Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Playlist

I haven't had much time to write recently - apologies for that. I definitely need to write something about last night's epic Ian Carr celebration concert, and I must also express my thoughts on all of these releases at some point:

Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me
Laura Veirs - July Flame
Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate - Ali and Toumani
Fringe Magnetic - Empty Spaces
Kairos 4Tet - Kairos Moment
Jaga Jazzist - One Armed Bandit
Bass Clef - May The Bridges I Burn Light The Way
Myra Melford Be Bread - The Whole Tree Gone
Pantha Du Prince - Black Noise
Polar Bear - Peepers
Field Music - (Measure)
Corinne Bailey Rae - The Sea (no, really...)
Tamikrest - Adagh
Richard Skelton - Landings
The Knife with Mt Sims and Planningtorock - Tomorrow in a Year
Pat Metheny - Orchestrion

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Orchestral Manouevres In the Dark

Peter Gabriel - Scratch My Back (Realworld)

For those who have us who have been waiting for ‘I/O’, the new album of original material Peter Gabriel has been promising for the past eight years, his ‘song exchange’ project ‘Scratch My Back’ is somewhat unexpected. For some, it will no doubt also be frustrating. It is now conventional for the covers album to be seen as a disappointment, a sign of diminishing creative powers or an abrogation of artistic responsibilities. This is something that always irritates me given the importance of the art of interpretation in the development of popular music.

In Peter Gabriel’s case, there’s a strong argument to be made that ‘Scratch My Back’ is the most radical move he could have made. Although his previous two albums ‘Us’ and ‘Up’ came spaced far apart, they gave a strong sense of consistent artistic preoccupations. Gabriel was fascinated by sound, by linear song structure and by a wide variety of music from around the world. He had developed a perfectionist streak in his own private studio and would rework his compositions for as long as he felt it necessary to tinker and tweak. He was also becoming strongly associated with personal, confessional lyrics, which added a human dimension to what could easily have been made for alienating listening. Both albums are brilliant and original – but I wonder what more of the same would have added to our understanding of this most underrated of artists.

Given the extent to which Gabriel’s sound is associated with his regular rhythm section (not least bassist Tony Levin and his customised ‘funk fingers’), recording an album without drums, guitar or electric bass and with an orchestra represents a substantial departure. For the most part, the orchestrations on ‘Scratch My Back’, by John Metcalfe, are not particularly adventurous, although sometimes stirring, sitting squarely in film soundtrack territory. It therefore falls more to Gabriel’s strengths and limitations as a singer to determine which of these musical settings work and which do not. His voice has not sounded this exposed since ‘Here Comes the Flood’ on his debut solo recording. Sometimes the results are grandiose or schmaltzy, but on other occasions, Gabriel finds a restrained and dignified sense of reflection and regret in his material.

Although its title suggests there is something lighthearted, entertaining, perhaps even humorous about this project, but the album that Gabriel has produced is unflinchingly earnest and sincere. Whilst he alters the mood of many of these songs, he also treats them with tremendous reverence. His aim seems to have been to strip these songs of the trappings of their original productions and amplify the emotions beneath the artifice. This is a bit difficult to achieve with a selection such as Neil Young’s wonderful ‘Philadelphia’, which was all about naked simplicity and vulnerability in the first place, the song demonstrating considerably more artistry than the film it soundtracked. Gabriel speeds up the temp slightly and makes the phrasing more precise, meaning that there’s less lilt and gentle swing. The orchestrations eventually drown both the melody and the purpose of the song. Similarly, it’s hard to add additional dense arrangements to Arcade Fire’s ‘My Body Is a Cage’, hardly a song that could have been much more portentous in its original guise. Somehow Gabriel succeeds in making it so however, although he finds something more intimate and restrained in the song’s coda.

There are moments, however, when his approach works to startling and transformative effect. With Radiohead’s ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’, he alters the phrasing of the vocal in the opposite way from ‘Philadelphia’, protracting the lines and finding the song’s inherent sadness and claustrophobia. His voice is cracked and wayward here. He’s by no means the most technically gifted of singers, but his voice has rarely been used so compellingly as an instrument before. Regina Spektor’s ‘Apres Moi’ sounds enticing when stripped of her indulgent kookiness, whilst Elbow’s ‘Mirrorball’ sounds a good deal more mysterious and elegant when divorced from Guy Garvey’s homely blokiness. It’s one of the more slippery and elusive songs here, and Gabriel handles its subtleties adroitly.

Best of all surely must be the lush, captivating take on Bon Iver’s ‘Flume’. This somehow retains all the passion and the emotion of the original, adding theatricality and drama but removing Justin Vernon’s trademark vocal trickery. It helps that this results in a clearer communication of the lyric. Gabriel completely inhabits this song, sounding at once powerful and mournful. This is a tremendous reading of an already excellent song.

Elsewhere, the situation is more complicated than merely a matter of straightforward success of failure. Removing the joyful township spirit of Paul Simon’s ‘The Boy In The Bubble’ radically alters its mood and feeling, although I can’t help feeling that this slow motion version is a little too soporific. The success of the version of The Magnetic Fields’ ‘The Book of Love’ depends on whether or not Stephin Merritt’s songs work when his layers of irony are peeled away. Some will find this conversational take sweet and endearing, others may feel it is sentimental. The piano-lead take on Randy Newman’s ‘I Think It’s Going to Rain Today’ is arguably too faithful and certainly pales into insignificance when placed against Nina Simone’s magisterial version. Uncharacteristically, Gabriel overdoes the forced emoting at the outset of his version of Bowie’s ‘Heroes’, but the song magically comes alive with the introduction of a Steve Reich-esque string figure. This in turn allows Gabriel’s voice to take full, natural flight.

By some distance the most surprising setting is a de-funked, chamber take on Talking Heads’ alarmingly prophetic ‘Listening Wind’. It’s the one that seems least likely to work given how much Talking Heads songs tended to rely on their spindly, angular grooves. Gabriel’s reading emphasises the importance of David Byrne’s vocal phrasing, and his ear for an engaging melody.

‘Scratch My Back’ is by no means a masterpiece, but it is an important addition to the catalogue of a major artist. Bob Ezrin, far better known as a fairly blustery rock producer, but who of course worked wonders on Lou Reed's 'Berlin', has captured the orchestral sound effortlessly, although I would have preferred it had the orchestrations focussed more on texture and colour and less on cinematic sweep. Nevertheless, Gabriel has pushed himself outside his usual comfort zone. The results are mixed, but never less than interesting.

Second Album Fail

Yeasayer – Odd Blood (Mute)

Yeasayer’s debut album ‘All Hour Cymbals’ seemed precariously balanced on a knife-edge between two extremes – hippy idealist psychedelia on one side and over-egged 80s pop on the other. It succeeded in walking a tightrope between the two due to its graceful melodies and the group’s instrumental prowess and skills in arranging. Its follow-up ‘Odd Blood’ certainly favours the band’s 80s preoccupations, frequently resembling Tears for Fears or Duran Duran.

It starts auspiciously with a total red herring. ‘The Children’ is an uncomfortable and sinister concoction dominated by creepy vocal effects, eerie sounds and a slow pace that serves to bewitch and hypnotise rather than soothe the listener. Its sheer weirdness suggests that ‘Odd Blood’ might live up to its title.

What follows mostly favours bright, infectious choruses that border on irritating. The musical backdrop largely consists of tribal-sounding tom toms and swathes of synth pads that do little to enhance or support these rather thin and lightweight songs. Occasionally, there is superimposed faux-sophistication that feels forced and lacks depth. The frequent comparisons with Animal Collective are understandable, but the similarities are all superficial. ‘Odd Blood’ doesn’t invoke anything as startling as the joyful synaesthesia of ‘Merriweather Post Pavilion’.

This sonic consistency perhaps shouldn’t be all that surprising. ‘2080’, one of the most popular songs on ‘All Hour Cymbals’ worked in spite of its strong resemblance to ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’. Sometimes they pull off a similar trick here. Despite its litany of lyrical clichés, ‘Ambling Alp’ still manages to be maddeningly irresistible. This is at least in part because the band imposes an entirely unexpected and highly imaginative middle section, complete with bizarre saxophones and deviating from the song’s otherwise predictable and formulaic structure.

The biggest problem with ‘Odd Blood’ is the switch of focus away from the arrangements and on to Chris Keating’s slight, reedy vocals, particularly grating when he adopts an untutored falsetto. ‘I Remember’ is another song of love, loss and memory to add to the substantial canon, but the bland and dated backing makes it difficult to experience any emotional impact. Peter Gabriel might be a reference point for this and the preceding ‘Madder Red’, but Gabriel’s songs have always had so much more depth and honesty. Most of the songs on ‘Odd Blood’ seem tricksy and contrived.

‘O.N.E.’ and ‘Love Me Girl’ make up the album’s quirky, upbeat centre. It’s difficult to resist unfavourable comparisons with Hot Chip here. There are a number of musical similarities – not least the 80s influences and single line synth riffs. But there’s nothing affecting or emotionally nuanced here. Regardless of the lyrical context, the insistent but limited melodies offer little hint of longing, melancholy, regret, excitement or discovery. ‘Love Me Girl’ particularly emerges as something of an incoherent mess of pick and mix influences (Prince, Depeche Mode, A-Ha, Duran Duran and much more besides).

In the album’s less focused second half, there are teasing hints of what might have been. The asymmetrical ‘Strange Reunions’, with its offbeat handclaps, devious melodic lines and psychedelic influences is initially beguiling, but it fades out abruptly, seeming like an interrupted journey. Nevertheless, it’s the one point where the group sound relaxed, not trying too hard to be accessible or clever. The saxophones are back to entertaining effect on ‘Mondegreen’, a nimble update of the Motown Stomp severely let down by some silly lyrics (‘everybody’s talking about me and my baby making love ‘til the morning light’ – are we really?).

However elaborately produced ‘All Hour Cymbals’ may have been, it was still believably the work of a band. On ‘Odd Blood’, Yeasayer appear to have stifled any sense of interaction or musicality in favour of a self-regarding, artificial sheen. It’s worth remembering that if the band really are hinting at the artful electro-pop of Talk Talk, then those records sound more durable and satisfying now than ‘Odd Blood’ does. This is a record that is trying desperately to impress, but ends up deeply irritating. It’s a real disappointment from a band that appeared to have considerable potential.

Friday, February 05, 2010

Bruised but Unbeaten

Gil Scott Heron - I'm New Here (XL Recordings)

This intriguing comeback from Gil Scott Heron is actually an incredibly difficult album to review. Scott Heron has arguably never made a bad record – even his last release, 1994’s ‘Spirits’, had its moments. Whilst ‘I’m New Here’ belatedly continues the quality streak, it stands alone in Scott Heron’s catalogue in terms of its sound and instrumentation. Yet it’s faintly ludicrous to applaud it for ‘incorporating hip-hop’ when, along with the Last Poets, Scott Heron is one of the founding fathers of rap. XL boss Richard Russell’s production therefore represents a sensitive and logical modernisation, rather than a forced or unnecessary one.

The sonic environment Russell has crafted for Scott Heron may not actually be all that radical. His claustrophobic, sinister but minimalist combination of strings and beats could easily have come from a Massive Attack album. He at least seems to be a good deal more creative with such backing tracks than Massive Attack themselves are these days. His accompaniments take Scott Heron away from his natural comfort zone without making him sound distant or uncomfortable. There’s no Fender Rhodes piano or live percussion and no attempt to smooth over the rough, nervy reality of Scott Heron’s words. The jazz lineage (the world of ‘lady Day and John Coltrane’) may have been sacrificed – but the results are suitably dank and fearsome.

What is most interesting about this record though is Scott Heron’s voice, which now sounds deeper and more resonant, but somehow simultaneously more weathered and dry. He now sounds like a man who has been through a tough prison sentence and various drug rehabilitation programmes. In this sense, the musical backings work remarkably well, given that they are atmospheric but unobtrusive – allowing that peculiar but powerful voice space to communicate.

This set supremely reaffirms Scott Heron’s talents as a performance poet. It is full of interludes and brief skits which complement the flow of the overall album rather than interrupt it. It is bookended by two parts of an autobiographical tale entitled ‘On Coming From A Broken Home’ in which Scott Heron’s elaborate language is as rich and evocative as the sound of his voice. Even more intense is the stark, pounding ‘Running’, which seems confessional in light of Scott Heron’s recent life experience.

The album is rather dominated by the choice of covers, which leads to obvious comparisons with Rick Rubin’s rehabilitation of Johnny Cash’s career. Yet, to hear Johnny Cash singing with acoustic instrumentation was not surprising. To hear Scott Heron doing it on the surprisingly effective version of Smog’s ‘I’m New Here’ is rather radical and unexpected. The song’s combination of irony and honesty is the perfect vehicle for Scott Heron’s resurrection, with its brilliant chat up lines (‘I met a woman in a bar and told her I was hard to get to know, but damn near impossible to forget’) and self-reflection (‘I had an ego the size of Texas. I forget –does that mean big or small?’).

Perhaps less unexpected are versions of Robert Johnson’s ‘Me and The Devil’, relocated from the Mississippi Delta to a paranoid urban environment, and an ostensibly soft take on Bobby Bland’s ‘I’ll Take Care Of You’. Here, Scott Heron’s harsh voice suggests not compassion or commitment – but rather defiance and conviction.

The only original ‘song’ here – ‘New York Is Killing Me’ – is excellent, and suggests that there may be much more to come from this resurrected artist. Set to a handclap backing reminiscent of the Dixie Cups’ ‘Iko Iko’, the accompanying vocal is anything but lightweight, actually weighed down by its burdensome natural gravitas.

I’ve long had reservations with the image of Scott Heron as a prophet of equality and human rights, given his early song ‘The Subject Was Faggots’, a rather unpleasant piece of observational writing. Perhaps now that he has singlehandedly failed to take his own advice (having fallen victim to the very drink and drugs he warned so gravely about) we can now see him in a different, more nuanced light. On ‘I’m New Here’ he seems defiant, but also wiser and slightly vulnerable too. This is an unexpected, powerful return to the real world.

Ready For The Four-to-the-Floor

Hot Chip - One Life Stand (DFA/EMI)

It’s quite a long way from ‘drivin’ in my Peugeot, blazin’ out Yo La Tengo’ and being ‘sick of motherf*ckers trying to tell me that they’re down with Prince’ to ‘why can’t I be bright, like my lover’s light?’, ‘happiness is what we all want’ and the various other platitudes that populate Hot Chip’s fourth album. With this record, Hot Chip have moved towards a concept of maturity that favours monogamous relationships and expressions of love. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, of course and unlike, say, Badly Drawn Boy (whose creativity seemed entirely stymied by domestic contentment), there doesn’t seem to be any diminution of Alexis Taylor’s gift for a melancholy melodic line, or Joe Goddard’s production talents.

There has, however, certainly been a reduction of the musical quirks that made Hot Chip such a distinctive proposition. There is already a consensus building around ‘One Life Stand’ being their most consistent (and therefore best) album. If consistent means the most accessible – this is certainly true. Most of the references that spring to mind when listening to these insistent and infectious ten songs are pop songs – New Order’s ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’, Eurythmics circa ‘Sweet Dreams’, the Pet Shop Boys take on ‘Always On My Mind’, early 90s Italian house singles, even Madonna on ‘I Feel Better’. The skittering, uneasy, sometimes disorientating grooves of ‘Coming on Strong’ and parts of ‘The Warning’ have been jettisoned in favour of a constant four to the floor kick drum pulse. The result is a near seamless and richly enjoyable collection of artful pop songs that rejects both the wayward, unpredictable charm of ‘Made In The Dark’ or the radical sophistication of ‘The Warning’.

Hot Chip still work best when deploying their mysterious balance of the sinister and the saccharine. It is this, both natural and unforced, that raises their music above the sum of its influences. Sometimes this peculiar equilibrium is achieved through the highly contrasting vocal contributions of Goddard and Taylor (and it’s great to hear Goddard back to greater prominence here), sometimes it just sounds like they’ve spliced two completely different songs together. This is the case with the title track, which I first heard several months ago in one of Alexis’ DJ sets, in a version that only included the outrageously infectious chorus. That this deceptively simple melody has hardly left my head since is itself testament to Alexis’ melodic strengths but the finished product is substantially more satisfying. The synth riff and verse melody seem almost to stand in opposition to the theme of the song – perhaps influenced by the Chicago house boom, and offering something predatory and seductive before the chorus’ sweet statement of commitment.

The group pull off a similar trick with the magnificent closing track ‘Take It In’. Goddard’s vocal is propulsive, dark and murky, before a wonderful, shimmering chorus takes over and eventually dominates. More linear but no less inventive is the delightful ‘Alley Cats’. This might just be my favourite Hot Chip song to date, slowly building from a subtle, unassuming introduction into something elegiac, haunting and affecting. The intial theme bears more than a passing resemblance (presumably intentionally) to Arthur Russell’s ‘That’s Us/Wild Combination’, a song with which I’ve become somewhat infatuated of late, but it develops into much more than mere homage. It’s a continuously developing, shifting narrative and Taylor’s counter-melody is plaintive and wistful.

Elsewhere, there are a handful of tracks with which I have minor reservations. ‘Brothers’ is a bit earnest, and reminds me inescapably of Boney M, although I’m not sure why. I’m usually a staunch defender of Alexis’ bittersweet ballads, but ‘Slush’ might be a step too far into Bacharach-lite territory even for me. Having said that, its more mysterious, lush and somewhat unexpected coda complete with steel pans takes it to an entirely different space. ‘I Feel Better’ perhaps overplays its synth string hand and steals its chorus melody from Madonna’s ‘La Isla Bonita’. It’s unfortunate also, particularly given that this album was largely completed some time ago, that its use of vocal autotune no longer sounds particularly novel.

Yet the album’s best moments render such problems largely trivial. In addition to the aforementioned triumphs, ‘Keep Quiet’ provides an essential moment of delicate intimacy, whilst ‘We Have Love’ and ‘Thieves in the Night’ are irresistible dancefloor tracks. ‘Hand Me Down Your Love’ ingeniously marries an Italia house piano stomp with the sweetest, most yearning string-laden chorus. As usual with Hot Chip, it’s the material that really shouldn’t work that somehow ends up being the most successful. Whatever they try here, they do so with confidence and conviction. It’s an immediately engaging sugar-rush of an album, but also one which grows with each listen. This one could be for the long term.