now vanished California – some reprehensible local politics in ‘Chavez Ravine’, folk radicalisation on ‘…Buddy’. By way of contrast, ‘I, Flathead’ seems to be considerably more lightweight, focussing on a new character, a dragster racer and bar band musician named Kash Buk, who missed out on a chance at bigger things. The main focus of the set, by Cooder’s own admission, is on ‘honky tonks and dirty blondes’. Cooder himself embodies the character, singing in a peculiar growling drawl that imbues the words with personality and gravitas, and helps make Buk’s story convincing.

This might be the best sounding of the California trilogy, in that Cooder draws a great deal from what are ultimately very skeletal arrangements. Although there are hints of the Mexican flavours that characterised ‘Chavez Ravine’, the main emphasis is on the traditional guitar, bass and drums set-up, playing a heady and enjoyable mix of country and good old fashioned rock and roll. There’s a great classic vintage-valve sound here that helps Cooder seem even further removed from modernity. The playing is consistently excellent, with Cooder and his band attacking the material with as much bite and passion as scholarly vigour.

Even with all the focus on all the fun of the fair, Cooder still can’t resist some political sidesteps. The outstanding ‘Pink-O-Boogie’ not only grooves righteously but also ‘has the thing you Republicans just ain’t got’, whilst ‘Steel Guitar Heaven’ makes reference to union cards and the problems in getting paid.

Perhaps best of all though are the songs towards the end of the album where Kash reflects on his life, on missed opportunities and battles against the melancholy of ageing. The deeply intoned, Waitsian ‘Flathead One More Time’ muses on lost friends and the days of dragster racing and rages against the dying of the light (‘time is all you’ve got…’). ‘5,000 Country Music Songs’ focuses more on the music – and how the opportunity to play with Ray Price proved to be a missed one – ‘those shoes were just too big to fill that year’.

Whilst some might prefer the weightier, more politicised themes of the previous two albums, ‘I, Flathead’ not only concludes the trilogy, but provides it with some much needed balance and emotional clarity. Prefab Sprout’s Paddy McAloon once famously dismissed Bruce Springsteen for writing songs about ‘cars and girls’, but those two subjects get plenty of mileage here, and they seem more than worthy of the exposition. Cooder has created a milieux rarely explored in modern music – as much archivist and academic as he is songwriter, he understands this world and he elucidates it brilliantly.