You Don't Miss Your Water Until Your Well Runs Dry

Bob Dylan – The Bootleg Series Vol 8: Tell Tale Signs (Columbia, 2008)
Various Artists – Take Me to the River: A Southern Soul Story (Kent, 2008)

For those of us who have been waiting patiently for The Bootleg Series to catch up with the contemporary Dylan, ‘Tell Tale Signs’ ought to be an essential purchase. Sadly, Columbia’s ludicrous multi-format strategy has perversely made it unaffordable – with an unnecessarily lavish 3CD set on sale for prices varying between £80 and £110. Not even the most obsessive of Dylan devotees would consider spending quite that much money on one product, especially when the box is so large that it won’t even fit on your average shelf. Thanks but no thanks Columbia.

The standard £15 2CD edition is, if we exercise critical acumen rather than slavish icon worship, a bit of a mixed bag. Its highlights are superb, and demonstrate that Dylan’s now ravaged voice has a caustic power all of its own, communicating wisdom and experience more than the defiant rage of the young Dylan. Perhaps the best example of this is the solo piano and vocal version of ‘Dignity’, one of those half-finished Dylan recordings that suggest he shouldn’t have bothered experimenting with more full blooded arrangements. His vocal is attacking and aggressive, but also full of compassion. The band version that eventually appeared on ‘Greatest Hits Vol. 3’ is nowhere near as assertive or compelling. The two additional versions of ‘Mississippi’ included here also give a clear impression of how Dylan never sees songs as malleable objects. The bare version which opens the first CD is remarkable – a lightly shuffled blues that seems more hopeful than resigned - much more striking than the slightly MOR plod of the ‘Love and Theft’ version.

There are, however, a number of superfluous alternate takes that were clearly consigned to the cutting room floor for good reason. There’s a radically different version of ‘Someday Baby’, a reverb-drenched U2-esque trudge that sounds like a totally different song from the slight but appealing barroom boogie of the ‘Modern Times’ version. Dylan sounds bored – and one can hardly blame him given the uninspired musical context. Only the delicate brush drums seem to complement the lyric. The punchier version of ‘Ain’t Talkin’ included here somehow sounds darker but less mysterious. The alternate versions of ‘Series of Dreams’ and ‘Everything is Broken’ are only superficially different from the previously released versions and don’t add quite so much to our understanding of Dylan’s songwriting process.

The collection continues to give credence to the argument that Dylan can frequently be a poor editor of his own work. There’s plenty of evidence here to suggest that both ‘Oh Mercy’ and ‘Time Out of Mind’ could have been even better albums. Not only this, but the versions of ‘God Knows’ and ‘Born In Time’ included here from the ‘Oh Mercy’ sessions are significantly superior to the less imaginative takes that eventually made it on to ‘Under The Red Sky’. Similarly, it’s hard to believe that the epic, rambling and haunting narrative of ‘Red River Shore’ was left off ‘Time Out of Mind’ in favour of some of the more lightweight blues numbers that peppered that album. Laced with accordion, the song is a meandering, languid delight.

There’s actually a relative paucity of completely unheard material here, although the small number of selections are certainly intriguing. ‘Can’t Escape From You’ seems inspired by vocal group music – perhaps The Platters or the early Drifters material. It sounds, pleasingly, like it could easily feature on one of Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour programmes. ‘Dreamin’ Of You’ is perhaps a little too characteristic of Daniel Lanois’ murky swamp and perhaps therefore suffers from over-familiarity. It’s an effective enough lyric, but not as melodic or as stirring as the best songs included on ‘Time Out of Mind’ and it covers similar thematic ground to some of the best tracks on that album. There’s a surprisingly mellifluous duet with Ralph Stanley on ‘The Lonesome River’, and Stanley deserves great credit for coping with the unenviable task of harmonising with Dylan.

There are a handful of soundtrack selections and live recordings padding out the set. Given the sheer volume of Dylan live recordings in recent years (what a shame the regular offerings streamed on the official website stopped with no warning), ‘Tell Tale Signs’ doesn’t seem to delve deep enough into this area. There’s a sterling, dramatic, tempestuous reading of ‘High Water’ but the version of ‘Lonesome Day Blues’ is a little perfunctory, Dylan hastily barking out the lyrics and obscuring his enunciation, as he does all too often in concert these days. Given the quality of his fresh readings of songs like ‘Hattie Carroll’, ‘John Brown’ and ‘Shelter From The Storm’ in recent London shows, I wonder whether some recent live performances of older songs might have been more valuable in this context, particularly in emphasising the changeable nature of Dylan’s songs, however sacred their original versions might seem.

For all the riches on ‘Tell Tale Signs’, I still suspect that a complete Dylan live album covering 2000 onwards would be a more rewarding addition to the catalogue, albeit with the reservation that the selections would need to be judicious. Some of ‘Tell Tale Signs’ feels a little too much like the scraping of a very deep barrel.

Putting the excessive asking price for the Dylan box set into very clear perspective is ‘Take Me to the River: A Southern Soul Story’, another new soul compilation from Kent Records. Frankly, the market is saturated with soul compilations, from the Motown Chartbusters series through to Dave Godin’s peerless Deep Soul collections. With this package though, Kent have taken the art of compiling to a whole new level. Lavishly packaged with a hard book filled with photographs and informative liner notes, the compilation is unique in spanning several labels and veering from predictable essentials to more obscure collectors’ gems. Priced at a very reasonable £28, it exposes Columbia’s greed and idiocy all too starkly.

If this is your first introduction to the heady, fervent world of southern soul music, it’s an ideal primer. It includes, amongst others, Al Green’s gospel-informed track that gives the set its title, two solid gold classics from William Bell (‘You Don’t Miss Your Water’ and ‘I Forgot To Be Your Lover’), Percy Sledge’s ‘When A Man Loves A Woman’, James Carr’s awesome ‘Dark End of the Street’ and Otis Redding’s staggering ‘Try A Little Tenderness’, possibly the best directive ever addressed to men in song form. These selections, familiar to anyone already immersed in this glorious music, are just the tip of the iceberg here though.

I can’t add much to David Hepworth’s perceptive and authoritative review in The Word magazine, other than to reiterate his point about the radicalism and sheer provocation of this music. Nothing that has come since – be it punk, acid house, hip hop or grime, has been quite as revolutionary as this remarkable combination of the sacred and profane. Clearly emerging from a gospel tradition, but shot through with desperation, lust and immoral urges, southern soul is as intense and passionate as popular music gets, dominated by compelling narratives and assertive personalities.

These statements of love, desire and heartbreak veer from the highly principled to the baldly insensitive. Arthur Alexander’s ‘Go Home Girl’ finds its protagonist weighing up the value of his love for a friend and his desire for said friend’s girlfriend and opting to sustain the friendship. By way of contrast, there’s Denise LaSalle’s promise to break up your home. Believe me, it’s no idle threat. In between, there’s plenty of good old fashioned adultery and musings on the bittersweet pain of unrequited love. All the emotions and longings fundamental to great pop music are here in droves.

It’s also great to hear some less predictable selections from great singers. We all know Eddie Floyd for ‘Knock on Wood’ but his ‘Got to Make a Comeback’ (actually the flipside to that stellar hit) is a languid hymn to steely determination that demonstrates his versatility and deserves a wider hearing. Similarly, Wilson Pickett is familiar for ‘Mustang Sally’ and ‘In the Midnight Hour’, but ‘Ninety Nine and a Half (Won’t Do)’ is an equally stirring piece of dirty blues still based on that unflappable backbeat.

I normally reject arguments that dismiss all modern R&B in relation to its earlier counterparts, not least because some of that contemporary music is so rhythmically exciting. Yet, listening to this wonderful compilation, one has to wonder if any of today’s divas or young males full of tedious bravado have had the kind of life experience that informs the great stories being told here. If there’s a comparable determination in the modern variations of soul music, it often seems to focus on money and material wealth. And whilst the music is still so often preoccupied with sex, very rarely does it now seem sensual or intimate. Many modern singers could do with listening to some of these confessions - be it Barbara and the Browns’ exquisite ‘If I Can’t Run To You I’ll Crawl’ or Doris Duke’s wonderfully uninhibited ‘To The Other Woman (I’m The Other Woman)’.

In fact, one of the strongest features of this collection is the volume of authoritative, artful performances from women. There’s the low down groove of Laura Lee’s ‘Dirty Man’, and gleefully accusatory performances from June Edwards (‘You Ain’t Woman Enough to Take My Man’) and Candi Staton (‘Another Man’s Woman, Another Woman’s Man’). Add to this two of the essential masterpieces of the form with Aretha Franklin’s ‘Do Right Woman, Do Right Man’ (one of Dan Penn’s best compositions) and Etta James’ ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’.

Perhaps what makes soul music one of the most accessible and enduring of all contemporary musical forms is its ability to absorb the best elements from a variety of traditions. Present within every song here is the sheer force and conviction of gospel music, the melancholy and pain of the blues and the unashamed vulnerability of country music. It is some of the greatest music ever recorded, plus the continual unearthing of more rare treasures suggests that soul music’s deep well may turn out to be bottomless.

Tag Team

Fyfe Dangerfield/Tom Rogerson – The Vortex, London 7th October 2008

It’s quite rare to see a shared improvised piano gig, particularly one which ends with three pianists playing together, gleefully sending up the entire process. In that sense, this Vortex gig could be described as self-aware and unpretentious, even if some of the playing could easily have given the opposite impression.

Tom Rogerson is one of this country’s most complete musicians, and it’s criminal that his profile has not yet risen further. Until recently, he has divided his time working with songwriters Jeremy Warmsley and Emmy the Great, neither of whom have really provided an adequate space for his expressive, assured piano playing. I’ve already waxed lyrical here about his group Three Trapped Tigers, who marry the propulsive, angular groove of Battles with the intangible mystery of Supersilent or Food. They are a superb, viscerally exciting group – both technically assured and physically thrilling.

Rogerson’s improvised work occupies a different space entirely though. He rarely, if ever, repeats himself, tonight’s performances demonstrating his debt to classical training as much to a tradition of free improvisation. There’s nothing self-conscious or decidedly avant-garde about his two performances – instead, he aims simply and squarely for playing meaningful music with real feeling. His stance is doubled up and awkward, but the intensity is sincere and palpable. He frequently looks in danger of knocking himself out against the piano as he rocks back and forth, lost in his own substantive reverie.

This sort of insular, self-absorbed world is easily in danger of leaving audiences baffled or bored, but Rogerson finds his own way of communicating. Midway through his second improvisation, there’s a passage of such languid beauty and harmonic simplicity that it could have come from a pop ballad, although the delicacy and nuance with which it is performed elevates it to something haunting and profound. Similarly, when he loses himself in moments of Jarrett-esque minimalism, the violence with which he plays seems honest and convincing rather than a forced piece of showmanship.

It’s hard to feel so confident about Fyfe Dangerfield, more known for his leadership role in Guillemots than he is for solo piano work. His first set seems a little shallow – mostly consisting of long, murky and uninvolving passages holding down the sustain pedal with a dogged and unhelpful resolve. He’s constantly searching for interesting and unconventional sounds from the instrument, but his banging and punching of the keys feels like a gimmick used in place of identifiable musical phrasing. It’s definitely more artifice than art.

If Dangerfield’s first set is a little boring, the second is intolerable. It’s admittedly unclear whether or not it’s supposed to be taken seriously, but it comes across as a piss take of barrelhouse boogie. Clearly, there’s no obligation to perform this music anymore, but irreverence towards it needs to be based on very firm foundations. It also needs to have a clear purpose. Dangerfield’s rhythmic language is tentative and repetitive and his occasional barked interjections (a little like Tom Waits perhaps) seem ill-judged, even if they are intentionally comic. Physically, he seems tetchy, moving his seat snappily when playing at the far extremes of the keyboard. It seems as if he makes too many conscious decisions whilst improvising (demarcating the geography of the keyboard too starkly, moving too rapidly between aggression and reflection, using gimmicky sounds by muting the strings), and all these choices end up doing is restricting his expression.

This gig certainly suggests that Rogerson is a creative and articulate talent making music at the most challenging level that also speaks directly and clearly to its audience. Whilst his work is defiantly unpredictable, the consistent thread is a clear and mostly successful desire to capture feeling and mood through improvisation and composition. Three Trapped Tigers are operating in a musical landscape that can often seem clinical and cold – and they have injected that terrain with a refreshing burst of physicality and sensation. Rogerson’s solo work sounds not just liberated, but also emotionally engaging. So why are more people not yet writing about him?

Portrait of An Artist

Wild Combination - A Portrait Of Arthur Russell (Matt Wolf, 2008)

Documentaries about musicians can be tedious affairs, sometimes neglecting to include any examples of the music itself. Often, they serve merely to deify rather than to critique their subject matter. Matt Wolf’s debut film, about the songwriter and composer Arthur Russell, nimbly avoids these pitfalls.

Pre-release speculation suggested that Wolf’s film might falter due to a paucity of footage of Russell performing. This obstacle has, in the event, proved to be exaggerated, as Wolf’s combination of home video footage and solo recordings adds a sense of mystery that might have been lacking from more direct concert material. It contributes to the overall sense of sadness – emphasising the idea that Russell’s contemporary audience was far smaller than it should have been. Here was a man mainly creating music mainly for himself, simply because it was his life’s work to do so.

It’s significant that Wolf came to Russell’s music in the same way as most people – through the recent reissues that have come courtesy of the Soul Jazz and Audika labels. He’s not a lifelong Russell anorak – he’s simply recognised Russell’s musical significance and worthiness as a documentary subject. He’s managed to secure contributions from most of the significant figures in Russell’s life – including moving testimonies from his parents and his long term partner Tom Lee, in addition to the bewildering array of musical collaborators, admirers and former band-mates.

The film conveys a strong sense of Russell as an ambitious and committed musician, but one whose combination of revisionism and perfectionism often made him into an awkward person. The song that gives the film its title eventually appeared on the posthumous ‘Calling Out Of Context’ album – Russell had apparently worked on it for over five years. The need to be in control of every aspect of his work made him impossible to work with – he could be unreliable and frequently refused to co-operate with others. In some senses, it’s a shame that his theatre collaboration with Robert Wilson proved such a disaster, but it’s clear that Russell was never best suited to joint ventures.

This is just one sense in which the film refuses to portray Russell as anything other than deeply flawed. There’s a moving moment in which Tom Lee recounts discovering that Russell tested positive for HIV, whilst he had tested negative. ‘Of course this upset me’, he admits, ‘because I thought that we were totally monogamous but he must have been fooling around a bit. Sadly, it only takes one time…’

Wolf’s film is successful in presenting Russell as a confused, reflective person, desperate to escape the confines of his rural American upbringing, whose restless mind took him in countless different directions. Perhaps this explains both his apparent unfaithfulness and his commitment to explore all aspects of music, uninhibited by the narrow restrictions of genre. To Philip Glass, he was an eccentric member of an avant-garde community, whilst to Lola Love (who provided the demented vocal to Dinosaur L’s ‘Go Bang!’), he was ‘the funkiest white boy I ever saw’. Ernie Brooks of the Flying Hearts saw him as a songwriter to rival John Lennon. To himself, Russell must have been all of these things at once.

The film is mostly excellent in demonstrating Russell’s open-mindedness towards all forms of music. It goes some way in explaining how his different explorations – acoustic folk songs, disco tracks under a variety of monikers, instrumental compositions and performances with his electronically treated Cello - all fell under his broad category of sophisticated bubblegum. In all his forms, his strong sense of melody and harmony always cut through. Perhaps the film skirts over his composed work a little too quickly – we only hear a small segment of ‘Instrumentals’, and the significance of ‘World of Echo’ is probably understated too.

Despite these minor issues, the film still gives a powerful sense of Russell as a man for whom making music is the only priority. Lee admits that he effectively became the breadwinner in their partnership, with Russell mostly avoiding work in order to write and record music all day, every day, regardless of whether he would ever complete it. Seeing Lee trawling through the countless hours of tapes Russell left behind is undoubtedly touching, and provides evidence that the rediscovery of Russell’s music is a journey that has only just begun.

Like all good documentaries, Wolf’s film recognises that all this music was, in Keith Jarrett’s words, the end result of ‘a process that has nothing to do with music’. The film is excellent in recognising Russell’s physical awkwardness and the restrictions of his isolated youth, recounted with warm and sincere regret by his parents. The pull of the city represented dreams of freedom and liberation, an uninhibited desire to experiment expressed in Russell’s body of work as a whole. There’s also a powerful irony in the testimony that as he descended into AIDS-related illness and dementia, Russell’s musical gift continued to grow stronger.

Brilliantly edited, and combined with some poetic camerawork of Wolf’s own imagining, ‘Wild Combination’ explores how we can be most free and creative. Russell seemed to work best when he was purely self-directing – with no deadlines or commercial expectations. Sometimes he clearly ached to be successful – but was ultimately more interested in pure artistic expression for its own sake, simply following his mind wherever it took him. Yet there’s also something powerful in the film’s conclusion, which hints at Tom Lee’s burgeoning relationship with Russell’s parents, and his comfort in regularly visiting the rural land where Arthur grew up. Amusingly, the ‘Master Mix’ cap Arthur sports on the cover for ‘Calling Out of Context’ has nothing to do with DJing, but is rather advertising a mix of animal feed! Lee, an entirely devoted and genuine man, clearly feels most free and at peace returning to his lost lover’s roots.

At once celebratory and poignant, but careful and compassionate in recognising human and artistic failings, ‘Wild Combination’ is exactly what it purports to be – a portrait of its subject. Going well beyond the music, the film demonstrates how difficult, awkward people can so often seem so compelling and attractive. Counterfactual speculation as to what Russell might have achieved had he not died at 40 seems to miss the point, as his father observes sweetly – ‘well, we’d at least have had another 800 reels of tape…’

A Private Broadcast

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!