Where Bawdy Meets Melancholy

Last night’s Beirut gig at Koko must surely rank as one of the best gigs of 2007 so far. Koko now seems to be the London venue of choice for promoters keen to gamble on aspiring independent artists, and the substantial audience for this show has surely vindicated that calculated risk. This is great to see – it’s just a shame that Koko is such an unwieldy, claustrophobic place. Like the Hotel California, you’re very welcome, but it’s damn near impossible to get out!

I hadn’t heard anything about support act Dirty Projectors before last night. Jeremy Warmsley informed us that mainman Dave Longstreth had some kind of obsession with the first Black Flag album, for which he had retained the inlay, but not the cassette, and for the first DPs album had endeavoured to recreate the sound of that seminal record as he remembered it in his head. Although I know many people for whom the whole US hardcore scene represents something close to an obsession, I’ve never really found the time for it. I therefore can’t comment on how closely Longstreth came to realising that rather bizarre ambition, but I can say that Dirty Projectors sounded like the most radical and original rock act I’ve seen in some time. The intricate and joyful interlocking guitars sounded like they were transported from Mali, and the rhythm section veered gamely between disco-inflected grooves and adroitly handled stabs and punctuations. Added to the mix were some delightful vocal harmonies, and controlled explosions of improvised noise. This should have been too many ideas for one band – but somehow it coalesced superbly. I shall be seeking out some of their recordings as a priority.

Beirut’s almost entirely acoustic live set-up was a joy to behold, with ukuleles, mandolins, various horns, baritone saxophone and accordion amongst sundry other instruments battling to be heard. Mercifully, this was a rare occasion for which Koko seem to have managed a decent sound balance, helped by the band performing with real zest and enthusiasm. The Eastern European folk music upon which Zach Condon has drawn heavily has a very bawdy heart indeed, and the band made the most of this in live performance, although the song’s melodies frequently seem more melancholy or mournful. It’s an intriguing juxtaposition, and the band capture a peculiar conflict between exuberant joy and reserved hesitancy. Zach Condon’s slurred vocals, somewhat similar to those of Rufus Wainwright, are still a slight obstacle, as its frequently difficult to grasp his lyrics and themes. Still, there’s clearly something innate and clear in this music with which audiences connect, as this is the most enthusiastic and excitable London crowd I’ve seen in a while. The new material didn’t sound quite as distinct as Condon had suggested in interviews that it would, although it offered a clear refinement of an already very successful formula. In a sense, more of the same would be more than enough.

Dispensing With Subtlety

Magnolia Electric Co. and Guests, The Scala, 25th June 2007

Having praised Immaculate Machine’s embrace of detail and intricacy yesterday, it’s amusing that my next live music outing was to a gig with little command of subtlety whatsoever. I first raised this point in a rather negative review of the ‘Trials and Errors’ live album a couple of years ago, but there really is a massive gulf between the music Jason Molina and his group commit to record and the sound of the band when performing live. Admittedly, the group has been moving gradually away from the elegiac and mysterious moods of Songs:Ohia in favour of a more conventional rock direction, but even the most recent MEC studio material benefits greatly from light textures full of space and sensitive dynamic contrasts. When on tour, they obviously just like to rock out, and Molina lets his Neil Young fetish get out of control, bursting into exuberant guitar solos far more often than is strictly necessary (can the band’s keyboard player really not improvise?).

Although there were moments when last night’s show at the Scala was hugely enjoyable, I still maintain that this difference in approach to live performance is largely to the band’s detriment. On disc, much of Molina’s best material is difficult to classify, in that it moves well beyond the confines of conventional rock or country music, despite being well versed in the language of Americana (ghosts, moons and highways all feature prominently). Seeing them live, I now find it much less surprising that the group are frequently stereotyped as ‘working class work’. The songs are all played at a similar mid-tempo trudge, everything is loud and clamorous throughout and there are guitar solos disrupting the flow of the lyrics.

For a while, this is really quite thrilling. The opening ‘I’ve Been Riding With The Ghost’ gets a thunderous and compelling treatment, and when the two guitarists duel with each other it even begins to feel like fun. ‘The Dark Don’t Hide It’ sounds more confrontational and less reflective here and even the calmer, slower songs are given pretty remorseless treatments. The quality of the playing is mostly tremendous, and it’s rare to see rock guitar solos with this much shape and spirit, although they don’t ever stray much from pentatonic conventions. The bigger problem is perhaps with the rhythm section, specifically the drums, which thud along monotonously without any variation or control. I kept finding myself thinking that the performance would be so much more effective if some of the soloists were sometimes given more space, or if the drums could follow the changes in mood implied through Molina’s inventive vocal phrasing. I’m pretty sure the same drummer features on recent studio work though, where there is

Luckily, Molina has been an amazingly consistent songwriter, and these songs are of such quality that they could withstand even the most mundane arrangements. Vocally, Molina sounds confident and assured – so much so that he is able to breathe new life into the songs without wandering too far from the original melodies. It’s rather bizarre to think that Molina was once dismissed as Will Oldham’s poorer imitator – their voices are actually rather different, Molina’s lacking the shaky pitching and vulnerability that is rather unique to Oldham.

The music finally matches the quality of the writing at the show’s breathtaking conclusion. ‘Oh, Grace’ at last instigates some rhythmic invention and is powerfully moving as a result, whilst ‘Hold On Magnolia’ is notably softer and more restrained. We could have done with more of this in the main body of the set.

It’s worth taking the time to mention the supporting line up as this was an extremely well organised and thoughtful line-up (put together by the wonderful people who organise The Local Night For Local People at the King’s Head in Crouch End). Poor David Vandervelde was made to look rather conventional in the end, but he did an admirable job of playing his pleasant, amiable songs to a mostly empty venue, and looked like he was enjoying every minute of it.

David Thomas Broughton was, by dramatic contrast, completely bonkers. Seemingly afflicted with a severe case of Attention Defecit Disorder, he simply couldn’t stay still, and certainly couldn’t focus on one idea for any length of time. With a mannered vibrato voice slightly reminiscent of Anthony Hegarty, and a clear desire to smash all singer-songwriter conventions into the ground, he delivered a madcap performance that was both bizarre and fascinating. Lots of singer-songwriters are now using multi-effects units to turn themselves into one man bands and watching people prostate on the ground fiddling with machines can be incredibly boring. Broughton, whilst edgy and aloof onstage, was clearly aware of the audience, playing his unusual ukulele unamplified from within the crowd. Delivering mostly incomprehensible lyrics, layering inappropriate parts over each other with scant regard for conventional musicality and even smashing his own head against his guitar, Broughton’s unusual schtik may have been intensely serious or intentionally hilarious – it was hard to tell. I’m not sure it mattered either way.

Adjagas were an international group unafraid to combine disparate ideas into what turned out to be a compelling and satisfying melting pot. Sometimes they appeared to be singing in another language, at others with no language at all, combining elements of avant rock with country tinged riffing and what sounded like Middle Eastern scales. It all went rather odd at the end, with some histrionic shouting, but the rest of their set was both finely judged and brilliantly executed. It also seemed genuinely original.

I've Seen Fire and I've Seen Rain

Peter Gabriel at Hyde Park, Immaculate Machine at The Windmill, Brixton

Well, Crowded House certainly brought one kind of weather with them for Hyde Park Calling, but the Biblical downpour that accompanied their set was hardly what any of us were hoping for. After an outrageously busy day (and a supporting line up so awful I couldn’t bring myself to arrive any earlier), I had hoped to make it to Hyde Park in time to catch the complete Crowded House set (as I still view them as something of a guilty pleasure). Unfortunately, an utterly abysmal Piccadilly Line service prevented that but allowed me to catch not only their last two songs but also the aforementioned freak storm. Frankly, I might as well have gone to Glastonbury after all.

Luckily the weather just about held out for the duration of Peter Gabriel’s rather marvellous set. Less stage managed than his recent tours, there were few gimmicks to this show, and a greater focus on playing a range of material covering his entire career. As the last two tours had focussed on material from ‘Up’, Gabriel and his band ignored that album entirely for this show, instead compiling a set from fan votes on the website for songs rarely performed these days. Admittedly, this made me even more gutted for missing out on the Growing Up tour, as the two performances would have complemented each other neatly.

The irritating thing about festivals is that they rarely ever run to schedule and the headline act is always restricted to a 90 minute set at max. As a result, we lost ‘Digging In The Dirt’, ‘Big Time’ and the extraordinary ‘Moribund The Burgermeister’ from the set list Gabriel had performed at the other European shows so far. This was somewhat annoying, but hardly disastrous given the supreme quality of the show.

The band were on top form. Tony Levin epitomised virtuosity (playing a variety of adapted bass guitars, sometimes with his trademark ‘funk fingers’, essentially a pair of broken drumsticks). David Rhodes played some coruscating flashes of inspired guitar and Ged Lynch was solid and extremely loud at the kit. Gabriel himself was in fine voice (although why he needed to sing into two microphones, one headset and one on a stand, is somewhat beyond me). He was clearly relishing the opportunity to update his back catalogue, much of which still sounds remarkably fresh.

The set list had a thoughtful arc to it, beginning with the exotic ‘Rhythm of the Heat’, reaching an intense peak in the middle with a powerful rendition of ‘Family Snapshot’ and ending with the more familiar (‘Solsbury Hill’, ‘Sledgehammer’ and ‘In Your Eyes’). Highlights included a mesmerising and hypnotic ‘No Self Control’, a faithful take on ‘Intruder’ which emphasised the song’s claustrophobic weirdness and some unexpected songs from the unfairly maligned second album – the band coped ably with the time singnature switches of ‘DIY’ and the peculiarly stuttering ‘On The Air’.

Gabriel, Levin and Rhodes entertained the crowd with some shamelessly hilarious formation dancing during Solsbury Hill and Sledgehammer, marching out on the ramp into the crowd during both. From the emotional vulnerability of ‘Mother of Violence’ (delivered by Gabriel’s daughter Melanie) to the poptastic exuberance of ‘Steam’, this was a shrewdly balanced and highly enjoyable show.

On Sunday, Immaculate Machine more than compensated for yet more dreary weather by putting in a fiery and slightly inebriated performance for the Brixton Windmill’s summer Sunday BBQ. After competent and engaging sets from Stagecoach and The Outside Royalty, IM proved they have that little something extra in the form of peerless energy, and some immediate and infectious melodies. It is somewhat criminal that this outstanding band has been almost entirely neglected in the British music press’ rather late-flowering obsession with the Canadian music scene. In London for five days, including some dates with The New Pornographers (for whom singer and keyboardist Kathryn Calder also plays), it’s rather depressing that they still seem to be playing to half-empty venues. At least the cognoscenti at the Windmill gave them a well-deserved ovation, forcing an encore. It was an impressive, punchy set, with a clutch of excellent new songs from new album ‘Immaculate Machine’s Fables’, due out in the UK in July, as well as judicious selections from their back catalogue (including ‘Broken Ship’ and ‘Phone No.’, two of their finest songs). Luke Kozlowski’s drummed with vigour and audacity and Brooke Gallupe and Kathryn Calder hamonised beautifully. The performance had something of a ramshackle spirit, which only served to make the band more endearing.

‘Immaculate Machine’s Fables’ may well be their most accomplished album to date. At ten tracks and only 36 minutes, it’s a mercilessly concise collection, but it’s also more ambitious than their previous work. Two tracks feature string parts from former Hidden Cameras arrangers Owen Pallett and Mike Olsen and this time round there’s as much lush balladry as punchy power pop. Calder’s voice is particularly spellbinding on ‘Roman Statues’ and ‘C’Mon Sealegs’ has some of the melodic charm of The Shins. Even the presence of Alex Kapranos and the utterly ghastly Cribs can’t ruin the energetic, brilliantly catchy ‘Jarhand’, an opener which, along with ‘Nothing Ever Happens’, refers back to their earlier work. Overall, it feels more arranged and orchestrated than either of the previous albums, with some fascinating attention to detail and more intricate guitar playing from Brooke Gallupe. Splendid.

Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are DEVOTees

Devo Live at Jarvis Cocker’s Meltdown, June 19th 2007

The newly refurbished Royal Festival Hall doesn’t exactly look transformed, although it has to be noted that the seats are now considerably more comfortable. It’s a great venue for classical music, folk and jazz, but a rather staid atmosphere for many of the acts Jarvis Cocker has selected for Meltdown. It’s interesting to note just how many of these artists are recently reformed or coaxed out of semi-retirement. There’s Iggy and the Stooges, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Melanie, Roky Erikson and, of course, Akron, Ohio’s greatest cultural export, art-rockers Devo, performing in the UK for the first time in seventeen years.

Devo are one of a small selection of bands that have influenced my life from the very formative years. I remember a tape put together for me by a rebellious childminder, which included a couple of David Bowie’s 80s moments, plus the first half of Devo’s Brian Eno-produced debut LP ‘Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo’. I’m pretty sure I hadn’t the first idea about the band’s concept of De-Evolution then, but I found the chanting choruses, angular rhythms and infectious hooks highly exciting. So, seeing the band live for the first time ought to have been a revelatory experience – uniting that rush of childhood enthusiasm with my later admiration for their conceptual wackiness.

In many ways, the show doesn’t disappoint. The band put on an absolutely fantastic show, beginning with an absolutely hilarious intro film which begins ‘So, you’ve decided to see a Devo performance…a wise decision…’ The band then leap to the stage in their customary yellow jumpsuits and ‘energy domes’ (staggering that so many purchased them for £18 from the merchandise stall when they are essentially just adapted plastic plantpots). They may look a great deal older (and considerably fatter in the case of Mark Mothersbaugh), but they still have plenty of energy, as the thunderous opening rendition of ‘That’s Good’ amply demonstrates. There’s plenty of instrument swapping throughout, with Mark Mothersbaugh frequently running across the stage to play out one of their trademark synth riffs before running back to centre stage again. The lighting is intelligently synchronised and the crowd are rapturous throughout, gamely trying to dance to their many songs with unexpected switches of time signature.

I make the last point not to sound like a muso, but rather to highlight that Devo had a rare rhythmic invention mostly lacking in their post-punk peers. As I recall, even on their more overtly produced 80s albums, the drums sounded motorik, but dry. It may have been that the Festival Hall has acoustics unfavourable to a big rock band, but they sounded imposing and boomy here, with far too much stadium reverb applied. As a result, the drums (played ambidexterously but unsubtly), all too frequently predominated in the mix, a problem not helped by the lack of definition in the mostly overdriven guitars. It sounded a little odd to hear Devo’s jerky, mostly weird songs refashioned, whether intentionally or not, as power rock assaults. Still, the vocals sound great, and the unusually responsive London crowd more than compensate for these niggles.

It would also be churlish to complain about the setlist, which is unashamedly nostalgic (there’s no new material yet) and strikes a shrewd balance between obvious favourites like ‘Girl U Want’, ‘Whip It’ and ‘Joko Homo’ and slightly less predictable selections like ‘Secret Agent Man’, ‘Mr. DNA’ and ‘Wiggly World’. The crowd participation reached its peak with the call and response coda to ‘Jocko Homo’, by which point the band had disrobed from their jumpsuits to reveal spectacularly tasteless black hockey outfits, complete with bizarre kneepads.

It’s all tremendous fun, with Mothersbaugh particularly in great voice. The encore is brilliant, with the band not only replicating the segue between ‘Gut Feeling’ and the outrageous ‘Slap Your Mammy Down’ but Mothersbaugh also rejuvenating his Booji Boy alter ego, complete with costume, for ‘Beautiful World’. Is it any wonder that this is the same man who composed the Rugrats theme tune?

An additional pleasure involved catching the post-concert foyer performance from Bishi, who has now assembled an excellent band featuring Zongamin, Matthew Glamorre, Fidel Villeneuve from the Applicants, an excellent tabla player and my musical co-conspirator Brendan Pickett. It was a sadly brief set, but Bishi’s voice, and gold lame costume, were sublime.

Don't Forget It's Dumb Luck That Got You Here

Reviews of ‘Icky Thump’, the new album from The White Stripes, have been predictably gushing, but also intriguing. First of all, there’s been a peculiar discomfort over Jack White’s appropriation of a Northern phrase for the album’s title. I rather like it actually, as it provides a suitably onomatopoeic description of Meg White’s untutored drum sound, which inevitably underpins everything here. Secondly, many have come close to using that ghastly critics’ cliché the ‘return to form’ after the ‘murky’ or ‘confusing’ ‘Get Behind Me Satan’. I don’t feel that album did anywhere near as much to obfuscate or confound as some suggest, containing as it did some of the group’s most infectious material (‘My Doorbell’ and ‘The Denial Twist’ in particular). It also did much more to expand their rather limited palette than ‘Icky Thump’ manages, in spite of good intentions and the appearance of the much maligned bagpipes.

‘Icky Thump’ starts impressively with the colossal title track, built on skewed stop-start rhythms, heavily distorted guitars, and unsubtle synthesiser blurts. For a songwriter rarely explicitly political, the track also sees Jack White make some telling but ambiguous points about the Bush administration’s stance on immigration (‘White Americans, what? Nothing better to do?/Why don’t you kick yourself out, you’re an immigrant too/Who’s using who? What should we do?/Well you can’t be a pimp and a prostitute too’). ‘You Don’t Know What Love Is (You Just Do As Your Told)’ is the most memorable song here, with some neat guitar work and an infectious tune. Towards the end of the album, they also capture something powerful on the brilliant ‘A Martyr For My Love For You’.

Some have hinted that the overall sound is bigger and more robust. This might be true, but it’s also cleaner and less brutal. There are even a handful of songs that could almost be described as subtle. Advance word left me expecting a heavy beast of a record – but even after three or four listens, I can’t help feeling there’s something missing here. Yes, there’s a greater range of instruments (heavy 70s organ, synthesisers, the aforementioned pipes), but this mostly seems to make the music sound more dated and less timeless. By contrast, the use of groovy piano and marimba on ‘Get Behind Me Satan’ gave the music a different texture, and took the group into new spaces. The increased reliance on irritating squealing guitar effects and elaborate solos doesn’t much help here either.

A prime example of the problem here is ‘300 MPH Torrential Outpour Blues’, which veers between delicate rustic sections and curtailed explosions of noise. Unfortunately, it also has a completely forgettable melody. I always feel Jack White sounds better when vocally untamed (as he is here on the excellent title track and the bizarre Corky Robbins cover ‘Conquest’, a kind of heavy metal mariachi song), or trying to force too many words into too small a space. Here, he simply sounds vague and nonchalant. It doesn’t help that ‘300 MPH…’ drags on, in cumbersome fashion, for over five minutes. As a clipped three minute blast, it might have been more effective. There are a clutch of tracks which hit all the hardest buttons but really fail to linger in the mind (‘Bone Broke’, ‘Little Cream Soda’, the rambling ‘Catch Hell Blues’).

These are small problems though when compared with two tracks that are completely unbearable. ‘Prickly Thorn But Sweetly Worn’ is a woefully unconvincing folk pastiche which is swiftly followed by Meg White’s mercifully brief spoken word piece ‘St Andrew’. This seems intentionally incomprehensible, her obscure vocals set to a concoction of bagpipes and percussion, with no discernible purpose or direction. Sequenced together they sound perverse, two lightweight throwaway jokes bizarrely placed at the very heart of the album. If they are attempts to inject some humour into proceedings, they look rather silly when placed next to the deliriously entertaining ‘Rag and Bone’, with its comic exchanges between Jack and Meg.

By far the best thing about ‘Icky Thump’ is its song titles, many of which demonstrate that Jack White has a confident mastery of the language of the blues (‘I’m Slowly Turning Into You’, ‘You Don’t Know What Love Is (You Just Do What You’re Told)’, ‘I’m A Martyr For My Love For You’ etc). Musically, it largely fails to live up to these ambitions. At its best (‘Icky Thump’, ‘I’m Slowly Turning Into You’, ‘You Don’t Know What Love Is…’) it sounds like business as usual, which whilst not necessarily a bad thing, risks becoming tiresome away from the alchemical thrill of their incendiary live shows. At its worst, it’s actually rather embarrassing. Luckily, it ends with redemption of sorts, as the countrified ‘Cause and Effect’ is sweet and clever. Yet, for me, the overall impression for me is that Jack White is running out of ways of assimilating old ideas, all too frequently resorting to gimmicks and pastiche. In the wake of the Stripes’ success, numerous ramshackle rock n’ roll duos have been springing up all over the place. It would be particularly galling if Jack White was to become his own worst imitator. ‘Icky Thump’ might be the first warning sign that this is a realistic possibility.

There’s plenty more imitation on offer this week, chiefly in the form of a handful of French electro releases owing a substantial debt to Daft Punk. Justice are already infamous for their scene-shaking ‘We Are Your Friends’ (a deft remix of Simian’s ‘Never Be Alone’) from last year, although I much prefer the insistent, uncompromising ‘Waters of Nazareth’ single, which is probably the most successful track on their intermittently wonderful debut album. The collection veers from generic house music to overtly cheesy disco (the ghastly ‘D.A.N.C.E.’, lyrics delivered by a group of helium-voiced kids and seemingly aimed at an aerobics market) via a good share of inventive moments too.

The segues between tracks attempt to make it cohere, but it veers haphazardly between the highly portentous and the ultimately silly. The best tracks are a lot of fun, and benefit greatly from some ingenious squelchy synth and unfashionable slap bass sounds. Sometimes, as on ‘New Jack’ they become excessive, and there’s so much cutting up and playing with the central themes that it just becomes grating.

I remain unconvinced by the vocal tracks, which sound self-consciously trendy. ‘DVNO’ seems to be striving for Jamie Lidell disco-funk territory but it sounds forced and contrived. ‘Thhee Ppaarty’ starts promisingly enough, with a skeletal theme in half time over which the spoken vocal is delivered, but it eventually morphs into another four to the floor diso track. The opening suckerpunch of ‘Genesis’ and ‘Let There Be Light’ is brilliant though – at once playful and unreservedly excessive. Similarly, the cinematic and dissonant string lines of ‘Stress’ sound genuinely terrifying. Ultimately, though, the jury’s still out.

Perhaps it’s easy to be too cynical about this sort of music but even listening to the much acclaimed new album from Digitalism, I’m still not quite convinced. The influence of Daft Punk is still fairly transparent, but there’s less of the cheesy 80s synth emulations and a more maverick, devil-may-care spirit on display here. They shamelessly pilfer The Cure for ‘Digitalism in Cairo’, and develop some infectious riffs on the likes of ‘Zdarlight’ and ‘Jupiter Room’. ‘Pogo’ is appropriately manic, and the title track is insistent and joyful, in part reminding me of Josh Wink’s classic ‘Higher State of Consciousness’. There’s still the nagging feeling that this is playing it pretty safe for dance music in 2007 – never really breaking any particularly interesting new ground. ‘I Want I Want’ is a particularly unfortunate electro-rock crossover which could just as easily have been made by Republica. There’s also far too heavy a reliance on distorted vocals, which sound neither fresh nor particularly interesting at this time. When it comes to the crunch, I’d rather listen to more substantial recent electronic works from The Field or Isolee. The best European dance music would appear now to be coming from Germany, not France.

It’s a little wispy and elusive, but after a few plays I’m really starting to like ‘Dumb Luck’, the new album from Dntel. Jimmy Tamborello is best known to me as one half of The Postal Service collaboration with Ben Gibbard from Death Cab for Cutie, and his own work follows a similarly collaborative impulse. Unlike Stephin Merrit’s work in the guise of The 6ths, where he essentially employed other singers to assume his voice, Tamborello has sought creative and compositional input from his co-conspirators. The results are never any less than interesting, and Tamborello’s overall guiding hand lends the album a mysterious and impressionistic mood, not too far from an electronic Yo La Tengo. Even the usually histrionic Conor Oberst sounds dignified and restrained on ‘Breakfast in Bed’, and there’s an eerie calm permeating the whole record. ‘The Distance’, featuring Arthur and Yu is gorgeous in its premeditated simplicity, and ‘Roll On’ provides a fresh, arguably more appealing context for the musings of Rilo Kiley’s Jenny Lewis. The album as a whole hangs together surprisingly well.

It’s been six years since the last Fridge album (2001’s ‘Happiness’) but the individual members of the group have packed rather a lot into that space. Kieren Hebden has released one excellent album and one adequate one as Four Tet, Adem Ilhan has recorded two lovely solo albums and drummer Sam Jeffers has made headway with his design company. Hebden has also found time to produce James Yorkston and record three albums of collaborations with legendary free improv drummer Steve Reid. The last thing anyone was really expecting was another Fridge record but here it is, released surreptitiously, despite the group’s increased profile as a result of their extra-curricular achievements. Some have chosen to criticise this rather curious album on the basis that it too obviously displays the individual preoccupations of the group’s members. This is true enough – the opening title track is percussive and emphasises sound rather than melody, much in the same way as the recent Hebden/Reid collaborations, and elsewhere there are hints of the acoustic meets electronic rustic atmospheres of Adem’s solo work. The combination of ideas is sympathetic and effective though, and the group sound expressive and relaxed on hazy experiments such as the lovely ‘Oram’ and ‘Insects’. There’s a benign warmth to much of the material here that distances it from much improvised machine music. ‘The Sun’ is a delightful and understated work that doesn’t outstay its welcome.

10 Years On And I'm Feeling Old

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/06/ten_years_of_ok_computer_and_w.html

On Monday 16th June 1997, not just one, but two albums were released which even at the time looked set to become established classics in the rock canon: Radiohead’s ‘OK Computer’, Spiritualized’s ‘Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space’. The Spiritualized album undoubtedly had the bigger impact on my life, influencing the music I was writing at the time rather too obviously and introducing me to a whole new range of sound (Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane etc). I still think the album sounds wonderful – and its mix of visceral intensity and naked emotion still chimes with me. Jason Pierce is hardly the best lyricist in the world, but here he found a way to capture aching sadness in simple sentiments, from the clever rhyme scheme of ‘I Think I’m In Love’ to the simple directness of ‘Broken Heart’ and ‘Cool Waves’. It’s a shame that Pierce has spent much of the subsequent decade trying to escape from it – either by building a bigger, more manipulative sound on ‘Let It Come Down’ (the first time his ambition outstripped his ideas) or by stripping it all back for the raw and mostly derivative ‘Amazing Grace’.

Whilst ‘Ladies and Gentlemen…’ sometimes appears in more outré greatest albums lists, it’s ‘OK Computer’ that has undoubtedly had the biggest cultural impact, for better or for worse. Many writers still highlight its focus on technology and urban alienation, but it seems bizarre that this still strikes people as groundbreaking. The writer of The Guardian piece I linked to above obviously hadn’t heard Kraftwerk’s ‘Computer World’ or Devo’s ‘Freedom Of Choice’.

A bigger problem is that Thom Yorke’s lyrics are mostly weak. His political attacks are vague and inarticulate, and I don’t think ‘OK Computer’ says anything particularly profound or clear about man’s relationship with technology. It offers no argument and certainly no solutions for its predominating feelings of alienation. Yorke actually fares much better as a lyricist when less detached and more vulnerable (the key tracks for me remain ‘Exit Music (For A Film)’ and ‘Let Down’). Overall, The Flaming Lips’ ‘The Soft Bulletin’ (1999) managed to address similar themes with more humanity, compassion and optimism.

Where OK Computer is interesting thematically is that, when placed in context, it is pretty much uniquely negative, and somewhat prescient. NuLabour had just won a landslide victory, and there was much vacuous and ill-judged celebrating, and plenty of odious schmoozing at number 10. Yorke’s frustration and rancour now looks rather shrewd, if only he could have expressed it more potently.

Musically, it still sounds expansive and impressive, but mostly in a rather formal and self-conscious way. The Pink Floyd comparisons are justified, as it’s stylistically very close to ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ and sometimes similarly turgid. When they allowed themselves to experiment with rhythm (as on ‘Airbag’ and ‘Paranoid Android’) the results were compelling, but the plodding tempos of ‘Karma Police’ and ‘No Surprises’ offered little that was truly new, although the former’s coda prickles the nerves somewhat. I’m not sure it’s fair to say they paved the way for Muse, Keane and Coldplay as that kind of blandly anthemic stadium rock can probably be more fairly traced back to the more bombastic excesses of the eighties. Still, I’m rarely inclined to listen to ‘OK Computer’ these days. Much like ‘Sgt Pepper’s…’ (about which Marcello Carlin has written incisively at Church of Me http://www.cookham.blogspot.com/, so I won’t bother) and ‘Nevermind’, it seems one of those albums that will simply be accepted as a classic, without much sensible criticism ever being applied to it. There’s so much weight of high praise surrounding it that simply hearing it feels stifling and oppressive.

Since its release, Radiohead have proved themselves to be an intriguing and adventurous band, although often poor editors of their own work and unable to make decent decisions. Had they combined the best parts of ‘Kid A’ and ‘Amnesiac’ into one short album, they would have produced a clear masterpiece. This goes against the prevailing critical consensus, but ‘Hail To The Thief’ still strikes me as their most successful album to date, combining all their musical concerns into one consistently engaging whole, but people with opinions I respect disagree with me on this. It’s for the best of these works that I still feel the band are an easy target for those who dislike the idea of ambition and complexity in popular music, but ten years on, ‘OK Computer’ strikes me as having a reputation built on rather uncertain foundations.

As an afterthought, both Radiohead and Spiritualized have new albums scheduled for the Autumn and it will be interesting to see where they are at in 2007!

Wireless Festival Report

London's 02 Wireless Festival (God forbid that we should forget the '02' prefix) strikes me as a fine example of the corporate explosion in music festivals over the last ten years. In an 'I can remember when it all were fields round here' way, I can remember when we only had Glastonbury, Reading and the lamented Phoenix festivals. Then came T in the Park, V and now we have Connect, Latitude, End of The Road, All Tomorrow's Parties and sundry other events. Some come with more independent spirit than others - All Tomorrow's Parties has succeeded by virtue of its esoteric artist-curated line-ups and holiday centre accommodation, whereas Wireless works as a series of one-day events rather than a festival as such. Corporate sponsorship is everywhere, restricting the beer and food on offer and naming every single stage. It won't be long before every band on the bill is brought to the event by a separate multinational.

It's not only down to this that the event is so lacking in atmosphere though. The programming this year has been bizarre. Sometimes this is a good thing - Daft Punk are no longer at their commercial peak, and LCD Soundsystem and CSS are brave choices of Main Stage acts. It's gratifying that this bill does indeed pack out Hyde Park on a partially rain drenched day. Beyond this, though, the programmers are trying too hard. Every act on the main stage today, with the notable exception of dire folk rapper Plan B, deploys four-to-the-floor rhythms and the conventions of house and electro music. Today's line-up seems like a rather joyless exercise in nostalgia. Metronomy are bafflingly poor - a synthesiser and guitar group clearly modelled on Hot Chip, but without Alexis and Joe's warmth, melodic invention and broad understanding of musical history. New Young Pony Club might be hip to the groove, but their songs are charmless and shouty. There's not even a hint of a tune, or even a memorable riff. What's more baffling is that these acts would have worked so much better in one of the smaller tents - second stage headliners Klaxons are timed neatly to clash with LCD Soundsystem, which is infuriating.

Over on the XFM stage, Shy Child are essentially the synth-revival version of The White Stripes - a vigorous and accomplished drummer bashing the hell out of a skeletal kit and electronic percussion, combined with surprisingly intricate riffing on that most uncool of instruments - the keytar. They have energy and spirit, and they are remarkably tight - but the yelping vocals become monotonous and tiresome by the end. They'll need to develop their schtik (as indeed The White Stripes have done surprisingly well) if they are to have any kind of longevity.

On the Tuborg-sponsored stage, Husky Rescue (all the way from Helsinkini!) provide some much needed variety, with their strange and occasionally compelling blend of shoegazing indie-pop, country, folk and electronica. It's very self-consciously atmospheric, and they are very much the sort of band that might come with a press release describing them as 'cinematic'. Dressed sharply, they are also rather boring to look at, although their singer eventually sheds the nonchalant look to reveal how much she is clearly enjoying herself. At their best, they are infectious and enchanting, although they really need to do more with their somewhat lumbering rhythm section.

I found myself quite enjoying CSS back on the main stage, rather limited and one dimensional as they undoubtedly are. They are an indie disco band, but they do indeed get people dancing (particularly girls it would appear), and their music has a roughshod, insouciant appeal. There's no denying that they have a certain coolness about them, and energetic frontwoman Lovefoxx is, well, foxxy. Any more than an hour of this relentless backbeat stuff though and I would start to go insane.

LCD Soundsystem put in the finest of the non-headline performances, although their set is plagued by horrendous sound problems. With the amount of money pouring into this event, the kind of balance and sound cut-out issues that occurred here just shouldn't happen. James Murphy is clearly agitated by it all, and compensates for the problems by constantly giving signals and directions, to band and soundmen alike, which is quite fascinating to watch. Murphy has a very peculiar gait, mostly looking as if he's at risk of falling over, and his half-spoken vocals are invigorated in live performance. LCD are the only band on this supporting bill who achieve something concrete through the minmalist aesthetic, at least in part because Murphy knows that music has the power to engage the brain and heart as well as the feet. Recent single 'All My Friends' with its pounding one-chord riff bears the clear influence of Steve Reich and Terry Riley, whilst 'Time To Get Away' and 'Us V Them' are brilliantly groovy. Best of all are rapid and demented versions of 'Daft Punk Is Playing At My House' and 'North American Scum', the latter of which really seems to energise the audience. Genuine enthusiasm infuses this music with party spirit, and the willingness of all to just clatter some percussion for the sake of it is thrilling. 'Sound of Silver' is one of the albums from earlier this year that I keep returning to - this set brings into relief exactly why that is.

Daft Punk were simply mind blowing. Whilst bits of the 'Human After All' album showed a band at risk of repeating themselves (both ad infinitum within individual tracks and through recycling older ideas), this performance was ceaselessly inventive and fantastically entertaining. Clad in robot helmets for the duration of the set, and concealed within a pyramid-shaped space-craft, the band maintained their enigmatic stance whilst playing a simultaneously creative and crowd pleasing set. There were only three short pauses in an otherwise continuous set that achieved, everything good dance music should - it was relentless, sensorily confounding, playful, energetic and defiantly basic. They never simply replayed the tracks as they were originally recorded - instead cutting up elements from different tracks and layering them over each other. The clever splicing of the vocal from 'One More Time' with the head-spinning 80s metal riff from 'Aerodynamic' was a particular highlight. They orchestrated the whole performance with admirable precision, both thematically (opening with 'Robot Rock' and closing with 'Human After All') and theatrically. They gradually added new elements to the simple but highly effective light show, and the performance created a cumulative impact through a series of brilliantly engineered synaesthetic crescendos. With some justification, the crowd go completely mental, and it's been a while since I've been pushed and shoved with such vigour. They encore with a brilliant medley of their side-projects, with little snippets of 'Together' and 'Music Sounds Better With You'. I had little notion of what to expect from a Daft Punk live show, but this show has elevated them in my estimations.

Video Killed The Radio Star....

…Well it didn’t exactly come to pass as Trevor Horn predicted, but now I wonder whether it might be happening more insidiously and indirectly. This week, XFM launched Xu, supposedly an innovative concept handing total control over its daytime programming to its listeners, from 10am through to 4pm. In the first instance, this is total bunkum. Listeners will only be able to select tracks from the very restrictive XFM music library used to create the original playlists, plus, depending on the policy’s success rate, a lot of the music will probably be pre-programmed by music editors anyway. It’s also hardly a novel concept, having been used by various music TV channels for a number of years. By subsuming this concept into their radio networks, are GCap finally fulfilling the Buggles prophecy?

Call me old fashioned – but I think there’s a critical difference between music TV and radio. Music TV, at its most successful, is as much based on visuals as audio – featuring largely expensive promos made by big teams and competent directors. This is partially where the energy and vitality comes from. Radio, lacking this visual identity, requires some form of personality and comment to provide it with identity.

One suggestion has been that XFM owners GCap are simply trying to save money on DJs salaries, which is of course plausible given the company’s commercial imperative. In light of the success of Radio 2 in particular (which has invested heavily in unpredictable choices of on-air talent in recent years), this does seem like a baffling way to cut costs though. Others have suggested that, fearful of technological development and the massive success of online video and social networking, XFM are attempting to create a ‘multimedia experience’ (which sounds horrible) by tying the daytime schedule directly to online content.

I’m all for exciting cross-platform developments. I love on demand functionality and I’m a great admirer of any broadcaster with a strong web presence. Yet there’s a massive problem when corporate bigwigs see ‘interactivity’ as purely synonymous with ‘User Generated Content’. The technologies involved develop so rapidly that a new fad will very quickly emerge and render all this obsolete. Not only this, but those simply looking for a music shuffle feature would surely prefer the more personal iPod, or will turn to more genuinely interactive online services such as last.fm (just last week the subject of a $142million takeover by CBS). Interaction between a radio station and its audience works chiefly through its presenters – it’s a tried and tested formula, and it works! As a result, the big innovations in Radio recently seem to have been through the choice of estoteric presenters – Russell Howard on 6Music, Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour, amongst other examples.

On a personal level, I’ve found XFM completely disastrous since the Capital takeover. Only John Kennedy’s XPosure show has been consistently worth a listen, but the station’s policy of forcing complete album playbacks into this slot has destroyed the format of the show too frequently. Elsewhere, the station provides no alternative at all, with wall-to-wall Keaneplay Razor Patrol of the likes you can hear on virtually any other station. Radio 2 is genuinely less conventional in its selection of music. It feels like an uncertain time for cutting edge radio at the moment, with Radio 3 cutting back its contemporary output with less jazz and the loss of the excellent Mixing It and now this, a gamble that I sincerely hope fails to pay dividends. The real problem that technology poses to the broadcasting industry is that anyone can now do it themselves (albeit by entering a legal minefield) – those of us who value diversity, and listening that challenges as well as entertains, may well desert traditional broadcasters altogether and find our musical tips elsewhere.

NB: Personal Opinion, not written in a work capacity.

The Young and The Old: Dizzee Rascal, Bishi, Bruce Springsteen, Nick Lowe

One of the most irritating elements of pop music culture is the tendency to throw up sub-genres which all-too-briefly blaze incandescent before very quickly dying out. Two new albums arrive this week amid talk of ‘the death of grime’, particularly troubling given this genre has only recently been subsumed into the mainstream. I’ve not heard the Wiley album yet, but ‘Maths and English’, Dizzee Rascal’s third album has emerged to a curiously mixed reception. The Observer Music Monthly, increasingly the national mouthpiece of ludicrous hyperbole (the Arcade Fire are the best band in the world etc) hailed it as the best British hip hop album ever, but more critical reviews have expressed serious reservations.

It’s certainly fair to say that this is Dizzee’s attempt to distance himself from the limitations of the grime sound. The compelling and intriguing opener ‘World Outside’ sees him proclaim that he’s found a new world outside the ghetto. Along with a handful of other tracks here, it deftly incorporates some of the familiar sonic tricks from grime’s instrumental offshoot dubstep, with recent albums from Burial and Skream! perhaps being influences.

Given that Dizzee is British hip hop’s most distinctive and articulate voice, it’s difficult to resent him for seeking new contexts for his lyrics. When these contexts genuinely sound fresh, they are startling. ‘Temptation’, with its Arctic Monkeys sample, is surprisingly effective, and hints at how interesting the Monkeys could be if they placed Alex Turner’s wry musings in a setting less slavish to angular indie rock conventions. The insistent, repetitive phrasing of ‘Where’s Da G’s?’ (a merciless attack on the faux-posturing of drugs-rap) and the appropriately unsettling ‘Paranoid’ work particularly well. Both tracks are less dependent on the familiar bowel-crushing synth bass figures that predominated on ‘Boy in Da Corner’ and ‘Showtime’, and look more to high end sounds for their sinister impact. ‘Hardback’ is interesting as Dizzee adopts the wise voice of experience, advising those who might follow in his footsteps. ‘Another thing, make sure you buy a house before a car’ he sagely suggests ‘everyone thinks that Porsche looks great/but do you really want it sitting outside your council estate?’ It’s good to see his humour has not deserted him.

Elsewhere, there’s an old-skool preoccupation that works only intermittently. ‘Bubbles’ is preoccupied with fashion, most specifically Nike Air trainers. Looking fresh? These were the must-have item when I was nine! What goes around comes around, I suppose. It is also evidence to suggest that Dizzee can make almost any topic sound significant simply with the precision of his vocals. ‘Da Feelin’ goes for a summery vibe with a frantic drum ‘n’ bass beat but ends up sounding a little cheesy, DJ Jazzy Jeff’s ‘Summertime’ meets Goldie’s ‘Inner City Life’. ‘Sirens’ is simply awesome though – a hard-hitting tale of adolescent criminality with heavy, noisy music to match. It recalls Public Enemy’s collaboration with Anthrax on ‘Bring the Noise’. ‘Pussyole’ is just lame by comparison, yet another track content on merely recyling the tired old James Brown ‘Think’ break (perhaps second only to Brown’s ‘Funky Drummer’ in overused hip hop samples). It’s also by no means the only example of a puerile undercurrent running through this album – it’s difficult to tell whether ‘Suk My Dick’ is deliberate parody of hip hop braggadocio (in which case it’s quite clever), or simply juvenile rubbish.

Some tracks are simply substandard unfortunately. On ‘Excuse Me Please’, he lists some rather obvious contemporary problems in a rather uninspired and schematic way, whilst sounding thoroughly disinterested. The collaboration with Lily Allen on ‘Wanna Be’ is predictably irritating. For the privately educated Allen to mouth the witty ‘your mum buys your bling’ accusations seems a little ridiculous.

‘Boy In Da Corner’ had something of the shock of the new, whilst ‘Showtime’ cannily refined the formula. ‘Maths and English’ is the sound of an artist struggling to retain his core identity and seek new directions. It’s occasionally over-confident, and whilst it spends plenty of time lambasting posturing, it doesn’t always succeed in finding true substance underneath. ‘You Can’t Tell Me Nuffin’, coming right at the end of the album, reminds us how musically inventive he can be, all dissonant synth string lines pulling against each other in grimly compelling mismatches. We needed more of it here.

It’s great to hear a full length album from Bishi, KashPoint and Siren Suite DJ, Patrick Wolf collaborator and one of London’s most idiosyncratic young talents. I had expected ‘Nights at the Circus’ to be an album of traditional Indian and Eastern European folk music, particularly given the excellent acoustic folk set she performed in support of the Unit single launch at the Spitz last year. The finished product actually merges Bishi’s folk music discoveries with her own incisive and intelligent writing to quite glorious effect. ‘Night…’ is an album with a clear and coherent vision, where traditional instruments (sitar, tabla, accordion) meet electronics in a natural, homogenising fusion that uncovers connections between musical forms often wrongly deemed mutually exclusive. Drawing links between Indian melodies, Bulgarian folk harmonies, contemporary composition (the string arrangement on ‘Broken Creatures’ is particularly ef

It helps that Bishi’s voice is so unfashionable in its studied confidence and accurate enunciation. There’s no slurring of words here, just crystal clear phrasing coupled with enticing melodies and harmonies that genuinely enrich and enhance the music. Bishi is a talented and effective communicator, with the title track conjuring a mysterious and hedonistic alternative world, and the delightful ‘Nightbus’ proving that observational lyrics are not the sole preserve of Alex Turner.

It’s also clear from this collection that Bishi has managed to sustain this vision for some time – the gorgeous, moving finale ‘Namaste’ is the result of a collaboration with Patrick Wolf from some years ago. It sits comfortably alongside the more recent work because it shares a warmth and generosity of spirit with tracks like ‘Grandmother’s Floor’ and ‘Broken Creatures’. The relentless rhythmic drive of ‘On My Own Again’ and ‘Never Seen Your Face’ prove that she is as comfortable with contemporary club culture as she is with the traditional idioms she has learnt. The press release presents this album as a product of the ‘quiet revolution’ but I would take this wonderful cross-cultural bounty over the forced, pretentious faux-folk of Devendra Banhart or Joanna Newsom any day of the week. ‘Nights at the Circus’ is a work of genuine artistry and invention, completely out of step with any current trends.

By complete contrast, I’ve also been enjoying two releases from older statesmen of the rock world. Bruce Springsteen and The Session Band’s ‘Live in Dublin’ (not sure why the Seeger prefix has now been dropped from the group’s name) brilliantly captures the sheer passion and euphoria of last year’s live shows across two audio CDs and a DVD. Although taken from three separate performances, the sequencing faithfully reproduces the careful balance of a typical show, featuring many of the traditional folk songs from the Seeger Sessions album alongside radical reworkings of Springsteen originals and previously unreleased interpretations.

With effortless spirit and a pretty much unprecedented trust in audiences, these shows pretty much covered the entire history of rock ‘n’ roll. There’s gospel fervour aplenty (‘This Little Light of Mine’, ‘O Mary Don’t You Weep’), New Orleans Dixie and rhythm and blues, Irish folk melodies (‘Mrs. McGrath’ and the original immigrant song ‘American Land’), even dalliances with ska and reggae (an almost unrecognisable ‘Blinded By The Light’ and unexpected ‘Love of the Common People’ respectively). The performances are consistently both inspiring and inspired, with Springsteen frequently spitting out the words with the grit and guts of a preacher. The sheer exhuberance of this remarkable band remains a revelation – and there are great moments when the brass section all solo together, vocalists trade lines and fiddles spar with banjos and accordions. The energy never lets up. Indeed, this seems as much a travelling community as a band, with Springsteen generously ceding lead vocal duties to Mark Anthony Thompson and Patti Scialfa.

There are some curious omissions (no ‘John Henry’) and some of the original selections are idiosyncratic. I would have liked to have the beautiful 6/8 take on ‘The River’ here (and I sincerely hope I can find a recording from another source), and it’s interesting that he goes for the country shuffle version of the verbose ‘Growin’ Up’ over the more accessible ‘Bobby Jean’, which he had performed in a remarkably similar style (although perhaps it simply wasn’t played at the Dublin shows). Instead, though, we get some more rarely performed riches. The reimagining of ‘If I Should Fall Behind’ in the style of the Tennessee Waltz is particularly heartwarming and ‘Highway Patrolman’, one of his very best narratives, sounds particularly moving in this new context. I’m particularly grateful for the inclusion of ‘Long Time Comin’, in its full brass-bolstered glory, and clearly one of the very best songs of Springsteen’s career.

Some songs are so thoroughly reworked that they completely change mood. ‘Further On Up The Road’ sounded doom-laden and apocalyptic on ‘The Rising’, but here it sounds mordant, reflective and melancholy – both dance and lament. ‘Open All Night’, a stark acoustic blues on ‘Nebraska’ is presented here as barroom boogie party anthem, complete with backing vocal workouts and obligatory audience participation.

The centrepiece of the show is Springsteen’s brilliant reworking of Blind Alfred Reed’s ‘How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?’, an impassioned howl of protest against the incompetence of the Bush administration in the face of Hurricane Katrina. It helps make the show far more than just a musical history revue – it’s brought crashingly, devastatingly into the present day, and crystallises the notion that the blues can never lose its relevance.

Springsteen is both committed bandleader and inspired storyteller throughout, laying his own claim to the public domain material and boldly refashioning his own to suggest a long dormant connection to the roots of American popular music. The E Street Band are now rumoured to be reconvening for a new studio album (again with Brendan O’Brien producing) and world tour, but there have to be serious doubts now as to whether this is the right move. Completely free from production trickery, this extraordinary record may be the very pinnacle of Springsteen’s career.

With its dry, self-mocking title and concise running time (just 33 minutes), ‘At My Age’ from Nick Lowe is a considerably more unassuming proposition. Lowe must be one of the most underrated songwriters in Britain. Best known for penning ‘(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding’ for Elvis Costello, his own work has been consistently neglected, and few have noticed the quite marvellous late-blossoming of his songwriting with his work since ‘The Impossible Bird’. This might be a result of his work-rate slowing considerably – ‘At My Age’ is the first we’ve heard of him since 2001’s outstanding ‘The Convincer’.

‘At My Age’ doesn’t offer any real surprises, mining the same rich seam of Southern country-soul as ‘The Convincer’, very much in the world of Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham. Those familiar with the recent work of Solomon Burke will already be familiar with ‘The Other Side of the Coin’, and the feel of that track is a pretty fair indication of the overall sound of the album. There are three covers, including an excellent version of Charlie Feathers’ ‘The Man in Love’, alongside nine Lowe originals.

The originals all have a relaxed, easy-going charm and direct lyrical simplicity. The opening ‘A Better Man’ is a slow dusty shuffle with a slight resemblance to Johnny Cash’s ‘I Still Miss Someone’, whilst ‘Long Limbed Girl’ has a slightly awkward half-groove that suits its title. ‘The Club’ combines a lazy brand or rockabilly with a lonely hearts lyric (Lowe claims he writes about what he knows, and he knows what it means to be blue). Most shocking is ‘I Trained Her To Love Me’, an exquisitely nasty piece of misogyny, with Lowe breaking a girl’s heart to take his vengeance on the whole of womankind.

It’s not a revelatory record by any means, and coming after ‘The Convincer’ it feels like more of the same, although if anything even more understated and controlled. Still, it’s a mostly warm and genial listen, and Lowe’s half-spoken, half-sung vocal delivery remains uniquely ingratiating.

Every week i spend too much on music and make a CD tower

I am in two minds about The National. Their last album ‘Alligator’ was something of a slow-burner, with some mysterious and powerful highlights, but somehow it didn’t quite coalesce into a striking whole. ‘Boxer’ has a more uniform sound and is more subtle, perhaps even more obtuse, than its predecessor. There is something oddly compelling about their atmospheric sound, but it takes some effort to appreciate their wilfully detached and skeletal melodies with minimal range.

On ‘Boxer’, they again make great use of the chamber arrangements of Padma Newsome that also worked so well on last year’s brilliant Clogs album (one of the many great records last year completely missed by UK critics). This is particularly notable on some of the album’s standout tracks – particularly the delightful coda of ‘Fake Empire’. This contrasts neatly with some muscular, driving songs in the form of ‘Mistaken for Strangers’ and ‘Apartment Story’, although these mostly take a backseat in favour of more restrained, laconic laments.

The overall tone is somewhat morose, a sensation emphasised by Matt Berenger’s tendency to sing in the club style, mumbling his way through most of the tracks. The most striking moments are when he enunciates clearly, making the uniquely poetic charm of his lyrics discernible. I particularly like it the disarming confession of ‘Slow Show’ (‘I dreamed about you for 29 years before I found you’).

Whilst the arrangements help characterise the songs as kitchen sink melodramas, there’s also a nagging suspicion that they also help mask the deficiencies of a rather pedestrian rhythm section. The piano on ‘Fake Empire’ is rather plinky-plonk, and the drumming throughout lacks finesse and, somewhat critically, is completely without dynamic variety. I rather prefer the band when the rhythm section blends into the background, as on the rather touching ‘Start a War’ and the Leonard Cohen-esque ‘Racing Like A Pro’.

I don’t therefore share the view that ‘Boxer’ is a future classic, but it has a rather individual charm – music for empty late night bars on rainy nights.

It might win most pretentious and verbose title of the year award, but ‘Everyday I Said a Prayer for Kathy and Made a One Inch Square’, the comeback album from Wheat (eagerly anticipated by, well, just about nobody except this blog and the wonderful Really Rather – http://www.reallyrather.blogspot.com/), has many virtues. It’s particularly strange that Wheat are so ignored given the excellence of both ‘Medeiros’ and ‘Hope and Adams’, records that could stand happily in the company of Grandaddy’s ‘The Software Slump’ and Mercury Rev’s ‘Deserters Songs’. This one does not feature the production hand of Dave Fridmann. It retains some of his widescreen finish, but mercifully doesn’t smother its excellent songs with his obtrusive electronic tinkering, instead absorbing and incorporating its more electronic preoccupations.

This is both a lush-sounding and inventive record, full of sustained, dramatic synthesiser chords, off-kilter, inventive drumming and slightly out of tune vocals. It frequently sounds like a piece of warped vinyl, albeit in a very good way. The band can veer between the conventional tropes of indie-rock and far more ambitious territory without ever losing their control. Odd song titles abound (‘To, as in addressing the grave’, ‘Courting Ed Templeton’, ‘Move=Move’), but the band mercifully have the quality of material to support their indulgences. ‘To, as in addressing the grave’ and ‘Saint in Law’ have a shimmering, beatific quality, whilst ‘Closeness’ , ‘Round in the Corners’ and ‘Little White Dove’ are crunchier, albeit with several unexpected twists and turns. This really is one of the best rock albums of the year, although it seems unlikely many will notice.

Another album I feel might have been slightly mis-represented is ‘Blue Alert’, the third album from Anjani. This intoxicating, melancholy and haunting record has been written and produced entirely in collaboration with her illustrious partner Leonard Cohen, although many reviewers have preferred to opt for Norah Jones as a convenient reference point. The similarities are obvious, but entirely superficial – ‘Blue Alert’ mostly features Anjani’s breathy vocals coupled with her cabaret jazz piano playing. Anjani’s voice is considerably more versatile than Jones’ though, and she interprets Cohen’s lyrics with deft understatement. It’s hard to conceive of Jones concocting anything this vivid and emotional though. The opening ‘Blue Alert’, with its cautious and understated delivery is about as close to Jones as it gets – elsewhere, the material is considerably more challenging. These songs go right to the heart of the human experience. ‘Never Got to Love You’ is as direct and heartbreaking a song as Cohen has penned, but those who dismiss him as a miserabilist should turn to the quite exquisite ‘Half a Perfect World’. Seemingly relating the unexpected blossoming of a relationship between two women, it’s a strange but beautifully incisive song.

The songs are also tinged with the same laconic minor chord sequences that characterised Cohen’s ‘Dear Heather’ album (indeed, the two albums even share a song, the lovely ‘Nightingale’). Anjani’s arrangements are deceptively simple, and the whole album is characterised by a dignified emotional restraint. The resulting performances are both powerful and sublime.

Anjani is performing on tonight’s edition of Later…With Jools Holland, but you’ll have to endure the tedious new incarnation of The Who and the ghastly Kaiser Chiefs as well unfortunately. Still, there’s always The White Stripes to keep things engaging…

I’ve always been a little fearful of Richard Thompson, not because, as Rufus Wainwright claims, he’s so ‘fiercely heterosexual’, but because he’s one of those artists who seems unnervingly prolific. Where should one start? Actually, new album ‘Sweet Warrior’ is only his 16th solo album in a 40 year career, although that doesn’t include his collaborations with Linda or his legendary work with Fairport Convention. I suspect it’s as good a place to begin as any, given that it confidently reiterates his core talent – the deft merger of straight ahead rock with the inflections of traditional English folk music. Thompson remains in strident voice – there’s very little evidence of any vocal deterioration from the Fairport days. He’s also a guitarist of piercing clarity and expressive detail. As a result of this, he can build exciting songs from even the most conventional of foundations.

The songwriting is consistently excellent, so it doesn’t seem particularly fruitful to pick highlights. The main talking point will certainly be ‘Dad’s Gonna Kill Me’, where the ‘Dad’ in question is actually an abbreviation of Baghdad (‘Dad’s in a bad mood, Dad’s got the blues/It’s someone else’s mess that I didn’t choose’). It shares some of the spirit of Steve Earle’s fearlessly political writing on ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘The Revolution Starts Now’. Elsewhere, Thompson’s lyrics are frequently very witty, particularly on ‘Mr. Stupid’ and the ferociously energetic ‘I’ll Never Give It Up’. ‘Bad Monkey’ pits Thompson’s committed vocal against an uplifting horn section.

‘Sweet Warrior’ also benefits from its fair share of tender songs. ‘She Sang Angels To Rest’, ‘Take Care The Road You Choose’and ‘Too Late to Come Fishing’ are particularly touching, although the latter two suffer a little from production and execution that may be slightly over-crisp. There are occasions on ‘Sweet Warrior’ when I’d like it all to sound it a little rougher or dirtier. With 14 tracks, it’s also arguable that it’s a little too long, but these are minor flaws to an otherwise engaging and enjoyable collection.

Controlled Explosions: Wilco, Band of Horses and The Besnard Lakes live

Jeff Tweedy claims not to have a very good track record with London audiences, but for Wilco's triumphant London return on May 20th he needn't have worried. What a superb performance this really was, coming complete with all the components you could wish for in a rock band. The current Wilco line-up has terrific chops, immediately marking them out from their less inspired Americana contemporaries. Glenn Kotche's drumming, at turns vigorous and sensitive, both supports and propels the group, whilst Nels Cline is a guitar player of effortless fluidity, also capable of creating real drama from the fretboard. Pat Sansone now seems to play as much guitar as he does organ, and the result is a triple guitar assault arranged and controlled with real dynamic precision. The real revelation though is Tweedy's voice. Once a rather muffled, diminutive instrument content to settle in the hazy distance, he now dominates proceedings with clarity and commanding vision.

As I predicted, the songs from 'Sky Blue Sky' really blossom in live performance, especially the show opener 'Side With The Seeds' and 'Impossible Germany', both of which sound decidedly more adventurous than the more reductive of critics have decreed. They expand on the blueprint of songs from 'A Ghost is Born' and 'Yankee Hotel Foxtrot', expanding 'Handshake Drugs' into something majestic and coruscating, whilst rendering 'Poor Places' mysterious and cinematic. The encore of 'Spiders' is explosive.

As Tweedy himself claims, though, they save the best for last. At the end of a generous two hour show, a dishevelled looking figure with long grey hair and bushy beard takes to the stage. It turns out to be legendary singer songwriter Bill Fay (about whom I wrote in an edition of John Kell's Unpredictable Same fanzine about three years ago), on a stage for the first time in over thirty years. He seems understandably reticent, and, duetting with Tweedy on a version of his great song 'Be Not So Fearful' he's unfortunately a little overwhelmed. Still, it's a great pleasure to see this most elusive and withdrawn of musicians back in a small amount of limelight - and if this goes any distance in making the rumoured collaboration with Wilco on new Fay material happen, it would be a gratifying result indeed.

At the Scala, Band of Horses don't quite manage the two hour marathon, if only because they're still a little shy of material. Still, in their not-quite-one-hour set they still manage to pack in the best moments from debut album 'Everything All The Time', along with three new songs and a rather brilliant David Allan Coe cover to round things off. Much has already been made (not least in this blog) of the band's uncanny resemblance to My Morning Jacket circa 'At Dawn', and whilst the band do little to dispel such comparisons in their musical execution, their genial good nature and ebullience throughout comes as something of a surprise. They are constantly thanking us all, and seem to be having a rather jolly time of it. This is great to see, and as a result they can get away with playing a previously unheard song and a cover in the encore, as well as opening with a particularly impressive new song.

The Besnard Lakes also have some superficial similarities with My Morning Jacket, although their sound is so diverse it's next to impossible to pin them down to simple comparisons. There are elements of the drone rock beloved of Spacemen 3 and the shoegazers, as well as some seriously unfashionable, slightly proggy 70s influences that come out much more clearly in live performance than they do on record, particularly in the form of some very long twin guitar solos which turn out to be surprisingly engaging. The Water Rats is a small and unassuming London pub venue, but The Besnard Lakes rock so unbelievably hard and loud that they make it seem like Earl's Court. Frankly, it's impressive that the foundations withstand the assault. The songs are mostly long, unpredictable and unashamedly adventurous. There's a great interplay within the band, particularly between the vocalists, and the careful orchestrations are pulled off with an almost casual confidence. They might be a bit earnest, were it not for the breadth of ambition and the quality of the playing, as well as the lyrical preoccupation with spies, which adds mystery and intrigue. It's a special gig, topped off with an hilariously ragged version of Fleetwood Mac's 'You Make Loving Fun' - so uncool it's brilliant. John Kell has it right though when he says that their lead singer looks like Mark Gatiss' tragic Creme Brulee character from the League of Gentlemen.

Haunting Voices: Elliott Smith's New Moon

Posthumous albums are almost always difficult to approach. There’s no way of knowing whether they reflect the artist’s intentions accurately – presumably there were always good reasons why tracks remained unreleased (unless the artist in question was as poor a judge of their own output as Bob Dylan was throughout the ‘80s). There’s also the thornier problem of ‘cashing-in’ – just who stands to gain from the endless Jeff Buckley live albums or ghastly 2Pac cast-offs?

When an artist dies in as dramatic and frankly macabre a way as Elliott Smith (Smith committed suicicide by stabbing himself in the heart), there’s the additional temptation to search for some bleak, comfortless worldview that might help explain the artist’s state of mind. Many people will approach Elliott Smith’s ‘New Moon’ from a strictly psychological viewpoint, but this will achieve little, and also misses the warmth and romantic vulnerability that lay alongside Smith’s angst and depression.

There’s already been one posthumous Elliott Smith release – ‘From A Basement on A Hill’ – due to have been a planned double album but never quite completed. Some find this album challenging and uncomfortable – but I rather admire its uneasy combination of sludgy rock and melancholy melodies. It combines the brutal with the unfathomably pretty in a way not many musicians could pull off.

‘New Moon’ is less confrontational, and takes a while to reveal its qualities. Its compilers are keen to emphasise that it is not an odds-and-sods collection, but rather represents a possible alternative canon to Smith’s back catalogue, drawn as it is exclusively from the sessions that produced Smith’s spare acoustic masterpieces ‘Elliott Smith’ and ‘Either/Or’.

Concerns over the value of ‘New Moon’ are mercifully alleviated pretty quickly, and there’s plenty of evidence of Smith’s subtle talents here, especially on the first disc. The trademark Smith sound helps this collection cohere – most tracks deploy the double tracking of vocals that Smith preferred, although this sometimes serves to emphasise his tremulous vulnerability rather than disguise it. There are some masterful moments, including the languid, melancholy ‘Go By’ which develops effectively through the layered multi-tracking of Smith’s vocal lines. ‘Angel in the Snow’ demonstrates Smith’s inventive harmonic sensibility, as well as his nimble guitar playing, rarely remarked upon in reviews.

Best of all is the infectious, touching ‘All Cleaned Out’. Where some of the songs in this set risk highlighting the more world-weary, profane dimensions of Smith’s lyric writing, ‘All Cleaned Out’ risks a more poetic approach, and suggests that Smith was at his best when combining barbed and cynical observations with a more playful quality. It has a great opening line (‘Here comes your pride and joy – the comic little drunk you call your boy’) and continues to exhibit Smith’s canny turn of phrase (‘Wearing clothes that clash/Wondering whether this is treasure or it’s trash…’).

The second disc is a little less immediate, and requires a little work. The most obvious delight is the charming ‘Whatever (Folk Song in C)’, with Smith at his most lush, with a McCartney-esque melodic flourish. The rest are more elusive, although I like the dusty, mysterious ‘New Disaster’ and the outstanding ‘Either/Or’, oddly missed off the album of the same name.

There are a handful of tracks which feature more of a ‘band’ sound, and they feel a little out of place on this otherwise spare collection. ‘New Monkey’ and ‘Fear City’ are both uncharacteristically evasive on melody and sound a little aggressive. Both seem to be in search of clear direction.

Some of the tracks might feel superfluous to all but the most ardent of collectors – there are alternate versions of ‘Pretty Mary K’ and ‘Miss Misery’ (the song from the Good Will Hunting soundtrack that brought Smith to wider recognition, included here with radically different lyrics). There’s also a cover of Alex Chilton’s ‘Thirteen’ which initially seems slavishly faithful. Listen closely, though, and the very essence of Smith’s come through. Where the Big Star original was innocent and nostalgic, Smith’s delivery quivers, and implies sadness, melancholy and regret, as if nothing in life can ever compete with the residual warmth of first love. It’s a beautifully intimate moment – and a reminder that Smith had an extraordinary ability for individual communication. At his best here, the unadorned arrangements genuinely capture not just the sound, but the feeling of a man alone in a room – singing directly to a single listener.

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.