Curios - Closer (Impure, 2008)
It’s probably testament to Tom Cawley’s talent and open-mindedness that his original writing and playing for Curios is so wildly at variance with his unbridled assault on his Nord Electro for Acoustic Ladyland. With ‘Skinny Grin’, I felt that group might have taken their punk-jazz schtik a little too far, removing much of the musicality in favour of cross-genre thrashing. By way of contrast, across just two albums, Cawley’s own group have demonstrated the extraordinary versatility of the Piano trio. Curios is a prime example of how considerable empathy between three players can result in music that more than defies its limitations.
For the most part, ‘Closer’ emphasises the group’s more measured, reflective and melancholy side. There are moments of playfulness and exuberance but most traces of fiery aggression have been tempered. It’s definitely steeped far more in the evolving European school than the American bebop tradition. The result is a thoughtful, wistful set filled with great warmth. The intimacy implied by the album’s title seems entirely apt. Cawley’s touch is as light as a feather, and these recordings capture the subtlety and nuance of his playing with elegance and precision. There’s a palpable and compassionate sense of the group playing in isolation but for the benefit of many. ‘Closer’ is like a series of private conversations revealed to the wider world.
A couple of features in Cawley’s writing strike me as particularly impressive. First, there’s the way he can take a simple phrase and extrapolate it into something bold and unpredictable. He builds a whole feature from a short series of notes on ‘Curious’, with 22-year old drummer Josh Blackmore contributing his own responses and a wealth of rhythmic intricacy. It veers seamlessly from a cool, spacey feel to an unexpectedly driving swing. Secondly, there’s the comfort with which he has absorbed such a wide range of influences. If anything, there’s as much Debussy as Keith Jarrett in his writing, and ‘The Tiling Song’ even resembles an East European classical dance. Perhaps the real hint is in ‘Bradford’, a piece recognising the pivotal influence of American pianist Brad Mehldau.
Equally significant is how the entire band put their technical abilities in the service of feeling and atmosphere rather than virtuosic showmanship. Whilst the combination of classical and jazz traditions can often seem studied and academic, Curios manage to be consistently engaging and stimulating. It’s not simply that the music is complex or polyrhythmic – it’s the way the band makes transitions that are so confident as to barely register an impact. Suddenly, the listener’s ear might awaken and realise the music has travelled to a completely new place. For example, the opening ‘Little Sharks and Baby Dolphins’ shifts effortlessly between a deceptively simple waltz theme and a more propulsive, but no less delicate exposition. It’s all guided calmly by Josh Blackmore’s varying cymbal patterns.
This is not, on the surface, accessible or populist music, but it appears to have found a reasonable audience by virtue of its sheer finesse alone. There is, it seems, as much excitement in Cawley’s expressive, lyrical themes as there is in the outlandish, more muscular improvisation emerging from the Loop Collective. That London-based jazz seems to be pulling in so many different directions at the moment is hugely exciting. This radical open-mindedness has revitalised the scene, and hopefully pointed out to those programmers who undermined Jazz broadcasting in this country how wrong-headed they have been. There is both the space and the appreciation for a great wealth of ideas to flourish.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Radiance
Emmylou Harris, London Hammersmith Apollo, 14th September 2008
It’s taken me a while to get round to writing up my thoughts on my first Emmylou Harris concert experience, so I hope my recollections are not too hazy and distant. With this and last month’s disappointing Stevie Wonder concert, I’m left with very few living legends to see in concert, which hopefully means I’ll be able to restrict myself to reasonably priced gigs from now on.
There has been a lot of debate among Emmylou obsessives about the merits of this latest touring ensemble, The Red Dirt Boys, and her superb previous band Spyboy. It’s certainly true that this band doesn’t attempt to mimic Spyboy’s mysterious swampy grooves, neither do they benefit from a singular talent quite as striking as Buddy Miller. My girlfriend commented perceptively on the limitations of the drum arrangements – the influence of rhythms from around the world, presumably imposed on Emmylou’s music by Daniel Lanois and Malcolm Burn, is now largely absent. It’s arguably appropriate though, given the more tasteful, rootsy nature of Emmylou’s latest album (‘All I Intended To Be’), that The Red Dirt Boys are a group well grounded in the American folk tradition. The strongest link in the band is Rickie Simpkins, who plays a bewildering variety of instruments including mandolin, fiddle and banjo. He’s also a more than competent vocalist, providing strongly supportive harmonies and a memorable duet on ‘Old Five and Dimers Like Me’. The whole group are tasteful, sensitive players who complement Emmylou’s haunting voice, an instrument not just undiminished in its powers, but still developing.
Perhaps most interestingly of all, they play subtly redefined versions of the songs post-‘Wrecking Ball’. These versions go some way toward emphasising the continuity throughout her career rather than presenting that album schematically as a radical seismic shift. Yes, the new emphasis on production values found a new context for her voice – but these songs, including her own, have strong ties with the country tradition. As a result, the show coheres superbly, with Appalachian balladry, bluegrass stomp and, as Emmylou herself admits, a healthy dose of the blues.
It is surely the latter ingredient that is the most significant in her potent mix. Whether she’s drawing something from her own experience or interpreting the work of her most admired writers, there is always an aching sadness and poignancy at the core of her delivery. She admits that she had to exaggerate for ‘Red Dirt Girl’ as her childhood was never quite so painful but claims that the selected Merle Haggard’s beautiful ‘Kern River’ because it’s ‘just so unbearably sad’. After performing a distinctive reading of Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Pancho and Lefty’ (sharper and starker than the original), she quotes Townes’ view that ‘there are only two types of music – zip-a-dee-doo-da and the blues’. Unsurprisingly, she promises more of the latter.
It’s become a cliché to say this about the great interpreters – but Emmylou does indeed make every song her own. Even the Gram Parsons songs, which must come with weighty, personal memories for her, are imbued with fresh vigour. She does ‘Return of the Grievous Angel’ and ‘Wheels’ tonight, two of his most memorable songs, inverting them so that her harmony lines become the lead voice. This initially makes them sound unfamiliar and strange, but by the final verse of each, she has such total command that the original melody begins to sound weaker.
The most striking revelation of the night turns out to be Emmylou’s skill as a guitarist. Anyone expecting her to strum politely throughout would no doubt have left impressed by her graceful finger picking, particularly on a moving version of ‘Bang The Drum Slowly’. I found myself wondering whether this rendition of the song might have been even more effective had it been completely solo. The interjection of swirling synth pads during the choruses did seem a little obvious – a touch of emotional manipulation where evidently none was required.
Two further reservations – in not playing ‘Michelangelo’ or ‘Boulder to Birmingham’ she arguably omits her two finest self-penned songs. The show opening ‘Here I Am’ acts as the sole selection from ‘Stumble Into Grace’, which seems a shame given the rich seam of material that album might provide. This is of course a mere quibble given the show’s near two-hour running time. A more significant obstacle is the amount of reverb added to her voice – it’s a strong enough instrument not to need it, and the effect is to obscure her enunciation so some of the words become lost. With her great emphasis on story songs and personal narratives, the words are often as important as the melodies.
Still, for a woman who claims not to be religious, she sounds fervent and almost evangelical tonight. There’s a strong gospel power to the show’s final stretch, with a striking unaccompanied vocal harmony version of ‘Bright Morning Stars’ and a joyous and rousing ‘Get Up John!’. This starts to make the spiritual strain of her more recent material (especially ‘The Pearl’) begin to make more sense.
It’s also impossible to review an Emmylou performance without mentioning just how wonderful she looks, her angelic facial beauty well preserved and her stunning white hair seeming to flow seamlessly into a radiant white dress. It’s good to see she can still wear cowboy boots too.
It’s taken me a while to get round to writing up my thoughts on my first Emmylou Harris concert experience, so I hope my recollections are not too hazy and distant. With this and last month’s disappointing Stevie Wonder concert, I’m left with very few living legends to see in concert, which hopefully means I’ll be able to restrict myself to reasonably priced gigs from now on.
There has been a lot of debate among Emmylou obsessives about the merits of this latest touring ensemble, The Red Dirt Boys, and her superb previous band Spyboy. It’s certainly true that this band doesn’t attempt to mimic Spyboy’s mysterious swampy grooves, neither do they benefit from a singular talent quite as striking as Buddy Miller. My girlfriend commented perceptively on the limitations of the drum arrangements – the influence of rhythms from around the world, presumably imposed on Emmylou’s music by Daniel Lanois and Malcolm Burn, is now largely absent. It’s arguably appropriate though, given the more tasteful, rootsy nature of Emmylou’s latest album (‘All I Intended To Be’), that The Red Dirt Boys are a group well grounded in the American folk tradition. The strongest link in the band is Rickie Simpkins, who plays a bewildering variety of instruments including mandolin, fiddle and banjo. He’s also a more than competent vocalist, providing strongly supportive harmonies and a memorable duet on ‘Old Five and Dimers Like Me’. The whole group are tasteful, sensitive players who complement Emmylou’s haunting voice, an instrument not just undiminished in its powers, but still developing.
Perhaps most interestingly of all, they play subtly redefined versions of the songs post-‘Wrecking Ball’. These versions go some way toward emphasising the continuity throughout her career rather than presenting that album schematically as a radical seismic shift. Yes, the new emphasis on production values found a new context for her voice – but these songs, including her own, have strong ties with the country tradition. As a result, the show coheres superbly, with Appalachian balladry, bluegrass stomp and, as Emmylou herself admits, a healthy dose of the blues.
It is surely the latter ingredient that is the most significant in her potent mix. Whether she’s drawing something from her own experience or interpreting the work of her most admired writers, there is always an aching sadness and poignancy at the core of her delivery. She admits that she had to exaggerate for ‘Red Dirt Girl’ as her childhood was never quite so painful but claims that the selected Merle Haggard’s beautiful ‘Kern River’ because it’s ‘just so unbearably sad’. After performing a distinctive reading of Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Pancho and Lefty’ (sharper and starker than the original), she quotes Townes’ view that ‘there are only two types of music – zip-a-dee-doo-da and the blues’. Unsurprisingly, she promises more of the latter.
It’s become a cliché to say this about the great interpreters – but Emmylou does indeed make every song her own. Even the Gram Parsons songs, which must come with weighty, personal memories for her, are imbued with fresh vigour. She does ‘Return of the Grievous Angel’ and ‘Wheels’ tonight, two of his most memorable songs, inverting them so that her harmony lines become the lead voice. This initially makes them sound unfamiliar and strange, but by the final verse of each, she has such total command that the original melody begins to sound weaker.
The most striking revelation of the night turns out to be Emmylou’s skill as a guitarist. Anyone expecting her to strum politely throughout would no doubt have left impressed by her graceful finger picking, particularly on a moving version of ‘Bang The Drum Slowly’. I found myself wondering whether this rendition of the song might have been even more effective had it been completely solo. The interjection of swirling synth pads during the choruses did seem a little obvious – a touch of emotional manipulation where evidently none was required.
Two further reservations – in not playing ‘Michelangelo’ or ‘Boulder to Birmingham’ she arguably omits her two finest self-penned songs. The show opening ‘Here I Am’ acts as the sole selection from ‘Stumble Into Grace’, which seems a shame given the rich seam of material that album might provide. This is of course a mere quibble given the show’s near two-hour running time. A more significant obstacle is the amount of reverb added to her voice – it’s a strong enough instrument not to need it, and the effect is to obscure her enunciation so some of the words become lost. With her great emphasis on story songs and personal narratives, the words are often as important as the melodies.
Still, for a woman who claims not to be religious, she sounds fervent and almost evangelical tonight. There’s a strong gospel power to the show’s final stretch, with a striking unaccompanied vocal harmony version of ‘Bright Morning Stars’ and a joyous and rousing ‘Get Up John!’. This starts to make the spiritual strain of her more recent material (especially ‘The Pearl’) begin to make more sense.
It’s also impossible to review an Emmylou performance without mentioning just how wonderful she looks, her angelic facial beauty well preserved and her stunning white hair seeming to flow seamlessly into a radiant white dress. It’s good to see she can still wear cowboy boots too.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Norman Whitfield RIP
Yet another legend has passed away this week - Motown producer and songwriter Norman Whitfield. Although Whitfield is less well known than Stax counterpart Isaac Hayes (he didn't enjoy such a fruitful solo career), his influence and style are pretty similar. His songwriting partnership with Barrett Strong mirrored the collaboration between Hayes and David Porter at Stax. His production style, creating what has since been dubbed 'psychedelic soul' must surely have informed Hayes' work on the Shaft soundtrack.
Whitfield was responsible for writing one of the most enduring songs of the Motown era - 'I Heard It Through The Grapevine'. The song was immortalised by Marvin Gaye's extraordinary delivery (and the exquisite orchestration on that version), but was also recorded by many other groups Whitfield was involved with, including The Temptations and The Undisputed Truth.
His production work for The Temptations still sounds imaginative today and has been hugely influential. Tracks like 'Psychedelic Shack', 'Ball of Confusion' and 'Papa Was A Rolling Stone' took them well beyond the conventional limitations of the soul vocal group.
The Undisputed Truth, very much a Whitfield project, have been less fondly remembered and remain criminally underrated. 'Smiling Faces (Sometimes)' and 'You Make Your Own Heaven and Hell (Right Here On Earth)' remain two of the most potent examples of Whitfield's skill with prodution and arranging - the mood of both is palpably threatening.
Whitfield was responsible for writing one of the most enduring songs of the Motown era - 'I Heard It Through The Grapevine'. The song was immortalised by Marvin Gaye's extraordinary delivery (and the exquisite orchestration on that version), but was also recorded by many other groups Whitfield was involved with, including The Temptations and The Undisputed Truth.
His production work for The Temptations still sounds imaginative today and has been hugely influential. Tracks like 'Psychedelic Shack', 'Ball of Confusion' and 'Papa Was A Rolling Stone' took them well beyond the conventional limitations of the soul vocal group.
The Undisputed Truth, very much a Whitfield project, have been less fondly remembered and remain criminally underrated. 'Smiling Faces (Sometimes)' and 'You Make Your Own Heaven and Hell (Right Here On Earth)' remain two of the most potent examples of Whitfield's skill with prodution and arranging - the mood of both is palpably threatening.
Daylight Robbery
There's always a lot of fuss about a 'new' Bob Dylan release, however much it scrapes the barrel for previously unreleased recordings. The latest volume in the Bootleg Series, 'Tell Tale Signs' is no different - but much of the fuss this time has been generated by those fans refusing to purchase the set. Sony's marketing strategy for this release is at best bizarre and at worst a total insult. They are releasing the collection in three versions - a single disc, a double disc and an inevitable limited edition 3CD set with deluxe booklet. The complete version costs....well, what would be reasonable? At the absolute top end, I'd say £39.99. This turns out to be very wide of Sony's valuation, which puts it at £101.49!!
Is the packaging made of the rarest diamonds?! This is three times the face value of a ticket to see the man himself in concert! There are many other Dylan 3CD compilations in circulation (the first Bootleg Series set vols 1-3, Biograph, various budget packages of the original albums) and none of them cost even close to this exorbitant asking price. It is no surprise that many fans are pledging to download the third disc illegally from torrent sites but this relies on someone being generous enough to shell out for the set and upload it, or for a very unscrupulous journalist to make a political stand.
What do Sony stand to gain from valuing the bonus disc at an additional £80? Is it the best material Dylan has recorded? This seems highly unlikely, however rejuvenated a force he has been since 'Time Out Of Mind'. One wonders what Dylan himself makes of all this, and whether or not he has any kind of control over it. This label is constantly milking the Dylan catalogue for a quick buck. Last year's 'Dylan' best of (also released in 2CD and 3CD versions) made little improvement on 'Biograph' save for some inclusion of later material, including some very peculiar selections. This has just taken the worship of Dylan into the realms of the ridiculous. I shall not be buying the set.
Is the packaging made of the rarest diamonds?! This is three times the face value of a ticket to see the man himself in concert! There are many other Dylan 3CD compilations in circulation (the first Bootleg Series set vols 1-3, Biograph, various budget packages of the original albums) and none of them cost even close to this exorbitant asking price. It is no surprise that many fans are pledging to download the third disc illegally from torrent sites but this relies on someone being generous enough to shell out for the set and upload it, or for a very unscrupulous journalist to make a political stand.
What do Sony stand to gain from valuing the bonus disc at an additional £80? Is it the best material Dylan has recorded? This seems highly unlikely, however rejuvenated a force he has been since 'Time Out Of Mind'. One wonders what Dylan himself makes of all this, and whether or not he has any kind of control over it. This label is constantly milking the Dylan catalogue for a quick buck. Last year's 'Dylan' best of (also released in 2CD and 3CD versions) made little improvement on 'Biograph' save for some inclusion of later material, including some very peculiar selections. This has just taken the worship of Dylan into the realms of the ridiculous. I shall not be buying the set.
Friday, September 12, 2008
It's Not Even Summer, Is It?
Stevie Wonder, London O2 Arena, 11th September 2008
On one level, it seems completely churlish to complain about Stevie Wonder’s performance at the O2 last night. Mercifully, we *are* treated to many of the highpoints of his back catalogue (‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered’, ‘My Cherie Amour’, a huge chunk of the ‘Innervisions’ album, ‘Superstition’, ‘Sir Duke’, ‘Knocks Me Off My Feet’, ‘I Wish’ amongst others). He has a huge band supporting him onstage and from the back of the hellish O2 it’s frequently difficult to determine precisely who is doing what. Does he really need two other keyboardists in addition to himself? Two percussionists and a drummer?!
Unfortunately, though, I could only leave ‘A Wonder Summer’s Night’ (a bit of a crass and unimaginative name for a tour) with a heavy heart and a feeling that this once great artist no longer has any interest in being original or challenging. The show is so poorly sequenced as to be interminably disengaging for substantial chunks of its epic duration. His opening rendition of Miles Davis’ ‘All Blues’ is unexpected and pleasing – but a little odd for an audience who will not associate the piece with the performer on stage. In fact, Wonder’s still dazzling piano playing demonstrates a consistent jazz influence throughout the show, although it is often refracted through a prism that magnifies the schmaltz at the expense of the substance. The rest of the show suffers from disorientating lurches in pace and style – he’ll play an upbeat funk gem from his golden period and then immediately follow it with a sentimental ballad or an aimless jam.
Even at its best, the music is arranged and performed in a manner that is unsuitably slick. These hard-hitting, technically proficient gospel rhythm sections appear to be de rigeur these days – but as impressive as they are, they are musically one-dimensional (the whole show lacks dynamic or textural variety) and often boring as a result. The appeal of Wonder’s fantastic run of albums from Music of My Mind to Songs In The Key of Life during the 1970s was that there was a certain sloppiness to the sound as well as precision to the rhythm – it’s this tension that provided the invigorating groove and the palpable sense of soul. Both are sadly absent in this concert. There’s a fairly uninspired Latin groove over which Wonder introduces his entire band and lets every musician take a solo – but even this seems to have had any sense of spontaneity surgically removed.
Lamentable inconsistency has been Wonder’s Achilles Heel since 1975 (‘Songs in the Key of Life’ favoured his sentimental side, although he got away with it then through the sheer verve and spirit of that music). As he has become less prolific, his lapses of taste and decency have become all the more startling. Personally, I could have done without the excruciating extended version of ‘Ribbon In The Sky’ (one of many moments when he gets a bit ambitious with his demands in terms of audience participation) and the mid-section of the set that favours ballads with Wonder at the piano could have happily been curtailed. I suspect everyone could have done without the spiel about his mother dying and inspiring him to return to music too, but he has always been a painfully sincere and earnest artist. His request for a minute's silence on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks was handled with more sensitivity and restraint, and I found myself rather angry with the morons who broke it with shouts of 'we love you Stevie!'
Whilst it’s great to see Wonder visibly enjoying his time on stage and treating fans to a generous set, the moments of audience participation and playfulness seem rambling and unfocused. There’s a moment when he sings ‘Hello London’ through a vocoder and you hope it’s going to meld into one of this 70s classics, but it never arrives anywhere at all. Sometimes he just stops completely and tries to engage the audience in call-and-response sessions but at the back of the venue, we’re just too detached from any kind of atmosphere to engage. There are so many moments when people drift to the bar and for once I find myself understanding the motivation to get a drink – I just wish he’d get on with it!
Vocally, Wonder is now a little vulnerable. The upper end of his register is still very strong, but at the lower end he seems to have lost power and volume. Sometimes his voice cracks or he doesn’t quite hit the right note, odd for a musician with such a capable ear. There are some songs (‘Knocks Me Off My Feet’ and ‘Visions’ particularly) where he seems to be struggling with the control of his voice and some of the lines are noticeably wayward as a result.
In spite of all this, the show certainly has its moments. ‘Higher Ground’ is as passionate and invigorating as ever, perhaps given fresh political resonance by Wonder’s passionate support for Barack Obama. Some lesser material from ‘Hotter Than July’ (including an enjoyable ‘Masterblaster’) stands up surprisingly well. ‘Don’t You Worry About A Thing’ and ‘Living For The City’ are also welcome treats, although, in his unwillingness to play the full seven minutes of the latter, the tempo is subjected to a bizarre and inappropriate acceleration. Similarly, whilst it’s good to hear the gorgeous ‘Visions’ amongst the ballads, its new soft rock coda is ill-judged, particularly when one of the guitarists begins shredding gratuitously to no discernible emotional impact.
Like Prince at his shows at the same venue last year, Wonder treats some of his greatest songs with far less respect than they deserve. An invigorating ‘Uptight’ is cut short and merged into a grotesque mass singalong of ‘I Just Called To Say I Love You’. I have never met anyone who has admitted liking the latter song, yet it remains Wonder’s biggest UK hit and gets the biggest ovation of the night. Frankly, who can blame Wonder for all his cheesy indulgences tonight when his paying audience are so undiscerning? It’s great to hear ‘I Wish’ and ‘Isn’t She Lovely?’, but frustrating that they are edited and merged together in a hurried medley. We needed more of this material earlier in the show!
Even tonight, there’s still plenty of evidence that Wonder is a master musician – the better of his ballads are intricate and intelligent, with harmonic complexity rarely found in pop music. His groove based music remains peerless, and even the treatment handed out to it by this mercilessly rehearsed band of session musos can’t really diminish that power. So, the final half hour of the show is at the very least entertaining. Better still, that pure and clear sound he gets from the harmonica remains one of the most beautiful sounds on earth. I would have liked to hear more of it.
On one level, it seems completely churlish to complain about Stevie Wonder’s performance at the O2 last night. Mercifully, we *are* treated to many of the highpoints of his back catalogue (‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered’, ‘My Cherie Amour’, a huge chunk of the ‘Innervisions’ album, ‘Superstition’, ‘Sir Duke’, ‘Knocks Me Off My Feet’, ‘I Wish’ amongst others). He has a huge band supporting him onstage and from the back of the hellish O2 it’s frequently difficult to determine precisely who is doing what. Does he really need two other keyboardists in addition to himself? Two percussionists and a drummer?!
Unfortunately, though, I could only leave ‘A Wonder Summer’s Night’ (a bit of a crass and unimaginative name for a tour) with a heavy heart and a feeling that this once great artist no longer has any interest in being original or challenging. The show is so poorly sequenced as to be interminably disengaging for substantial chunks of its epic duration. His opening rendition of Miles Davis’ ‘All Blues’ is unexpected and pleasing – but a little odd for an audience who will not associate the piece with the performer on stage. In fact, Wonder’s still dazzling piano playing demonstrates a consistent jazz influence throughout the show, although it is often refracted through a prism that magnifies the schmaltz at the expense of the substance. The rest of the show suffers from disorientating lurches in pace and style – he’ll play an upbeat funk gem from his golden period and then immediately follow it with a sentimental ballad or an aimless jam.
Even at its best, the music is arranged and performed in a manner that is unsuitably slick. These hard-hitting, technically proficient gospel rhythm sections appear to be de rigeur these days – but as impressive as they are, they are musically one-dimensional (the whole show lacks dynamic or textural variety) and often boring as a result. The appeal of Wonder’s fantastic run of albums from Music of My Mind to Songs In The Key of Life during the 1970s was that there was a certain sloppiness to the sound as well as precision to the rhythm – it’s this tension that provided the invigorating groove and the palpable sense of soul. Both are sadly absent in this concert. There’s a fairly uninspired Latin groove over which Wonder introduces his entire band and lets every musician take a solo – but even this seems to have had any sense of spontaneity surgically removed.
Lamentable inconsistency has been Wonder’s Achilles Heel since 1975 (‘Songs in the Key of Life’ favoured his sentimental side, although he got away with it then through the sheer verve and spirit of that music). As he has become less prolific, his lapses of taste and decency have become all the more startling. Personally, I could have done without the excruciating extended version of ‘Ribbon In The Sky’ (one of many moments when he gets a bit ambitious with his demands in terms of audience participation) and the mid-section of the set that favours ballads with Wonder at the piano could have happily been curtailed. I suspect everyone could have done without the spiel about his mother dying and inspiring him to return to music too, but he has always been a painfully sincere and earnest artist. His request for a minute's silence on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks was handled with more sensitivity and restraint, and I found myself rather angry with the morons who broke it with shouts of 'we love you Stevie!'
Whilst it’s great to see Wonder visibly enjoying his time on stage and treating fans to a generous set, the moments of audience participation and playfulness seem rambling and unfocused. There’s a moment when he sings ‘Hello London’ through a vocoder and you hope it’s going to meld into one of this 70s classics, but it never arrives anywhere at all. Sometimes he just stops completely and tries to engage the audience in call-and-response sessions but at the back of the venue, we’re just too detached from any kind of atmosphere to engage. There are so many moments when people drift to the bar and for once I find myself understanding the motivation to get a drink – I just wish he’d get on with it!
Vocally, Wonder is now a little vulnerable. The upper end of his register is still very strong, but at the lower end he seems to have lost power and volume. Sometimes his voice cracks or he doesn’t quite hit the right note, odd for a musician with such a capable ear. There are some songs (‘Knocks Me Off My Feet’ and ‘Visions’ particularly) where he seems to be struggling with the control of his voice and some of the lines are noticeably wayward as a result.
In spite of all this, the show certainly has its moments. ‘Higher Ground’ is as passionate and invigorating as ever, perhaps given fresh political resonance by Wonder’s passionate support for Barack Obama. Some lesser material from ‘Hotter Than July’ (including an enjoyable ‘Masterblaster’) stands up surprisingly well. ‘Don’t You Worry About A Thing’ and ‘Living For The City’ are also welcome treats, although, in his unwillingness to play the full seven minutes of the latter, the tempo is subjected to a bizarre and inappropriate acceleration. Similarly, whilst it’s good to hear the gorgeous ‘Visions’ amongst the ballads, its new soft rock coda is ill-judged, particularly when one of the guitarists begins shredding gratuitously to no discernible emotional impact.
Like Prince at his shows at the same venue last year, Wonder treats some of his greatest songs with far less respect than they deserve. An invigorating ‘Uptight’ is cut short and merged into a grotesque mass singalong of ‘I Just Called To Say I Love You’. I have never met anyone who has admitted liking the latter song, yet it remains Wonder’s biggest UK hit and gets the biggest ovation of the night. Frankly, who can blame Wonder for all his cheesy indulgences tonight when his paying audience are so undiscerning? It’s great to hear ‘I Wish’ and ‘Isn’t She Lovely?’, but frustrating that they are edited and merged together in a hurried medley. We needed more of this material earlier in the show!
Even tonight, there’s still plenty of evidence that Wonder is a master musician – the better of his ballads are intricate and intelligent, with harmonic complexity rarely found in pop music. His groove based music remains peerless, and even the treatment handed out to it by this mercilessly rehearsed band of session musos can’t really diminish that power. So, the final half hour of the show is at the very least entertaining. Better still, that pure and clear sound he gets from the harmonica remains one of the most beautiful sounds on earth. I would have liked to hear more of it.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Club Uncool
Kurt Wagner, Cate Le Bon, James Blackshaw - The Borderline, London 10th September 2008
Every so often London blesses us with a club night that has been intelligently programmed, with three interesting acts that make sense lined up next to each other. Last night’s Club Uncut was one of those rare and highly enjoyable evenings – and one which came with the added bonus of a very joyous and positive atmosphere.
Proceedings were opened by the prodigious guitarist James Blackshaw, a descendent of the Takoma school of playing strongly influenced by the likes of Robbie Basho and John Fahey. Blackshaw’s compositions are dense and long, drawing every ounce of potential from each and every theme or motif. His playing is technically accomplished and impressively dexterous, but his use of open tunings means his music is characterised most by warmth and intimacy. It’s hard to describe exactly what is so satisfying about his performance – he sits legs crossed and performs without much in the way of personality or charisma. The impact comes exclusively from the hypnotic power of his music. What a shame he couldn’t have been given a little more time.
I know very little about Cate Le Bon other that she is a Welsh associate of Gruff Rhys and is currently performing as part of the Neon Neon project. Her first song tonight seemed a little clunky to me – the chords strummed a fraction too heavily and her voice seeming somewhat mannered. She eased into her performance though, and within a couple of songs communicated a personality and musical vocabulary that seemed distinctive and refreshing. Many of the songs seemed to be about murdered animals, but the assured quality of her delivery transported her songs beyond the realms of whimsy.
Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner began his quite wonderful solo set by bellowing what he described as a ‘hogcall’ from within the audience, eventually completing the job from the stage. He then sat down with his guitar and performed a superb rendition of Bob Dylan’s ‘You’re A Big Girl Now’. It’s rare to hear a Dylan song covered and forget there was ever a Bob Dylan version – but Wagner inhabited and controlled this song so completely that he made it his own.
The rest of his set consisted entirely of material from the new Lambchop album ‘OH(Ohio)’, the result being a revelatory glimpse at how brilliant that album could have been. With the focus now on his soulful, idiosyncratic guitar playing and unusual vocal phrasing, and with the words once again clearly audible, the songs revealed themselves as humane narratives, full of wit and insight. I found myself once again moved and stirred by the imaginative poetry of this compelling everyman.
Wagner himself was a genial figure on stage – revelling in the comic potential of the solo performance, and again demonstrating himself to be one of the most amiable, gentle and modest of songwriters. ‘I’m not here trying to be like Neil Young breaking away from Crosby, Stills and Nash’ he declared, ‘I’m just trying to become a better person – oh, and the rest of the group are busy with the Silver Jews thing too.’
He may however have been working to a strict contract, employing one bemused audience member to watch an egg timer throughout the whole set to ensure he didn’t extend his allotted time. As a result, the performance was frustratingly brief. Some parts of the audience may well have appreciated a smattering from the back catalogue, although that was clearly not the purpose of this show, and Wagner’s refusal to play ‘a song called Up With People’ was understandable.
He ends with a hoary old country standard ‘I Believe in You’ which may be now be responsible for one of the most straightforwardly romantic moments in my life so far. By his own admission, it’s ‘sappy’ and defiantly ‘uncool’, but it’s also sweet-natured and positive and it’s refreshing that Wagner is unafraid to express the value of good old fashioned human compassion.
My feeling now is that by drifting into ever more tasteful and restrained arrangements, Lambchop as a group has probably exhausted its potential. The band will probably not make a clearer, more articulate statement of dignified minimalism than ‘Is A Woman’ and will definitely not make a record as lush and invigorating as ‘Nixon’. On this evidence, the greater mystery and drama now resides in Wagner as a solo singer-songwriter, although he seems far too humble to pursue this path any time soon.
Every so often London blesses us with a club night that has been intelligently programmed, with three interesting acts that make sense lined up next to each other. Last night’s Club Uncut was one of those rare and highly enjoyable evenings – and one which came with the added bonus of a very joyous and positive atmosphere.
Proceedings were opened by the prodigious guitarist James Blackshaw, a descendent of the Takoma school of playing strongly influenced by the likes of Robbie Basho and John Fahey. Blackshaw’s compositions are dense and long, drawing every ounce of potential from each and every theme or motif. His playing is technically accomplished and impressively dexterous, but his use of open tunings means his music is characterised most by warmth and intimacy. It’s hard to describe exactly what is so satisfying about his performance – he sits legs crossed and performs without much in the way of personality or charisma. The impact comes exclusively from the hypnotic power of his music. What a shame he couldn’t have been given a little more time.
I know very little about Cate Le Bon other that she is a Welsh associate of Gruff Rhys and is currently performing as part of the Neon Neon project. Her first song tonight seemed a little clunky to me – the chords strummed a fraction too heavily and her voice seeming somewhat mannered. She eased into her performance though, and within a couple of songs communicated a personality and musical vocabulary that seemed distinctive and refreshing. Many of the songs seemed to be about murdered animals, but the assured quality of her delivery transported her songs beyond the realms of whimsy.
Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner began his quite wonderful solo set by bellowing what he described as a ‘hogcall’ from within the audience, eventually completing the job from the stage. He then sat down with his guitar and performed a superb rendition of Bob Dylan’s ‘You’re A Big Girl Now’. It’s rare to hear a Dylan song covered and forget there was ever a Bob Dylan version – but Wagner inhabited and controlled this song so completely that he made it his own.
The rest of his set consisted entirely of material from the new Lambchop album ‘OH(Ohio)’, the result being a revelatory glimpse at how brilliant that album could have been. With the focus now on his soulful, idiosyncratic guitar playing and unusual vocal phrasing, and with the words once again clearly audible, the songs revealed themselves as humane narratives, full of wit and insight. I found myself once again moved and stirred by the imaginative poetry of this compelling everyman.
Wagner himself was a genial figure on stage – revelling in the comic potential of the solo performance, and again demonstrating himself to be one of the most amiable, gentle and modest of songwriters. ‘I’m not here trying to be like Neil Young breaking away from Crosby, Stills and Nash’ he declared, ‘I’m just trying to become a better person – oh, and the rest of the group are busy with the Silver Jews thing too.’
He may however have been working to a strict contract, employing one bemused audience member to watch an egg timer throughout the whole set to ensure he didn’t extend his allotted time. As a result, the performance was frustratingly brief. Some parts of the audience may well have appreciated a smattering from the back catalogue, although that was clearly not the purpose of this show, and Wagner’s refusal to play ‘a song called Up With People’ was understandable.
He ends with a hoary old country standard ‘I Believe in You’ which may be now be responsible for one of the most straightforwardly romantic moments in my life so far. By his own admission, it’s ‘sappy’ and defiantly ‘uncool’, but it’s also sweet-natured and positive and it’s refreshing that Wagner is unafraid to express the value of good old fashioned human compassion.
My feeling now is that by drifting into ever more tasteful and restrained arrangements, Lambchop as a group has probably exhausted its potential. The band will probably not make a clearer, more articulate statement of dignified minimalism than ‘Is A Woman’ and will definitely not make a record as lush and invigorating as ‘Nixon’. On this evidence, the greater mystery and drama now resides in Wagner as a solo singer-songwriter, although he seems far too humble to pursue this path any time soon.
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
A Presidential Election
Calexico - Carried to Dust (City Slang, 2008)
Lambchop - OH(Ohio) (City Slang, 2008)
If I see the words ‘return to form’ used in reference to either of these two albums one more time I think I’m going to throw a hissyfit. John Mulvey at least admits the term is a ‘dread phrase’ in his blog about ‘OH(Ohio)’ on the Uncut website but it’s still a contestable claim that either band ever really lost form. Lambchop albums have perhaps become more slippery and elusive since ‘Is A Woman’, but ‘Damaged’ had a rather creeping, insidious effect on me that I came to admire. As for Calexico, their tentative venture into rockier territory on ‘Garden Ruin’, rightly acclaimed in reviews at the time, has now been condemned as a mis-step in retrospect. Regardless of what one thought of that attempt to diversify, the mini album with Iron and Wine ‘In The Reins’ remains to my mind one of the great unsung masterpieces of the decade so far. Critics are fickle beasts!
‘Carried to Dust’ certainly ought to please those Calexico admirers who would prefer them not to change too much. The mariachi horns return, there are plenty of lush strings and border-evoking brushed drums. Yet to suggest the group have completely abandoned the map they began charting with ‘Garden Ruin’ is a little misleading. There are some dramatic guitar atmospherics on the restless ‘Writer’s Minor Holiday’ particularly and a number of other tracks are not easy to pigeon-hole as border music. The slow building tension of ‘Man Made Lake’, for example, crafted with sustained piano chords and some unrestrained guitar howling, would not have been a feature of the Calexico sound before ‘Garden Ruin’. If Arcade Fire borrowed some of Calexico’s stylings for their majestic ‘Ocean of Noise’ (by some distance the best track on ‘Neon Bible’ for me), Calexico now return the compliment by using a distinctly Arcade Fire-esque backbeat and slow building tension on ‘Two Silver Trees’.
Elsewhere, the sound is more comforting and familiar, the Spanish language collaboration with Amparo Sanchez on ‘Inspiracion’ taking many of Calexico’s preoccupations to their logical conclusion. There’s that deliciously dusty quality to many of the songs, with the lightly rolling rhythms, evoking, it must be admitted, images of horses and wagons, they deploy so effortlessly. One can hardly blame the group for returning to these well worn tropes when they are so adept at executing them. Best of all is when they apply a new and unexpected nuance to these characteristic features. The superb ‘Fractured Air (Tornado Watch)’ benefits from some echo effects on the horns more common to dub reggae than American or Mexican folk music. Together with some syncopated rhythm guitar, it makes for something lithe and funky.
I’ve seen some reviews that suggest the songwriting on this album fails to match the impact of the group’s instrumentals. I have to disagree quite strongly with this, as ‘Carried to Dust’ is certainly Calexico’s most immediate collection so far (if not necessarily their best). Some of their songs are admittedly more about mood than melody (‘Bend to the Road’) but ‘Carried to Dust’ has more than its fair share of stirring creations. ‘Slowness’, featuring the delightful vocals of Canadian Pieta Brown, is particularly glorious, subtle and restrained but also with some kind of gently hymnal quality to the performance. ‘Victor Jara’s Hands’ and ‘News From William’ are the kind of compelling narratives we’ve come to expect from the group. Perhaps least predictable is the hazy, eerie, partially electronic ‘Contention City’, a journey into dreamlike fantasia the band handle remarkably well.
As is often the case with Calexico, there’s quite a lot to absorb within this album’s fifteen tracks (sixteen if you get the iTunes bonus track) but it’s too easy to take this group for granted. They remain musicians who luxuriate in every slight detail – the effect created by a single hit on a cymbal bell, or exploring the interplay between guitars and pianos, a frequent feature of this collection. I suspect this is something a little more than just another good Calexico album.
The extent to which ‘OH (Ohio)’ represents a diversion from Lambchop’s most recent work has arguably been overstated. It’s more skeletal, with the florid string flourishes of ‘Aw, C’Mon/No You C’Mon’ now firmly jettisoned, but 2006’s excellent ‘Damaged’ had already initiated that process. It shares with its predecessor a tendency to divest Kurt Wagner’s idiosyncratic voice of personality, his croaky mumble too often obscuring his strange and original lyrics. His words can as a result fall into the background, carefully enmeshed in what is undoubtedly a very lovely, mostly sedate sound.
For me, Lambchop tracks were always more powerful when they made a triumphant virtue of Wagner’s vocals and lyrics. ‘Nixon’ worked as much because of the extraordinary, piercing attack and surprise of that falsetto, as much as through its lavish arrangements. The best songs on ‘How I Quit Smoking’ (‘Theone’, ‘The Man Who Loved Beer’) saw Wagner embracing melody as well as acute-angled phrasing. Whilst some found the smoky ambience of ‘Is A Woman’ detached and unemotional, I found both lyrical and musical poetry within it, given investment of the necessary time and effort. Whilst there are plenty of moments on ‘OH(Ohio)’ that are tender and pleasant, there is nothing here that really moves me quite as palpably as those highlights from their back catalogue.
Where the band would previously delve into a nimble and funky soul groove, the emphasis on ‘Ohio’ is more on gently plucked guitars, Tony Crow’s piano now providing subtle shading rather than dominating proceedings as it did on ‘Is a Woman’. Typical are the title track, ‘Of Raymond’ and ‘Slipped, Dissolved and Loosed’. The latter is easily the most memorable thing here, its cooing backing vocals almost sounding comic but also providing a smooth counterpoint to Wagner’s staccato bursts. The opening title track is irresistibly cute (with its central refrain of ‘green doesn’t matter when you’re blue’) but, with its Jobim-tinged arrangement, it’s perilously perched on the precipice between tasteful delight and background or lounge music.
Perhaps there are two points of significant departure here – the use of two producers (regular contributor Mark Nevers and Roger Moutenot, who has worked wonders in the past for Yo La Tengo and Sleater Kinney amongst others) and the occasional deployment of uncharacteristically brisk, driving rock backbeats. These tracks, both superbly titled (‘National Talk Like A Pirate Day’ and ‘Sharing a Gibson with Martin Luther King Jr.’), arguably sound incongruous in context, but they at least provide a very welcome distraction from the familiar dignified restraint on offer elsewhere. ‘National Talk Like A Pirate Day’ is superbly arranged, with Byrdsian jangly guitars and a potent counter melody from the bass.
A number of the tracks here seem to be more subtle and stately takes on familiar Lambchop modes. The lovely ‘A Hold Of You’ veers close to the country soul template they perfected on ‘Nixon’ but seems, perhaps rather self-consciously, to make sure the lid stays firmly on. Some of the songs seem to drift or meander rather lazily, sometimes outstaying their welcome a little. Perhaps the clearest example of this here is the lengthy ‘Popeye’, where Wagner’s words are at their most buried, the harmony seems to repeat a familiar Lambchop sequence, and everything just seems to run on without much purpose (at least until it suddenly veers into a loose-limbed funky coda). It all makes for a very appealing late night or early morning listen – mostly relaxed and elegant but never quite completely awake. Perhaps this is the same criticism that many used against ‘Is A Woman’, but I felt the consistent languid mood of that album serviced its unusual and idiosyncratic songs well. Also, Wagner’s vocals, although abandoning the falsetto, remained striking and incisive on that record.
As ever with Lambchop, the track titles are a veritable treasure trove of imagination in themselves and Wagner’s ruminations on the nature and limitations of masculinity remain transfixing and illuminating. Yet there’s an increasing sense that Lambchop albums now require a quite substantial investment of time and effort from their audience. I’m sure the dignified, tasteful songs on this album will continue to grow on me but I can’t quite escape the sense that this is basically just another good Lambchop album and nothing more, nothing less.
Lambchop - OH(Ohio) (City Slang, 2008)
If I see the words ‘return to form’ used in reference to either of these two albums one more time I think I’m going to throw a hissyfit. John Mulvey at least admits the term is a ‘dread phrase’ in his blog about ‘OH(Ohio)’ on the Uncut website but it’s still a contestable claim that either band ever really lost form. Lambchop albums have perhaps become more slippery and elusive since ‘Is A Woman’, but ‘Damaged’ had a rather creeping, insidious effect on me that I came to admire. As for Calexico, their tentative venture into rockier territory on ‘Garden Ruin’, rightly acclaimed in reviews at the time, has now been condemned as a mis-step in retrospect. Regardless of what one thought of that attempt to diversify, the mini album with Iron and Wine ‘In The Reins’ remains to my mind one of the great unsung masterpieces of the decade so far. Critics are fickle beasts!
‘Carried to Dust’ certainly ought to please those Calexico admirers who would prefer them not to change too much. The mariachi horns return, there are plenty of lush strings and border-evoking brushed drums. Yet to suggest the group have completely abandoned the map they began charting with ‘Garden Ruin’ is a little misleading. There are some dramatic guitar atmospherics on the restless ‘Writer’s Minor Holiday’ particularly and a number of other tracks are not easy to pigeon-hole as border music. The slow building tension of ‘Man Made Lake’, for example, crafted with sustained piano chords and some unrestrained guitar howling, would not have been a feature of the Calexico sound before ‘Garden Ruin’. If Arcade Fire borrowed some of Calexico’s stylings for their majestic ‘Ocean of Noise’ (by some distance the best track on ‘Neon Bible’ for me), Calexico now return the compliment by using a distinctly Arcade Fire-esque backbeat and slow building tension on ‘Two Silver Trees’.
Elsewhere, the sound is more comforting and familiar, the Spanish language collaboration with Amparo Sanchez on ‘Inspiracion’ taking many of Calexico’s preoccupations to their logical conclusion. There’s that deliciously dusty quality to many of the songs, with the lightly rolling rhythms, evoking, it must be admitted, images of horses and wagons, they deploy so effortlessly. One can hardly blame the group for returning to these well worn tropes when they are so adept at executing them. Best of all is when they apply a new and unexpected nuance to these characteristic features. The superb ‘Fractured Air (Tornado Watch)’ benefits from some echo effects on the horns more common to dub reggae than American or Mexican folk music. Together with some syncopated rhythm guitar, it makes for something lithe and funky.
I’ve seen some reviews that suggest the songwriting on this album fails to match the impact of the group’s instrumentals. I have to disagree quite strongly with this, as ‘Carried to Dust’ is certainly Calexico’s most immediate collection so far (if not necessarily their best). Some of their songs are admittedly more about mood than melody (‘Bend to the Road’) but ‘Carried to Dust’ has more than its fair share of stirring creations. ‘Slowness’, featuring the delightful vocals of Canadian Pieta Brown, is particularly glorious, subtle and restrained but also with some kind of gently hymnal quality to the performance. ‘Victor Jara’s Hands’ and ‘News From William’ are the kind of compelling narratives we’ve come to expect from the group. Perhaps least predictable is the hazy, eerie, partially electronic ‘Contention City’, a journey into dreamlike fantasia the band handle remarkably well.
As is often the case with Calexico, there’s quite a lot to absorb within this album’s fifteen tracks (sixteen if you get the iTunes bonus track) but it’s too easy to take this group for granted. They remain musicians who luxuriate in every slight detail – the effect created by a single hit on a cymbal bell, or exploring the interplay between guitars and pianos, a frequent feature of this collection. I suspect this is something a little more than just another good Calexico album.
The extent to which ‘OH (Ohio)’ represents a diversion from Lambchop’s most recent work has arguably been overstated. It’s more skeletal, with the florid string flourishes of ‘Aw, C’Mon/No You C’Mon’ now firmly jettisoned, but 2006’s excellent ‘Damaged’ had already initiated that process. It shares with its predecessor a tendency to divest Kurt Wagner’s idiosyncratic voice of personality, his croaky mumble too often obscuring his strange and original lyrics. His words can as a result fall into the background, carefully enmeshed in what is undoubtedly a very lovely, mostly sedate sound.
For me, Lambchop tracks were always more powerful when they made a triumphant virtue of Wagner’s vocals and lyrics. ‘Nixon’ worked as much because of the extraordinary, piercing attack and surprise of that falsetto, as much as through its lavish arrangements. The best songs on ‘How I Quit Smoking’ (‘Theone’, ‘The Man Who Loved Beer’) saw Wagner embracing melody as well as acute-angled phrasing. Whilst some found the smoky ambience of ‘Is A Woman’ detached and unemotional, I found both lyrical and musical poetry within it, given investment of the necessary time and effort. Whilst there are plenty of moments on ‘OH(Ohio)’ that are tender and pleasant, there is nothing here that really moves me quite as palpably as those highlights from their back catalogue.
Where the band would previously delve into a nimble and funky soul groove, the emphasis on ‘Ohio’ is more on gently plucked guitars, Tony Crow’s piano now providing subtle shading rather than dominating proceedings as it did on ‘Is a Woman’. Typical are the title track, ‘Of Raymond’ and ‘Slipped, Dissolved and Loosed’. The latter is easily the most memorable thing here, its cooing backing vocals almost sounding comic but also providing a smooth counterpoint to Wagner’s staccato bursts. The opening title track is irresistibly cute (with its central refrain of ‘green doesn’t matter when you’re blue’) but, with its Jobim-tinged arrangement, it’s perilously perched on the precipice between tasteful delight and background or lounge music.
Perhaps there are two points of significant departure here – the use of two producers (regular contributor Mark Nevers and Roger Moutenot, who has worked wonders in the past for Yo La Tengo and Sleater Kinney amongst others) and the occasional deployment of uncharacteristically brisk, driving rock backbeats. These tracks, both superbly titled (‘National Talk Like A Pirate Day’ and ‘Sharing a Gibson with Martin Luther King Jr.’), arguably sound incongruous in context, but they at least provide a very welcome distraction from the familiar dignified restraint on offer elsewhere. ‘National Talk Like A Pirate Day’ is superbly arranged, with Byrdsian jangly guitars and a potent counter melody from the bass.
A number of the tracks here seem to be more subtle and stately takes on familiar Lambchop modes. The lovely ‘A Hold Of You’ veers close to the country soul template they perfected on ‘Nixon’ but seems, perhaps rather self-consciously, to make sure the lid stays firmly on. Some of the songs seem to drift or meander rather lazily, sometimes outstaying their welcome a little. Perhaps the clearest example of this here is the lengthy ‘Popeye’, where Wagner’s words are at their most buried, the harmony seems to repeat a familiar Lambchop sequence, and everything just seems to run on without much purpose (at least until it suddenly veers into a loose-limbed funky coda). It all makes for a very appealing late night or early morning listen – mostly relaxed and elegant but never quite completely awake. Perhaps this is the same criticism that many used against ‘Is A Woman’, but I felt the consistent languid mood of that album serviced its unusual and idiosyncratic songs well. Also, Wagner’s vocals, although abandoning the falsetto, remained striking and incisive on that record.
As ever with Lambchop, the track titles are a veritable treasure trove of imagination in themselves and Wagner’s ruminations on the nature and limitations of masculinity remain transfixing and illuminating. Yet there’s an increasing sense that Lambchop albums now require a quite substantial investment of time and effort from their audience. I’m sure the dignified, tasteful songs on this album will continue to grow on me but I can’t quite escape the sense that this is basically just another good Lambchop album and nothing more, nothing less.
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
'We Are R.E.M. and This Is What We Do'
R.E.M., Twickenham Stadium, 30th August 2008
When REM announced that the UK leg of their tour to promote ‘Accelerate’ would feature stadiums, I felt the group’s management and promoters were being a touch ambitious. No number of silly ‘return to form’ reviews is going to turn around the band’s commercial decline overnight, particularly given that ‘Accelerate’ is hardly a return to the southern gothic folk sound that characterised the band’s years of multi-platinum sales. With the Cardiff show downgraded to an Arena and the entire top tier of Twickenham’s seating completely empty, this feeling proved to be correct.
Still, it’s hard to envisage how this superb show would have worked in a smaller venue. Having reinvented themselves some time ago as a touring act par excellence, the group have really pushed the boat out with this tour. I’ve seen REM some six times since 1995 and this really was by some distance the best performance I’ve seen them give – muscular, charismatic and, ingeniously, providing mass entertainment whilst being firmly uncompromising. Every aspect of the show’s design – including visuals and lighting – had been carefully prepared and orchestrated to enhance the atmosphere.
The sheer brilliance of their set merely heightened the torture of watching support act Editors. Dismissing them as a poor man’s Interpol really is too kind to this wretched band. Their four to the floor beat (constantly pushed ahead of the actual pulse by an aggressive and unsubtle drummer) is relentless rather than insistent (it pounds rather than grooves), the music is arranged with little or no imagination (simply adding some echo effects to the guitars does not make them innovative) and overall the group simply take themselves far too seriously. The earnestness is intolerable, and the whole experience is like being treated as a punch-bag. It left me with a severe headache. Their popularity really is hard to fathom.
This is the fiery, politicised REM that Michael Stipe promised during the pre-release campaign for ‘Around The Sun’. When that album proved to be subdued and mostly soporific, it unsurprisingly provoked a reaction that was somewhat nonplussed. Today, REM are dedicating a storming ‘Man Sized Wreath’ to the memory of Martin Luther King, calling for a sea-change to ‘get the Bush administration the fuck out of office and the Obama administration the fuck into office’, before launching into a visceral, vitriolic ‘Ignoreland’ and admitting ‘we’re kinda political’.
The verbal exhortations are more than matched by the righteous fury of the music, which has been amplified and toughened up. The tracks from ‘Accelerate’ work much better in a live context, sounding genuinely thrilling when stripped of Jacknife Lee’s irritating production techniques. The back-to-basics sound also leads them into unexpected and fruitful corners of their back catalogue, with thunderous versions of ‘Disturbance at the Heron House’ and ‘Exhuming McCarthy’ (the latter interspersed with soundclips from the McCarthy hearings) being particular highlights.
Luckily, there’s also a good deal of charm and humour to the show, with the comic book graphics emphasising the band’s occasional tendency towards goofiness (ending songs with words like ‘wow!’ and ‘yeah!’. Quite brilliantly, Stipe dedicates ‘Walk Unafraid’ to a particular group of people – “we call them redheads, I think you call them ‘ginge’ – but they’re the most beautiful people in the world”. He then asks the crowd to raise their hands if they have a special ginger in their lives and a surprisingly large number of hands go up. Finally, there’s a brilliant moment when someone puts MORE on the camera lens in Scrabble tiles before the encore.
The set-list is an extremely effective and careful selection that spans their entire career. It’s a shame that there’s nothing from ‘Reckoning’ or ‘Fables of the Reconstruction’ this time, but few people could really mourn the absence of any material from ‘Around the Sun’. Clearly the memory of that album has now been excised. Every other album is covered though – most unpredictably ‘Murmur’ is represented with a lovely rendition of the ballad ‘Perfect Circle’, with Mike Mills at the piano.
The opening triple salvo of ‘Living Well is the Best Revenge’, a slower but more mercurial ‘These Days’ and a strident version of ‘The Wake Up Bomb’ makes for a remarkably confident start. Sometimes bands take a while to hit their stride, but REM leap straight in on this occasion, and the intensity never really lets up. Ken Stringfellow is oddly absent from this tour (perhaps he’s busy with Big Star, but that can hardly be as much of a moneyspinner) and the band compensate for the occasional absence of keyboard shadings by beefing up the guitar assault. For ‘The One I Love’,
As usual, Michael Stipe commands the stage with his deranged dancing, limbs and hands flailing – but it’s also notable that his voice seems in considerably better shape on this tour, less gravely than in previous years. This is particularly welcome on the moments of levity – ‘I’ve Been High’ (a more straightforward, less mesmeric version than on ‘Reveal’ but delivered with real tenderness by Stipe) and ‘Let Me In’, performed in a group circle in a new acoustic arrangement. Stipe’s reading of it, enhancing the melody, is majestic.
The generous half-hour encore not only features the aforementioned ‘Perfect Circle’ but also a haunting, very powerful performance of ‘Country Feedback’, which remains a firm favourite both with fans and the group themselves. The regulars are also saved for the end – ‘Losing My Religion’, ‘It’s The End Of The World (As We Know It)’ and ‘Man On The Moon’ round off proceedings. It still seems staggeringly inappropriate that Stipe does a meet and greet with the crowd during a mass singalong of ‘Losing My Religion’, surely one of the most emotionally articulate and painful songs ever to have become an uplifting stadium anthem, but his generosity with the audience helps reduce the distance between band and audience that can sometimes be a major obstacle with huge shows like this.
So, scrub out what I said in my lukewarm review of ‘Accelerate’. These days, it hardly seems important what REM commit to disc in the studio. It’s extraordinary that 28 years into their existence, they continue to get better and better as a live proposition, still filled with vigour, enthusiasm, a desire to communicate and a sense of fun. That, frankly, is enough of a purpose, and their continued existence remains absolutely vital.
When REM announced that the UK leg of their tour to promote ‘Accelerate’ would feature stadiums, I felt the group’s management and promoters were being a touch ambitious. No number of silly ‘return to form’ reviews is going to turn around the band’s commercial decline overnight, particularly given that ‘Accelerate’ is hardly a return to the southern gothic folk sound that characterised the band’s years of multi-platinum sales. With the Cardiff show downgraded to an Arena and the entire top tier of Twickenham’s seating completely empty, this feeling proved to be correct.
Still, it’s hard to envisage how this superb show would have worked in a smaller venue. Having reinvented themselves some time ago as a touring act par excellence, the group have really pushed the boat out with this tour. I’ve seen REM some six times since 1995 and this really was by some distance the best performance I’ve seen them give – muscular, charismatic and, ingeniously, providing mass entertainment whilst being firmly uncompromising. Every aspect of the show’s design – including visuals and lighting – had been carefully prepared and orchestrated to enhance the atmosphere.
The sheer brilliance of their set merely heightened the torture of watching support act Editors. Dismissing them as a poor man’s Interpol really is too kind to this wretched band. Their four to the floor beat (constantly pushed ahead of the actual pulse by an aggressive and unsubtle drummer) is relentless rather than insistent (it pounds rather than grooves), the music is arranged with little or no imagination (simply adding some echo effects to the guitars does not make them innovative) and overall the group simply take themselves far too seriously. The earnestness is intolerable, and the whole experience is like being treated as a punch-bag. It left me with a severe headache. Their popularity really is hard to fathom.
This is the fiery, politicised REM that Michael Stipe promised during the pre-release campaign for ‘Around The Sun’. When that album proved to be subdued and mostly soporific, it unsurprisingly provoked a reaction that was somewhat nonplussed. Today, REM are dedicating a storming ‘Man Sized Wreath’ to the memory of Martin Luther King, calling for a sea-change to ‘get the Bush administration the fuck out of office and the Obama administration the fuck into office’, before launching into a visceral, vitriolic ‘Ignoreland’ and admitting ‘we’re kinda political’.
The verbal exhortations are more than matched by the righteous fury of the music, which has been amplified and toughened up. The tracks from ‘Accelerate’ work much better in a live context, sounding genuinely thrilling when stripped of Jacknife Lee’s irritating production techniques. The back-to-basics sound also leads them into unexpected and fruitful corners of their back catalogue, with thunderous versions of ‘Disturbance at the Heron House’ and ‘Exhuming McCarthy’ (the latter interspersed with soundclips from the McCarthy hearings) being particular highlights.
Luckily, there’s also a good deal of charm and humour to the show, with the comic book graphics emphasising the band’s occasional tendency towards goofiness (ending songs with words like ‘wow!’ and ‘yeah!’. Quite brilliantly, Stipe dedicates ‘Walk Unafraid’ to a particular group of people – “we call them redheads, I think you call them ‘ginge’ – but they’re the most beautiful people in the world”. He then asks the crowd to raise their hands if they have a special ginger in their lives and a surprisingly large number of hands go up. Finally, there’s a brilliant moment when someone puts MORE on the camera lens in Scrabble tiles before the encore.
The set-list is an extremely effective and careful selection that spans their entire career. It’s a shame that there’s nothing from ‘Reckoning’ or ‘Fables of the Reconstruction’ this time, but few people could really mourn the absence of any material from ‘Around the Sun’. Clearly the memory of that album has now been excised. Every other album is covered though – most unpredictably ‘Murmur’ is represented with a lovely rendition of the ballad ‘Perfect Circle’, with Mike Mills at the piano.
The opening triple salvo of ‘Living Well is the Best Revenge’, a slower but more mercurial ‘These Days’ and a strident version of ‘The Wake Up Bomb’ makes for a remarkably confident start. Sometimes bands take a while to hit their stride, but REM leap straight in on this occasion, and the intensity never really lets up. Ken Stringfellow is oddly absent from this tour (perhaps he’s busy with Big Star, but that can hardly be as much of a moneyspinner) and the band compensate for the occasional absence of keyboard shadings by beefing up the guitar assault. For ‘The One I Love’,
As usual, Michael Stipe commands the stage with his deranged dancing, limbs and hands flailing – but it’s also notable that his voice seems in considerably better shape on this tour, less gravely than in previous years. This is particularly welcome on the moments of levity – ‘I’ve Been High’ (a more straightforward, less mesmeric version than on ‘Reveal’ but delivered with real tenderness by Stipe) and ‘Let Me In’, performed in a group circle in a new acoustic arrangement. Stipe’s reading of it, enhancing the melody, is majestic.
The generous half-hour encore not only features the aforementioned ‘Perfect Circle’ but also a haunting, very powerful performance of ‘Country Feedback’, which remains a firm favourite both with fans and the group themselves. The regulars are also saved for the end – ‘Losing My Religion’, ‘It’s The End Of The World (As We Know It)’ and ‘Man On The Moon’ round off proceedings. It still seems staggeringly inappropriate that Stipe does a meet and greet with the crowd during a mass singalong of ‘Losing My Religion’, surely one of the most emotionally articulate and painful songs ever to have become an uplifting stadium anthem, but his generosity with the audience helps reduce the distance between band and audience that can sometimes be a major obstacle with huge shows like this.
So, scrub out what I said in my lukewarm review of ‘Accelerate’. These days, it hardly seems important what REM commit to disc in the studio. It’s extraordinary that 28 years into their existence, they continue to get better and better as a live proposition, still filled with vigour, enthusiasm, a desire to communicate and a sense of fun. That, frankly, is enough of a purpose, and their continued existence remains absolutely vital.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Too Much Information?
Bloc Party - Intimacy
In this weekend’s Observer, Kitty Empire suggested that ‘Intimacy’ might eventually be remembered as the classic Bloc Party album. For me, this is proof that Bloc Party are being too readily indulged. I do not share Kitty’s confidence that this album will stand up to much critical scrutiny even in five years’ time. I fear Bloc Party might actually be destined to be a prime example of the short shelf life of so many British bands once rashly trumpeted as original creative masters.
Production duties are split between Paul Epworth, who produced the group’s excellent debut ‘Silent Alarm’ and Jacknife Lee, producer of the flawed but interesting ‘A Weekend In The City’. What we essentially get here is a concise juxtaposition of the concerns of both previous Bloc Party albums. Lee here once again overcooks his tracks to within an inch of their lives, whilst Epworth aims at a more polished version of that potent punch the band packed at the earliest stage of their development. On the worst moments of ‘Intimacy’, the band is simply trying far too hard. Even at its best, this is often merely another covering of ground this band has already traversed.
For the most part, this is an atavistic and cold album that doesn’t match the thematic preoccupations implied by its title. The opening ‘Ares’ is clearly intended as a bold statement of intent – some kind of declaration of the group’s radical experimentalism. For all its transparent intentions though, ‘Ares’ is a very inauspicious start. Unfortunately, it sounds exactly like The Chemical Brothers’ ‘Setting Sun’, a record released more than ten years ago. The band throws every gimmicky noise and production trick at the wall here in the hope that something will stick. Okereke’s shouty vocals help render the track unbearable, and it’s hard to believe that he’s thrown the line ‘get fucked up!’ into the song, even if it is ironic rather than sincere. ‘Mercury’ tries similar tactics with more coherence – the brass sounds are menacing and confrontational and that repeated processed vocal successfully straddles that fine line between insistent and irritating. Some of the more conventional moments, with a taut and precise sound (‘One Month Off’ particularly) end up sounding worryingly close to Green Day.
Many critics have found Kele Okereke’s romanticism clunky and ham-fisted, but I initially welcomed the prospect of ‘Intimacy’ moving to the personal after the less than incisive socio-political analysis of its predecessor. The warmth and candour of tracks such as ‘I Still Remember’ and ‘Kreuzberg’ from that album made more impact on me than the ugly rantings of ‘Uniform’ or ‘Hunting for Witches’. Yet Okereke’s preoccupation with sex here comes across as rather dislikeable and self-pitying. ‘I’m sleeping with people I don’t even like!’ he bellows triumphantly on ‘Mercury’. Well, why are you doing that exactly? The psychological aspects of sex and sexuality can be fascinating and important subject matter (as the films ‘Shortbus’ and ‘Lust, Caution’ have recently proved) but statements without analysis lack depth or interest and ultimately come across as shallow.
There’s obviously genuine feeling here – some of the lyrics seem to be focussed on bringing a lost lover back from the dead - but all this soul-bearing often doesn’t seem to get beyond basic cliché (‘the world isn’t kind to little things’). Sometimes it’s just completely cringe-inducing. The lyrics that open ‘Trojan Horse’ - ‘you used to take your watch off, before we made love, you didn’t want to share our time with anyone’ - don’t even make much sense. You could reasonably remove a watch so as not to be aware of time during sex but how exactly does wearing one mean you’re sharing that time with someone else? It’s all rather perplexing and the image of a Jarvis Cocker-esque voyeur hiding in the cupboard monitoring the duration of Okereke’s erotic activities is not a particularly pleasant one.
For me, the album works best when the group grasps for a musical delicacy to correspond to these windows into Okereke’s private sphere. ‘Ion Square’ is a brooding, minimal, slow-building epic that at least has some sense of mood and atmosphere. ‘Signs’, with its pulsating heartbeat and lightly percussive backbone, represents a genuine and positive diversion from the band’s back catalogue but its determinedly linear and repetitive structure prevents it from ever really taking flight. I need to listen to the bizarre electro-choral beast that is ‘Zephryus’ a bit more – I can’t decide whether it’s the boldest track here or an example of insufferable pretension. The choir is certainly not as incorporated as effortlessly as Bjork managed with ‘Vespertine’ (incidentally, a record so often unfairly dismissed as cold and uninvolving – but so much more intimate and moving than this). One thing I certainly admire about this track is the restraint the group exercise. Whereas the dark, mysterious atmosphere of ‘Better Than Heaven’ is destroyed by an all-too-predictable explosion of drums and guitars, ‘Zephyrus’ maintains its dreamlike but detached poise. ‘Biko’, so incongruously titled as to be offensive and nothing to do with the Peter Gabriel song, is sweet-sounding and vulnerable, although the entry of programmed beats quickly and irrevocably punctures its serenity.
Whether they are attempting to craft something edgy or affecting, the Bloc Party sound could now benefit from a brighter, more naturalistic treatment. The drums are transformed into a dull thud with every trace of natural resonance removed – whilst the additional effects so often seem tacked on as an afterthought to give the impression that the group are either innovative or uniquely open-minded. The band and their producers are clearly thinking very hard about drama and atmosphere but when the tracks are so over-produced, it’s hard to find the original feeling or spark. Ultimately, there is nothing here that the band didn’t capture with greater power and clarity on ‘Silent Alarm’, mostly doing so without resorting to trickery.
Unfortunately, with his voice more exposed here than on previous Bloc Party albums, Okereke is revealed as a dull and imaginative vocalist, perhaps a bigger problem than the poor quality of his poetry. When he’s not plagiarising from The Cure, he’s repeating his own tricks. Many of the melodies here sound regurgitated from previous Bloc Party songs (sometimes the music follows his lead – ‘One Month Off’ repeats the dual guitar assault of ‘Helicopter’). His range is limited and his sense of timing and phrasing curiously lacking. Sometimes he stretches syllables to fit the melodies in a way that sounds unmusical and forced. Too often, his lyrics simply do not scan. Whilst no-one will approach a Bloc Party record in search of diva acrobatics, they might reasonably expect some form of expression to match the album’s clearly stated theme and certainly something more than the same notes endlessly reformulated.
Some reviews will no doubt herald the band’s toughening of their sound, and the addition of new elements from the worlds of electronica and even hip hop. Beneath the surface gimmicks though, ‘Intimacy’ really presents a band that has run out of ideas. Even the most energetic, aggressive moments here somehow sound sterile. ‘Halo’ should hit all the right buttons with its attacking barrage of guitars but it comes across as more calculated than spontaneous. Perhaps ‘Signs’ and ‘Zephyrus’ offer some positive signals for the group but they clearly ought to have taken more time to develop these new paths. Okereke often seems articulate and persuasive in interview but currently seems incapable of reproducing that intelligence on disc. This is also a remarkably one-dimensional view of human intimacy – one which emphasises intensity, trauma and dependency rather than fun and mutual fulfilment. Perhaps that's another reason why, for all its grand designs, 'Intimacy' is something of an anticlimactic letdown.
In this weekend’s Observer, Kitty Empire suggested that ‘Intimacy’ might eventually be remembered as the classic Bloc Party album. For me, this is proof that Bloc Party are being too readily indulged. I do not share Kitty’s confidence that this album will stand up to much critical scrutiny even in five years’ time. I fear Bloc Party might actually be destined to be a prime example of the short shelf life of so many British bands once rashly trumpeted as original creative masters.
Production duties are split between Paul Epworth, who produced the group’s excellent debut ‘Silent Alarm’ and Jacknife Lee, producer of the flawed but interesting ‘A Weekend In The City’. What we essentially get here is a concise juxtaposition of the concerns of both previous Bloc Party albums. Lee here once again overcooks his tracks to within an inch of their lives, whilst Epworth aims at a more polished version of that potent punch the band packed at the earliest stage of their development. On the worst moments of ‘Intimacy’, the band is simply trying far too hard. Even at its best, this is often merely another covering of ground this band has already traversed.
For the most part, this is an atavistic and cold album that doesn’t match the thematic preoccupations implied by its title. The opening ‘Ares’ is clearly intended as a bold statement of intent – some kind of declaration of the group’s radical experimentalism. For all its transparent intentions though, ‘Ares’ is a very inauspicious start. Unfortunately, it sounds exactly like The Chemical Brothers’ ‘Setting Sun’, a record released more than ten years ago. The band throws every gimmicky noise and production trick at the wall here in the hope that something will stick. Okereke’s shouty vocals help render the track unbearable, and it’s hard to believe that he’s thrown the line ‘get fucked up!’ into the song, even if it is ironic rather than sincere. ‘Mercury’ tries similar tactics with more coherence – the brass sounds are menacing and confrontational and that repeated processed vocal successfully straddles that fine line between insistent and irritating. Some of the more conventional moments, with a taut and precise sound (‘One Month Off’ particularly) end up sounding worryingly close to Green Day.
Many critics have found Kele Okereke’s romanticism clunky and ham-fisted, but I initially welcomed the prospect of ‘Intimacy’ moving to the personal after the less than incisive socio-political analysis of its predecessor. The warmth and candour of tracks such as ‘I Still Remember’ and ‘Kreuzberg’ from that album made more impact on me than the ugly rantings of ‘Uniform’ or ‘Hunting for Witches’. Yet Okereke’s preoccupation with sex here comes across as rather dislikeable and self-pitying. ‘I’m sleeping with people I don’t even like!’ he bellows triumphantly on ‘Mercury’. Well, why are you doing that exactly? The psychological aspects of sex and sexuality can be fascinating and important subject matter (as the films ‘Shortbus’ and ‘Lust, Caution’ have recently proved) but statements without analysis lack depth or interest and ultimately come across as shallow.
There’s obviously genuine feeling here – some of the lyrics seem to be focussed on bringing a lost lover back from the dead - but all this soul-bearing often doesn’t seem to get beyond basic cliché (‘the world isn’t kind to little things’). Sometimes it’s just completely cringe-inducing. The lyrics that open ‘Trojan Horse’ - ‘you used to take your watch off, before we made love, you didn’t want to share our time with anyone’ - don’t even make much sense. You could reasonably remove a watch so as not to be aware of time during sex but how exactly does wearing one mean you’re sharing that time with someone else? It’s all rather perplexing and the image of a Jarvis Cocker-esque voyeur hiding in the cupboard monitoring the duration of Okereke’s erotic activities is not a particularly pleasant one.
For me, the album works best when the group grasps for a musical delicacy to correspond to these windows into Okereke’s private sphere. ‘Ion Square’ is a brooding, minimal, slow-building epic that at least has some sense of mood and atmosphere. ‘Signs’, with its pulsating heartbeat and lightly percussive backbone, represents a genuine and positive diversion from the band’s back catalogue but its determinedly linear and repetitive structure prevents it from ever really taking flight. I need to listen to the bizarre electro-choral beast that is ‘Zephryus’ a bit more – I can’t decide whether it’s the boldest track here or an example of insufferable pretension. The choir is certainly not as incorporated as effortlessly as Bjork managed with ‘Vespertine’ (incidentally, a record so often unfairly dismissed as cold and uninvolving – but so much more intimate and moving than this). One thing I certainly admire about this track is the restraint the group exercise. Whereas the dark, mysterious atmosphere of ‘Better Than Heaven’ is destroyed by an all-too-predictable explosion of drums and guitars, ‘Zephyrus’ maintains its dreamlike but detached poise. ‘Biko’, so incongruously titled as to be offensive and nothing to do with the Peter Gabriel song, is sweet-sounding and vulnerable, although the entry of programmed beats quickly and irrevocably punctures its serenity.
Whether they are attempting to craft something edgy or affecting, the Bloc Party sound could now benefit from a brighter, more naturalistic treatment. The drums are transformed into a dull thud with every trace of natural resonance removed – whilst the additional effects so often seem tacked on as an afterthought to give the impression that the group are either innovative or uniquely open-minded. The band and their producers are clearly thinking very hard about drama and atmosphere but when the tracks are so over-produced, it’s hard to find the original feeling or spark. Ultimately, there is nothing here that the band didn’t capture with greater power and clarity on ‘Silent Alarm’, mostly doing so without resorting to trickery.
Unfortunately, with his voice more exposed here than on previous Bloc Party albums, Okereke is revealed as a dull and imaginative vocalist, perhaps a bigger problem than the poor quality of his poetry. When he’s not plagiarising from The Cure, he’s repeating his own tricks. Many of the melodies here sound regurgitated from previous Bloc Party songs (sometimes the music follows his lead – ‘One Month Off’ repeats the dual guitar assault of ‘Helicopter’). His range is limited and his sense of timing and phrasing curiously lacking. Sometimes he stretches syllables to fit the melodies in a way that sounds unmusical and forced. Too often, his lyrics simply do not scan. Whilst no-one will approach a Bloc Party record in search of diva acrobatics, they might reasonably expect some form of expression to match the album’s clearly stated theme and certainly something more than the same notes endlessly reformulated.
Some reviews will no doubt herald the band’s toughening of their sound, and the addition of new elements from the worlds of electronica and even hip hop. Beneath the surface gimmicks though, ‘Intimacy’ really presents a band that has run out of ideas. Even the most energetic, aggressive moments here somehow sound sterile. ‘Halo’ should hit all the right buttons with its attacking barrage of guitars but it comes across as more calculated than spontaneous. Perhaps ‘Signs’ and ‘Zephyrus’ offer some positive signals for the group but they clearly ought to have taken more time to develop these new paths. Okereke often seems articulate and persuasive in interview but currently seems incapable of reproducing that intelligence on disc. This is also a remarkably one-dimensional view of human intimacy – one which emphasises intensity, trauma and dependency rather than fun and mutual fulfilment. Perhaps that's another reason why, for all its grand designs, 'Intimacy' is something of an anticlimactic letdown.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Two For The Price Of One
School of Language – Sea From Shore
The Week That Was – The Week That Was (Memphis Industries, 2008)
It would be tremendously gratifying if this intriguing new business model from Peter and David Brewis, the lead creative brains behind Field Music, were to be as fruitful and influential as what has become known as ‘doing a Radiohead’. Despite praise from critics and bloggers, the Brewis brothers recognised that Field Music had failed to become an economical proposition and put the band on extended hiatus shortly after the release of the outstanding ‘Tones of Town’ album last year. I initially had the group unfairly cast as a poor man’s Futureheads, whereas they were actually a much more inventive and maverick proposition than that – their songs crisp and melodic but full of unexpected twists and turns.
Now the brothers have worked on separate projects, both conceptually and musically self-contained whilst sharing some common character traits. Whilst the (possibly temporary) demise of Field Music is something to mourn, like a Phoenix rising from the ashes we now have two examples of that increasingly rare beast – imaginative and enjoyable British indie-rock. By refocusing on writing and studio recording as opposed to fruitless touring, the Brewis brothers are playing to their considerable strengths.
Released this week to a surprisingly appreciative fanfare, Peter Brewis’ contribution to the new Field Music Productions banner as The Week That Was is clearly benefiting from the lion share of the press attention. I was certainly pleasantly surprised by the featured album of the month review in the current edition of Mojo, which should at least give the album’s sales a small boost. What a shame it has emerged too late for the Mercury Music Prize shortlist.
It would seem a pity that in finally coming to these projects a little late in the day, the music press condemn the other contribution, David Brewis’ School of Language, to relative obscurity. Released back in early February, but something I’ve delayed digesting properly until recently, it’s one of 2008’s unassuming treasures (and one that was probably never on the radar of anyone judging this year’s Mercury, much to the shortlist’s detriment).
Brewis largely recorded the album solo, playing a bewildering array of instruments to an impressive degree of proficiency. There are numerous appealing melodies peppered throughout this record, which more than demonstrate Brewis’ pop sensibility, but his wilfully subversive streak usually seems to win out. There’s a skittering, tetchy, nervy and unsettled feeling to many of these tracks – but Brewis manages to turn his short attention span into a virtue.
This is mainly because the album, whilst concise, is meticulously structured and composed. The four parts of the splendid ‘Rockist’ suite, with its consistent underpinning vocal sample and clattering percussion, serve as supportive bookends for the generally more abstract music found across the rest of the album. In between, there are signs of more pastoral leanings on ‘Marine Life’ and ‘Ships’, and an intelligent discipline on ‘Keep Your Water’ which stays subtle and restrained for four minutes until some deranged guitar improvising finally breaks through.
The almost ludicrous arrangements of ‘Disappointment 99’ and ‘This Is No Fun’ are, like much of Field Music’s best work, strongly reminiscent of the quirky drama of XTC, although the latter has interruptions of something more lavish and grand – perhaps Soft Bulletin-era Flaming Lips. It’s clear that Brewis is an acute and clever musician, brimming with ideas and rapidly developing the means by which to express them.
Download Peter Brewis’ contribution as The Week That Was from iTunes, and the bonus track reveals a remarkable similarity in conception and construction to that of his brother. The extra track, The Week That Was Overture, essentially takes small segments from the album’s tracks and rearranges them, with remarkable ease, into a complete whole. There are sounds and thematic preoccupations to which Brewis returns throughout the work, which give it something of a crafted, composed and arranged quality.
It has a slightly different personality from the School of Language album though, the emphasis here being on 80s production techniques, big drums and spiky string arrangements. An obvious reference point is that big Fairfisa/Fairlight Peter Gabriel 3 sound, although my girlfriend also astutely spotted hints of Simple Minds’ big hits (in fact, the intro of ‘Scratch the Surface’ more than closely resembles ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’). It would be unfair to categorise this simply as an 80s throwback though. The percussive textures of ‘It’s All Gone Quiet’ give yet another example of the pervading influence of Reichian minimalism on pop music, whilst the longer tracks clustered around the album’s centre are more languid and dreamy.
Brewis brings a distinctive energy, restlessness and craftsmanship to this finely tuned patchwork. It’s particularly interesting to hear string parts deployed more for their staccato rhythmic effect than for swooning emotional manipulation. Indeed, if it’s possible to find a reason to criticise both Brewis’ work, it’s that there are occasions when they sound a little coldly rational. Fortunately, there are enough infectious tunes on both albums to compensate for this tendency. ‘Scratch The Surface’ and ‘Good Life’ on The Week That Was are especially irresistible.
‘The Week That Was’ is ostensibly a concept album about the media and its insidious role in society. This is hardly a new theme and perhaps also a little clunky, but given the recurring themes of the music (this is much more a song cycle than collection of isolated songs), it makes sense that there is an ideological preoccupation gluing it all together.
What’s so impressive about the Brewis Brothers is the way that a single expression of a good idea is never enough for them. They always seem to be striving to develop every motif and technique and build from them consistent threads that make their work coherent in spite of its inherent quirkiness and unpredictability. I actually think that, of these two records, the School of Language one is marginally more interesting, but the greater immediacy of The Week That Was may make it the more commercially viable. There’s a real ambition and creative mania at work here that separates the Brewises from their contemporaries, most of whom seem to be merely treading water.
Although the Brewises are quite stubborn in emphasising the virtues of studio recordings over live performances, both projects have now been taken into the live arena and next week’s Barfly gig (August 28th) featuring both groups on the same bill promises to be something special.
The Week That Was – The Week That Was (Memphis Industries, 2008)
It would be tremendously gratifying if this intriguing new business model from Peter and David Brewis, the lead creative brains behind Field Music, were to be as fruitful and influential as what has become known as ‘doing a Radiohead’. Despite praise from critics and bloggers, the Brewis brothers recognised that Field Music had failed to become an economical proposition and put the band on extended hiatus shortly after the release of the outstanding ‘Tones of Town’ album last year. I initially had the group unfairly cast as a poor man’s Futureheads, whereas they were actually a much more inventive and maverick proposition than that – their songs crisp and melodic but full of unexpected twists and turns.
Now the brothers have worked on separate projects, both conceptually and musically self-contained whilst sharing some common character traits. Whilst the (possibly temporary) demise of Field Music is something to mourn, like a Phoenix rising from the ashes we now have two examples of that increasingly rare beast – imaginative and enjoyable British indie-rock. By refocusing on writing and studio recording as opposed to fruitless touring, the Brewis brothers are playing to their considerable strengths.
Released this week to a surprisingly appreciative fanfare, Peter Brewis’ contribution to the new Field Music Productions banner as The Week That Was is clearly benefiting from the lion share of the press attention. I was certainly pleasantly surprised by the featured album of the month review in the current edition of Mojo, which should at least give the album’s sales a small boost. What a shame it has emerged too late for the Mercury Music Prize shortlist.
It would seem a pity that in finally coming to these projects a little late in the day, the music press condemn the other contribution, David Brewis’ School of Language, to relative obscurity. Released back in early February, but something I’ve delayed digesting properly until recently, it’s one of 2008’s unassuming treasures (and one that was probably never on the radar of anyone judging this year’s Mercury, much to the shortlist’s detriment).
Brewis largely recorded the album solo, playing a bewildering array of instruments to an impressive degree of proficiency. There are numerous appealing melodies peppered throughout this record, which more than demonstrate Brewis’ pop sensibility, but his wilfully subversive streak usually seems to win out. There’s a skittering, tetchy, nervy and unsettled feeling to many of these tracks – but Brewis manages to turn his short attention span into a virtue.
This is mainly because the album, whilst concise, is meticulously structured and composed. The four parts of the splendid ‘Rockist’ suite, with its consistent underpinning vocal sample and clattering percussion, serve as supportive bookends for the generally more abstract music found across the rest of the album. In between, there are signs of more pastoral leanings on ‘Marine Life’ and ‘Ships’, and an intelligent discipline on ‘Keep Your Water’ which stays subtle and restrained for four minutes until some deranged guitar improvising finally breaks through.
The almost ludicrous arrangements of ‘Disappointment 99’ and ‘This Is No Fun’ are, like much of Field Music’s best work, strongly reminiscent of the quirky drama of XTC, although the latter has interruptions of something more lavish and grand – perhaps Soft Bulletin-era Flaming Lips. It’s clear that Brewis is an acute and clever musician, brimming with ideas and rapidly developing the means by which to express them.
Download Peter Brewis’ contribution as The Week That Was from iTunes, and the bonus track reveals a remarkable similarity in conception and construction to that of his brother. The extra track, The Week That Was Overture, essentially takes small segments from the album’s tracks and rearranges them, with remarkable ease, into a complete whole. There are sounds and thematic preoccupations to which Brewis returns throughout the work, which give it something of a crafted, composed and arranged quality.
It has a slightly different personality from the School of Language album though, the emphasis here being on 80s production techniques, big drums and spiky string arrangements. An obvious reference point is that big Fairfisa/Fairlight Peter Gabriel 3 sound, although my girlfriend also astutely spotted hints of Simple Minds’ big hits (in fact, the intro of ‘Scratch the Surface’ more than closely resembles ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’). It would be unfair to categorise this simply as an 80s throwback though. The percussive textures of ‘It’s All Gone Quiet’ give yet another example of the pervading influence of Reichian minimalism on pop music, whilst the longer tracks clustered around the album’s centre are more languid and dreamy.
Brewis brings a distinctive energy, restlessness and craftsmanship to this finely tuned patchwork. It’s particularly interesting to hear string parts deployed more for their staccato rhythmic effect than for swooning emotional manipulation. Indeed, if it’s possible to find a reason to criticise both Brewis’ work, it’s that there are occasions when they sound a little coldly rational. Fortunately, there are enough infectious tunes on both albums to compensate for this tendency. ‘Scratch The Surface’ and ‘Good Life’ on The Week That Was are especially irresistible.
‘The Week That Was’ is ostensibly a concept album about the media and its insidious role in society. This is hardly a new theme and perhaps also a little clunky, but given the recurring themes of the music (this is much more a song cycle than collection of isolated songs), it makes sense that there is an ideological preoccupation gluing it all together.
What’s so impressive about the Brewis Brothers is the way that a single expression of a good idea is never enough for them. They always seem to be striving to develop every motif and technique and build from them consistent threads that make their work coherent in spite of its inherent quirkiness and unpredictability. I actually think that, of these two records, the School of Language one is marginally more interesting, but the greater immediacy of The Week That Was may make it the more commercially viable. There’s a real ambition and creative mania at work here that separates the Brewises from their contemporaries, most of whom seem to be merely treading water.
Although the Brewises are quite stubborn in emphasising the virtues of studio recordings over live performances, both projects have now been taken into the live arena and next week’s Barfly gig (August 28th) featuring both groups on the same bill promises to be something special.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Almost Normal
David Byrne and Brian Eno – Everything That Happens Will Happen Today (Download Only from http://www.everythingthathappens.com 2008)
A new collaboration between David Byrne and Brian Eno, the first since the groundbreaking ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts’ in 1981, ought to be a significant event in the 2008 musical calendar. Perhaps following the Radiohead model, or maybe playing their own version of the modern music marketing game, Byrne and Eno have released this new album via their own website, a matter of a couple of weeks after announcing its completion. The publicity machine is now trying to catch up. I still see this as a massively positive development in the industry – so many bands languish in artistic frustration and boredom when compelled to fall in line with ‘record company schedules’, and then end up touring an album some three years after they actually completed the material. The only problem is that it’s only established, internationally renowned artists who have the financial and creative freedom to do this – the conventional music industry is hardly going to disappear tomorrow.
Those expecting something subversive and challenging in the manner of ‘…Bush of Ghosts’ will come away from this album disappointed. In its least effective moments, it actually sounds dated where ‘…Ghosts’ still sounds remarkably radical. It’s very much a song-based album, whereby Eno sent musical sketches to Byrne, who penned lyrics and melodies and developed them into songs. Eno’s music is decidedly conservative, in spite of the use of electronics. There is no unusual harmony and no alien, unfamiliar sounds. Beneath the burbling, gurgling and occasionally clunky drum programming, there’s actually rather a lot of very conventional guitar playing. One begins to appreciate how comfortable Eno must have been working with the likes of Coldplay, U2 and James.
This doesn’t mean that it’s a record bereft of value or virtue though. Songcraft remains an artform as much as it is a format, and sometimes the combination of Eno’s comforting sounds and Byrne’s lyrical and melodic sensibility does indeed produce something artful. Eno has spoken articulately about the influence of gospel music on this material, not so much as a means of praise and devotion, but as a ‘music of surrender’. On the quietly moving title track and the stirring ‘The River’, it’s easy to hear this appealing theory whirring into action. Eno’s textures, if no longer original, are at least characteristically mesmerising. Even better, the concluding ‘The Lighthouse’, easily the most mysterious and enchanting track of this set, is compelling without ever loudly voicing its intent. Byrne’s intriguing words add a sense of awe and wonder to Eno’s shimmering sounds. It’s a song in which one can slowly, almost imperceptibly drown.
Sometimes it seems as if the gospel foundation leads the pair into rather uncomfortable cliché. Another hymnal song called ‘One Fine Day’ hardly adds anything new to the popular music canon (Elbow have traversed very similar ground already this year with their terrace anthem ‘One Day Like This’). ‘Home’ and ‘My Big Nurse’ begin the album on a strangely underwhelming manner, both tracks sounding safe and secure, but lacking any real sense of adventure. Perhaps that’s necessary, at least in the first example, to underline the themes, but it’s unusual to hear Byrne sounding so unengaging.
The tracks with the most immediate impact are those where Byrne’s recurring preoccupations cut through. It’s easy to see why the lithe funk of ‘Strange Overtones’ was selected as a taster – it’s infectious and immediate without being saccharine. More inventive is the outstanding ‘Poor Boy’ which, with its series of chants, is the only moment here where Byrne’s interest in music from around the globe really becomes transparent. For all the talk of gospel, Eno’s preoccupations seem resolutely stuck within a western pop tradition for much of this set. Even the weird and wonderful ‘I Feel My Stuff’, a little more unpredictable and adventurous, is closer to Radiohead or the REM of ‘Up’ than anything Byrne might release through Luaka Bop.
Perhaps this method of detached collaboration, which worked so fruitfully for Jimmy Tamborello and Ben Gibbard as The Postal Service (with all due respect, two lesser creative talents), has not worked quite so consistently for Byrne and Eno. ‘Everything That Happens…’ is intermittently fascinating, but never quite as imaginative as expectation might dictate. Those who have already heaped knee-jerk praise on it are arguably indulging Eno’s middle-aged comfort zone. He’s not really pushing himself compositionally here – there’s not much experimentation with either form or content.
Byrne, by way of contrast, is continuing to push himself vocally, stretching his range, tone and quality of sound. He is getting the most out of that quirky vulnerability that people either love or loathe and really using his voice as an instrument. He elevates every track here, sometimes to the extent that Eno’s wispy blandness is superseded by something much more arresting. On this evidence his next solo step, freed from these constrictions, ought to be worth some investment.
A new collaboration between David Byrne and Brian Eno, the first since the groundbreaking ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts’ in 1981, ought to be a significant event in the 2008 musical calendar. Perhaps following the Radiohead model, or maybe playing their own version of the modern music marketing game, Byrne and Eno have released this new album via their own website, a matter of a couple of weeks after announcing its completion. The publicity machine is now trying to catch up. I still see this as a massively positive development in the industry – so many bands languish in artistic frustration and boredom when compelled to fall in line with ‘record company schedules’, and then end up touring an album some three years after they actually completed the material. The only problem is that it’s only established, internationally renowned artists who have the financial and creative freedom to do this – the conventional music industry is hardly going to disappear tomorrow.
Those expecting something subversive and challenging in the manner of ‘…Bush of Ghosts’ will come away from this album disappointed. In its least effective moments, it actually sounds dated where ‘…Ghosts’ still sounds remarkably radical. It’s very much a song-based album, whereby Eno sent musical sketches to Byrne, who penned lyrics and melodies and developed them into songs. Eno’s music is decidedly conservative, in spite of the use of electronics. There is no unusual harmony and no alien, unfamiliar sounds. Beneath the burbling, gurgling and occasionally clunky drum programming, there’s actually rather a lot of very conventional guitar playing. One begins to appreciate how comfortable Eno must have been working with the likes of Coldplay, U2 and James.
This doesn’t mean that it’s a record bereft of value or virtue though. Songcraft remains an artform as much as it is a format, and sometimes the combination of Eno’s comforting sounds and Byrne’s lyrical and melodic sensibility does indeed produce something artful. Eno has spoken articulately about the influence of gospel music on this material, not so much as a means of praise and devotion, but as a ‘music of surrender’. On the quietly moving title track and the stirring ‘The River’, it’s easy to hear this appealing theory whirring into action. Eno’s textures, if no longer original, are at least characteristically mesmerising. Even better, the concluding ‘The Lighthouse’, easily the most mysterious and enchanting track of this set, is compelling without ever loudly voicing its intent. Byrne’s intriguing words add a sense of awe and wonder to Eno’s shimmering sounds. It’s a song in which one can slowly, almost imperceptibly drown.
Sometimes it seems as if the gospel foundation leads the pair into rather uncomfortable cliché. Another hymnal song called ‘One Fine Day’ hardly adds anything new to the popular music canon (Elbow have traversed very similar ground already this year with their terrace anthem ‘One Day Like This’). ‘Home’ and ‘My Big Nurse’ begin the album on a strangely underwhelming manner, both tracks sounding safe and secure, but lacking any real sense of adventure. Perhaps that’s necessary, at least in the first example, to underline the themes, but it’s unusual to hear Byrne sounding so unengaging.
The tracks with the most immediate impact are those where Byrne’s recurring preoccupations cut through. It’s easy to see why the lithe funk of ‘Strange Overtones’ was selected as a taster – it’s infectious and immediate without being saccharine. More inventive is the outstanding ‘Poor Boy’ which, with its series of chants, is the only moment here where Byrne’s interest in music from around the globe really becomes transparent. For all the talk of gospel, Eno’s preoccupations seem resolutely stuck within a western pop tradition for much of this set. Even the weird and wonderful ‘I Feel My Stuff’, a little more unpredictable and adventurous, is closer to Radiohead or the REM of ‘Up’ than anything Byrne might release through Luaka Bop.
Perhaps this method of detached collaboration, which worked so fruitfully for Jimmy Tamborello and Ben Gibbard as The Postal Service (with all due respect, two lesser creative talents), has not worked quite so consistently for Byrne and Eno. ‘Everything That Happens…’ is intermittently fascinating, but never quite as imaginative as expectation might dictate. Those who have already heaped knee-jerk praise on it are arguably indulging Eno’s middle-aged comfort zone. He’s not really pushing himself compositionally here – there’s not much experimentation with either form or content.
Byrne, by way of contrast, is continuing to push himself vocally, stretching his range, tone and quality of sound. He is getting the most out of that quirky vulnerability that people either love or loathe and really using his voice as an instrument. He elevates every track here, sometimes to the extent that Eno’s wispy blandness is superseded by something much more arresting. On this evidence his next solo step, freed from these constrictions, ought to be worth some investment.
Friday, August 15, 2008
An Impressive Cast
Okkervil River - The Stand-Ins (Jagjaguwar, 2008)
Sometimes I associate particular bands or specific albums with times and places. Okkervil River, about whom I’ve enthused rapturously here several times, are inexorably linked with my visit to Toronto, where I purchased their outstanding ‘Black Sheep Boy’ album on a whim (mostly because I adore the Tim Hardin song that inspired it). That album, with its literary brand of songwriting, made virtues out of melodrama and excess, in a way that the more photogenic and well-promoted Conor Oberst clearly aspires to but, for me at least, never quite achieves. ‘The Stand-Ins’, with its frequent allusions to band life and being on tour, is clearly an album intended to be divorced from specific locations, if not from memories.
Last year’s ‘The Stage Names’ again demonstrated Will Sheff’s presentation of songs as miniature novels – squeezing in a wealth of intelligent musings, quirky images and elaborate character portraits. Musically, it was a different beast though – at times veering into a more upbeat and exuberant stomp. ‘The Stand-Ins’ is a collection of songs recorded at the same time but then shelved when it was decided a double album would be too great an indulgence. It’s clearly very much a companion piece, revisiting some of the characters and themes first introduced in ‘The Stage Names’, particularly the acting/movie concept, seafaring imagery and emphasis on songs about being in a band (Sheff shares a lot of songwriting qualities and characteristics with Craig Finn of The Hold Steady). 'Starry Stairs' even continues the story of 'Savannah Smiles' from the previous album.
The initial reaction on the blogosphere seems to be one of mild disappointment, at least when ‘The Stand Ins’ is judged by the band’s so far consistently high standards. On the surface, it’s easy to see the reasons for this. At 40 minutes, including three instrumental interludes, it’s surprisingly concise and there’s little doubt that the group have moved towards something more musically accessible. The Motown stomp that informed a couple of tracks on ‘The Stage Names’ is in full flight here, and ‘Starry Staired’ even flirts with Memphis soul horns.
I’m not underwhelmed by this articulate, moving and intelligently designed record though. If Sheff’s linguistic intricacies can find a wider audience, I’m all in favour of a greater reliance on standard melodies and immediate hooks. His lyrics here are frequently wonderful, often capturing something melancholy or poignant with free-flowing ease. ‘On Tour With Zykos’ movingly details the emotions of a lover left-behind as the touring band move on.
Closer to home perhaps, ‘Lost Coastlines’, on which Sheff duets with the now- departed Jonathan Meiburg, is particularly affecting. The two deploy shipping metaphors to express the inherent difficulties in keeping a band together. Meiburg’s smooth but charismatic baritone makes for some restrained relief from Sheff’s emoting. The final lines sum up life in a band succinctly and perceptively: ‘Every night finds us rocking and rolling on waves wild and wide, and if we’ve lost our way, well no-one’s gonna say it outright.’ When strings and horns enter in the song’s final section, it seems to elevate the song to something vivid and dramatic, but which also emphasises the song’s mournful core.
Sometimes the lyrics are so cutting and insightful that they jar with the jauntiness of the music. The contrast is surprisingly effective on ‘Calling and Not Calling My Ex’, where Sheff ruminates eloquently on resuming contact with an ex from three years ago who has progressed to celebrity status (‘you look the same on TV as when you were mine’). The music veers between a familiar chiming theme and moments of reflective calm.
It’s a song full of hypothetical conjectures, resentment and devastating regret – the sort of intense but futile emotions that are very common human failings. He imagines the girl’s sudden return: ‘…it’s a mixture of dumb jealousy and fear/that I might feel should she appear…as if it hasn’t been three years’. The song is made even more touching because it keeps one rational eye on a more uneventful, mundane reality (life is ‘slightly, disappointingly, just gliding by’). It ends with an inevitable resignation: ‘I remember every instance that you stung me, oh you’re so lovely, you’re so smart/ So go turn their heads, go knock ‘em dead, go break their hearts/And I know you will’. For all his self-absorbtion and self-pity, it’s hard not to sympathise with Sheff’s character’s pain, so artful is his expression of it.
Perhaps most powerful of all is the epic closing track, with its rather unmanageable title: ‘Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1979’. Cambell was apparently a gay glam rock artist, whose star shone only briefly, eventually reduced to singing cabaret at parties as Cole Berlin. Suffering from AIDS, he committed suicide in 1983. The song has Campbell weakened, drinking on his own and ‘sick of singing the same songs’. The song’s conclusion would be absurdly grandiose in any other hands, with Campbell being lifted into space (presumably reflecting his thematic preoccupation with aliens).
Elsewhere, Sheff’s concerns are less weighty. ‘Singer Songwriter’ is the kind of snarling character assassination of which the young Bob Dylan could be proud (indeed, there’s more than a hint of ‘Positively 4th Street’ in the song’s nursery rhyme melody and insistent rhythm). ‘I saw your big sis on the year’s best book list/and your brother he manages bands’ Sheff rasps dismissively, before sneering ‘you’ve got wealth, you’ve got wealth/ What a bitch, they didn’t give you much else!’. The song surprises at its end by turning inward – with its cry of ‘your world isn’t gonna change nothing’ subtly becoming ‘our world isn’t gonna change nothing’, as if Sheff is condemning himself alongside his target. This self-reverential irony crops up again on ‘Pop Lie’, a song cynically sniping at songs with choruses designed to get people to sing along. The song itself of course has something approaching a singalong chorus, and a relentless energy that suggests unshakeable conviction.
Sometimes it’s the sheer combination of words Sheff uses that is most imaginative, from the ‘cuts from the Kinks’ on ‘Singer Songwriter’ to this wonderfully florid passage from ‘Lost Coastlines’: ‘Is that marionette real enough yet to step off that set and decide what a dance might mean to it’. Then there’s the conflicting emotions of ‘On Tour With Zykos’, with Sheff convincing in female character – ‘how come I shout goodbye when I just want to make this white lie big enough to climb inside with you’. It gets even better ‘I’m in disgust with desire from the guys who conspire at the only decent bar in town/and they wish they had me like I wish I had fire, what a sad way to be…’ It’s all observed with piercing clarity, but also with disarming tenderness and sensitivity.
Sheff has discovered ways and means of hitting all the right buttons with his arrangements, particularly with swelling strings and horns, that mean his ambitions are no longer forced or overwraught. He always uses the additional instruments to animate the sentiments and feelings of his songs. Listen to the way the organ subtly shadows the piano during ‘On Tour With Zykos’, before dramatically taking the lead as the song takes flight and then itself giving way to the strings.
There will some who will dislike the glimmer of light that fights against the melodramatic darkness the group communicated circa ‘Black Sheep Boy’. They may also dislike the fact that Sheff’s linguistic imagination has been fitted neatly into a crisper, more coherent musical template. But these songs are so much more than mere Motown pastiches – they are as much alive with America’s literary tradition as with its rich pop music heritage. His cast of recurring characters is as reminiscent of Raymond Carver as Bruce Springsteen.
This has been a long review, but Sheff writes songs that can be listened to repeatedly, with language that wraps itself around you and absorbs you completely. They cannot easily be summarised and paraphrased. Something new will emerge from his words and music with every play. This is a glorious record that, for all its emphasis on character and disguise, is very much filled with real life and real feeling. It shines a rare spotlight on those left behind or cruelly ignored, and even undercuts the self-aggrandising image of those putting on the whole show.
Sometimes I associate particular bands or specific albums with times and places. Okkervil River, about whom I’ve enthused rapturously here several times, are inexorably linked with my visit to Toronto, where I purchased their outstanding ‘Black Sheep Boy’ album on a whim (mostly because I adore the Tim Hardin song that inspired it). That album, with its literary brand of songwriting, made virtues out of melodrama and excess, in a way that the more photogenic and well-promoted Conor Oberst clearly aspires to but, for me at least, never quite achieves. ‘The Stand-Ins’, with its frequent allusions to band life and being on tour, is clearly an album intended to be divorced from specific locations, if not from memories.
Last year’s ‘The Stage Names’ again demonstrated Will Sheff’s presentation of songs as miniature novels – squeezing in a wealth of intelligent musings, quirky images and elaborate character portraits. Musically, it was a different beast though – at times veering into a more upbeat and exuberant stomp. ‘The Stand-Ins’ is a collection of songs recorded at the same time but then shelved when it was decided a double album would be too great an indulgence. It’s clearly very much a companion piece, revisiting some of the characters and themes first introduced in ‘The Stage Names’, particularly the acting/movie concept, seafaring imagery and emphasis on songs about being in a band (Sheff shares a lot of songwriting qualities and characteristics with Craig Finn of The Hold Steady). 'Starry Stairs' even continues the story of 'Savannah Smiles' from the previous album.
The initial reaction on the blogosphere seems to be one of mild disappointment, at least when ‘The Stand Ins’ is judged by the band’s so far consistently high standards. On the surface, it’s easy to see the reasons for this. At 40 minutes, including three instrumental interludes, it’s surprisingly concise and there’s little doubt that the group have moved towards something more musically accessible. The Motown stomp that informed a couple of tracks on ‘The Stage Names’ is in full flight here, and ‘Starry Staired’ even flirts with Memphis soul horns.
I’m not underwhelmed by this articulate, moving and intelligently designed record though. If Sheff’s linguistic intricacies can find a wider audience, I’m all in favour of a greater reliance on standard melodies and immediate hooks. His lyrics here are frequently wonderful, often capturing something melancholy or poignant with free-flowing ease. ‘On Tour With Zykos’ movingly details the emotions of a lover left-behind as the touring band move on.
Closer to home perhaps, ‘Lost Coastlines’, on which Sheff duets with the now- departed Jonathan Meiburg, is particularly affecting. The two deploy shipping metaphors to express the inherent difficulties in keeping a band together. Meiburg’s smooth but charismatic baritone makes for some restrained relief from Sheff’s emoting. The final lines sum up life in a band succinctly and perceptively: ‘Every night finds us rocking and rolling on waves wild and wide, and if we’ve lost our way, well no-one’s gonna say it outright.’ When strings and horns enter in the song’s final section, it seems to elevate the song to something vivid and dramatic, but which also emphasises the song’s mournful core.
Sometimes the lyrics are so cutting and insightful that they jar with the jauntiness of the music. The contrast is surprisingly effective on ‘Calling and Not Calling My Ex’, where Sheff ruminates eloquently on resuming contact with an ex from three years ago who has progressed to celebrity status (‘you look the same on TV as when you were mine’). The music veers between a familiar chiming theme and moments of reflective calm.
It’s a song full of hypothetical conjectures, resentment and devastating regret – the sort of intense but futile emotions that are very common human failings. He imagines the girl’s sudden return: ‘…it’s a mixture of dumb jealousy and fear/that I might feel should she appear…as if it hasn’t been three years’. The song is made even more touching because it keeps one rational eye on a more uneventful, mundane reality (life is ‘slightly, disappointingly, just gliding by’). It ends with an inevitable resignation: ‘I remember every instance that you stung me, oh you’re so lovely, you’re so smart/ So go turn their heads, go knock ‘em dead, go break their hearts/And I know you will’. For all his self-absorbtion and self-pity, it’s hard not to sympathise with Sheff’s character’s pain, so artful is his expression of it.
Perhaps most powerful of all is the epic closing track, with its rather unmanageable title: ‘Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1979’. Cambell was apparently a gay glam rock artist, whose star shone only briefly, eventually reduced to singing cabaret at parties as Cole Berlin. Suffering from AIDS, he committed suicide in 1983. The song has Campbell weakened, drinking on his own and ‘sick of singing the same songs’. The song’s conclusion would be absurdly grandiose in any other hands, with Campbell being lifted into space (presumably reflecting his thematic preoccupation with aliens).
Elsewhere, Sheff’s concerns are less weighty. ‘Singer Songwriter’ is the kind of snarling character assassination of which the young Bob Dylan could be proud (indeed, there’s more than a hint of ‘Positively 4th Street’ in the song’s nursery rhyme melody and insistent rhythm). ‘I saw your big sis on the year’s best book list/and your brother he manages bands’ Sheff rasps dismissively, before sneering ‘you’ve got wealth, you’ve got wealth/ What a bitch, they didn’t give you much else!’. The song surprises at its end by turning inward – with its cry of ‘your world isn’t gonna change nothing’ subtly becoming ‘our world isn’t gonna change nothing’, as if Sheff is condemning himself alongside his target. This self-reverential irony crops up again on ‘Pop Lie’, a song cynically sniping at songs with choruses designed to get people to sing along. The song itself of course has something approaching a singalong chorus, and a relentless energy that suggests unshakeable conviction.
Sometimes it’s the sheer combination of words Sheff uses that is most imaginative, from the ‘cuts from the Kinks’ on ‘Singer Songwriter’ to this wonderfully florid passage from ‘Lost Coastlines’: ‘Is that marionette real enough yet to step off that set and decide what a dance might mean to it’. Then there’s the conflicting emotions of ‘On Tour With Zykos’, with Sheff convincing in female character – ‘how come I shout goodbye when I just want to make this white lie big enough to climb inside with you’. It gets even better ‘I’m in disgust with desire from the guys who conspire at the only decent bar in town/and they wish they had me like I wish I had fire, what a sad way to be…’ It’s all observed with piercing clarity, but also with disarming tenderness and sensitivity.
Sheff has discovered ways and means of hitting all the right buttons with his arrangements, particularly with swelling strings and horns, that mean his ambitions are no longer forced or overwraught. He always uses the additional instruments to animate the sentiments and feelings of his songs. Listen to the way the organ subtly shadows the piano during ‘On Tour With Zykos’, before dramatically taking the lead as the song takes flight and then itself giving way to the strings.
There will some who will dislike the glimmer of light that fights against the melodramatic darkness the group communicated circa ‘Black Sheep Boy’. They may also dislike the fact that Sheff’s linguistic imagination has been fitted neatly into a crisper, more coherent musical template. But these songs are so much more than mere Motown pastiches – they are as much alive with America’s literary tradition as with its rich pop music heritage. His cast of recurring characters is as reminiscent of Raymond Carver as Bruce Springsteen.
This has been a long review, but Sheff writes songs that can be listened to repeatedly, with language that wraps itself around you and absorbs you completely. They cannot easily be summarised and paraphrased. Something new will emerge from his words and music with every play. This is a glorious record that, for all its emphasis on character and disguise, is very much filled with real life and real feeling. It shines a rare spotlight on those left behind or cruelly ignored, and even undercuts the self-aggrandising image of those putting on the whole show.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Death and All His Friends
Noah and The Whale - Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down (Mercury, 2008)
‘Peaceful, The World Lays Me Down’ is not exactly the kind of enthusiastic, life-affirming title you might expect from a debut album by a group barely into their twenties. Noah and the Whale’s songwriter Charlie Fink is clearly a little more precocious than Tim Wheeler or Gaz Coomes were in the mid-90s. The chirpy optimism of songs along the lines of ‘Alright’ or ‘Girl From Mars’ clearly don’t chime with him.
The twee bubblegum folk of their top ten single ‘5 Years’ Time’ is therefore more than a little misleading of what can be found here. Fink’s biggest themes would appear to be death and a rather self-conscious flight from whatever real love might be. Sometimes his words are eloquent, sometimes they feel forced – as if he’s grasping too hard at profundity. He might be leaving himself very exposed to accusations of cynicism with lyrics like ‘if there’s any love in me don’t let it show’ – but he can be forgiven the occasional lapse into adolescent pretence (especially, as he later asks, in all sincerity ‘when will your hand find itself in mine?’).
Whilst it might risk becoming an albatross around their necks, one can hardly resent the band from leaping to pop status on the back of ‘5 Years Time’. Odd, though, that they have very suddenly eclipsed all their associates in what is increasingly being dubbed as a London arm of the ‘anti-folk’ scene (the group began as backing band for Emmy The Great). The genre classification may in fact be less than helpful. I’m not quite sure what the indie-tronica of Jeremy Warmsley has to do with the ramshackle irreverence of Jeffrey Lewis, for example. Indeed, the reliance on basic strumming patterns as much as plucked ukuleles suggests the folk tag is a little too slippery for NaTW too. Although fiddle player Tom Hobden has clearly absorbed a great deal of the tradition, there are times when the band seems more Belle and Sebastian than Richard Thompson.
The first two-thirds of this album are, in spite of Fink’s preoccupations, mostly concise and breezy pop songs. They are at their best when they make features of Hobden’s incisive fiddle, or of Doug Fink’s unorthodox but sympathetic drumming (at its most brittle and sensitive, his playing assumes as crucial a role as any other instrument here). Even better, the songs are occasionally elevated by further brass embellishments, which emphasise the inherent joy beneath Fink’s self-absorbtion. ‘Shape of My Heart’ and ‘Give a Little Love’ are especially charming.
However, the true extent of what this band might eventually achieve only really emerges during the album’s finishing straight. The title track places Charlie’s slightly mannered voice in its most sympathetic context, and at last his desire to escape the circus of relationships and conveyor belts seems genuine, in spite of some rather unsightly rhymes (‘abrasions/ ‘quotations’ etc). When the song eventually bursts open with Hobden’s delightful violin theme, it achieves something simple but stirring.
On ‘Mary’, Fink allows himself to be a little more elusive and ambiguous and the results are affecting even if it’s not easy to pin down precisely why. The lyric ‘When I last saw Mary she lied and said it was her birthday’ has stuck with me since I first saw the group live, and I’m glad it’s made it on to the album. This song and the title track also seem to have a greater emphasis on development and progression – themes and ideas are expanded and the structures are a good deal less formulaic.
Those expecting an entire album of cute fluffiness may well have switched off by this point, but they’d be missing the burgeoning of a real songwriting talent. The funereal resignation of ‘Hold My Hand as I’m Lowered’ perhaps gives the more accurate sense of Fink’s laudable ambitions, its sombre brass band coda somehow both world-weary and elevating.
There’s a sense that the Noah and the Whale of this album are not yet the finished article (and let’s not forget that this is exactly how a debut album should present a band – with somewhere left to go!). If Charlie Fink can shed some of his po-faced exterior (I remember feeling he spent too long staring at his shoes in live performance), he is clearly capable of writing clear, haunting and mature songs. If this supposed London-centred ‘scene’ is let down by one unifying factor, it would appear to be a tendency towards narcissism. Luckily, Fink already has the able support of a band unique (at least among British chart acts) in their willingness to provide unusual, unexpected arrangements that linger satisfyingly in the mind.
‘Peaceful, The World Lays Me Down’ is not exactly the kind of enthusiastic, life-affirming title you might expect from a debut album by a group barely into their twenties. Noah and the Whale’s songwriter Charlie Fink is clearly a little more precocious than Tim Wheeler or Gaz Coomes were in the mid-90s. The chirpy optimism of songs along the lines of ‘Alright’ or ‘Girl From Mars’ clearly don’t chime with him.
The twee bubblegum folk of their top ten single ‘5 Years’ Time’ is therefore more than a little misleading of what can be found here. Fink’s biggest themes would appear to be death and a rather self-conscious flight from whatever real love might be. Sometimes his words are eloquent, sometimes they feel forced – as if he’s grasping too hard at profundity. He might be leaving himself very exposed to accusations of cynicism with lyrics like ‘if there’s any love in me don’t let it show’ – but he can be forgiven the occasional lapse into adolescent pretence (especially, as he later asks, in all sincerity ‘when will your hand find itself in mine?’).
Whilst it might risk becoming an albatross around their necks, one can hardly resent the band from leaping to pop status on the back of ‘5 Years Time’. Odd, though, that they have very suddenly eclipsed all their associates in what is increasingly being dubbed as a London arm of the ‘anti-folk’ scene (the group began as backing band for Emmy The Great). The genre classification may in fact be less than helpful. I’m not quite sure what the indie-tronica of Jeremy Warmsley has to do with the ramshackle irreverence of Jeffrey Lewis, for example. Indeed, the reliance on basic strumming patterns as much as plucked ukuleles suggests the folk tag is a little too slippery for NaTW too. Although fiddle player Tom Hobden has clearly absorbed a great deal of the tradition, there are times when the band seems more Belle and Sebastian than Richard Thompson.
The first two-thirds of this album are, in spite of Fink’s preoccupations, mostly concise and breezy pop songs. They are at their best when they make features of Hobden’s incisive fiddle, or of Doug Fink’s unorthodox but sympathetic drumming (at its most brittle and sensitive, his playing assumes as crucial a role as any other instrument here). Even better, the songs are occasionally elevated by further brass embellishments, which emphasise the inherent joy beneath Fink’s self-absorbtion. ‘Shape of My Heart’ and ‘Give a Little Love’ are especially charming.
However, the true extent of what this band might eventually achieve only really emerges during the album’s finishing straight. The title track places Charlie’s slightly mannered voice in its most sympathetic context, and at last his desire to escape the circus of relationships and conveyor belts seems genuine, in spite of some rather unsightly rhymes (‘abrasions/ ‘quotations’ etc). When the song eventually bursts open with Hobden’s delightful violin theme, it achieves something simple but stirring.
On ‘Mary’, Fink allows himself to be a little more elusive and ambiguous and the results are affecting even if it’s not easy to pin down precisely why. The lyric ‘When I last saw Mary she lied and said it was her birthday’ has stuck with me since I first saw the group live, and I’m glad it’s made it on to the album. This song and the title track also seem to have a greater emphasis on development and progression – themes and ideas are expanded and the structures are a good deal less formulaic.
Those expecting an entire album of cute fluffiness may well have switched off by this point, but they’d be missing the burgeoning of a real songwriting talent. The funereal resignation of ‘Hold My Hand as I’m Lowered’ perhaps gives the more accurate sense of Fink’s laudable ambitions, its sombre brass band coda somehow both world-weary and elevating.
There’s a sense that the Noah and the Whale of this album are not yet the finished article (and let’s not forget that this is exactly how a debut album should present a band – with somewhere left to go!). If Charlie Fink can shed some of his po-faced exterior (I remember feeling he spent too long staring at his shoes in live performance), he is clearly capable of writing clear, haunting and mature songs. If this supposed London-centred ‘scene’ is let down by one unifying factor, it would appear to be a tendency towards narcissism. Luckily, Fink already has the able support of a band unique (at least among British chart acts) in their willingness to provide unusual, unexpected arrangements that linger satisfyingly in the mind.
Isaac Hayes 1942 – 2008
Had Isaac Hayes’ career extended only as far as being a session musician and songwriter for the Stax/Volt/Atlantic labels (with writing partner David Porter he composed Sam and Dave’s most memorable hits, including ‘Hold On I’m Coming!’ and ‘Soul Man’), he would still merit a pretty substantial footnote in soul music history. Yet his achievements as a solo performer arguably elevated him to the pantheon of greats.
His 1969 debut album ‘Hot Buttered Soul’ reinvented him as a magnificent arranger and interpreter and included brilliant, interpolated versions of Burt Bacharach’s ‘Walk On By’ and Jimmy Webb’s ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’. Both tracks were unashamedly vivid and grandiose, memorable as much for Hayes’ improvised half-rapping as for their flourishes of strings and stylised guitar lines. This lavish approach would greatly influence the later Stax sound that, whilst dooming the label to financial collapse in the short term, has more recently been reappraised for its inventiveness and musical character (particularly see Tony Hester’s arrangements and production for The Dramatics, heavily indebted to Hayes).
Some might have felt he developed the style beyond its logical conclusion with the bloated ‘Black Moses’, but there was actually more genuine emotion there than self-aggrandising. If it was a feat of artistic indulgence, it still stands comfortably with Marvin Gaye’s ‘Here My Dear’ and Stevie Wonder’s ‘Songs in the Key of Life’ as an indulgence worth tolerating.
Along with Curtis Mayfield and Bobby Womack, Hayes bolstered his career with a major soundtrack (‘Shaft’). Whilst the blaxploitation movies have recently been re-examined with fresh favour as cultural landmarks, there’s still little argument against the contention that Hayes’ instantly identifiable wah-wah theme has outlived the film.
Like many before and after him, Hayes overspent in the immediate aftermath of his fame and filed for bankruptcy in the mid-70s. Unlike others, he recovered from this with dignity and artistic credibility intact, continuing to write and perform throughout the 80s and 90s. An album as recent as ‘Branded’ could claim to be a worthy part of his musical legacy.
He may now be remembered as fondly for his good-humoured role as Chef in the controversial but popular animated series South Park, its somewhat unsubtle ‘Chocolate Salty Balls’ single providing him with a late re-appearance in the pop charts. It’s undoubtedly a shame that Hayes could tolerate and even encourage the series’ lambasting of cultural and social targets save only for his hallowed Church of Scientology. The programme’s attack on the religion/cult clearly proved a step too far for Hayes and provoked his resignation from the show. Whilst this doesn’t exactly tarnish his image, it sadly leaves many of us wondering how such a talent could be quite so irrational.
Hayes had been married four times and leaves a pretty impressive tally of twelve children. He obviously lived life with a somewhat reckless intensity. Still, at just 65, he may well have had another grand statement left to offer, although he had apparently already suffered a stroke in 2006.
His 1969 debut album ‘Hot Buttered Soul’ reinvented him as a magnificent arranger and interpreter and included brilliant, interpolated versions of Burt Bacharach’s ‘Walk On By’ and Jimmy Webb’s ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’. Both tracks were unashamedly vivid and grandiose, memorable as much for Hayes’ improvised half-rapping as for their flourishes of strings and stylised guitar lines. This lavish approach would greatly influence the later Stax sound that, whilst dooming the label to financial collapse in the short term, has more recently been reappraised for its inventiveness and musical character (particularly see Tony Hester’s arrangements and production for The Dramatics, heavily indebted to Hayes).
Some might have felt he developed the style beyond its logical conclusion with the bloated ‘Black Moses’, but there was actually more genuine emotion there than self-aggrandising. If it was a feat of artistic indulgence, it still stands comfortably with Marvin Gaye’s ‘Here My Dear’ and Stevie Wonder’s ‘Songs in the Key of Life’ as an indulgence worth tolerating.
Along with Curtis Mayfield and Bobby Womack, Hayes bolstered his career with a major soundtrack (‘Shaft’). Whilst the blaxploitation movies have recently been re-examined with fresh favour as cultural landmarks, there’s still little argument against the contention that Hayes’ instantly identifiable wah-wah theme has outlived the film.
Like many before and after him, Hayes overspent in the immediate aftermath of his fame and filed for bankruptcy in the mid-70s. Unlike others, he recovered from this with dignity and artistic credibility intact, continuing to write and perform throughout the 80s and 90s. An album as recent as ‘Branded’ could claim to be a worthy part of his musical legacy.
He may now be remembered as fondly for his good-humoured role as Chef in the controversial but popular animated series South Park, its somewhat unsubtle ‘Chocolate Salty Balls’ single providing him with a late re-appearance in the pop charts. It’s undoubtedly a shame that Hayes could tolerate and even encourage the series’ lambasting of cultural and social targets save only for his hallowed Church of Scientology. The programme’s attack on the religion/cult clearly proved a step too far for Hayes and provoked his resignation from the show. Whilst this doesn’t exactly tarnish his image, it sadly leaves many of us wondering how such a talent could be quite so irrational.
Hayes had been married four times and leaves a pretty impressive tally of twelve children. He obviously lived life with a somewhat reckless intensity. Still, at just 65, he may well have had another grand statement left to offer, although he had apparently already suffered a stroke in 2006.
Friday, August 08, 2008
Every Actor Wants To Sing
She & Him – Volume One (Double Six/Domino, 2008)
This seems to be one of those years for film stars venturing into song. Were it not for David Sitek’s characteristically inventive production, I doubt anyone would really have given Scarlett Johansson’s album of Tom Waits covers any credit at all. Her flat, double-tracked vocalising certainly didn’t rise to the considerable challenge posed by her choice of material.
This collaboration between the lovely Zooey Deschanel and songwriter/multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire M Ward is a good deal more straightforward and unpretentious than Johansson’s peculiar venture. In fact, it’s really rather lovely – a sometimes melancholy, sometimes joyful set of spare and simple songs evoking classic country, dusty soul and, best of all, early 60s girl-pop (particularly on the irresistible ‘I Was Made For You’ and ‘This is Not A Test’).
Deschanel’s voice is unlikely to set anyone’s world on fire, but she sings confidently within her limitations. Most of these songs are originals, and they are both touching and convincing. Perhaps Deschanel and Ward’s affiliation with the sounds and techniques of 60s pop occasionally push the music into pastiche – but it is always handled with sensitivity and affection.
Some have criticised her handling of pop standards as the weakest moments here – and the Hawaii Pineapple treatment of The Beatles’ ‘I Should Have Known Better’ is probably the album’s lowpoint. Perhaps the performance of Smokey Robinson’s ‘You Really Got A Hold On Me’ is similarly hokey, but there’s something about the vocal interjections of M Ward (the only time his voice appears on the album) that seem to make this version strangely affecting.
Ward’s arrangements are appropriately naturalistic and delicate with minimal embellishment. As a result, there’s a slightly rustic and pastoral feel to this material – perhaps redolent of those wonderful auburn New England autumns. It’s surprisingly easy to relate to Deschanel’s homespun words which are deliberately unflighty (‘I sometimes find what’s beautiful in things that are ephemeral’). It’s a warm and immediate record with a great deal of charm. The title offers some vague hope that there might be more than one ‘volume’ whilst Deschanel has suggested that she views this venture as much more than a one-off side project. Good for her, and for us!
This seems to be one of those years for film stars venturing into song. Were it not for David Sitek’s characteristically inventive production, I doubt anyone would really have given Scarlett Johansson’s album of Tom Waits covers any credit at all. Her flat, double-tracked vocalising certainly didn’t rise to the considerable challenge posed by her choice of material.
This collaboration between the lovely Zooey Deschanel and songwriter/multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire M Ward is a good deal more straightforward and unpretentious than Johansson’s peculiar venture. In fact, it’s really rather lovely – a sometimes melancholy, sometimes joyful set of spare and simple songs evoking classic country, dusty soul and, best of all, early 60s girl-pop (particularly on the irresistible ‘I Was Made For You’ and ‘This is Not A Test’).
Deschanel’s voice is unlikely to set anyone’s world on fire, but she sings confidently within her limitations. Most of these songs are originals, and they are both touching and convincing. Perhaps Deschanel and Ward’s affiliation with the sounds and techniques of 60s pop occasionally push the music into pastiche – but it is always handled with sensitivity and affection.
Some have criticised her handling of pop standards as the weakest moments here – and the Hawaii Pineapple treatment of The Beatles’ ‘I Should Have Known Better’ is probably the album’s lowpoint. Perhaps the performance of Smokey Robinson’s ‘You Really Got A Hold On Me’ is similarly hokey, but there’s something about the vocal interjections of M Ward (the only time his voice appears on the album) that seem to make this version strangely affecting.
Ward’s arrangements are appropriately naturalistic and delicate with minimal embellishment. As a result, there’s a slightly rustic and pastoral feel to this material – perhaps redolent of those wonderful auburn New England autumns. It’s surprisingly easy to relate to Deschanel’s homespun words which are deliberately unflighty (‘I sometimes find what’s beautiful in things that are ephemeral’). It’s a warm and immediate record with a great deal of charm. The title offers some vague hope that there might be more than one ‘volume’ whilst Deschanel has suggested that she views this venture as much more than a one-off side project. Good for her, and for us!
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Cinematic Fraudulence
Some Thoughts On Carlos Reygadas
Somewhere on these pages, I apparently once dubbed innovative Dogme film-maker Lars Von Trier a ‘ludicrous charlatan’ for his laughable and grotesque pretentions in films such as ‘Breaking the Waves’ and ‘The Idiots’. Watching Mexican director Carlos Reygadas’ absurdly over-praised third feature ‘Silent Light’ on DVD last weekend, I was once again reminded of those inadvertently hilarious words. Reygadas must surely be the most generously indulged of contemporary film-makers. Alternately hailed as either an ‘enfant terrible’ or as Mexican cinema’s brightest new talent, Reygadas’ combination of fatuous provocation and pseudo-intellectual meandering actually distinguishes him more as a gigantic fraud than either of these things.
Watching ‘Silent Light’ set me pondering why I immediately like some serious, high-minded and slow-paced films, but am very wary of other films of a similar stylistic nature. Films do not need to have action, plot or a driving narrative for me to connect with them. They also do not need to be judgmental or adopt clear moral stances. I am a self-confessed evangelist for the works of directors as ponderous and ambiguous as Wong Kar Wai (I can think of no more beautiful film in the last twenty years than ‘In The Mood For Love’, slow and bereft of direct action though it is), Bela Tarr (whose ‘Satantango’ is, at more than seven hours, the longest film in my collection) and Tsai Ming-Liang (most notable for his almost complete renunciation of dialogue). Yet I am instinctively wary of languid pacing or technical superiority simply for the sake of it (the best examples of this I can highlight are Alexander Sokurov’s ‘Russian Ark’, Zhang Yimou’s bizarrely lifeless ‘Hero’, David Gordon Green’s ‘George Washington’, an all-too slavish homage to Terence Mallick, and, of course, Carlos Reygadas’ ‘Japon’). The most successful directors developed signature styles that are in service to their broader themes and ideas. Carlos Reygadas seems to use an established cinematic lexicon simply to shout his credentials as some kind of newcomer to the pantheon of great masters.
I’m not quite sure why I felt compelled to give Reygadas a second chance (his debut feature ‘Japon’ is among the worst films I have ever endured in a cinema). Some very favourable reviews of ‘Silent Light’ (particularly a glowing testament from Jonathan Romney in Sight and Sound) encouraged me to give it a try. At the most basic level, the film’s theme of infidelity in a Mennonite community, using real Mennonites rather than actors in the cast, at least appeared to be promising.
Indeed, for at least its first hour, ‘Silent Light’ succeeds in spite of its ponderous pacing. Much comment has already been made about its impressive opening sequence – a single six minute time lapse shot of a sunrise, but such impressive control of the camerawork continues throughout the film. The technique also extends to the intelligent staging of the domestic scenes as much as to the familiar long tracking shots obligatory to any work of contemporary ‘art’ cinema.
Best of all is the film’s extraordinary sound design – without a musical soundtrack, most of the work needed to create its atmosphere comes from the sound itself, which is vivid and intensely loud. The heavy sound of footsteps through long grass, the noisy whirring of farming equipment, the overpowering noise of wind and rain – all capture not just a community and its way of life, but how the physical intensity of human feeling paradoxically both echoes and exceeds the buzz and intensity of everyday life. It also shows the extent to which ritual pervades every aspect of this community’s existence.
Whilst the non-professionals in the film are often blank and deceptively emotionless in conversation, Reygadas creates powerful impact in the scenes where devastating feeling is allowed to break through (the first scene of Johan crying at the family table, the later, considerably more heavy-handed scene where his wife Esther breaks down in heavy rain). Reygadas makes an assured decision to start the film somewhere in the middle of Johan’s story, after his affair has already begun. We are spared any superfluous backstory, or any understanding of how his treacherous attraction began.
More interesting than this, though, is the very non-judgmental way in which Reygadas treats the theme of infidelity. Johan is troubled by his actions and painfully honest with both his wife and father about the affair. One might have expected Johan to be quickly condemned and ostracised by his community, but all listen carefully to his admission of succumbing to temptation. Reygadas is surprisingly confident in both his emphasis on human compassion in the first half of this film.
He even considers that Johan’s family commitment might have been a terrible mistake, and that Marianne might in fact be the woman with whom he feels the greater connection.
The film is considerably more tasteful than the outlandish, provocative and silly ‘Battle in Heaven’, and although her part is inevitably underwritten, Marianne is portrayed sensitively, alive to the feelings of Johan’s troubled wife as well as her own confused mindset. The film is alive to the overwhelming power of physical attraction, even at a time when life’s plan seems to have been entirely determined and when to submit to it might mean the loss of all security.
Yet, even in its stronger moments – the unpleasant whiff of artifice that surrounded ‘Japon’ still lingers. Reygadas continues to develop an interest in religion and spirituality, but only explores this opaquely. It’s vaguely implied that Johan's temptation might be the work of the devil – yet the film’s religiously observant characters also seem to accept (perhaps refreshingly) that these things happen to human beings as a matter of course (his father also confesses to an adulterous desire). It’s also suggested that whatever happens is pre-determined anyway, and all of Johan’s agonising is therefore entirely futile. Such fatalism rather undermines all of Reygadas’ quasi poetic ruminations. The point in setting this familiar everyday story in a religious community seems lost if some of the theological complications are never adequately explored.
In addition to these undeveloped ideas, ‘Silent Light’, like ‘Japon’ before it, is demonstrably indebted to the work of great masters. I’m not an expert on the works of Carl Theodor Dreyer, but Reygadas’ film apparently bears strong similarities with ‘Ordet’. The directorial signature that I most noticed here though was that of the great Ingmar Bergman, particularly in the austere close-ups of faces and carefully framed domestic scenes. Yet the film lacks Bergman’s mastery of tension and claustrophobia, and its confused and fundamentally objectionable conclusion removes any claim the film can make to saying anything profound about either religion or infidelity. Where ‘Silent Light’ echoes Bergman and Dreyer, ‘Japon’ desperately aspired to the languid mastery and spiritual profundity of Andrei Tarkovsky, but fell short of his pioneering and unique language in the most embarrassing of ways.
‘Silent Light’ ends up a good deal more like ‘Japon’ than most commentators have noted (it has been described as a more audacious and mature work, but by its conclusion I’m not convinced that it is). Both films are undermined by unfathomably precious and intellectually flimsy conceits, and burdened by a self-appointed transcendent artistic purpose.
‘Japon’ can be summed up very succinctly, given that it is a film of very little substance. A disillusioned middle-aged man ends up in a small community in the Mexican wilderness – he walks around a lot, paints a bit, and masturbates fervently, apparently trying to rid himself of some unexplained grief or burden. He meets and befriends an old woman, with whom he has unnecessarily candid sex towards the end of the film. The woman then subsequently dies in an accident, the supposedly ‘spiritual’ implication being that she has transferred her life to the man through the act of sexual union. Oh yes, and her name is Ascension.
What an offensive and arrogant proposition this is (the sacrificed female body regenerates an uncritically heroic man) – and one for which Reygadas has never been held properly to account. He has claimed that Japon has no delusions of grandeur, but is merely a ‘simple story of how we help one another in life’. If it’s really that simple, then it’s remarkably trite. If it aspires to something more profound, it presents us with a gratuitously simplistic sexual psychology linking the libido with an urge for death. It also privileges male life above female, whilst pretending to imbue the female contribution with the greater intellectual significance.
Reygadas certainly duped The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, a usually dependable critic, into finding the film’s sex painful, emotional and convincing rather than indulgent and gratuitous. Over at the filmfreak.com website, Travis Mackenzie Hoover even argues that the film’s sexual dimension keeps it ‘out of the transcendent’ (no it doesn’t – in revisiting the age-old conception of the profane act having sacred meaning, transcendence is precisely what Reygadas is aspiring to) and that there is humour in the film's overall austerity (I can’t detect this – unless you count the unsubtly inserted scenes of horses copulating or the masturbation sequence as funny). Yet Reygadas provides no adequate explanation as to why this woman would consent to transforming a plucky friendship into a sexual relationship. There’s no reason why either of these characters would have been attracted to each other and there’s not even a hint that their coupling is mutually satisfying. It’s not even presented as transgressive, which in itself might even have been more interesting, however cliched. What is even worse is that there is no sense that the indulgent male character, who remains a complete enigma throughout, deserves the considerable sacrifice and indignity this woman affords him. It simply happens, for reasons that Reygadas stubbornly refuses to reveal to us.
‘Silent Light’ ends with a similarly forced and unconvincing miracle. Esther’s breakdown and death in pouring rain might be a pompous scene (Reygadas delayed production on the film for over three weeks waiting for a suitable Biblical downpour in which to shoot) but it at least had some convincing emotional resonance. Having tried with extraordinary resilience to be understanding, Esther finally collapses on hearing that Johan has seen Marianne one last time. The subsequent lengthy funeral scenes provide insight into Mennonite customs and death rituals, and would have made for an effective end to a flawed but ultimately intelligent film.
Yet Reygadas is obviously not a man who could ever exercise this kind of restraint, however necessary. The very notion of Marianne resurrecting Esther through kissing her corpse is completely absurd. What life has Marianne within her that she can return to Esther? Why is she imbued with the strength that Esther lacks and what sacrifice is she making here – is it all in the knowledge that her relationship with Johan must end in order to restore Esther’s vitality? Or is it of some wider spiritual significance? Either way, why is Esther reduced to the status of a mere passive participant when she is arguably the most injured party?
I’m by no means objecting more generally to the use of religious or spiritual themes in any form of art. In fact, the ideas of personal religion experience and miracle remain of great interest to me. Yet these are notions that Reygadas has simply attached to his films in their closing moments, as if they somehow explain or justify any self-conscious ambiguities in the preceding two hours. There is the sense that his pacing is deliberately leaden – which, along with his audacious borrowings, admonish his audience into thinking his concepts are weighty and of profound insight. Yet his films say so very little about life, death, grief, faith, repentance or sacrifice, in spite of their lofty ambitions.
Reygadas has absorbed the technical skill and some of the style of his influences without their intellectual rigour, sound editorial judgment or emotional clarity. The predictability of his ideas eventually even undermine the impact of his undoubted technical flair. It seemed grimly inevitable that ‘Silent Light’ wound end with a second time lapse shot, this time of the sun setting once again. These films are the worst recent examples of arthouse style over substance, and the acclaim gifted to them is an affront to intelligent cinema audiences – many of whom could be forgiven for being deterred from seeking out more adventurous examples of great world cinema after enduring such pious nonsense. If Reygadas is grasping to create some kind of iconography, these are modern day cinematic icons that I’d be happy to smash.
Somewhere on these pages, I apparently once dubbed innovative Dogme film-maker Lars Von Trier a ‘ludicrous charlatan’ for his laughable and grotesque pretentions in films such as ‘Breaking the Waves’ and ‘The Idiots’. Watching Mexican director Carlos Reygadas’ absurdly over-praised third feature ‘Silent Light’ on DVD last weekend, I was once again reminded of those inadvertently hilarious words. Reygadas must surely be the most generously indulged of contemporary film-makers. Alternately hailed as either an ‘enfant terrible’ or as Mexican cinema’s brightest new talent, Reygadas’ combination of fatuous provocation and pseudo-intellectual meandering actually distinguishes him more as a gigantic fraud than either of these things.
Watching ‘Silent Light’ set me pondering why I immediately like some serious, high-minded and slow-paced films, but am very wary of other films of a similar stylistic nature. Films do not need to have action, plot or a driving narrative for me to connect with them. They also do not need to be judgmental or adopt clear moral stances. I am a self-confessed evangelist for the works of directors as ponderous and ambiguous as Wong Kar Wai (I can think of no more beautiful film in the last twenty years than ‘In The Mood For Love’, slow and bereft of direct action though it is), Bela Tarr (whose ‘Satantango’ is, at more than seven hours, the longest film in my collection) and Tsai Ming-Liang (most notable for his almost complete renunciation of dialogue). Yet I am instinctively wary of languid pacing or technical superiority simply for the sake of it (the best examples of this I can highlight are Alexander Sokurov’s ‘Russian Ark’, Zhang Yimou’s bizarrely lifeless ‘Hero’, David Gordon Green’s ‘George Washington’, an all-too slavish homage to Terence Mallick, and, of course, Carlos Reygadas’ ‘Japon’). The most successful directors developed signature styles that are in service to their broader themes and ideas. Carlos Reygadas seems to use an established cinematic lexicon simply to shout his credentials as some kind of newcomer to the pantheon of great masters.
I’m not quite sure why I felt compelled to give Reygadas a second chance (his debut feature ‘Japon’ is among the worst films I have ever endured in a cinema). Some very favourable reviews of ‘Silent Light’ (particularly a glowing testament from Jonathan Romney in Sight and Sound) encouraged me to give it a try. At the most basic level, the film’s theme of infidelity in a Mennonite community, using real Mennonites rather than actors in the cast, at least appeared to be promising.
Indeed, for at least its first hour, ‘Silent Light’ succeeds in spite of its ponderous pacing. Much comment has already been made about its impressive opening sequence – a single six minute time lapse shot of a sunrise, but such impressive control of the camerawork continues throughout the film. The technique also extends to the intelligent staging of the domestic scenes as much as to the familiar long tracking shots obligatory to any work of contemporary ‘art’ cinema.
Best of all is the film’s extraordinary sound design – without a musical soundtrack, most of the work needed to create its atmosphere comes from the sound itself, which is vivid and intensely loud. The heavy sound of footsteps through long grass, the noisy whirring of farming equipment, the overpowering noise of wind and rain – all capture not just a community and its way of life, but how the physical intensity of human feeling paradoxically both echoes and exceeds the buzz and intensity of everyday life. It also shows the extent to which ritual pervades every aspect of this community’s existence.
Whilst the non-professionals in the film are often blank and deceptively emotionless in conversation, Reygadas creates powerful impact in the scenes where devastating feeling is allowed to break through (the first scene of Johan crying at the family table, the later, considerably more heavy-handed scene where his wife Esther breaks down in heavy rain). Reygadas makes an assured decision to start the film somewhere in the middle of Johan’s story, after his affair has already begun. We are spared any superfluous backstory, or any understanding of how his treacherous attraction began.
More interesting than this, though, is the very non-judgmental way in which Reygadas treats the theme of infidelity. Johan is troubled by his actions and painfully honest with both his wife and father about the affair. One might have expected Johan to be quickly condemned and ostracised by his community, but all listen carefully to his admission of succumbing to temptation. Reygadas is surprisingly confident in both his emphasis on human compassion in the first half of this film.
He even considers that Johan’s family commitment might have been a terrible mistake, and that Marianne might in fact be the woman with whom he feels the greater connection.
The film is considerably more tasteful than the outlandish, provocative and silly ‘Battle in Heaven’, and although her part is inevitably underwritten, Marianne is portrayed sensitively, alive to the feelings of Johan’s troubled wife as well as her own confused mindset. The film is alive to the overwhelming power of physical attraction, even at a time when life’s plan seems to have been entirely determined and when to submit to it might mean the loss of all security.
Yet, even in its stronger moments – the unpleasant whiff of artifice that surrounded ‘Japon’ still lingers. Reygadas continues to develop an interest in religion and spirituality, but only explores this opaquely. It’s vaguely implied that Johan's temptation might be the work of the devil – yet the film’s religiously observant characters also seem to accept (perhaps refreshingly) that these things happen to human beings as a matter of course (his father also confesses to an adulterous desire). It’s also suggested that whatever happens is pre-determined anyway, and all of Johan’s agonising is therefore entirely futile. Such fatalism rather undermines all of Reygadas’ quasi poetic ruminations. The point in setting this familiar everyday story in a religious community seems lost if some of the theological complications are never adequately explored.
In addition to these undeveloped ideas, ‘Silent Light’, like ‘Japon’ before it, is demonstrably indebted to the work of great masters. I’m not an expert on the works of Carl Theodor Dreyer, but Reygadas’ film apparently bears strong similarities with ‘Ordet’. The directorial signature that I most noticed here though was that of the great Ingmar Bergman, particularly in the austere close-ups of faces and carefully framed domestic scenes. Yet the film lacks Bergman’s mastery of tension and claustrophobia, and its confused and fundamentally objectionable conclusion removes any claim the film can make to saying anything profound about either religion or infidelity. Where ‘Silent Light’ echoes Bergman and Dreyer, ‘Japon’ desperately aspired to the languid mastery and spiritual profundity of Andrei Tarkovsky, but fell short of his pioneering and unique language in the most embarrassing of ways.
‘Silent Light’ ends up a good deal more like ‘Japon’ than most commentators have noted (it has been described as a more audacious and mature work, but by its conclusion I’m not convinced that it is). Both films are undermined by unfathomably precious and intellectually flimsy conceits, and burdened by a self-appointed transcendent artistic purpose.
‘Japon’ can be summed up very succinctly, given that it is a film of very little substance. A disillusioned middle-aged man ends up in a small community in the Mexican wilderness – he walks around a lot, paints a bit, and masturbates fervently, apparently trying to rid himself of some unexplained grief or burden. He meets and befriends an old woman, with whom he has unnecessarily candid sex towards the end of the film. The woman then subsequently dies in an accident, the supposedly ‘spiritual’ implication being that she has transferred her life to the man through the act of sexual union. Oh yes, and her name is Ascension.
What an offensive and arrogant proposition this is (the sacrificed female body regenerates an uncritically heroic man) – and one for which Reygadas has never been held properly to account. He has claimed that Japon has no delusions of grandeur, but is merely a ‘simple story of how we help one another in life’. If it’s really that simple, then it’s remarkably trite. If it aspires to something more profound, it presents us with a gratuitously simplistic sexual psychology linking the libido with an urge for death. It also privileges male life above female, whilst pretending to imbue the female contribution with the greater intellectual significance.
Reygadas certainly duped The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, a usually dependable critic, into finding the film’s sex painful, emotional and convincing rather than indulgent and gratuitous. Over at the filmfreak.com website, Travis Mackenzie Hoover even argues that the film’s sexual dimension keeps it ‘out of the transcendent’ (no it doesn’t – in revisiting the age-old conception of the profane act having sacred meaning, transcendence is precisely what Reygadas is aspiring to) and that there is humour in the film's overall austerity (I can’t detect this – unless you count the unsubtly inserted scenes of horses copulating or the masturbation sequence as funny). Yet Reygadas provides no adequate explanation as to why this woman would consent to transforming a plucky friendship into a sexual relationship. There’s no reason why either of these characters would have been attracted to each other and there’s not even a hint that their coupling is mutually satisfying. It’s not even presented as transgressive, which in itself might even have been more interesting, however cliched. What is even worse is that there is no sense that the indulgent male character, who remains a complete enigma throughout, deserves the considerable sacrifice and indignity this woman affords him. It simply happens, for reasons that Reygadas stubbornly refuses to reveal to us.
‘Silent Light’ ends with a similarly forced and unconvincing miracle. Esther’s breakdown and death in pouring rain might be a pompous scene (Reygadas delayed production on the film for over three weeks waiting for a suitable Biblical downpour in which to shoot) but it at least had some convincing emotional resonance. Having tried with extraordinary resilience to be understanding, Esther finally collapses on hearing that Johan has seen Marianne one last time. The subsequent lengthy funeral scenes provide insight into Mennonite customs and death rituals, and would have made for an effective end to a flawed but ultimately intelligent film.
Yet Reygadas is obviously not a man who could ever exercise this kind of restraint, however necessary. The very notion of Marianne resurrecting Esther through kissing her corpse is completely absurd. What life has Marianne within her that she can return to Esther? Why is she imbued with the strength that Esther lacks and what sacrifice is she making here – is it all in the knowledge that her relationship with Johan must end in order to restore Esther’s vitality? Or is it of some wider spiritual significance? Either way, why is Esther reduced to the status of a mere passive participant when she is arguably the most injured party?
I’m by no means objecting more generally to the use of religious or spiritual themes in any form of art. In fact, the ideas of personal religion experience and miracle remain of great interest to me. Yet these are notions that Reygadas has simply attached to his films in their closing moments, as if they somehow explain or justify any self-conscious ambiguities in the preceding two hours. There is the sense that his pacing is deliberately leaden – which, along with his audacious borrowings, admonish his audience into thinking his concepts are weighty and of profound insight. Yet his films say so very little about life, death, grief, faith, repentance or sacrifice, in spite of their lofty ambitions.
Reygadas has absorbed the technical skill and some of the style of his influences without their intellectual rigour, sound editorial judgment or emotional clarity. The predictability of his ideas eventually even undermine the impact of his undoubted technical flair. It seemed grimly inevitable that ‘Silent Light’ wound end with a second time lapse shot, this time of the sun setting once again. These films are the worst recent examples of arthouse style over substance, and the acclaim gifted to them is an affront to intelligent cinema audiences – many of whom could be forgiven for being deterred from seeking out more adventurous examples of great world cinema after enduring such pious nonsense. If Reygadas is grasping to create some kind of iconography, these are modern day cinematic icons that I’d be happy to smash.
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Coming in From the Cold
Polar Bear – Polar Bear (Tin Angel, 2008)
In the rather sweet liner notes and acknowledgements that accompany this third Polar Bear album, Seb Rochford apologises for his latest album being so long. In this age of downloading and compiling, perhaps Rochford fears that his audience, maybe broader than your average jazz crowd, might not have the necessary patience or concentration span to digest it. Well, that would be a shame. For those of us who have been following the development of Rochford’s refreshingly original group, we’ve been waiting quite a while for this one, it having originally been scheduled for release by V2, before Polar Bear became a sad casualty of that label’s restructuring and downsizing. The value for money we’ve been offered seems like suitable compensation. V2’s loss, it would appear, is our gain. Great too for the small Coventry based label Tin Angel with whom Rochford is now collaborating for this release.
For those who find Polar Bear hard to appreciate or understand, the most common criticism is that perennial favourite: ‘It’s just not jazz’. Given how unconcerned I am with the precise definitions of musical genres, I can hardly summon the energy to address this argument. Nevertheless, I must concede my most immediate response to ‘Polar Bear’ is to pick up on the wide array of sounds and influences, many drawn from well beyond the radar of most jazz musicians. Most obviously, there’s Leafcutter John’s electronics, performed live and now more closely integrated with the overall musical landscape of Rochford’s compositions. Yet, the powerful opening one-two of ‘Tay’ and ‘Goodbye’ hints at the influence of Jamaican musical forms – particularly ska and dub. ‘Tay’ is ushered in on a remarkably simple but righteously groovy bass and drums figure that could easily have underpinned a Skatelites track. Given how well Rochford subsumes these ideas into a complete whole (‘Polar Bear’ is the group’s most coherent album so far), this seems far more of a strength than a weakness.
If Polar Bear are ‘more pop than jazz’, it shows in the playful exuberance of Rochford’s compositions. This perhaps comes through best on the superb ‘Tomlovesalicelovestom’, written after the happy occasion of Tom Herbert’s marriage and with every bit as joyous a sense of celebration as such a piece might demand. A more cynical listener might sense in the song’s journey into abstraction a hint at the uncertainty and vulnerability of commitment – but so solid and driving is the returning thematic narrative that its mood seems overwhelmingly positive. This is audacious, mostly improvised music without pretensions or any elevated sense of superiority above its intended audience.
The absence of a harmonic foundation allows this group its breathing space. With no textural support from a piano or guitar, the fundamental connection between Rochford’s conversational explorations on the drums and Tom Herbert’s full and clear bass patterns sounds even more significant. Similarly, the dynamic relationship between saxophonists Mark Lockheart and Pete Wareham is exploited to brilliant effect – with Rochford’s themes relying heavily on the careful interweaving of their distinct sounds. It tends to be Wareham who directs the group towards their more aggressive and incendiary moments, with Lockheart’s musicality and thorough grasp of time anchoring them in solid ground.
Whilst all the acclaim and publicity thrown at Rochford can sometimes seem like hype and bluster, the quality of his musicianship more than justifies the attention. Whilst his feel is relaxed and accurate, it’s the sound and timbre of his drumming that take precedence above technical showmanship. This means that his playing can assume a central and creative role without obscuring the contributions of his other musicians. Polar Bear is definitely a band – with all the sense of collective creativity that this implies. This is the group’s warmest, most coherent work to date, however indigestible it may be.
In the rather sweet liner notes and acknowledgements that accompany this third Polar Bear album, Seb Rochford apologises for his latest album being so long. In this age of downloading and compiling, perhaps Rochford fears that his audience, maybe broader than your average jazz crowd, might not have the necessary patience or concentration span to digest it. Well, that would be a shame. For those of us who have been following the development of Rochford’s refreshingly original group, we’ve been waiting quite a while for this one, it having originally been scheduled for release by V2, before Polar Bear became a sad casualty of that label’s restructuring and downsizing. The value for money we’ve been offered seems like suitable compensation. V2’s loss, it would appear, is our gain. Great too for the small Coventry based label Tin Angel with whom Rochford is now collaborating for this release.
For those who find Polar Bear hard to appreciate or understand, the most common criticism is that perennial favourite: ‘It’s just not jazz’. Given how unconcerned I am with the precise definitions of musical genres, I can hardly summon the energy to address this argument. Nevertheless, I must concede my most immediate response to ‘Polar Bear’ is to pick up on the wide array of sounds and influences, many drawn from well beyond the radar of most jazz musicians. Most obviously, there’s Leafcutter John’s electronics, performed live and now more closely integrated with the overall musical landscape of Rochford’s compositions. Yet, the powerful opening one-two of ‘Tay’ and ‘Goodbye’ hints at the influence of Jamaican musical forms – particularly ska and dub. ‘Tay’ is ushered in on a remarkably simple but righteously groovy bass and drums figure that could easily have underpinned a Skatelites track. Given how well Rochford subsumes these ideas into a complete whole (‘Polar Bear’ is the group’s most coherent album so far), this seems far more of a strength than a weakness.
If Polar Bear are ‘more pop than jazz’, it shows in the playful exuberance of Rochford’s compositions. This perhaps comes through best on the superb ‘Tomlovesalicelovestom’, written after the happy occasion of Tom Herbert’s marriage and with every bit as joyous a sense of celebration as such a piece might demand. A more cynical listener might sense in the song’s journey into abstraction a hint at the uncertainty and vulnerability of commitment – but so solid and driving is the returning thematic narrative that its mood seems overwhelmingly positive. This is audacious, mostly improvised music without pretensions or any elevated sense of superiority above its intended audience.
The absence of a harmonic foundation allows this group its breathing space. With no textural support from a piano or guitar, the fundamental connection between Rochford’s conversational explorations on the drums and Tom Herbert’s full and clear bass patterns sounds even more significant. Similarly, the dynamic relationship between saxophonists Mark Lockheart and Pete Wareham is exploited to brilliant effect – with Rochford’s themes relying heavily on the careful interweaving of their distinct sounds. It tends to be Wareham who directs the group towards their more aggressive and incendiary moments, with Lockheart’s musicality and thorough grasp of time anchoring them in solid ground.
Whilst all the acclaim and publicity thrown at Rochford can sometimes seem like hype and bluster, the quality of his musicianship more than justifies the attention. Whilst his feel is relaxed and accurate, it’s the sound and timbre of his drumming that take precedence above technical showmanship. This means that his playing can assume a central and creative role without obscuring the contributions of his other musicians. Polar Bear is definitely a band – with all the sense of collective creativity that this implies. This is the group’s warmest, most coherent work to date, however indigestible it may be.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
How Did We Get Here And Where Do We Go Now?
The Bug – London Zoo (Ninja Tunes, 2008)
It’s tempting to caricature Kevin Martin as something of a musical chancer, given the length of his career and his tendency to latch on to certain musical scenes. ‘London Zoo’ has been marketed, somewhat inaccurately, as another chapter in the story of dubstep. Actually, it seems like a natural progression from Martin’s first album as The Bug, which had more in common with the heavy and insistent rhythms of dancehall. Like its predecessor, ‘London Zoo’ makes fruitful use of an exciting cast of guest vocalists and toasters.
The vocal performances on this outstanding record have so much urgency and conviction that they simply compel the listener to pay attention. Longstanding Bug collaborator Warrior Queen returns to command attention through the sheer force of her vocal personality and Roots Manuva cohort Ricky Ranking provides the album’s concluding and most resonant imagery on the apocalyptic ‘Judgment’. It’s simply impossible to ignore the righteousness of Tippa Irie on the opening ‘Angry’, striking at everything from the American government response to Hurricane Katrina to suicide bombing at home.
Even more brutal and uncompromising is Spaceape on ‘F**kaz’ (hard to believe that this piercing directness comes from the same vocalist who made the more ambiguous ‘Memories of the Future’ with kode9). He finds faults on all sides of arguments, attacking both the selfish oppressors who would deny people opportunity for improvement and the head-in-the-clouds liberals who don’t understand the problems they are trying to solve. ‘Look at the state of your own home!’ he chides, with genuine bile and justified rancour. Eventually, he arrives at the crucial question that sums up this album’s sustained mindset: ‘How did we get here and where do we go now?’
Yet it’s Martin’s pitch-perfect production, bolstering the sense of anger, frustration and confusion in the vocal performances, that makes ‘London Zoo’ such a well-realised document. The music lacks melodic and harmonic sophistication – but the sheer relentless force of its rhythms make it compelling. The sounds that Martin conjures are appropriately doom-laden – with a plethora of clanks, gunshots, echo-laden percussive hits and colossal deep bass pulses.
‘London Zoo’ achieves what Bloc Party’s ‘A Weekend In The City’ only tentatively hinted at – a bleak, angry and downright terrifying vision of modern London in terminal decline (‘the people are turning so mad, the place is turning so bad…the streets are filled with blood red’). Is life in this bustling, diverse and brilliant city really this oppressive? Maybe it is for many people, in ways that I can only struggle to imagine.
Perhaps ‘London Zoo’ can be criticised in much the same way as I approached a stylistically different but thematically very similar album – Chris T[T’s ‘Capital’. It is perhaps guilty of being more than a little negative and charmless. Yet my concluding remarks about ‘Capital’ erred towards the generous, in that I accepted why the current climate makes it difficult to avoid an apocalyptic, downbeat tone and that maybe such fiery urgency is necessary in order to create something positive. Maybe it’s simply not the job of rappers, producers or songwriters to offer solutions – here Kevin Martin’s extraordinary cast seem to aim more at simply documenting their fears and experiences. By way of some levity, there’s a sense of personal angst as well as anger here – the performers occasionally questioning their own sanity as well as the world gone mad around them.
This is an outstanding record that deserves to be spoken of in the same breath not just as musically similar works such as Massive Attack’s ‘Blue Lines’ or Tricky’s ‘Maxinquaye’ but also with the classics of questing social consciousness – Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On?’, Stevie Wonder circa ‘Innervisions’ and, perhaps most potently, Sly Stone’s articulate paranoia on ‘There’s A Riot Going On’. Was this simply too confrontational and unsettling for the Mercury judges? Maybe it can be argued that Burial has already crafted a similarly uncomfortable portrait of urban claustrophobia without deploying the armoury of language and rhetoric. Nevertheless, ‘London Zoo’ is heavy, portentous and vehemently dystopian and it must not be ignored.
It’s tempting to caricature Kevin Martin as something of a musical chancer, given the length of his career and his tendency to latch on to certain musical scenes. ‘London Zoo’ has been marketed, somewhat inaccurately, as another chapter in the story of dubstep. Actually, it seems like a natural progression from Martin’s first album as The Bug, which had more in common with the heavy and insistent rhythms of dancehall. Like its predecessor, ‘London Zoo’ makes fruitful use of an exciting cast of guest vocalists and toasters.
The vocal performances on this outstanding record have so much urgency and conviction that they simply compel the listener to pay attention. Longstanding Bug collaborator Warrior Queen returns to command attention through the sheer force of her vocal personality and Roots Manuva cohort Ricky Ranking provides the album’s concluding and most resonant imagery on the apocalyptic ‘Judgment’. It’s simply impossible to ignore the righteousness of Tippa Irie on the opening ‘Angry’, striking at everything from the American government response to Hurricane Katrina to suicide bombing at home.
Even more brutal and uncompromising is Spaceape on ‘F**kaz’ (hard to believe that this piercing directness comes from the same vocalist who made the more ambiguous ‘Memories of the Future’ with kode9). He finds faults on all sides of arguments, attacking both the selfish oppressors who would deny people opportunity for improvement and the head-in-the-clouds liberals who don’t understand the problems they are trying to solve. ‘Look at the state of your own home!’ he chides, with genuine bile and justified rancour. Eventually, he arrives at the crucial question that sums up this album’s sustained mindset: ‘How did we get here and where do we go now?’
Yet it’s Martin’s pitch-perfect production, bolstering the sense of anger, frustration and confusion in the vocal performances, that makes ‘London Zoo’ such a well-realised document. The music lacks melodic and harmonic sophistication – but the sheer relentless force of its rhythms make it compelling. The sounds that Martin conjures are appropriately doom-laden – with a plethora of clanks, gunshots, echo-laden percussive hits and colossal deep bass pulses.
‘London Zoo’ achieves what Bloc Party’s ‘A Weekend In The City’ only tentatively hinted at – a bleak, angry and downright terrifying vision of modern London in terminal decline (‘the people are turning so mad, the place is turning so bad…the streets are filled with blood red’). Is life in this bustling, diverse and brilliant city really this oppressive? Maybe it is for many people, in ways that I can only struggle to imagine.
Perhaps ‘London Zoo’ can be criticised in much the same way as I approached a stylistically different but thematically very similar album – Chris T[T’s ‘Capital’. It is perhaps guilty of being more than a little negative and charmless. Yet my concluding remarks about ‘Capital’ erred towards the generous, in that I accepted why the current climate makes it difficult to avoid an apocalyptic, downbeat tone and that maybe such fiery urgency is necessary in order to create something positive. Maybe it’s simply not the job of rappers, producers or songwriters to offer solutions – here Kevin Martin’s extraordinary cast seem to aim more at simply documenting their fears and experiences. By way of some levity, there’s a sense of personal angst as well as anger here – the performers occasionally questioning their own sanity as well as the world gone mad around them.
This is an outstanding record that deserves to be spoken of in the same breath not just as musically similar works such as Massive Attack’s ‘Blue Lines’ or Tricky’s ‘Maxinquaye’ but also with the classics of questing social consciousness – Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On?’, Stevie Wonder circa ‘Innervisions’ and, perhaps most potently, Sly Stone’s articulate paranoia on ‘There’s A Riot Going On’. Was this simply too confrontational and unsettling for the Mercury judges? Maybe it can be argued that Burial has already crafted a similarly uncomfortable portrait of urban claustrophobia without deploying the armoury of language and rhetoric. Nevertheless, ‘London Zoo’ is heavy, portentous and vehemently dystopian and it must not be ignored.
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