Adventurers United

I’ve been attempting to catch up on some records this week, so here are some of the results…

I have to confess to an element of ‘genre tokenism’ when it comes to specialist dance music. I don’t pick up that many dance records in the course of a year, and I’m certainly no expert in the field. I’m certainly appreciating the new album from The Field though (oh dear, do you see what I did there?). I’m not sure that Axel Willner’s breed of minimalist techno is bracingly original, but it’s certainly mesmerising and effective, as this music should be. All the individual elements of this music are steadfastly basic, from the skeletal drum programming (which initially seems unadventurous) to the repetition ad nauseum of various vocal samples and ambient effects. Yet this is anything but background music. The effect is such that very subtle shifts in texture become unexpectedly dramatic. With the four to the floor beat pushed into the background, the emphasis is more on sound and atmosphere than rhythm. The rippling synth figures of ‘The Little Heart Beats So Fast’ hark back to the acid house movement, whilst the more prominent ideas in tracks like ‘Over the Ice’ and ‘Everyday’ create an eerie calm unusual for dance music. This is music that sounds simultaneously detached and immediate – elusive, mysterious but captivating. The title seems eerily appropriate – this seems to capture what the process of sublimation might sound like.

‘Mirrored’ is the first album proper from avant-rock Warp signings Battles, and it seems to be dividing opinion somewhat. There are some that find it overly cerebral and irritating, whilst others seem to admire its rhythmic drive and foot-tapping qualities. The band certainly have technical pedigree, featuring former members of Don Caballero and Helmet, as well as Tyondai Braxton, son of free jazz legend Anthony Braxton. They are completely unafraid to show their chops – the opening ‘Race: In’ is about as dexterous and technically impressive as rock music gets. Luckily, it’s as exhilarating as it is confounding. Elsewhere, they prefer things quirky and goofy, as on lead single ‘Atlas’ with its peculiar vocals that completely eschew language. The best of the album provokes physical or visceral reactions, and the group interplay (particularly in the deft juxtaposition of electronic and conventional rock elements) is frequently compelling. The group become less engaging when they veer into abstraction though, and there’s a short section of the album (the close of ‘Rainbow’ leading into ‘Bad Trails’) that seems forced and out of place. Still, by the exhuberant, playful ‘Tij’ they’re more than back on track, and ‘Mirrored’ proves that rock music can still be bold and adventurous.

‘Noise Won’t Stop’ is the UK debut from Shy Child, a drums and synth duo that has inevitably been tagged with the rather ludicrous nu-rave label. The album shares some tracks with another album, ‘One With The Sun’, released elsewhere in the world last year, but unfortunately ignores the group’s two best moments (the outrageous ode to auto-fellatio ‘Down on Yourself’ and the insistent, clattering single ‘Technicrats’). There are plenty of treasures here in spite of this though, and what is likely to elevate this group above their similarly nostalgic contemporaries is the real sense of fun here. This is a tremendously entertaining record, all single finger synth lines, jittery drum beats, silly lyrics and bleepy noises. The collaboration with quirky rap outfit Spank Rock fits in perfectly. ‘Drop The Phone’, ‘Pressure to Come’ and ‘Kick Drum’, all three jerky and off kilter (essentially this seems to be club music for people who can’t dance), make for a killer opening trio. The group’s minimalism is perhaps a little limiting, and when they try for a smoother, more melodic sound on ‘Summer’ and ‘What’s It Feel Like?’ they come unstuck. ‘Cause and Effect’ is memorably delirious though – a fitting conclusion to a hugely enjoyable record.

For those that like their indie rock to come with a hefty dose of melodrama, ‘Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters’, the debut album from Scotland’s The Twilight Sad may just be the perfect tonic. One need only look at the titles to discern the group’s shameless lunges for grandeur (‘that summer, at home I had become the invisible boy’, ‘mapped by what surrounded them’, ‘and she would darken the memory’ – all set in consistently lower case letters). Yet, amidst the loftiness and grandiose theatrics there’s also plenty to like. The alternately shimmering and thunderous epic rock dynamics distance this music from the tepid template of most contemporary British guitar music. There’s also something inherently endearing in singer James Alexander Graham’s refusal to disguise his thick Scottish vowels and exaggerated consonants. For all the obvious swelling guitar crescendos, it’s the foregrounding of melody and emotive vocal lines that make this music effective. Similarly, the frequent use of accordion prevents the arrangements from becoming too swamped by the walls of abstract guitar noise. It’s interesting that all this has earned the band some serious plaudits – it sounds quite unfashionable in the current musical climate and if I can think of a clear reference point for this, it’s underrated Irish epic rockers Whipping Boy who spring most immediately to mind. A good friend of mine abandoned his early taste for indie rock by dismissing it as all about ‘trying to regress to the womb’. It’s an interesting notion, and one that this album does little to disprove, such is its focus on the torment of adolescence. Yet there’s an admirable empathy and perceptiveness at this album’s core that prevents it lapsing into caricature or mere bombast. It feels like a series of emotional highs and lows, which is exactly as it should feel.

It’s been a while since I’ve latched on to anything from the Kill Rock Stars label, but ‘In Advance of the Broken Arm’ by Marnie Stern is one of the albums of the year so far. It’s furious, high velocity rock and roll combining the visceral blues of Sleater Kinney with an unhinged and demented intricacy. It’s essentially a totally frenetic mess, but Stern is somehow gifted with the ability to shape these uncompromising elements into spirited, joyful and exhilarating music. It helps that she has the outrageously gifted drummer Zach Hill to work with. For Hill, a simple backbeat is never appropriate, and whilst he veers off in several unexpected tangents simultaneously, he always anchors the music to a clear pulse too, albeit usually a completely beserk one. Stern’s guitar playing rejects conventional riffing or soloing in favour of a constantly energetic high-end noodle, as if she’s been mainlining caffeine. With titles like ‘Plato’s Fucked Up Cave’ and (my personal favourite) ‘Put All Your Eggs in One Basket and Then Watch That Basket!!’, there’s also plenty of humour here too. She’s supporting the outstanding Animal Collective at the Coronet in London in July – definitely a show not to miss.

More to come later this week – including albums from The National, Fennesz/Sakomoto and Elliott Smith as well as my thoughts on the superb Wilco gig last weekend. There’s also a whole set of inspirational releases from the ECM label that I need to get round to writing about!

Dahling, You Were Fabulous: Rufus Wainwright's Camp Cabaret

Opulent, camp, grandiose, extravagant, excessive, theatrical, operatic, romantic – these are all words that spring immediately to mind when listening to Rufus Wainwright’s latest magnum opus. Even the CD itself is bright pink, for heaven’s sake. Never one to under-egg the pudding, he has continued the orchestral preoccupations of the Want double set on ‘Release The Stars’, albeit with a generous helping of sensitivity and restraint for the sake of balance. It may be his most considered and effective work to date. Those who feared that Neil Tennant’s appearance as Executive Producer might have made for an album of throwback synth-pop need not have been concerned.

Rufus’ most overblown creations continue to work because they come with a deliciously self-mocking sense of their own absurdity. His own arrangement for ‘Do I Disappoint You?’ is hysterical, and even the introduction of a child’s choir fails to destroy its music hall cabaret spirit. It’s hard not to raise a smile as Rufus bellows ‘why does it always have to be….CHAOS?!!’. Similarly, the portentous ‘Slideshow’ works because it is also hilarious, its chorus featuring a decidedly smug Rufus demanding ‘and I’d better play a prominent part in your next SLIDESHOW!’. Most ridiculous of all, from its title to its ludicrous outro complete with Sian Phillips voiceover, is ‘Between My Legs’, a sharper, more infectious take on the punchier rock sound of ‘Movies of Myself’. Even when the arrangements are less embellished, Waiwright still can’t resist excess. ‘Tulsa’ is apparently an ode to Killers frontman Brandon Flowers, and comes with a quite extraordinary opening gambit (‘You taste like potato chips in the morning/You face has the Marlon Brando club calling’).

Wainwright is a true romantic of course, and elsewhere this album contains some moments of real beauty. The lush ‘Tiergarten’ is entrancing, and yet again demonstrates Wainwright’s mastery of vocal harmony arrangements, through which he continues to extend his musical language. ‘Not Ready to Love’ sounds painfully candid, and is as a result heartbreaking. It’s easily the most subtle and controlled song Wainwright has yet delivered. Similarly, ‘Leaving for Paris No. 2’ is tinged with genuine sadness. These songs hark back to the finest moments on ‘Poses’.

His romanticism is more playful on the excellent ‘Rules and Regulations’ and the exotic ‘Sanssouci’, on which he delivers two quite masterful vocal performances. In fact, his voice is much improved throughout the record – there’s much less slurring of words and he’s relying more now on his ability to vary dynamics to give the songs shape and direction.

Wainwright’s greatest gift may be his ability to make the trivial sound vital, and to make the superficial sound beautiful. It’s quite a trick, but whilst ‘Release the Stars’ continues to make beauty a paragon of virtue, it also captures a more tender side as well. Some will see these as conflicting extremes, pulling Wainwright in two directions. I find it easier to view them as two sides of the same coin – and this album makes Wainwright sound more multi-faceted and intriguing than ever. He’s a star himself.

Impossible Synthesis?: Wilco's 'Sky Blue Sky'

Whilst it would be a Herculean task to argue that ‘Sky Blue Sky’ is in the same league as Wilco’s best work, the critical reaction to it has still left me somewhat perplexed. Its harshest critics seem to be not only labouring under the misapprehension that Wilco are at the vanguard of experimentalism, but also assuming that music can be compartmentalised into neat, mutually exclusive categories. For these writers, an album is either experimental or retrogressive, forward thinking or backward looking.

The argument in pretty much every review has been that ‘Sky Blue Sky’ represents a major volte-face and a retrenchment from the adventurous wilds of ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’ and ‘A Ghost is Born’. The Observer this weekend called it a futile exercise in ‘rock archaeology’. I rather like the idea of ‘rock archaeology’ actually – it suggests an uncovering of something hitherto undiscovered from music’s illustrious past, rather than a simple homage or borrowing. Even more lazily, Rob Mitchum on Pitchfork suggests it reveals the ‘dadrock’ side the band has ‘always tried to hide’.

This is palpable nonsense – Wilco have always worn their influences rather proudly. Even the more outré moments on ‘A Ghost is Born’ (the krautrock ‘Spiders’ for example) have harked back mainly to the 1970s for inspiration. Even on ‘Yankee…’ and ‘…Ghost…’, Wilco’s raison d’etre was never to experiment, but rather to synthesise (extremely successfully) a range of musical approaches. They have never simply been a ‘dadrock’ band in the manner of Ocean Colour Scene or Kula Shaker (bands that even resorted to dressing as if from an earlier decade), but they’ve hardly been determined modernists either.

I can find plenty of evidence to suggest that the band’s striving for synthesis continues on ‘Sky Blue Sky’. With its current line-up including the intuitive, nimble guitarist Nels Cline and brilliant drummer Glenn Kotche, Wilco has more of a group dynamic than on previous studio albums, and I don’t agree that the band are ‘passive’ or ‘sidelined’ on this album as some have suggested. Comparisons with Fleetwood Mac or Supertramp are pretty lazy – much more accurate reference points would be early Steely Dan (when they combined a love of country and soul with their jazz chops) or Little Feat. ‘A Ghost is Born’ actually set a number of precedents for the mix of lush impressionism and guitar interplay that lies at the heart of ‘Sky Blue Sky’ – think of ‘At Least That’s What You Said’, ‘Hell is Chrome’, ‘Muzzle Of Bees’ and ‘The Late Greats’ and you’re not actually that far away from the sound the band conjure here. There are no tracks ending in fifteen minutes of feedback, but the majority of Wilco fans may well be relieved at this.

The fist half of ‘Sky Blue Sky’ is dynamic, expressive and enticing. To simply dismiss it as a retro-rock album misses the intricate detail and intriguing mystery of ‘Impossible Germany’, or the dramatic, restless soulfulness at the heart of ‘Side With The Seeds’. There’s also the unpredictable, stop-start jerkiness of ‘Shake it Off’ and the light, dusty country shuffles of the title track and ‘Either Way’. Jeff Tweedy appears to be singing with much greater confidence, and there’s a fresh emphasis on melody and mood. The guitar playing is fluid and inventive, particularly when Tweedy and Cline extemporise simultaneously. Whilst ‘Sky Blue Sky’ isn’t Wilco at their most innovative – it may be Wilco at their most musical, something most critics appear to have missed completely.

The real problem is an uncharacteristic lack of consistency. Where Tweedy once made an entire double album engaging (‘Being There’), he now seems to be struggling to fill a 50 minute single disc. It's made more noticeable by the fact that the album's weaker moments congregate in its second half. ‘Hate it Here’ attempts to repeat the soulful trick of the superior ‘Side with the Seeds’, whilst ‘Leave Me (Where You Found Me)’ is so delicate that it risks becoming bland. 'Walken' is probably the album's most derivative moment.

Similarly, the lyrics veer from the surreal imagery and inventive manipulation of language that characterised the previous albums to rather more banal platitudes that seem limpid and uninspired. Tweedy displays his gifts on ‘Side with the Seeds’ (‘Tires type black/Where the blacktop cracks/Weeds spark through/Dark green enough to be blue/When the mysteries we believe in/Aren’t dreamed enough to be true/Some side with the leaves/Some side with the seeds…’) but he’s really struggling for anything meaningful on ‘Walken’ (I’m walking all by myself/I was talking to myself about you/What am I going to do?’) or the rather benign-sounding ‘On and On and On’ (‘Don’t deny what’s inside’). It’s troubling to say it, but contentment doesn’t seem to come naturally to Tweedy – the songs characterised more by ambiguity and confusion are considerably more successful.

For the most part though, ‘Sky Blue Sky’ is a controlled but nuanced display of group dynamics, interplay and musicality. I also suspect the thrilling essence of many of these songs will come across more clearly in live performance, but we’ll have to wait until next week’s London shows for evidence of this. By synthesising the conventional ingredients of the songwriting art with intuitive and dexterous musicianship, Tweedy has at least avoided repeating himself, again demonstrating that Wilco are a constantly shifting, satisfyingly questing group.

Uneasy Listening: Cat Power at the Forum

I’ve been wondering what to write about this show, given that my entire experience of the night was soured by a particularly thoughtless couple. Having reserved our tickets somewhat late in the day, John Kell (http://www.kingofquiet.co.uk/) and I settled for unreserved seating upstairs. Neither of us had quite accounted for the number of early arrivals (in fact, I expected most of the seated crowd to spend the support slots in the bar), so getting a seat proved more of a mission than expected. Having secured a severely uncomfortable pew (not kind on the lower spine), I felt unduly sympathetic to a couple audacious enough to ask us to save seats for them. Having done this, I did not expect in a million years that they would proceed to talk and giggle (not even quietly, but quite obtrusively) CONSTANTLY THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE PERFORMANCE. They barely even stopped to breathe. Now I can accept that there are different schools of thought on talking at gigs, but my own position on this is clear: no reasonable person would contemplate talking like that through a classical concert, an intimate jazz gig, a movie or a play. What exactly is the difference about a rock concert? Why pay £20 plus to hold a conversation when you could just as easily hold it for the price of a couple of drinks in a bar, café or pub? Having paid from my own hard earned cash, I was not best pleased about their conduct. In the unlikely event that you’re reading this – next time pay more courtesy to people kind enough to secure you a seat (it was so busy they would have been standing at the very top of the balcony otherwise).

Unfortunately, I can’t remember the name of the rockabilly duo support act, who were highly entertaining – basically Revered Horton Heat meeting the White Stripes in a dark alley. No bad thing.

Cat Power has something of a reputation as a difficult performer, an image intimately connected with her battles with alcoholism and depression. Her solo shows have seen her so crippled with fear that she’s been unable to perform, or has simply forgotten her own songs. She’s now performing with a stable band (still in support of her outstanding album ‘The Greatest’, released early last year), Dirty Delta Blues, and has seemingly defeated most of her demons. So why then was this show still so difficult?

She may no longer be such a loose canon, but Chan Marshall still seems a profoundly uncomfortable performer, relentlessly pacing up and down the stage and preferring not to face the audience directly. Her voice, a vulnerable and sensitive instrument on record, is rather more uncompromising live, and she frequently renders her own material incomprehensible tonight, intentionally slurring the words. Whilst she projects confidently, she ignores most of the nuances in the recorded versions. It’s frequently fascinating, but rarely pretty. On record, she sounds positively seductive – live, she appears awkward and unpredictable.

The band, although much acclaimed, are not equals to the legendary Hi label session band that played on ‘The Greatest’. They all seem impressive musicians, but in a relatively straightforward and unadventurous way. They don’t give the songs enough room to breathe, and are frequently just too loud for the rapturous textures Marshall originally concocted.

True to her reputation, Marshall handles a number of covers, most of them major works in the soul and pop canon – James Brown’s ‘Lost Someone’, ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, Smokey Robinson’s ‘The Tracks of My Tears’, Willie Nelson’s ‘Crazy’ and Dan Penn’s ‘Dark End Of The Street’ among them. Identifying the material proves a challenge, given Marshall’s reluctance to enunciate and the unnecessary reverb added to her voice. She veers so far from the established melodies, not in itself a crime, but she seems somehow uncertain in her extemporising, and her interpretations have little shape or direction. ‘The Tracks of My Tears’ arguably works best, simply because she transforms it radically from elaborately arranged ballad into full-force Northern Soul stomp.

The show gets more comfortable and meaningful as it progresses (if anything it seems to be about pushing the songs to their utmost extremes), but there’s a lingering sense of missed opportunity at the end in spite of this. I think Marshall has plenty of talent and originality – but, in spite of the successful 'Dusty in Memphis' vibe of ‘The Greatest’, she may not entirely be at home with ‘the greatest soul singer in the world’ tag that her band bestows on her.

I'm Behind Schedule...

So here's a list of things I need to blog about, lest I should forget myself:

Cat Power live at the Forum last week
Dava (about whom only a select few know)
Bishi (should get the album later this week)
David Torn - Prezens
John Surman - The Spaces in Between
Elliott Smith - New Moon
Cinematic Orchestra - Ma Fleur
Laura Veirs - Saltbreakers
Soulsavers - It's Not How You Fall, It's The Way You Land
Medeski, Scofield, Martin and Wood - Out Louder
John Abercrombie - The Third Quartet
Led Bib - Sizewell Tea
Eberhard Weber - Stages of a Long Journey
Wilco - Sky Blue Sky
Rufus Wainwright - Release The Stars
Tord Gustavsen Trio - Being There
Von Sudenfed - Tromatic Reflexxions
Sebadoh - The Freed Man (Domino reissue)
The Field - From Here We Go Sublime
Abram Wilson - Ride! The Ferris Wheel To The Modern Day Delta
Curios (Tom Cawley Trio) - Hidden
Basquiat Strings with Seb Rochford - s/t
Robyn - s/t
The Bird and the Bee - s/t
Tinariwen - Aman Iman: Water is Life
Paul Motian w/ Joe Lovano and Bill Frisell - Time and Time Again
Marnie Stern - In Advance of the Broken Arm
Maximo Park - Our Earthly Pleasures
Sarah Nixey - Sing, Memory
Field Music - Tones of Town

The Earth From The Air: Bjork's Volta

I’m aware that this is going to sound incredibly snobbish, but there’s this lingering sense that the rock and pop press consistently underestimate Bjork. Predictably, Volta has received universal plaudits so far, but very much of the four-out-of-five-stars, take-her-for-granted kind. ‘Volta’ is a sixth remarkable album in a sequence that has seen Bjork expand her reach fearlessly with every new recording. It is therefore manifestly absurd that a dependably brilliant new Bjork album should be accorded the same ratings as, say, the latest dull offering from Kasabian. Let’s be absolutely clear about this – Bjork is quite peerless in contemporary pop music. There is no other artist prepared to push themselves quite as far, to manipulate their voice to such intense effect, to be as upfront about their influences whilst striving to expand the language of modern music. Her passionate combination of the mechanical innovations of electronic music with an emotional honesty and warmth often lacking in the work of other comparably experimental performers marks her out as a unique and massively significant artist.

She has rarely ever followed trends or expectations, and it’s therefore no surprise that the pre-release talk of ‘Volta’ representing a return to ‘commerciality’ after the ‘introspective’ approach of ‘Vespertine’ and ‘Medulla’ has turned out to be complete piffle. If anything, ‘Volta’ draws as much from her recent soundtrack for husband Matthew Barney’s ‘Drawing Restraint 9’ as any of her previous albums proper. There’s perhaps more of an abandonment of conventional song structure and melody here than on any of her previous works, and the unconventional instrumentation imbues the accompaniment with unusual and compelling textures.

Perhaps it’s precisely this individualism and isolation that has led most commentators, with justifiable surprise, to focus on the presence of R’n’B mastermind Timbaland here. This comes in spite of the fact that his contributions are arguably more gimmicky and less significant than those of the many other collaborators here (including Bjork regular Mark Bell, Congolese mavericks Konono No.1, avant drummers Chris Corsano and Brian Chippendale and the master Kora player Toumani Diabate).

If ‘Medulla’ focussed on the sound of the human voice, then ‘Volta’ focuses on the combination of primal rhythms and exquisite, cinematic horn arrangements that sound both vivid and alien. It opens with the delightfully groovy ‘Earth Intruders’, something of a close relation to ‘Human Behaviour’ with its rolling tom drums from Corsano. The lyrics are characteristically bonkers, with Bjork ranting about ‘necessary voodoo’ and ‘metallic carnage’ (although the Dr. Who fan in me genuinely mistook the latter for ‘The Dalek College’). The vocal phrasing is in itself intensely percussive, and it’s fascinating to hear how voice and drums intertwine effortlessly. The distorted thumb pianos of Konono No. 1 emphasise the juxtaposition between the traditional and the shock of the new.

The horns make their first entrance on the quite astounding ‘Wanderlust’, in which Bjork falls into some kind of existential rapture (‘I have lost my origin and I don’t want to find it again’). There’s a genuine sense of awe and mystery here that justifies her use of this suddenly in vogue song title (the REM song of the same name sadly had nothing of the sort). Her voice is also at its most forceful and intimidating, and for all those complaining of a lack of melody, there’s definitely a tune here, unconventional as it may be. The prominence of the polyphonic horn arrangements continues with ‘Dull Flame of Desire’, a lengthy duet with Antony Hegarty that slowly unravels into something weirdly compelling. It seems very much a love song, and as such probably the least oblique song in the set. ‘Vertebrae by Vertebrae’ somehow makes the horns bigger, bolstering them with military percussion. The song is full of curious imagery and Bjork’s vocal twists and turns in entirely unexpected directions. Later, on ‘Pneumonia’, we get Bjork’s voice set along against the horns, which creates a particularly eerie and discomforting effect.

‘Innocence’ stands out as the moment where Timbaland is given some kind of freedom, the beat being particularly syncopated and off-kilter. It also features some odd samples that could easily have come from an old Sega beat-em-up console game. Luckily, the song itself is exquisite, with Bjork singing candidly about self discovery and the onset of sexual awareness (‘to my surprise, I grew to like boys!’) whilst maintaining that the original innocence is still there, simply ‘in different places’. I’m not sure that anybody writes about sex and sexuality quite as convincingly and honestly as Bjork (return to the quite wonderful ‘Cocoon’ from ‘Vespertine’, a song characterised by real musical and lyrical intimacy to match its subject matter). As a result, it was precisely the ‘introspection’ of ‘Vespertine’ and ‘Medulla’ that made them so masterful. I’m therefore grateful that she allows some of that approach to remain on Volta, most notably on the gorgeous ‘I See Who You Are’, in which she sings boldly ‘let’s celebrate now, this flesh on our bones!’. Toumani Diabate’s kora adds exotic flavour.

Bjork has declared that she aimed to return to some kind of rhythmically charged, toe-tapping dance music with ‘Volta’, and this is most clear with the relentlessly punishing ‘Declare Independence’, which sounds remarkably close to something you might hear on a compilation from outrageous London nightclub KashPoint. It has a thumping four-to-the-floor kick drum relentlessly propelling it, and is as confrontational a statement of individuality and liberation as Bjork has yet penned.

The two trickiest songs here are ‘Hope’ and the closing ‘My Juvenile’, for which Antony returns as Bjork’s ‘conscience’. On the former, she sings ‘what’s the lesser of two evils, if a suicide bomber made to look pregnant manages to kill her target or not’. She’s mangling the English language here, but I suppose her real question is whether the success of failure of an act of terrorism makes any difference to how we should judge it. Musically, it is a sublime combination of subtle electronic glitches with Diabate’s lush, delicate kora. ‘My Juvenile’ is bizarrely ambiguous – it could be about falling in love with someone too young, it could be about protecting her child – who knows? Bjork sings ‘My juvenile, I truly say you are my biggest love…one last embrace to tie a sacred ribbon’. Antony justifies it all with ‘the intentions were pure’. It’s a very strange, intensely personal song that concludes the album on an intimate and mysterious note.

Of all Bjork’s albums, ‘Volta’ may be the most stylistically diverse and uncompromising. It doesn’t have the consistent intimate warmth of ‘Vespertine’ for example. Yet there’s a sense of Bjork achieving some kind of transcendence here, observing life on earth from somewhere higher, and translating her observations into a mysterious and ambiguous language. There’s also a dynamic and strident theatricality to Bjork’s vocal performances. Given a few listens, I suspect it will reveal itself as another masterpiece.

No Progression: The Return of Dinosaur Jr.

There are some bands, perhaps those that display their creative ambitions most explicitly, that we want to push themselves further and further, and we get disappointed when they fail. However, there are some bands that have so spectacularly nailed what it is that they do that any form of change might well spell disaster. Three of my favourite bands fall firmly into this category – Teenage Fanclub, The Lemonheads and Dinosaur Jr. All three bands make guitar based rock music that makes no attempt whatsoever to hide its simplicity, and with which it is remarkably easy to connect. Dinosaur Jr. perhaps had the most brutally effective formula – a unique brand of scuzzy slacker rock that somehow managed to sound lazy and invigorating at the same time. That their template greatly informed the grunge phenomena of the early 90s is now undisputed.

How appropriate it is, then, that ‘Beyond’, the first album from the band’s original line-up since 1988’s ‘Bug’ should open with a characteristically coruscating distorted guitar solo from J Mascis. It’s clear from the opening ten seconds that not a lot has changed in the intervening 19 years. Well, good. J Mascis has not lost his ability to pen addictive and infectious rock songs, and ‘Almost Ready’, ‘This Is All I Came To Do’ and the jangly ‘Crumble’ are more than worthy additions to the Dinosaur Jr. canon. The Mascis songs on this album don’t do much to develop or progress this band one bit – but they certainly sound like they are enjoying rediscovering their original strengths. Mascis’ double-tracked guitar solos are consistently thrilling, Barlow is rock solid throughout, and Murph’s drumming is simply awesome, always crisp and propulsive, particularly on the relentless ‘Been There All The Time’. Perhaps the one exception to this is the restrained ‘I Got Lost’, which dares to deploy (shock! horror!) acoustic guitars and a cello. As a consequence, however, it’s probably the least immediate track of the set.

The main obstacle to Dinosaur Jr. breaking out of cult appeal probably continues to be Mascis’ voice – a deliberately muffled, throaty, cigarette-stained whine of contempt for obligation and responsibility. Even the song titles carry that weary sense of resignation and negativity (‘I Got Lost’, ‘What If I Knew’, ‘Pick Me Up’ etc). More casual listener might well therefore embrace the two Lou Barlow compositions featured here. It’s a delight to hear Barlow’s tender melancholy bolstered by this band’s furious riffing and inspired exposition, and ‘Back To Your Heart’ and ‘Lightning Bulb’ easily stand up to any of Mascis’ contributions.

Excellent though this album is, and wonderful that it is to see Mascis and Barlow onstage together again, I have to confess to some reservations about this whole project. There’s of course the lingering sense that most reformations have a financial impetus, and given that this one started with some no doubt lucrative festival appearances, there can be little doubt that lucre came into this one too. Nevertheless, one certainly can’t begrudge them earning a little cash, particularly Barlow, who seems to have been largely subsisting throughout his career, a fate that should never befall a songwriter of his quality. I’ve also observed that this reunion seems to have given birth to a rather questionable form of critical revisionism that suggests that the second line-up of Dinosaur Jr. was purely a matter of diminishing returns. Mike Johnson may well have cause to feel a little upset about this, as the later line-up of the band produced three of the greatest singles of the nineties with ‘The Wagon’, ‘Start Choppin’ and ‘Feel The Pain’. ‘Beyond’ is a very satisfying record, but I’m not sure it contains any surefire classics on that level. Still, the fact that there’s still a kinetic and fiery connection between these three is surely enough.

'In those days, they had time for everything...'

…Or so says a line from Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons used by Terence Davies in his masterful film ‘The Long Day Closes’ from 1992. The line strikes me as hugely significant given that the film’s young protagonist Bud values the escapism of the cinema. Today, it’s again become difficult to see the kind of classic films referenced here in repertory (unless you happen to live in London or Paris), and we are constantly being told that we don’t have time for great works of art. Just last week, the Newsnight Review panel, were justly lambasting a new series of 'edited' versions of classic works of literature, with the business mogul responsible for this heinous project stating ‘most people don’t have time to read long novels these days’. Speak for yourself, you overpaid berk! I still read a book every couple of weeks on average. I get so infuriated by marketing types telling me what I can and can’t do, and how much spare time I should have. ‘Time management’ must be one of the most odious phrases in the modern English language.

Davies’ films may be concise by comparison with the great novels of Melville and Tolstoy (both ‘Distant Voices…’ and ‘The Long Day Closes’ clock in at around 85 minutes), but they are challenging for audiences who usually respond only to comfortable cinematic conventions. It is perhaps for this reason that Davies, surely Britain’s greatest living film-maker, cannot now get funding to make another film. This is nothing short of outrageous, especially when big production companies like Working Title can effectively saturate the market with a plethora of banal romcoms.

Like Davies’ earlier masterpiece ‘Distance Voices, Still Lives’, the film is an autobiographical work (this time focussing on the life of a twelve year old boy in 1950s Liverpool), composed of a series of vignettes without straightforward plot or narrative that somehow manage to combine a lingering melancholy with the warm glow of nostalgia. It’s this peculiarly unsentimental juxtaposition of sensations that captures the very essence of human experience – life can be hard, but the simple fact of being alive is, in itself, a cause for awe and inspiration. It is all the more remarkable that Davies achieves this through a uniquely cinematic language, marrying meticulously composed images to a soundtrack of period songs (including Nat King Cole, Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds), radio programmes and movies.

There is little in the way of narrative or dialogue but to argue that the film offers no character development or that we cannot sympathise with the family environment at its core is palpable nonsense (interestingly, it would appear to be mostly American writers who have argued this in what little available writing there is about the film online). The songs the characters sing frequently reveal much about their joys and regrets, albeit in much more subtle and controlled ways than conventional dialogue. Where speech plays a greater role, it frequently provides light relief, and there is great warmth to the characters of Edna and Curly.

It’s easily possible to identify with Bud’s love of cinematic escapism, his mother’s understated, yet unconditional love, his confused religiosity born from a Catholic upbringing, and his wide-eyed observation of the world around him. Very much a companion piece to ‘Distant Voices…’, the film is essentially about memory, and Davies is surely right to assert that memories rarely come with a recognisable chronological framework. Whilst the film covers a clear period of a few months between 1955 and 1956, the timeframe is decidedly non-linear.

Through creating a sustained and coherent mood, Davies creates a portrait of that unique time on the cusp of adolescence that is naturalistic and wholly convincing. Bud’s childhood might be free from the violence and rage of Davies’ earlier film (‘The Long Day Closes’ is set a few years after the death of Davies’ father) but it is far from trouble free. There is the disciplinarian rule of the cane at Bud’s new school, as well as the rigorous mundanity of the teaching (a scene detailing a dictation about erosion is hilarious) and the social Darwinism of the playground. There’s also the fact that Bud’s life away from school is mostly lonely and solipsistic, and the film brings to life his self reliance with real panache and elegance.

Davies has claimed that he aimed to capture ‘the poetry of the ordinary’ with these films, and his greatest achievement in ‘The Long Day Closes’ may be the capturing of a childhood sense of wonder and obsession with detail. There’s a wonderful shot capturing the light changing on a carpet, and as a result the audience sees the regular, ordered aspects of the world through Bud’s inspired, imaginative vision. Another wonderful moment shows Bud and his family in the cinema, with a long tracking shot gradually showing the cinema transforming into a Church, thus neatly highlighting the parallels between the ritualistic aspects of moviegoing and worship. The combination of images as extraordinary as this has a cumulative impact, and the final shot of Bud and his friend gazing out at a darkening sky therefore assumes a genuine grandeur.

Whilst it’s tempting to emphasise the comparative lack of hardship or fear in ‘The Long Day Closes’, the film certainly offers hints of troubles to come. There’s a latent homoeroticism to some of Bud’s observations, and his vivid nightmare indicates a sense of underlying unease. David Thomson has emphasised that the film stops short of the time period that may be the most challenging (although Davies did address the difficulties of his young adulthood in his earlier trilogy of short films), but this is surely exactly what Davies intended. ‘The Long Day Closes’ offers a sense of innocence being eroded that is implied rather than stated, and is all the more effective for this.

The Terence Davies retrospective continues next week at the BFI Southbank.

Female Artistry vs. The Marketing Buzz: A bit more on Feist, Mavis Staples and a crass aside on The Arctic Monkeys

It’s immensely pleasing to report that Feist’s ‘The Reminder’ is every bit as wonderful as the sampler I received two weeks ago suggested. Although it is stylistically scattershot, veering from luxurious pop to a languid jazzy folk not a million miles from Jolie Holland or Erin McKeown, it achieves coherence through the carefully crafted nuances of the arrangements and the compassionate emotional insight of its lyrics. Feist’s vocals are exquisite throughout – technically impressive but beautifully controlled, distinctive but naturalistic and unmannered, frequently as interesting for what they reserve as for what they express. The nearest comparison that springs to my mind is the late great Dusty Springfield, a singer consistently underrated in her lifetime, capable of handling a great variety of material, genuinely soulful and emotionally convincing. Gonzales’ piano is also a crucial ingredient, proving that he is as capable of sophisticated musicality as the outstanding novelty rap pop he produced under his own name.

It’s possible that the sequencing may be an obstacle for some listeners, with the album concluding with its most stately and atmospheric tracks. It’s precisely because of this that the album has a satisfying emotional arc though, and repeated listens draw out its subtleties and textures. If there’s an over-arching theme, it’s love and the machinations of the female heart – well-worn subjects perhaps, but Feist effortlessly invests them with new depth and feeling. In addition to the tracks I’ve already discussed, highlights include the gloriously soulful ballad ‘The Limit To Your Love’, and the vulnerable ‘Intuition’, which ponders the difficulty of knowing which relationships might be the ones that last (‘did I, did I miss out on you?’ she asks at the end, with a hint of genuine sadness and regret). ‘The Water’ and ‘Honey Honey’ are both mysterious and minimal, with Feist’s voice given plenty of space to cast its spell. These songs carry the memories of former love affairs, both unrequited and realised, and the album frequently contrasts the heady rush of young love with the changing feelings that come with age and experience. It’s a beautiful album – at once touching and mesmerising.

Showcasing these songs at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire last week, Leslie Feist also proved herself a compelling stage presence, challenging and entertaining the audience in equal measure. Gigs that consist almost entirely of unreleased material can be problematic (the Kings of Leon performance at Glastonbury 2004 seems a case in point), but this worked brilliantly, due at least in part to the quality of the material, but also ably assisted by the subtle and unusual qualities of her malleable musical ensemble.

Equally brilliant, albeit for very different reasons, is Mavis Staples’ collection of ‘freedom’ songs ‘We’ll Never Turn Back’. This is yet another career resurrection from the outstanding Anti label (also responsible for Solomon Burke’s ‘Don’t Give Up On Me’ and Bettye Lavette’s ‘I’ve Got My Own Hell To Raise’). Where the Feist album is reflective, melancholy and restrained, ‘We’ll Never Turn Back’ is fierce, steadfast, gutsy and committed in restating the relevance of these songs beyond the original civil rights movement (in which The Staple Singers of course played a crucial role).

Not content with having produced his own passionate but whimsical vision of a vanished America on ‘My Name is Buddy’, Ry Cooder also lends his considerable talents to this project both as a musician and producer. This record simply sounds wonderful – keeping the gospel spirit of these songs by sticking to traditional instrumentation, but with inventive playing and dynamics that give this powerful material a fresh questing imperative. Cooder’s own contributions on guitar and mandolin are dependably crisp and powerful, but Jim Keltner’s drumming is equally significant. Nobody plays a backbeat with the degree of accuracy that Keltner commands, and he invests each of these songs with a relentless force that, as one of the songs suggests, they will not be moved. ‘Ninety Nine and a Half’ even sounds like it could be a dance track – fusing the spirit of folk, gospel and disco. Cooder’s musical backdrops are a consistent reminder of the close links between the American folk tradition, gospel, blues and soul.

Mavis’ sleevenotes show that she is keenly aware of the social injustices and divisions that still characterise modern America, and there are thinly veiled attacks on the Bush administration throughout this record. Cooder and Staples add lyrics to the traditional songs (‘This Little Light of Mine’ now states ‘ain’t gonna fight in no rich man’s war’) and Staples frequently veers out into long half-spoken, half-sung extemporised sermons. The more sceptical among us might prefer to question Staples’ reliance on the Church in this context (particularly given the evangelical commitment to Bush’s administration), but Staples states her form of Christianity boldly and explicitly (‘My God is a loving God…a merciful God’), and this music has the uplifiting and inspirational qualities of the best gospel music. There’s also real insistence to both form and rhythm here, with repetition playing a strong part in ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’ and ‘Turn Me Around’.

Staples has lost some of her power and range in recent years, but in this context, her gritty, emphatic voice, with clear phrasing, sounds just right. The deeper end of her range still has a unique character too, as demonstrated clearly on the title track. This is clearly not just material with which she is familiar, but a collection of songs which can best channel her determination and spiritual commitment. Anyone with even the remotest interest in American cultural and social history should snap this up straight away, but that it also serves as a living, breathing document of America’s current predicament makes it all the more remarkable.

Of course, everyone else is rushing out for the second Arctic Monkeys album. Whilst I have no particular axe to grind against this band, the shape the reviews for this album are taking fascinates me as an example of the more cynical machinations of the music industry. The consensus seems to be that it represents a musical development from the much-lauded debut (not having heard it yet, I can't really judge this), yet it seems to have received a more measured four-star treatment than the hyperbolic five star, best British debut album nonsense heaped upon its predecessor. Paul Morley stated on Newsnight Review that 'Favourite Worst Nightmare' was 'the perfect soundtrack to the self-consciousness of the moment'. What the hell does that mean, Paul? And, yes, of course they were aware that it was their second album when they were making it. If Alex Turner is such a poetic genius, one would also expect him to be able to count. To my ears, 'Brianstorm' is a neat fusion of the limber white-boy funk of Franz Ferdinand with the taut guitar pop of The Libertines. Lyrically, it's characterised by joky rhymes and bad puns. In its observational style, it's hardly all that far removed from something like Blur's 'Charmless Man'. Nothing particularly wrong with any of that, but it's hardly an original vision.

A Song and Dance Man: Dylan Triumphs at Wembley

I’ve been going to Bob Dylan London shows since 2002, and watching with grim fascination as he’s struggled to reinterpret his back catalogue for what has become an undeniably mangled voice. Some of his more ardent followers mourn the loss of the Appalachian subtleties brought to his touring band by guitarists Larry Campbell and Charlie Sexton, but thinking back to those shows, they seem more memorable for utterly garbled renditions of ‘Blowing In The Wind’ (with Sexton and Campbell struggling to harmonise with a wayward Dylan) or ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’, most of the lyrics rendered incomprehensible with an ambivalent mumble or growl. The softer, delicate arrangements of those days also did little to mask Dylan’s obvious deficiencies.

Not so the Bob Dylan and Band of 2007. Something has undoubtedly been revived in Dylan’s performance since the recording of ‘Modern Times’. Whilst the voice is hardly likely to make a magical recovery, the significant qualities of Dylan’s artistry were always crisp, playful phrasing and a skill for manipulating language and rhythm, rather than the conventions of pitch or timbre. For the first time in what must be many years, these qualities were evident consistently in his shows at Wembley this week. Sunday’s performance came as such a surprise to me that I picked up a ticket for Monday’s show at the last minute from the Wembley box office – an excellent move as it turned out, for Monday’s show was even better. Dylan has, at least temporarily, rediscovered the ability to communicate, and with it, the capacity to move an audience, as was obvious from the rapturous reception from Monday’s crowd particularly.

Although some commentators seem perplexed by it, part of the reason for the increased consistency surely lies in the emphasis on uptempo traditional rhythm and blues over melodic acoustic songs. The hillbilly meets swing and R&B stylings of ‘Modern Times’ provide a much more suitable context for Dylan’s singing (almost like preaching during many of the songs), and also gives his remarkable touring band a chance to spar ferociously, with enviable spontaneity and vigour. Dylan has surely been wise to play six songs from ‘Modern Times’ at each of these shows – he’s clearly committed delivering the material clearly and with feeling, and it allows him to make more judicious forays into his back catalogue.

From the opening lines of ‘Cat’s In The Well’ on Sunday (a slightly perverse opener, but one that actually works well as a curtain-raiser for these shows given its 12 bar form), there’s power and control in Dylan’s delivery. It’s not one of his best songs, but many might opt to read new prescience in its apocalyptic howl (‘Cat’s in the well, and grief is showing its face/The world’s been slaughtered and it’s such a bloody disgrace….Cat’s in the well and the leaves are starting to fall/Goodnight my love and may the lord have mercy on us all’). It sounded propulsive and furious.

What’s proved interesting for many is that Dylan is back on guitar again, for the first time since 2002. He plays four songs on electric Stratocaster, following ‘Cat’s In The Well’ with a chugging, desperate version of ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’. It’s a song to which he might well have been indifferent on previous tours, now spat out with a newfound confidence and sense of purpose. It’s clear that this is going to be a great show when ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’ proves recognisable from its opening lines – there’s no game of ‘guess which song he’s actually singing’ this time round. He ends his four songs on guitar with a blisteringly relentless take on ‘It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’, singing the melody entirely on one note, almost rapping, but brilliantly intense. Last time I saw this song performed, the only comprehensible line was ‘even the president of the United States sometimes has to stand naked’, which got a giant cheer, perhaps because the audience had had to wait a good three minutes to work out which song it was. There’s no need for that tonight. Nobody knows exactly why Dylan stopped playing guitar (although the onset of arthritis would seem as likely an explanation as any), but regardless of the superfluity of adding a fourth guitar to the group, returning to the instrument has clearly revitalised him.

He’s then on to keyboards for a snarly, prophetic delivery of ‘The Levee’s Gonna Break’ and a tender and compassionate reading of ‘Spirit on the Water’ (one of the best of his recent batch of songs). Oddly, it has even more space than the album version, and Denny Freeman (unfairly maligned on Dylan web forums as a poor guitarist for his preference for languid, melodic lines) plays two inspired solos as a result. It swings with a delicate lilt. Dylan’s keyboard playing remains caustic, unorthodox and defiantly off-kilter, and whilst this often works well, I wasn’t quite convinced by the preference for a cheesy Bontempi organ sound over the electric piano used on previous keyboard tours. It did rather make ‘When The Deal Goes Down’ sound like the soundtrack to a fairground carousel ride, perhaps undermining the convincing and affecting vocal performance.

This might just be a retrospective view following Monday’s more intense performance, but there was some degree of deterioration following a crackling ‘Rolling and Tumbling’. A groovy version of ‘Blind Willie McTell’, still relatively rarely performed, and bolstered by multi-instrumentalist Donnie Herron’s banjo, enlivened proceedings but, whilst it was a pleasure to hear ‘Chimes of Freedom’ (one of Dylan’s greatest and most complex ‘protest’ songs), he occasionally resorted to the cursed upsinging device at this point. Luckily, an astounding, brilliantly controlled ‘Nettie Moore’, with Herron’s violin adding to the mournful mood, rescued proceedings but things slipped again with a perfunctory ‘Summer Days’ (perhaps surprisingly the only ‘Love and Theft’ song in the set), Dylan forgetting the opening lines to two of the verses (and, if anything, his greater clarity elsewhere made this all the more obvious). ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ provided the standard conclusion, with a rollicking ‘Thunder on the Mountain’ and ‘All Along The Watchtower’ as encores.

At Dylan’s 2005 Brixton show, I was astounded by versions of ‘Shelter From The Storm’ and ‘A Hard Rain’s-A-Gonna Fall’ where all the lines were crisp and clear. The entirety of Monday’s show was performed at this level. It also had the edge of the two shows for the considered judgement of the set list, with a little more variety in pace and dynamic. Whilst there was nothing out of the ordinary for this tour, it was great to get ‘Watching The River Flow’ and a superb ‘John Brown’ (a war song slightly reminiscent of the Irish ballad ‘Mrs. McGrath’, which Springsteen recorded for his Seeger Sessions project last year). I also enjoyed a fiery and almost funky rendition of ‘Ain’t Talkin’ (which replaced ‘Nettie Moore’), with the band sounding particularly tight and inspired.

There was also real interplay and chemistry on display – with Dylan visibly directing the band, seemingly calling on Herron and rhythm guitarist Stu Kimball to play more. This reached its apotheosis with a magnificent, moving version of ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’. Dylan delivered much of the last verse in drawn-out triplets, and the band followed suit in a moment of wonderfully spontaneous group improvisation.

Perhaps it’s because the more animated crowd contributed to the show, inevitably responding ‘Nooooooo!’ when Dylan crooned ‘you think I’m over the hiiiiiillll?’ on ‘Spirit on the Water’, but both singer and band seemed more alive to creative possibilities in this show. Also, Dylan’s posture was less static, and at the keyboards he appeared far less rigid, instead moving in time with the music.

The only real flaw in an otherwise outstanding show was his confusing the lyrics to ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ (‘you used to be…so amused….by the mystery tramp...’ oops!), but again, this simply served to highlight his increased commitment and clarity elsewhere. These were two great shows, delivered with apocalyptic fervour, and constituting a major creative reawakening in the live arena at last. He sang, he even had a little dance.

The Inner Child: Panda Bear's 'Person Pitch'

I can remember having quite an in-depth conversation with Emmy the Great about Animal Collective during a car journey from the Brixton Windmill to Camden Town.
I think this must have been around the time the group released ‘Sung Tongs’, something of a leap towards accessibility, but Emmy had their debut album ‘Spirit They’ve Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished’ on the car stereo. I had ambivalent feelings about this record – whilst it contained flashes of the inspiration the group have since distilled far more successfully, it was also fiercely combative, characterised by noise so high-pitched it induced headaches. I’m all for experimentation, but I wondered whether their electronic interventions need be quite so forced and malevolent. Emmy clearly loved the album, but I feel that the group’s more recent excursions, which have assimilated electronic trickery and improvisation far more comfortably, have proved me right. I haven’t really felt the need to return to that frustrating debut.

Noah Lennox, AKA Panda Bear, is the group’s drummer and singer, and whilst ‘Person Pitch’ is his second solo recording, it’s his first to gather a feverish level of excitement from the cognoscenti. Many are suggesting it is the best record yet from the entire Animal Collective staple. They may well be right. Panda’s debut ‘Young Prayer’ has, with hindsight, been judged as a little confounding and obscure, although I loved its powerful mix of percussive clamour and mantric chanting. ‘Person Pitch’ arguably adopts a much more coherent vision though, weaving infectious melody and even some comprehensible, affecting lyrics into its intoxicating sound collage.

‘Intoxicating’ is a tricky adjective inevitably implying 60s cliché, but despite Lennox’s rejection of mind-altering substances on ‘Take Pills’, this music comes very close to a genuine recreation of the lysergic sounds of the psychedelic era. It’s not just mere homage, as Lennox’s cut and paste use of samples adds a fresh and exciting impetus to the music. If Lennox doesn’t require drugs to achieve this, surely the more interesting it all becomes. The most obvious influence is certainly Brian Wilson, particularly apparent in Lennox’s meticulously crafted harmonies, but there are also hints of The Byrds’ explorations on ‘3D’, The Monkees circa ‘Head’, and in the imaginative collage approach, David Axelrod’s productions for The Electric Prunes.

Many critics described the early Animal Collective material as ‘childlike’, and there’s a sense of awe and discovery here that lends that description weight in an entirely positive sense. The music, constructed almost entirely from samples, is dense and compelling. It has the minimalist ethos of contemporary composition, layering a variety of sounds over what can frequently be reduced to just one chord – it’s far more about texture, mood and atmosphere. This effect is rendered brilliantly on ‘I’m Not’, the album’s summery, swirling centrepiece.

Lyrically, Lennox makes little attempt to avoid straying into whimsy, but this is an intrinsic part of this album’s quirky and endearing charm. On the opening ‘Comfy in Nautica’, he proclaims, with little sense of irony, ‘coolness is having courage’. Well, there’s probably some truth in that sentiment, even if most lyricists would stop short of taking it further than a private notepad. It’s almost as if Lennox is trying to recapture some of the perceptive observations that children can make, many of which get lost in the more mundane routine of adult life.

Lennox creates great impact from altering the mood of his constructions mid-way through. Whilst the 12 minute epic ‘Bros’, daringly released as a single, is hypnotically relentless, it’s the added layers of processed guitars towards the conclusion that elevate the music to a new level. ‘Take Pills’ shifts between a woozy, abstract introduction into something chiming, infectious and almost jaunty. It’s a shift both surprising and satisfying. For all the obvious reference points, ‘Good Girls/Carrots’, another 12 minute epic, is both primitive and disturbingly modern, with its pulsating rhythms borrowed from house music. The tablas that open the track provide this album’s clearest link back to ‘Young Prayer’.

There’s a playful contrast at work between driving rhythms, and the hazy somnambulance of the punctuating mood pieces (particularly ‘I’m Not’ and ‘Search For Delicious’). Lennox arguably saves the simplest, and perhaps the best, for last with ‘Ponytail’. At just two minutes, its brevity comes as welcome relief after the intensity of the album’s main expositions. The lyrics are simple and charming (‘when my soul starts growing, I get so hungry, and I wish it never would stop growing’) It also sounds wonderfully warm, a contented conclusion to a quite remarkable album.

Kurt Vonnegut: 1922 - 2007

It's worth taking some time to mourn the passing, and celebrate the life of one of my American heroes, the great writer Kurt Vonnegut, who has died at the age of 84. Vonnegut had a genius for reducing complex issues and concepts to their starkest, simplest terms and was a master of dry, biting satire. It's perhaps for this reason that he always rejected the 'science fiction' box, although as a scientist-turned-writer, he was in a unique position among the great American writers, and able to highlight the pitfalls of a form of 'progress' that continually threatens to destroy civilisation. As a self-proclaimed progressive socialist and committed member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Vonnegut realised that left wing politics and personal freedom needn't be mutually exclusive, and his experiences as a PoW and of the Dresden bombings also left him a firm pacifist.

Vonnegut was perhaps unique among the great male American writers for his mercilessly concise prose style. The likes of Roth, Updike, Bellow and Ford opted for intentional verbosity, elaborate rants and lengthy sentences. Vonnegut summed up his sentiments in crisp, dry phrases ('So it goes...' etc) and his writing never contained anything extraneous.

Whilst many will remember the superb anti-war novel Slaughterhouse Five, or perhaps Cat's Cradle or Breakfast of Champions as his best works, it's also worth noting his mastery of the essay and short story forms, as well as his emergence from retirement last year with his extraordinary 'memoir' 'A Man Without A Country' (not so much a memoir as a remarkably cogent and wise summary of where America has gone wrong, and, more impressively, even offering some solutions to put it right). Despite his initial hope for the world turning into pessimism, and his personal battles with depression (he once attempted suicide), Vonnegut still managed to make his allegories and satires blisteringly funny.

It is an extraordinary injustice (and one which we should not begrudge Vonnegut identifying himself in 'A Man Without a Country') that he was never awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. If any writer has better captured the ideals highlighted by the Nobel committee, I've yet to find them.

Many full obituaries will appear in the press over the next few days, but it's surely best to let the man speak for himself. Here are just a few of his edifying statements:

"When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon."

"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before."

"We are put on earth to fart around, don't let anyone tell you any different."

"I said that only one person on the entire planet benefited from the raid, which must have cost tens of millions of dollars. The raid didn't shorten the war by half a second ... only one person benefited - not two or five or ten. Just one. ... Me. I got three dollars for each person killed. Imagine that." (1977 Paris interview on the Dresden firebombings)

"For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere."

"My last words? 'Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.'"

"Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward. "

"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance. "

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. "

"Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe."

Identity Parade: Bill Callahan

All this playing with identity is really rather tedious, isn’t it? Following in the pretentious footsteps of Prince and, a more obvious connection, Will Oldham, Bill Callahan has adopted a variety of guises. He started out recording as Smog before rather stubbornly adding parentheses and making the s lower case to become (smog). He has now strangely opted to start using his real name some distance into his career. Aside from the fact that this makes record store managers’ jobs unnecessarily difficult when filing music, what exactly is the change of name meant to signify? Has there been some great change in his songwriting formula? Are there great revelations here that lead to some kind of unmasking or a more intimate, less cynical style? Perhaps (unfairly) he’s become better known as Mr. Joanna Newsom now anyway.

Branding aside, ‘Woke on a Whaleheart’ is his umpteenth album and I have to confess I wasn’t sure I really needed yet another Callahan album in my life. He’s been remarkably consistent, misjudging only with the oblique droning of ‘Rain On Lens’, but his three greatest albums (‘Wild Love’, ‘Knock Knock’ and ‘Supper’) best summarise his main concerns, with everything else simply a bonus. His last album (‘A River Ain’t Too Much To Love’) was dependably good, but didn’t really offer anything fresh or surprising.

After just three listens, I’m already convinced that ‘Woke on a Whaleheart’ is one of those albums reviewers have taken for granted, simply because there’s already a wealth of notable Callahan material out there, and there’ll likely be another one within a couple of years anyway. I suspect the talk of a blunting of his lyrical barbs has been overstated (there might be a line like ‘You bring out the softness in everyone’, but he juxtaposes it with ‘we gather like ravens on a rusty scythe’), but the music has certainly acquired real warmth and attention to detail.

It’s uncharacteristic, given the raw and untamed energy of much of his own music, but perhaps part of the credit for this should go to former Royal Trux guitarist Neil Michael Hagerty, who has been drafted in as producer. It’s also fair to say that this is the most intriguing and expressive group of musicians that Callahan has assembled. The most obvious surprises are provided by Howard Draper’s mournful piano, the unusual backing vocals of Deani Pugh-Flemmings and the neat combination of bass and percussion that underpins the album’s more rhythmic moments.

A handful of the songs stand out among Callahan’s best. ‘Diamond Dancer’ (‘she danced so hard she turned herself into a diamond’) is a sweet and generous song, encapsulated in pithy and concise language, and set to a relentless beat that almost grooves. ‘Night’ begins with Callahan’s hushed vocal set against a lone piano playing a deceptively simple figure slightly reminiscent of REM’s ‘Nightswimming’ – the effect is haunting. There’s also the pleasingly autumnal ‘Sycamore’, with its intertwining guitars, which, to my ears at least, seem slightly out of tune with each other, perhaps intentionally. The all-inclusive closer ‘A Man Needs A Woman or a Man To Be A Man’ emulates the scratchy shuffle of Carl Perkins or Scotty Moore, and features some quite wonderful lyrics. Callahan describes a feminine room, with its ‘legacy of good’ before proceeding to confess that ‘I’m not sure I can uphold it on my own’. The song is brimming with startling firework imagery (‘fireworks are wasted during the day/but I set them off anyway’, ‘and when it’s good and dark/The sky a wet black, like the earth has turned’) and the arrangement swells brilliantly.

Callahan has never been the most melodic of writers, and it’s possible that his half-spoken baritone will remain too much of an acquired taste for the unconverted. Nevertheless, ‘Woke on a Whaleheart’, whilst perhaps more conventional than anything else he’s recorded, is surely in the upper tier of his catalogue – both warm and cerebral, as romantic as it is mordant.

Jogging The Memory: Feist's 'The Reminder'

This isn't a full review, as I've not heard the whole album yet, but I've spent part of this evening listening to a sampler of what looks to be an outstanding second album from Feist. The slow burning popularity of debut 'Let It Die', at least in part due to the appearance of 'Mushaboom' in an ubiquitous advert (but can I remember what the hell it was advertising? No!), might have paved the way for Feist to drift comfortably into the middle of the road.

The opening track on the sampler, and the album's first single ('My Moon My Man'), suggests otherwise. It's pure pop - with its stomping pianos and sultry, expressive vocals. Simultaneously groovy, sexy and seductive, it's one of the the finest singles of the year so far. It also has an absolutely irresistible twangy guitar break. Collaborating with Gonzales, Jamie Lidell and Mocky on this album has predictably directed Feist towards more sophisticated textures and arrangements - much as I like Broken Social Scene, this is about as far away from their sound as it's possible to get.

The five tracks on this disc neatly encapsulate the diversity at the heart of 'The Reminder' - each track takes a radically different approach, but coherence is achieved through the distinctive tones of Feist's vocals and the emphasis on melody. '1234' is also brilliant - another pure pop song for sure, but one that dares to feature banjo and brass without drifting into folk pastiche. It sounds fresh and exciting, and also features some splendid honky tonk piano (presumably from the talented Gonzales).

'Sealion' built on a sample of a Nina Simone chant, has relentless rhythmic drive and an infectious energy that is sure to be a highlight of this month's live shows. It's propelled by layered handclaps, vocals and, again, some superb twangy guitar playing. 'I Feel It All' is similarly joyous, but perhaps a little more conventional in its arrangement, characterised more by strumming guitars this time. It's the layering of the vocals that works superbly here, and when they are set against the delicate chime of a glockenspiel, the effect is particularly charming. The dreamy romanticism of 'The Park', apparently inspired by London's open spaces, is enchanting and its acoustic rustles and plucks work a subtle, spacey magic. I'm not entirely convinced by the birdsong backdrop though - that seems like a rather obvious and unnecessary flourish.

Feist has juxtaposed a vast array of influences with real panache here, creating an amalgam that sounds exciting and intriguing, all dominated by her vocals, which are stronger and more creative here than on 'Let It Die'. Sadly, this sampler does not reveal whether there are any inspired interpretations to rival her take on The Bee Gees 'Inside and Out' or Ron Sexsmith's 'Secret Heart'. It's clear, however, that she has more than enough inspiration of her own this time around. Slowly but surely, Leslie Feist seems to be drifting into serious artistic and creative territory - there's plenty of evidence here to suggest that she could become as singular and unusual a female talent as Bjork. Can't wait for the Shepherd's Bush Empire show now!

Against The Grain: Subtle Shifts from Kings of Leon and Low

When I interviewed Kings of Leon at Glastonbury 2003, they proved themselves tedious and frustrating interviewees. Barely able to get more than cursory one word answers out of them, I concluded that they probably had little of interest to say anyway. Admittedly, this probably was not helped by the fact that I was directed to limit my questioning to the festival (by my people not theirs!), but I couldn’t escape the view that they set out deliberately to obfuscate their unwitting and inexperienced interrogator. Their set, extraordinarily second only to the headliners (I think it was Oasis that night), did little more to convince me of their value. Debuting new material, but with little passion or conviction, they sounded tired, and already bored with that terribly unpleasant business of playing music to over 100,000 people.

Much has happened in the intervening years to force me into changing my mind. The album that followed that perfunctory Glastonbury set (‘Aha Shake Heartbreak’) turned out to be a vast improvement on their debut, channelling the spirit of Southern country rock with an electric charge drawn straight from the blues. The focus became less on the media spin (their supposed family status, their preacher father, the mysterious Angelo, who may or may not be the creative force behind the band) and more on the kinetic music they were creating, at last justifying the blitz of hype.

Again produced by Ethan Johns (also responsible for Ryan Adams’ ‘Heartbreaker’ among other substantial works) and the aforementioned Angelo, ‘Because of the Times’, poor grammar of the title notwithstanding, is another big step forward. The group have succeeded here in creating a big rock album, inspired as much by The Pixies as Led Zeppelin or Lynyrd Skynyrd, that sounds organic and fresh whilst remaining steeped in the rich history of rock and roll.

Real attention has been paid to the sound of this record. Although it’s still based firmly on a raw, ‘live band’ template, there’s plenty of attention to detail in the arrangements. Guitar lines are carefully interwoven, and the bulk of the songs are built on the sturdy foundations of Jared and Nathan Followill’s crisp basslines and strangely funky drumming. Also used to its full capacity as an instrument is the gritty voice of Caleb Followill which, increasingly versatile in its impact, ranges from the sincerely affecting to the caustic and visceral. Even though his lyrics sometimes seem like a string of bizarre non-sequiturs, he manages to twist the words into powerful and compelling vignettes.

There’s also a surprising level of diversity in the music, and a handful of the songs require a few listens before they really take root. There’s the slow-burning epic opener ‘Knocked Up’, which along with the crunching single ‘On Call’ and ‘Trunk’ deploys atmospherics effectively. ‘Knocked Up’ also veers quite brilliantly between it’s minimal, brooding verses and its powerful, extrovert choruses. Perhaps most unexpected of all is the deliciously groovy ‘My Party’, which quite comfortably beats the likes of Franz Ferdinand and Arctic Monkeys at their own wiry, angular game. The explosive ‘Charmer’ is a direct hotline to The Pixies’ ‘Debaser’, although it comes across as homage rather than copycat plagiarism. The superbly titled ‘McFearless’ is both relentless and compelling.

Lyrically, Caleb still devises some peculiar and occasionally uncomfortable metaphors (I particularly like ‘Girl, you’re wanted like a wanted man’ and ‘she shakes like the morning railway’) – perhaps he’s still trying to be a little too clever. When he’s direct, the results are much better. ‘True Love Way’ is a blistering account of frustrated lust (‘She’s a cold one and it hurts me so/ It’s a dark path and a heavy toll’), and, by way of contrast, the protagonist of ‘Black Thumbnail’, whilst deeply affected by beauty, seems afraid of love (‘my cold cold sailor heart says get on your way/I ain’t too proud to say but that’s how I’m made/I’ll be that person til my dying day/I try so awful hard but I can’t change’). Best of all is ‘Knocked Up’ which, as many other commentators have observed, seems like the masculine counterpart to Madonna’s ‘Papa Don’t Preach’, with its young lovers determined to keep their child.

There certainly seems to be much more depth here than on the previous albums, both lyrically and musically. KoL seem to be that rare breed of band – in an era where the earth shattering debut album seems to be all or nothing, and where time is most definitely not on a band’s side, they are slowly maturing and coming good.

Perhaps only the most ardent of Low fans will jump for joy at the prospect of yet another album from this most regular and dependable of bands. Like its predecessor (‘The Great Destroyer’), ‘Drums and Guns’ comes with plenty of talk of a change in direction. The last album actually heralded nothing of the sort, it was simply a heavier, louder take on the same furrow Low have been ploughing for years. ‘Drums and Guns’ arguably offers much more in the way of surprises. Whilst it retains the key elements of Low’s trademark sound – the stark minimalism, the stately tempos and the mellifluous harmonies from Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker (it’s hard to think of two other voices in the contemporary pop landscape that connect so beautifully with each other)- it also adds striking new elements . There are delicate electronic percussion interventions, ambient sound, and a variety of keyboards that shift the emphasis away from rudimentary beaten toms and strumming guitars.

‘Drums and Guns’ is certainly a grower, which coming from a group that is slow burning at the best of times may not exactly be a selling point. The majority of Low albums do have some moments of real immediacy though – a ‘Just Like Christmas’, ‘Dinosaur Act’ or ‘That’s How You Sing Amazing Grace’, for instance. There’s nothing remotely comparable here. It’s not helped by the fact that it starts terribly, with ‘Pretty People’ pitting Sparhawk and Parker against a rather uninteresting backdrop of mundane droning feedback. ‘All the soldiers are gonna die/All the little babes, they’re all gonna die’ they sing, rather portentously, suggesting that ‘Drums and Guns’ will wear its theme of a violent and corrupt world rather obviously on its sleeve (the inlay even features arty photographs of, well, drums…and guns).

Mercifully, things get a lot better very quickly. ‘Belarus’ and ‘Breaker’ are two of Low’s quirkiest tracks to date, and given that the entire album is helmed by Dave Fridmann (who has certainly been guilty of superficiality in some of his previous productions), it’s remarkable how subtle and effective the electronics are here. They add an additional layer of mystery and intrigue to this sombre and reflective music. ‘Dragonfly’ is elegant and haunting, as the group so often are. The work that these tracks most remind me of is REM’s criminally underrated ‘Up’, where the band found a new texture and context for their melodic and harmonic sensibilities. The arrival of new bassist Matt Livingston also seems to have heralded a greater reliance on lower tones and pulsating bass lines.

The two most striking tracks are ‘Always Fade’ and ‘Hatchet’, not least because they represent the closest this defiantly slow group has ever come to producing something uptempo. The latter, with its punctuating guitar figures, brazenly melodic vocals and stuttering beat even reminds me a little of Hot Chip circa ‘Coming on Strong’.

Although there is a somewhat murky period after the shock of ‘Hatchet’ (where individual songs do seem to blur into one a little) the album does coalesce both thematically and musically as it progresses. What emerges by the superb conclusion (‘Murderer’ and ‘Violent Past’ are both album highlights) is a sinister, downbeat and very pessimistic world view, both personal and political. ‘Murderer’ is a particularly striking song in the current climate, with its protagonist offering one last service to God ‘before I go’, suggesting ‘you may need a murderer to do your dirty work’. It’s powerful and edgy.

This album seems to have divided opinion as to whether it’s one of the group’s more challenging or accessible ventures, which is odd, given that it clearly can’t be both. I feel it’s comfortably the most difficult of their recent albums, and probably closer in spirit to ‘Trust’ than ‘Secret Name’ or ‘Things We Lost in the Fire’. It is frequently audacious though, where Low albums tend to stick to their very particular comfort zone. They are now finding new ways to sustain a long-term musical career, and ‘Drums and Guns’ is characterised by a new boldness and confrontational vision.

Abstract Fury: Tim Berne's Paraphrase @ The Vortex, 27th March 2007

Tim Berne has been a leading creative force (and a fiercely independent one too) in the New York free jazz scene for over 20 years, but only familiar with the last Big Satan album (‘Souls Saved Hear’), I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from this performance. Then again, that’s surely half the point of free improvisation anyway and if it becomes predictable, it risks losing its impact.

There seemed to have been a slight change of plan for this performance. The last of three shows at The Vortex, it had been billed as a battle between Berne’s two trios Big Satan and Paraphrase, but actually ended up as two sets from the same combination of both groups.

As tends to be the custom with free jazz gigs (proving that even the most spontaneous music can develop its own conventions), the two sets were both extended, continuous improvisations veering between furious powerhouse grooves and lengthy periods of quiet abstraction. To my ears, the band proved far more adept at the former rather than the latter, benefiting greatly from Marc Ducret’s extraordinarily visceral guitar squall (and dexterous soloing), and Tom Rainey’s masterful drumming. Rainey really is world class, dominating the first set with his polyrhythmic explorations and colouring the second with a rich variety of timbre, playing an intriguing solo with his hands.

Acoustic bassist Drew Gress had an impressive empathy with the rest of the group, and the ability to deploy intriguing effects (bowed playing, detuning the lowest string and tapping the body of his instrument). Similarly, Ducret had a good ear for sound, frequently generating unusual noises through the use of his lead as much as his strings.

At its best, this was an instinctive and intuitive performance, veering away from the purely theoretical in favour of toe-tapping but occasionally confounding rhythms. Kurt Vonnegut has described the free improvising group as the clearest expression of the equal collective in action, and there was plenty of evidence of that ideal on display here.

Less successful were the ventures into abstraction, where Berne himself occasionally proved the weak link, relying far too heavily on forced sounds from the upper register of his saxophone, a sonic extreme that no longer sounds particularly original or provocative. This was a particular problem towards the end of the second set, which definitely outstayed its welcome, and ended with a lengthy soporific period leading into two minutes of complete silence.

Elsewhere in the set, though, Berne demonstrated the more sensitive and thoughtful side of his improvising, deploying effective descending figures and even some surprisingly lyrical and melodic lines.

Throughout the show, Stephen Byram and Jonathan Rosen provided visual stimulus with their film-work, the worst of which struck me as banal, the most interesting of which inevitably detracted my attention from the music. Byram and Rosen describe themselves somewhat pretentiously as ‘practising synaesthesiologists’ and, whilst I’m entirely open to multi-media performances involving the marriage of sound and vision, I wasn’t particularly convinced by this particular example.

On balance though, this was a powerful and mostly engaging performance, and one that seems to have proved popular with London audiences. This was one of the more polite and receptive audiences I’ve encountered recently, and the venue was packed out. This unfortunately rendered the atmosphere extremely hot and somewhat claustrophobic – but I guess that’s a small price to pay for a challenging and fascinating evening of music.

The Genius Of Warren Zevon

The three Rhino CD reissues of Warren Zevon albums released this week seem to have been in the pipeline for ages and ages. It also seems that Zevon reissues are like buses – you wait a couple of years for them, and then they all come together (in May, Artemis, the label for which Zevon recorded his last three albums are putting together a 2CD compilation of pre-1976 material for which they’ve somehow managed to secure the rights). Given that these reissues have taken so long to prepare, it’s a shame that they’re not more lavish – cheap jewel cases, and a mere four additional tracks (including relatively unnecessary alternate takes) on each CD. I suspect there must have been more material on the cutting room floor. Still, at £6.99 each, they’re certainly a snip, and more than worth the investment, especially given the entertaining and incisive inlay notes that come with all three. ‘Excitable Boy’ (actually Zevon’s third album, but commonly referred to as his second following his disownment of ‘Wanted Dead Or Alive’) will be familiar as Zevon’s biggest seller and home to his only sizeable hit in ‘Werewolves of London’. 1980’s live album ‘Stand In The Fire’ and 1982’s ‘The Envoy’ have long been considered holy grails among Zevon fans, so long have they been left criminally unavailable. Both now appear on CD for the first time.

It might be accepted wisdom, but ‘Excitable Boy’ probably remained Zevon’s creative high watermark. Although he recaptured some magic with ‘Sentimental Hygiene’, his 1987 collaboration with REM, and the late albums are excellent, this is as fine a collection of songs as he produced. Whilst some of the 80s material is understandably marred by unpleasant synthesisers and pounding drum sounds, Jackson Browne and Waddy Wachtel’s production here is sensitive, naturalistic and unobtrusive. The songs and their remarkable arrangements are allowed to breathe, the playing throughout is masterful, and the superb backing vocals from seasoned professional Jennifer Warnes and The Gentlemen Singers resound brilliantly.

The variety and sheer invention of Zevon’s vision is at its fullest expression on this album. Zevon recognised the poetic qualities of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon et al, but noted that America did not yet have the John Updike or Norman Mailer of songwriting. It is the literate quality of Zevon’s writing that stands out, a preoccupation he would continue through collaborations with his author friends Carl Hiaasen and Hunter S. Thompson. So, we get the title track, a marvellous satire on Attention Defecit Disorder before the term even existed; the majestic and bizarre ‘Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner’, a ghost story of Congo mercenaries co-written with David Lindell, himself an ex-mercenary and the utterly hilarious feckless criminal on the run story of ‘Lawyers Guns and Money’. The opener ‘Johnny Strikes Up The Band’ is one of many great songs Zevon wrote about the art of rock and roll itself, a surprisingly difficult subject for a songwriter to approach without sounding ham-fisted or self-referential.

At the heart of the album is the peculiar juxtaposition of ‘Werewolves of London’ (built around an insistent and repetitive descending chord sequence) and ‘Accidentally Like A Martyr’. The latter, with its seemingly nonsensical title, is one of the most extraordinary ballads in pop history, the technical mastery of its harmony and arrangement betraying Zevon’s classical training at the home of Igor Stravinsky. It is a song that dares to suggest that time in fact does not heal (‘the hurt gets worse and the heart gets harder’) and Bob Dylan took the line ‘Time Out Of Mind’ for the title of his deeply solipsistic and moving 1997 album. ‘Werewolves…’ effectively made Zevon a one-hit wonder, but it’s worth recognising what a funny and inventive song it is, as fine a portrait of a predatory ladiesman as has been written and full of great lines (‘I’d like to meet his tailor!’).

In fact, ‘Werewolves..’ won a BBC Radio 2 vote for greatest opening line in rock a couple of years ago (I’m sure Chinatown restaurant Lee Ho Fuk’s were equally grateful for the plug), but I wonder whether ‘Lawyers, Guns and Money’ (perhaps my favourite Zevon song) might actually surpass it. It’s a tragicomic confessional, told with ribald glee (‘I went home with a waitress, the way I always do/How was I to know that she was with the Russians too?’). Its central plea (‘send lawyers, guns and money/Dad, get me out of this’) never fails to raise a wry smile. That’s before we get to the playful ending, with its masterful breaks (dig the way Zevon grunts ‘huh!’) and superb guitar line.

Of the bonus tracks, the alternate take of ‘Werewolves…’ is interesting only to the most completist of fans, given that it buries the vocal too deeply in the mix and features some unnecessarily busy playing from the rhythm section that smothers the song. They definitely went with the right take in the end. There are two reversions of songs from ‘Wanted Dead Or Alive’ – the solo piano version of ‘Tule’s Blues’, an exceptionally moving break-up song, is powerful and effective, and Zevon’s own string arrangement for ‘Frozen Notes’ is subtle and desolate. The core of Zevon’s genius is contained succinctly within the mere 50 seconds of ‘I Need a Truck’, two verses of a reworked blues delivered accappela. The lyric is masterful, referencing Zevon’s hard-drinking and hell-raising ways (he nearly killed himself early in his career, falling off a stage when drunk) – ‘I need a truck to haul my guns to town/I need a truck to haul my bad thoughts around/I need a truck to haul my Percodan and gin/And I need a truck to haul all my trucks in’ – as deceptively simple and intelligent a verse as any songwriter has written.

The most well-known songs from ‘The Envoy’ are musically less subtle, and betray the mutual appreciation society building between Zevon and Bruce Springsteen (Springsteen is credited as co-writer for ‘Jeannie Needs A Shooter’, which featured on Zevon’s superbly titled 1980 album ‘Bad Luck Streak at Dancing School’). Interestingly, much of ‘The Envoy’ captured that big, behemoth ‘Born in the USA’ sound before Springsteen even got there. ‘Ain’t That Pretty At All’ and ‘Looking For The Next Best Thing’ are intelligent songs perhaps slightly undermined by their production values, whilst the pounding approach works much more successfully for the fascinating title track, perhaps the most startling example of Zevon’s ironic approach to world politics.

Zevon himself may well have appreciated the playful irony that the album is at its most effective when at its least bombastic. The closing ‘Never Too Late For Love’ boldly risks descending into cliché, but ends up more inspiring than sentimental (‘You say you’re tired/how I hate to hear you use that word’) and may well have provided the direct reference point for REM’s ‘Everybody Hurts’. ‘The Hula Hula Boys’ is a delightfully mournful ballad, and ‘Jesus Mentioned’, stripped back to just guitar and voice, stands with Gillian Welch’s ‘Elvis Presley Blues’ as one of the best songs about Elvis’ death, his inspirational power and his unshakeable influence. ‘Let Nothing Come Between You’ tempers the synths with a quieter, less intrusive backbeat and some pleasant jangly guitar work.

It may be slightly uneven, but on balance ‘The Envoy’ is a powerful album that maintained Zevon’s wit, wisdom and songwriting invention. The bonus tracks included here are rather less illuminating. ‘Word of Mouth’ is an instrumental and pleasant enough, the cover of ‘Wild Thing’ is ragged and rough, and the alternate take of ‘Let Nothing Come Between You’ is superfluous. The one substantial song is ‘The Risk’, which most clearly demonstrates the influence of Springsteen on Zevon’s work at this time.

The real revelation of this series is ‘Stand In The Fire’, the 1980 live album that captured Zevon over five nights at the Roxy in LA. It’s remarkable for documenting Zevon as a vivid and incendiary entertainer, making playful alterations to his lyrics and delivering most of the vocals in a gutsy and gritty style. Even Zevon’s great friend Jackson Browne apparently expressed surprise at Zevon’s conjecture that ‘if you’re not entertaining, you’re not doing anything’. Browne had always considered Zevon to be too intelligent and too original for mere entertainment. With these shows, Zevon proved that the cerebral and the visceral need not be mutually exclusive. Here, they are entirely complementary.

For his backing band for these shows, Zevon hired a solid rock group that amusingly specialised in Warren Zevon covers. The result is blisteringly intense and rarely subtle, but it’s precisely this bludgeoning quality that gives much of the material its brutal impact. ‘Werewolves of London’ and ‘Lawyers, Guns and Money’ are rendered fresh by being taken and slightly slower, heavier tempos, and there are even a handful of hilarious machine gun fret-tapping guitar solos. ‘I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead’ from the self-titled album becomes an almost Bon Jovi-esque trudge, whilst ‘Mohammed’s Radio’ is rendered with savage passion.

The album is perhaps most interesting for the two tracks that Zevon composed especially for the shows. The title track is another impassioned rock ‘n’ roll testimony, whilst ‘The Sin’ is an elaborate and compelling prose poem with a striking opening (‘The time that you were cruel for cruelty’s sake’), and a complex web of guilt and intrigue.

Throughout, Zevon is riotously inventive. ‘Werewolves of London’ perhaps undergoes the most significant lyrical adjustments, the key line being replaced by the gleeful bellowing of ‘and he’s looking for James Taylor!’. Jackson Browne also gets a mention (‘I saw Jackson Browne walking slow down the evenue…his heart was perfect!’) which raises a cheer. Zevon gets completely wild on ‘Excitable Boy’, even enjoying some kind of barbed Elvis impersonation mid-way through.

Of all three reissues, ‘Stand In The Fire’ is the one most enhanced by its bonus selections. In fact, it’s difficult to comprehend why these were ever omitted from the original tracklisting. The album came accompanied with a Thomas McGuane quotation claiming ‘the dog ate the part we didn’t like’, but in this instance it would appear that the dog was not entirely helpful. There are superbly energetic takes on ‘Johnny Strikes Up The Band’ and ‘Play It All Night Long’, the latter a gloriously deadpan take on Southern country rock (‘Sweet Home Alabama, play that dead band’s song’ rings the chorus, and even nastier is the zesty ‘there ain’t much to country living: sweat, piss, jizz and blood!’). Most significant though are the two concluding tracks played solo at the piano – a vivid, rambling ‘Frank and Jesse James’ and a beautifully forlorn ‘Hasten Down The Wind’, during which he asks for the house lights to be turned up (‘I think I’ve found the ones who are my friends!’, he cries, in reference to the song’s central lyric). These songs not only provide much needed balance, but also a sense of serious finality evaded by the Bo Diddley medley that originally concluded the album on a much more playful note.

If some people find the show’s pre-encore finish (Zevon going down in gunfire and being stretchered offstage), a little incongruous with his literate and cerebral profile, then they are neglecting the man’s sense of humour, which was both zany and profound. When told of his terminal lung cancer in 2002, Zevon claimed he had just one ambition left – to see the next James Bond film (Die Another Day), an ambition he did live to achieve. When asked what his overall plan was for his last months, he responded dryly ‘I’m gonna enjoy every sandwich’. A man that witty and courageous in the face of death richly deserves these fitting tributes and more.

Up All Night

Apostle Of Hustle - National Anthem of Nowhere (Arts and Crafts)
El-P - I'll Sleep When You're Dead (Definitive Jux)

A couple of albums have emerged in the past couple of weeks that could be serious album of the year contenders (although 2007 is, like the previous two years, offering such rich pickings that I’m not sure there will be one clear standout).

Oddly, given the belated chorus of approval for Toronto’s Broken Social Scene last year, nobody here seems to have noticed that one of their contributors, Andrew Whiteman, has just released a second album under his Apostle of Hustle guise. I wrote in praise of his first record, ‘Folkloric Feel’ a couple of years ago, although I now suspect that my admiration for that album had more to do with its sound and musical sensibility than the quality of Whiteman’s songwriting. ‘National Anthem of Nowhere’ makes big strides in achieving a greater equilibrium between ideas and memorable tunes – this is a consistently excellent set of songs.

Much like ‘Folkloric Feel’, the songs here deploy Whiteman’s burgeoning interest in a variety of music from across the globe, but most particularly the rhythms of Cuba. Whiteman has been remarkably successful in merging these ideas with a more conventional indie-rock template, and where Apostle of Hustle stand apart from a number of their counterparts is in the sheer quality of playing and arranging. Whilst this is very much Whiteman’s project, it sounds like there’s a real group dynamic here, and there’s never any bland strumming patterns or monotonous chugging. Instead, we get the atmospheric and infectious ‘Cheap Like Sebastien’ (a close relation of Wilco’s ‘Handshake Drugs’), the sea-shanty roll of ‘Haul Away’ and the Afro-Cuban groove of ‘My Sword Hand’s Anger’. There are even two Spanish language songs.

There are also a number of moments that will be instantly familiar to any BSS fan. ‘The Naked & Alone’ uses an ascending bass pattern that resembles ‘Stars and Suns’ from ‘You Forgot It In People’, whilst ‘National Anthem of Nowhere’ echoes the grander concerns of the eponymous BSS album with its introduction of an effervescent horn section. Yet, whilst BSS revel in fuzzy, sometimes incoherent production textures, there’s a much greater clarity of sound here that may well elevate this album above and beyond the achievements of the supergroup. Also, Whiteman’s voice sounds confident and commanding here, whereas Broken Social Scene’s vocals tend towards the unfocussed (sometimes burying their best singers – Leslie Feist, Emily Haines etc too deep in a sound fog). BSS are a remarkable band, and there’s something very exciting about the flexible collective approach they adopt – but let’s pay attention when there’s real clarity of vision from their less well known individual members.

It feels like a long time since I’ve written anything substantial about a hip-hop album (although I did briefly comment on Ghostface Killah’s outstanding ‘Fishscale’ in my albums of the year list). Producer and Definitive Jux label supremo El-P has been involved in some of my all time favourite rap records, including Company Flow’s masterpiece ‘Funcrusher’, and the terrifyingly dark netherworld of Cannibal Ox’s ‘The Cold Vein’, a real Urban record if ever there was one. He’s now back with another solo record, following the entertaining ‘Fantastic Damage’ and the brilliant Thirsty Ear jazz project ‘High Water’.

I’m pleased to report that ‘I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead’ is yet another masterpiece, maintaining a standard in production that few others have even come close to matching. It’s darker and heavier than ‘Fantastic Damage’ – if anything closer to the menacing, threatening landscape of ‘The Cold Vein’. It sounds positively dangerous and raw – a musical terrain filled with fear and foreboding. At 55 minutes, it’s mercilessly concise by hip-hop’s bloated standards; there are no pointless skits and no instrumental interludes. Alarm bells sounded when I first heard the guest cast list (including Omar and Cedric from The Mars Volta and Trent Reznor), but not even the mutual backslapping can puncture this record’s distinctive and claustrophobic atmosphere.

Amidst the harsh and punishing production, there is also an intelligence, warmth and emotional resonance that does even more to undermine hip-hop’s stale conventions. How many rap tracks are there with choruses that repeat lines like ‘I found love on a prison ship’? There are amusing ruminations (‘why should I be sober when God is so clearly dusted out of his mind?’) and powerful descriptions of revenge (‘heart of an altar boy molested in confession/who plotted for 20 years then slit the throat of a reverend’). What is most impressive about the lyrics is their preference for half-rhymes and internal rhymes, rather than the more obvious schemes which tend to appear in rap tracks. Even when it hits its most lyrically conventional, as on ‘Drive’, the beats are so relentless and powerful, with rich variety in the sounds and samples that drift in and out. It all coalesces brilliantly on the epic concluding track ‘Poisenville Kids No Wins’, which features subtle vocal interventions from Cat Power. ‘I’ll Sleep…’ is a hard-hitting record with a singular vision – nobody else in hip-hop production is working at this level. It won’t help my insomnia much though….

Further thoughts to come on new albums from Laura Veirs, Willy Mason, Findlay Brown, Maximo Park, Air, Robyn, The Bird and The Bee, Basquiat Strings, Paul Motian and more. I should also take the time to note how great 2007 has been for reissues so far - superb packages from Warren Zevon (with The Envoy becoming available on CD for the first time), Sly and The Family Stone, Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath, Dexy's Midnight Runners, The Triffids and Nico.