John Foxx: Metamatic

Thirty years ago I’d just really started to get into punk and new wave and electronic music. I really liked the music of Gary Numan, who combined all of the above, and I’d read interviews with him in which he mentioned Ultravox as an influence. But I couldn’t find their records anywhere.

Meanwhile, a friend at high school had discovered the UK music papers, which had a lot of news about all of this new music we were curious about. The first one I picked up was an issue of Record Mirror — not exactly the most respected of the bunch, I later learned, but it had articles on Kate Bush and the Clash, so it looked worth a shot.

And this was there:

It was a combined review of Japan’s Quiet Life and Foxx’s Metamatic, the first I knew of his solo career, and even though the review seems hopelessly vague about the sound of the record, I knew I had to have it.  That was 30 years ago. Which is why this post now. I’ve blathered a lot about Foxx here already, so I won’t go on about Metamatic, and what a brilliant and groundbreaking album it was, and how great it still sounds, and how the whole second disc of bonus material with the last reissue makes it worth buying again.

Funny thing… I eventually got into Japan, too, and bought Quiet Life. I love it, but the Roxy Music/disco/Moroder sound of it makes it seem more dated in a way than the relatively primitive synth sounds of Metamatic. They became timeless with Gentlemen Take Polaroids, I think.

So, time to get back to business as usual around here. I was looking for a job, and then I found a job, and heaven knows I didn’t have as much spare time as I was used to, which is why the paucity of posts lately. But I think things are getting back in balance. And if not, well, when the contract is up I may be really prolific here.

Hudson Mohawke: Butter

I used to buy a lot of CDs. Now I get a lot of music from eMusic and other online sources. But they don’t have everything, and they don’t cater to the collector side of me, or to the side of me that remembers to play something more often if there’s a physical copy lying around. So how many CDs have I bought this year? (I’m not counting the ones mounted on magazine covers.)

Raphael Saadiq: The Way I See It
John Foxx: My Lost City
Cadence Weapon: Afterparty Babies
D’Agostino/Foxx/Jansen: A Secret Life
Ultravox: Quartet
Yeah Yeah Yeahs: It’s Blitz!
John Foxx and Robin Guthrie: Mirrorball
Lupe Fiasco: Lupe Fiasco’s Food and Liquor
J Dilla: Donuts
Nadja: When I See the Sun Always Shines on TV
Various artists: Dancehall: The Rise of Jamaican Dancehall Culture
Various artists: Play Drill: Dugga Dugga Dugga
Editors: In This Light and On This Evening
Franz Ferdinand: Tonight
John Foxx and Louis Gordon: Shifting City
John Foxx and Louis Gordon: The Pleasures of Electricity
John Foxx: In the Glow
Leyland Kirby: Sadly, the Future Is No Longer What It Was
Hudson Mohawke: Butter

That’s nineteen so far. But a few of them are expanded reissues of albums I already owned.  How about last year? Leaving out magazine covermount CDs and audiobooks, in 2008 I bought 24 CDs, again with a few being expanded reissues. In 2007? 58. In 2006, 35. In 2005, 30.

Okay, so not as much of a decline as I thought; 2007 was an atypical year. I think being unemployed is enough to explain the difference. Part of the reason 2007 was atypical was dubstep: I got into it in a big way then.

I don’t have an ipod, though occasionally I use my cellphone as an mp3 player (it has a capacity of one gB, or about a dozen albums). I tend to listen to albums as albums, not random selections of tracks, and I still like CDs because they can be played in more places, although our next car may be able to handle mp3s. Still, the main selling point of mp3s is price and storage space. If I know I’m going to listen to them a lot, I’ll burn them to audio CD.

There will be more posted about some of these albums before too long…

Fucked Up: The Chemistry of Common Life

Fucked Up: The Chemistry of Common Life, Year of the Rat, Hidden World. They’re Canadian, they won a big award, and they’re an atypical hardcore band, so I was curious. I like the first one, haven’t listened to the others much yet. They’re definitely neither the kind of hardcore I listened to many years ago nor the annoying stuff the genre evolved into over the years. They’re doing something different.

Various artists: 5: Five Years of Hyperdub disc 1. I have pretty much everything on disc 2, which is a sampling of past releases on Hyperdub; disc 1 is all new material, showing the future of one of the most consistently interesting dubstep and post-dubstep labels. And the future looks bright, not constrained by the cliches that some dubstep has fallen prey to.

Close Lobsters: Forever Until Victory. Singles collection from the jangly late ’80s band who recorded the great Foxheads Stalk This Land, a missing link between the Soft Boys, the House of Love, and other great pre-shoegazer guitar bands.

Raveonettes: In and Out of Control. Latest from the Jesus and Mary Chain-influenced retro fuzzpop band, more melodic, less noisy this time around.

Kevin Drumm: Imperial Horizon, Imperial Distortion. Austerely minimalist ambient/drone.

Bad Lieutenant: Never Cry Another Tear. The full album by New Order minus Peter Hook, it’s another okay outing with some pretty good songs but nothing that’ll change your life.

2562: Unbalance. Second album of techno-fied dubstep. I think this one has a little more character than the first.

Annie: Don't Stop

Annie: Don’t Stop. More retro dance pop. Catchy and fun, with the occasional touch of melancholy.

Nurse With Wound: Salt Marie Celeste. Experimental ambient/drone/noise.

Robin Guthrie: Songs to Help My Children Sleep EP. More of the usual instrumental guitar bliss, quieter and more ambient than some of his other material.

Anuj Rastogi: Dark Matter EP. A Canadian mix of dubstep and Indian music, going deeper than some UK dubstep producers who just drop in random Indian samples.

Andrew Liles: The Dead Submariner. More dark ambience. Where its predecessor, The Dying Submariner, used processed piano sounds, this one uses guitar.

Plus the usual dubstep and electronic singles, this time around from Broken Note, Various Production, A Made Up Sound, Darkstar, Ital Tek, Sp:Mc, and Sully.

Yes, I’ve posted about John Foxx several times already. But if he keeps putting out albums…

Unlike his four previous releases this year, his latest albums are expanded reissues of previously available material, remastered and in some cases remixed, and shuffling some material previously available on other releases.

In the Glow has the most previously unreleased material, in the form of live recordings from two 1983 concerts. There are no songs that haven’t been released in some form before, but many of these particular versions are new to CD. Nine songs appeared as the first disc in the 2002 double CD The Golden Section Tour/The Omnidelic Exotour, which is now out of print. There are 26 songs on this new release, though many appear twice. There are some differences in the performances, though, which makes the duplication worthwhile. For fans of Foxx’s most commercially successful era, this may be the album to get, as it’s a full band playing songs from The Garden and The Golden Section as well as Ultravox’s Systems of Romance. Sounds like the drummer is playing electronic drums on all the songs, and Foxx seems to be losing control of his voice a little towards the end of the first concert, but for anyone who wanted to know what a live Foxx concert sounded like back then, this is well worth getting. The sound quality, incidentally, is very good. Much better than the bootlegs that have been floating around for years.

After these concerts, Foxx released one more album, In Mysterious Ways, and then disappeared from the public eye for over a decade. He returned in 1997 with Cathedral Oceans, an ambient album, and Shifting City, a collaboration with the relatively unknown Louis Gordon. Shifting City is a bit odd — it’s a guitar-free album, totally electronic, harking back to his Metamatic album, but some of the songs draw on the Beatles and psychedelic influences that were noticeable in his music circa The Golden Section. Songs like “Crash,” “Shadow Man,” and “Concrete, Bulletproof, Invisible” are somewhere between techno and industrial, but “Through My Sleeping,” though electronic, is unmistakably influenced by the Beatles’s psychedelic period. There are a couple of forgettable, underdeveloped slow tunes (“Forgotten Years” and “Everyone”), but overall, despite the slightly inconsistent tone of the album, it was a very welcome return. The reissue has been somewhat remixed and remastered, and the first disc has three bonus tracks, a demo version of “Shadow Man” and Subterranean Omnidelic Exotour versions of two Ultravox songs. The second disc of the Shifting City reissue is the second disc of the 2002 Golden Section Tour/Omnidelic Exotour mentioned above. That in itself was an expansion of two very limited edition releases called Subterranean Omnidelic Exotour, which I don’t have. They’re live-in-studio versions of songs played on tour by Foxx and Gordon, released in lieu of an actual live album. Some older songs sound a little thin and flat with only synths; some sound quite good, and some Shifting City songs have a more dynamic feel.

The Pleasures of Electricity was the second Foxx/Gordon album, originally released in 2001. It’s more stylistically consistent than Shifting City, hewing closer to Foxx’s 1980 Metamatic album and classic Kraftwerk. When I first heard it in 2001 I thought it was a bit samey and unoriginal, but over time it’s grown a lot in my estimation. This reissue is a bit odd, though. The first disc is the original album with four songs remixed. The second disc is the original album with those songs in their original form, plus two previously unreleased songs from the same recording sessions. There’s a lot of duplication here, but the album, the alternate mixes of those four songs, and the two bonus songs wouldn’t fit on one disc. This way, at least, fans who missed the original can have both versions of the album. And fans who have the original are already used to having a lot of duplication in our collections.

And speaking of duplication: two other Foxx CDs were reissued recently. Impossible and A New Kind of Man, released in 2008, were originally limited to a thousand copies each, but have been re-pressed due to popular demand. Impossible was largely rerecorded versions of songs from Foxx’s back catalogue, but it also included two new tracks. A New Kind of Man was a live recording from a 2007 tour in which Foxx played his 1980 Metamatic album and some related songs. The only change was that one song on Impossible was remixed; the remix was made available as a free mp3 download, so people who bought the limited edition wouldn’t have to buy the CD again. Very thoughtful and much appreciated, that was.

I’m going to guess that that’s it for John Foxx for 2009, but there’s always the chance something else may pop up. He has several albums in the works and has been talking with other people about starting new projects.The future may yet see collaborations with Leftfield’s Paul Daley, Benge, Vincent Gallo, Harold Budd (again), Robin Guthrie (again)….

I have tried. Really. I didn’t like the first bit of music I heard by Joanna Newsom, whatever it was, but Ys got so much praise from music critics, and it was available on eMusic at the time, so I thought, maybe I’m missing something, maybe this is the one where it clicks and I get it.

After all, she gets compared to Kate Bush and Bjork, two adventurous women musicians with distinctive singing styles, and I like both of them. The news that she added full orchestral arrangements to her usual harp accompaniment also made this sound more interesting, more substantial somehow.

But I listen to this and all I can think of is some precocious five-year-old girl singing to herself, just rambling, sometimes following a hint of melody, sometimes just jumping up and down the scale, sometimes with a hint of rhythm, other times randomly speeding up or slowing down or singing more softly or getting abruptly louder. And sometimes she sings like a senile old lady with a cracked voice. And it’s hard to find any rhyme or reason to any of it.

There are moments when it’s possible to imagine what a less affected Joanna Newsom might sound like, when you can almost imagine her putting aside her bag of tricks and just singing. They don’t tend to last long, but they make me wish they did. Chances are she’d lose her current fans if she did, though; there’s a reason she’s sometimes categorized as freak folk, and the reason is that some people enjoy unnatural and contrived freakishness. (I heard a song by Devendra Banhart once. Life’s too short, but if life meant having to listen to Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom regularly, it’d be worth making it shorter still.)

The arrangements aren’t bad, anyway, in a children’s fairy tale movie soundtrack kind of way.

So, no, I still don’t get it. Every so often I give it another shot, but I don’t think that’s going to change.

Howard Shore: Crash

Howard Shore’s soundtrack for Crash, the David Cronenberg movie based on the J.G. Ballard novel, is of my favourite movie soundtracks ever, and one of very few that wouldn’t sound out of place played between albums by, say, Robert Fripp and Robin Guthrie.

The main instrument is electric guitar, but it’s not rock music at all. In many of the tracks, reverbed guitar is the only noticeable instrument. The fourth track begins with a woodwind, creating a more contemplative tone; the fifth features some strings and prepared piano as the music becomes more discordant. The ninth features ominous noise and percussion, sounding like isolationist ambient music, and the tenth primarily features strings, with the album expanding its musical palette beyond guitars as it progresses, but never leaving them behind. And, thanks in no small part to the opening titles theme, the guitars are what come to mind when I think of this soundtrack. It’s textured and experimental enough to suggest avant garde music or postrock, but it still has melodic motifs. It’s not aural wallpaper. And not only does it work in the context of the film and on CD, it worked wonderfully as a live performance, too.

In 1998, the National Arts Centre here in Ottawa held its second “Generations XYZ New Music Festival.” The first event was Crash: The Music of Howard Shore. Shore conducted a group of musicians in a newly arranged version of the music composed for the film. Following that, there was a discussion on scoring for movies, featuring both Shore and David Cronenberg, which lasted maybe 40 minutes. And then a showing of Crash.

The musicians included six electric guitar players, three harpists, and flute, oboe, clarinet, percussion, and keyboard. Quoting from Robert Markow’s notes in the program:

The concert suite… brings together approximately fifteen musical sequences from the film arranged in chronological order lasting about three-quarters of an hour. The ensemble consists of essentially three timbral groups: guitars and harps, percussion, and woodwinds. ‘The piece is about harps,’ says Shore, and the three harps do indeed constitute the focus of the score. The guitar writing is derived from the harp music, and in a sense the three harps function as a single unit, with the harps acting at times like bass guitars. (The two episodes in the film employing a fifty-piece string orchestra have been arranged for guitars for tonight’s performance.) The percussion consists of metal sculpture, tuned gongs, prepared piano, and miscellaneous everyday metal objects. Woodwinds… are used as solo voices.

The harps may be the focus, but in the music as played the guitars dominated. They were loud, but clear and precise. Quite enjoyable.

The Shore/Cronenberg discussion had some good moments, but the moderator asked a few too many silly questions, and eventually the discussion was derailed by an audience member who wanted to get into a discussion about Cronenberg’s philosophy.

The concert was recorded for CBC Radio’s Two New Hours program, but it never aired. It’s a shame; I was hoping to tape it. I would have loved to supplement the soundtrack CD with this alternate version.

Synth Britannia

A bunch of people scattered across the UK, reading J.G. Ballard and watching science fiction movies, inspired by the DIY ethos of punk and newly affordable synthesizers, all doing their own thing in their own way at the same time, not necessarily aware of the others — in 1978, no one knew who they were, but by 1981 they’d changed pop music in the UK.

Last night, BBC Four aired a new 90 minute documentary and an hourlong collection of filmed performances from BBC archives. I haven’t watched all of the latter yet, but I watched the documentary and enjoyed every minute of it. Most of the people I’d want to see in this kind of program were there. There was some background on Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder, two of the big influences. There was archival footage and new interview material of Daniel Miller (The Normal, Silicon Teens, Mute Records), Cabaret Voltaire, the Future/the Human League/Heaven 17, Depeche Mode, Yazoo, John Foxx, Midge Ure, Gary Numan, OMD, and more.

The first part of the show is called The Alienated Synthesists and deals with the more experimental side of the music and the buildup to the moment of the first commercial breakthrough, Gary Numan’s “Are Friends Electric.” (I still remember how that song hit me when I first heard it; it was exactly what I’d been waiting for.) Part two, Construction Time Again, deals more with what came next, when the emphasis in synthpop was on pop as much as synth. There’s a lot of Depeche Mode, Human League, Soft Cell, and Yazoo here. The story progresses past the early hits to the mid-’80s, when so many synthpop bands broke up or changed their sound. The show suggests that New Order, with songs like “Blue Monday,” began a transition in British electronic music from synthpop to electronic dance music, and ends the show with the Pet Shop Boys as the band who completed that transition.

One bit that I found a little funny: as talking heads discuss the beginning of the end of synthpop, with trite and conventional pop songs that happen to be made with synths oversaturating the music scene, the screen shows bits of videos by Howard Jones and the Thompson Twins. Seems kind of appropriate to me; I’ve got at least one or two albums by pretty much everyone else in the documentary, but I never bought anything by those two artists, because they just seemed too much like ordinary pop bands.

Synth Britannia at the BBC is a collection of performances from various BBC TV programs, starting with Roxy Music’s “Do the Strand” as a precursor to the scene, and including Numan, Depeche Mode, Ultravox, Sparks, and many others. In some cases the artists are miming to recorded tracks, in others they’re actually playing live. It’s a bit of a mixed bag in that respect, and it includes one or two acts not mentioned in the documentary (e.g., Tears for Fears). The only commentary is in the form of a few text pop-ups on the screen.

I was never the type to listen to only one kind of music, to belong wholly to one scene; while I was listening to synthpop I was also listening to punk and other stuff. Still, watching this documentary brought a lot of nostalgia for an age when electronic music was something unusual and exciting. It’s not flawless; I would have liked to see Ultravox get more attention, not least because they were cited as a major influence on Gary Numan, who gets a lot of attention in the program as the first person to top the charts with synthpop. For that matter, David Bowie’s nowhere to be seen, though he was an influence on many postpunk and synthpop artists, and his Berlin trilogy of late ’70s albums would have fit in nicely. But my quibbles won’t keep me from enjoying this again.

Venetian Snares: Rossz Csillag Allat Szuletett

When it looked, briefly, like drum ‘n’ bass was going to be the next big thing in dance and electronic music to hit the mainstream, I didn’t get into it. (Instead, it just became the soundtrack for many years of car commercials.) The hyperactive skittery drums seemed to get slathered onto a variety of musical styles, making it seem like more like a fad than a style. If you have a soul/R&B tune on top of that percussion, and something contructed out of jazz loops on top of that percussion, and ominous dark ambient synth sounds on top of that percussion, are those all part of the same genre just because they’re constructed on top of looped breakbeats? Well, I still don’t know. I still haven’t listened to a lot of drum’n'bass or jungle, though I make occasional efforts.

But somehow this album caught my attention, and I downloaded it when it popped up on eMusic. It’s not one of my neglected or forgotten downloads, though; I’ve played it fairly often. It just takes a certain mood to appreciate it. On this album, Venetian Snares works with the aggressive drill’n'bass style of dnb percussion — or maybe breakcore; depends whose review you’re reading, and I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on this part of the musical continuum; but the music is primarily sampled from classical albums (aside from one track, built on samples from Billie Holiday’s take on legendary suicide song “Gloomy Sunday”). Some tracks are devoid of percussion, like the sinister “Felbomlasztott Mentökocsi.” On others, the orchestral samples are given time to create a mood and sense of direction before the percussion comes in. “Hajnal” starts with some speedy string playing and, eventually piano, before changing gears into something much jazzier, with light jazz-style drumming instead of dnb percussion, before returning to the ominous strings, which are soon joined by an assault of dnb percussion and synth noises.

If there’s a near-mainstream comparison I can make, it would be with some of the tracks on Bjork’s Homogenic album, which also used strings and drum’n'bass percussion tracks. But this is almost entirely instrumental, and for that matter much more mental. Sometimes it’s hard not to laugh at the stuff Aaron Funk, the guy behind Venetian Snares, pulls off here; there’s a sheer sense of delight and exuberance about the possibilities of mashing things up that don’t conventionally go together, and an energy that makes this a blast to listen to (preferably at high volume). It’s beautiful and noisy and glorious. I haven’t heard any other Venetian Snares stuff, because I gather that this is something of an anomaly. Still, it’s hard not to be curious… in a world where Canadian music brings to mind people like Nickelback, Celine Dion, and the Barenaked Ladies, this is a welcome alternative.

Hank Thompson: Hank World

Another insufficiently-listened-to eMusic download! Back in 1999, insurgent country/alt.country label Bloodshot Records released this collection of material recorded by Hank Thompson back in the 1950s, as part of a Bloodshot Revival series of relatively forgotten old time country stars. It’s not his best known material, which was released on Capitol; instead, it’s a few alternate versions and a number of otherwise unavailable songs.

Laura and I have a few CDs of good ol’ country music that we really like, especially for long roadtrips — Webb Pierce, Lefty Frizzell, George Jones, Marty Robbins, and a few others. The more upbeat stuff is fun to sing along with and keep you awake when you’ve been on the road for hours. Plus, it reminds me of my childhood, when I loved my parents’ Marty Robbins and Eddy Arnolds albums, before I decided for a few years that country wasn’t cool. Seeing local Ottawa country revivalists like Lucky Ron and Lonesome Paul helped resurrect my love for the good  ol’ stuff.

So Hank is an obvious choice for our collection. We don’t have the stuff he’s best known for, but then we discovered, when my  mother heard it, that the first Webb Pierce we bought and played to death was partly made up of rerecorded versions, not originals, too. And we don’t have memories of the originals, so for now this’ll do. This is classic country: Hank’s voice, guitar, fiddle, pedal steel, standup bass, and drums, playing a range of ’50s country, some of it reminiscent of Webb and Lefty’s honkytonk stuff, sometimes reminding me of other Hanks, Snow and Williams. If there’s nothing that hooks me as instantly as Webb’s “There Stands the Glass,” well, Webb probably never did a Western Swing take on Benny Goodman’s “Don’t Be That Way,” either. Yep, there are some curveballs here, all right. But fun.

This stuff is really the product of another age. Country radio doesn’t play this kind of music now, instead focusing on stuff that might as well be middle of the road pop or slick ’70s rock. And frankly I’m probably still more likely to put on something more familiar than this when I’m in the mood for this kind of music, but I should definitely be listening to it more than once every couple of years. And I should check out some of Hank’s more famous recordings, too.

Funny how the dismal days drag and the months fly by.

Heralds of Change: Secrets EP

Hudson Mohawke: 7×7 Beat Series Number 6 EP, Heralds of Change (Hudson Mohawke and Mike Slott): Sittin’ on the Side/Rock With You EP, Secrets EP. Saw something online about the forthcoming Hudson Mohawke album and listened to the minisampler (go here) and decided I want it and I need to get some backstory. Basically hiphop/electronic stuff, though the album will have more of a soul/R&B feel.

Alien Sex Fiend: Acid Bath. Liked a couple of ASF songs back in the day, and a discussion of the band over at Gallifrey Base, the Doctor Who forum with a surprisingly busy and interesting music subforum, inspired me to get this. Now to travel back through time to tell my younger self to throw this into the mix with all that Sisters of Mercy, Cult, Siouxsie, Bauhaus, etc I was listening to.

Julian Plenti: Julian Plenti is… Skyscraper; Maximo Park: Quicken the Heart. The former is Interpol’s front man’s first solo album. I really liked the first Interpol and Maximo Park albums, along with Bloc Party, Kaiser Chiefs, Franz Ferdinand, etc, and liked a lot of stuff from their various second (and in some cases third) albums, but I haven’t been instantly grabbed by anything during the one or two cursory listens so far. Must make an effort.

TV On the Radio: Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes

Telepathe: Dance Mother. Sort of artsy ’80s synthpop/dance revivalism with female vocals. My kind of thing, I guess.

TV on the Radio: Young Liars EP, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes. They’re always being compared to stuff I like, and band members are popping up here and there (like producing the aforementioned Telepathe album) so I should listen to this soon.

Bad Lieutenant: Sink or Swim/Dynamo: see previous post.

And, as usual, various dubstep singles, this time from Faib, Cyrus, and Kryptic Minds.

Bad Lieutenant: Sink or Swim/Dynamo

We’re back in another period in which a New Order reunion seems extremely unlikely, so it’s up to the side projects to keep us going. Bad Lieutenant is Bernard Sumner’s latest. and though the lineup is different, it doesn’t sound all that far removed from where his previous side band, Electronic, ended up: melodic Britpop guitar rock.

It may seem a bit anticlimactically normal for someone who was part of Joy Division and New Order to make such conventional rock music, but it’s well crafted, it’s still Barney singing, and it’s not really a departure from some of the songs on the last couple of New Order and Electronic albums.

“Sink or Swim” particularly echoes the guitar side of New Order, a midtempo tune with electric and acoustic guitars (Peter Hook’s bass is sorely missed; the bass is anonymous by comparison). The chorus has a decent hook, and after the bridge, some backing vocals make the song a bit bigger, catchier, and more generally engaging. Three listens in and I’m liking this a lot, and hoping the album (due in a couple weeks) is as good.

“Dynamo”… well, if this were a physical 7″ single, it’d be the b-side, not the a-side. There’s a pulsing keyboard line in the background, but it’s less reminiscent of Sumner’s earlier bands than of the Who. It’s not as catchy as “Sink or Swim,” and the occasional little electronic sound effects sound out of place on a song that, with just a little less inspiration, could be a throwaway Oasis tune. Very classic rock ending: harmonica, then more of a Who sound, then the guitars crash back in and the drums pound away and Barney doo-doo-doos and repeats “whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do” a few times, then back to “Won’t Get Fooled Again” for the last few seconds. It’s a lot less impressive than “Sink or Swim.”

So: one good song, one meh song. When the album shows up on eMusic (I assume it will, because the single did) I’ll download it and hope for more of the former.

Wir: Vien (1997)

I don’t think I’ve actually listened to this before now, and I’ve had it for about a year. Oops.

The band Wire has gone through a few phases of activity and inactivity. There was the punk era Wire, who released three studio albums and a sort of live album before disappearing around 1980, then the version that reappeared for the mid-’80s to mid-’90s, then the one that reappeared earlier in this decade. For part of the second era, they shortened their name to Wir, to reflect the (temporary) departure of drummer Robert Gotobed. This two-song, 25-minute EP was the last thing they released before hibernating.

“The First Letter” begins with five minutes of ambient noise drone before an aggressive rock song starts grinding in, almost industrial, with Colin Newman’s growled distorted vocals, a busy beat, a rhythmic single note medlody, and other guitar (and possibly synth) lines weaving around. And it goes on. Wire once released an album called The Drill, several songs based on more or less the same base, something Wire calls dugga, a repetitive rhythm. This is somewhat similar, as a core song, with no verse/chorus/bridge variations, plays through but different sounds are added and subtracted and different vocals appear and disappear, the song noisily winding down over the last of its sixteen minutes.

“Sexy and Rich (Janet)” starts with some muttered German and synth whooshes, the former disappearing quickly, the latter building up and layering on more sounds gradually (this is reminding me a little of some of Neu!’s quieter tracks right now). Two minutes in, an electric guitar has appeared and the drums are starting to show up in the mix. Whereas the first track switches abruptly from experimental to rockish, this is a much more gradual transition. By three minutes in, Graham Lewis has begun singing. This is a bit more musical and pleasant than the first track, but it’s still a long way from pop music. Well, pop music from a robot’s nightmare, maybe.

This is quite good, actually. The last couple of albums from Wire’s second phase, Wire’s Manscape and Wir’s The First Letter, never did a lot for me. This has me thinking I should give them another chance. And keep this in rotation, too.

Mekons: So Good It Hurts

There’s cult bands, and then there’s the Mekons. They first appeared during the late ’70s punk scene and are still around, through an endless series of lineup changes, musical styles, side projects, and legendary live shows. I’ve encountered people online who see the Mekons every chance they get, buy all the albums, argue the merits of various side projects, and evangelize the Mekon cause to all who will listen. But I’ve never really managed to get completely into them.

I own one Mekons CD, I ♥ Mekons, which I bought because I loved the song “Millionaire,” an upbeat new wavey pop tune with a dreamy vocal by Sally Timms. But the rest of the album never really connected with me; I just kept playing “Millionaire” on repeat. But I kept hearing how great the Mekons were, and how their album Fear and Whiskey was a big alt.country influence, and I remembered liking “Ghosts of American Astronauts” when I saw the video ages back, so I got a couple of Mekons albums from eMusic, one of them being So Good It Hurts.

The album starts with a slightly skewed take on Caribbean-influenced ’70s pop rock, with a bit of a reggae feel, male vocals, and a lovely violin line, with lyrics that undercut the pleasant music. Then comes the utterly essential country-influenced ballad, “Ghosts of American Astronauts,” a song whose lyrics, which read like a condensed J.G. Ballard story, are sung beautifully by Timms. This is the one likely to get played indefinitely on repeat.

The next track is a good, pounding rocker, “Road to Florida,” a definite change of pace. Next up is a reggae take on “Johnny Miner,” which reminds me for some reason of the Clash’s Sandinista. Timms is back on “Dora,” another country/folk-tinged ballad, and another reason I should be listening to this album much more regularly. (It’s no coincidence that I have two of her solo albums.) Next track, “Poxy Lips,” is a fun, fast number that sounds a bit like the Pogues gone Cajun.

The stylistic adventuring continues with the slower, folky (with synths) “(Sometimes I Feel Like) Fletcher Christian,” which incorporates a bit of a tropical feel in the guitar line. “Fantastic Voyage” is a rockier, driving tune, which sounds (am I really saying this?) a bit like the anthemic ’80s rockers like Big Country and U2. It’s back to the islands, again with a hint of Poguesiness, for “Robin Hood.” Then Timms is back for a cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Heart of Stone,” played straight. “Maverick” is a more upbeat tune with big backing vocals alternating with the male vocal lead, for an almost country gospel feel.

It seems a bit odd to end with songs called, respectively, “Vengeance” and “Revenge,” but that’s what happens. The former is a fiddle-driven folk song, while the latter again reminds me a bit of the Clash’s style-mashing on Sandinista, though Timms is singing again, on a rockin’ tune about, naturally, revenge.

So… overall, the album isn’t necessarily helped by the stylistic mishmash, any more than the aforementioned Sandinista was. There are many good songs but they don’t really cohere into something greater. On a few songs, I think the production sounds a bit dated, too.

But the highlights on this album are so damn good. I don’t know if I need to play this album a lot more or just start going through Mekons stuff to build a compilation of the best tunes, but I can’t go too long without listening to some of these songs again.

Billy Currie: Push

Continuing my posts about albums I downloaded from eMusic and never seem to listen to, here’s one in a series of instrumental solo albums from Billy Currie, the keyboardist/violinist/viola player from Ultravox. Currie’s synths, especially his ARP Odyssey, and string playing were a distinctive part of the Ultravox sound, both in the John Foxx era and the Midge Ure era. So how does he fare on his own?

Currie’s first solo album, Transportation (1988), featured Yes guitarist Steve Howe on several tracks. It struck me at the time as kind of Vangelis-lite, floating somewhere between progressive rock and new age music, so I was disappointed with it. I’ve revisited it a couple of times over the years without changing my opinion. In fact, I’ve had similar impressions from a lot of Currie’s solo work, which is why I don’t listen to it much (I’ve downloaded a lot of it from eMusic because of the Ultravox connection and because hope springs eternal).

Push, according to Currie’s website, is about two things: using something called Granular Synthesis to allow him to play his viola and interact with samples being played back in real time, and to record some dance-oriented tracks with a bit of a rock edge. Sounds promising enough. Currie’s solo stuff has tended to feel too pretty and sedate by comparison to his Ultravox work.

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Tombs: Tombs

I think I came across this while looking for metalgaze, that ill-defined blend of metal and shoegazer that can be applied to bands as disparate as Jesu, Nadja, Angelic Process, and Alcest. This didn’t seem to be quite what I was looking for when I downloaded it a few months ago, which is why I haven’t listened to it much. It owes a lot to hardcore punk, including the vocal style, which really differentiates it from shoegazer. Apparently, it’s the album after this EP that has more of a ‘gazer sound, but that one’s not on eMusic. So… what am I listening to?

If there’s a shoegazer connection, it’s the pounding and noisy My Bloody Valentine of songs like “You Made Me Realise” and “Feed Me With Your Kiss,” not the more tranquil and hyperproduced Loveless version of the band (don’t get me wrong, I love that album). Tombs uses loud squalling guitars in its songs, which tend to be a bit slower than a lot of hardcore and metal.

A Decibel article on the band mentions Swans and Black Flag as influences along with MBV, and I can definitely hear that; I’d already thought that Tombs had the churning anger and hostility of Black Flag’s Damaged multiplied by the noisier side of MBV, but Swans (their earlier noise dirge stuff) fits too, and I’m reminded a bit of Helmet occasionally. The vocals on the penultimate track occasionally almost drift into silly metal cookie monster territory, but they aren’t actually that much more extreme than the vocals elsewhere on the EP, which tend to be shouted or howled. But this song is definitely more metal than punk once it kicks off. The last track, “Hallways of the Always,” is where I hear the most Helmet, and that’s not a bad thing at all.

I’ve never really been able to get into mainstream metal much, aside from Motorhead and some Metallica, but I’ve found some good music over the years that lurks around the edges. I think this deserves to be added to that list, even if it’s not quite what I initially expected.

Out Hud: Let Us Never Speak of It Again

(Damn, that’s an ugly album cover.)

Okay, let’s listen to some of that music that’s been listened to once or twice and all but forgotten about, as discussed in the last post.

Out Hud is one of those New York bands lumped into the dancepunk scene a few years ago, like the Rapture, !!!, and LCD Soundsystem and… well, I never really got into that scene, so I dunno. (Too often I could hear what I thought the bands in that scene were trying to do, but they didn’t have the hooks or the songs to pull it off.)

Apparently they started out a bit noisier and more confrontational but by this album they’re playing straightforward ’80s revivalism, pretty much. A mix of synthpop, electro, and disco is what I’m hearing so far, smooth danceable beats, synths, airy female vocals, a little noise burst of jagged electric guitar here and there… they’re pushing a lot of my buttons, I have to admit. I like Ladytron, I like Ladyhawke, I like Annie, I like Sally Shapiro, I just downloaded Telepathe, so I do like girls singing over synths and dance beats and a whole lot of ’80sness. I like some ’90s electronica, too, and that sound is present here as well.

As the album goes on, it moves away from that dance pop sound a bit. The fifth track, “The Song So Good They Named It Thrice,” is a long, stomping dance instrumental, and though the next track, “How Long,” ends up solidly in that girly dance pop arena, it has a long, atmospheric intro. “2005: A Face Odyssey” has a bit of a ’70s instrumental soul/disco feel blended in with the ’80s electronics.

So how did this slip between the cracks and not get the kind of attention Ladytron et al. get in this house? So far, I’m not sure. There’s not a hell of a lot of personality to some of the music but there’s nothing obviously wrong, either. It may have suffered from coming out when I was spending a lot of time listening to the more guitar-oriented revivalists, like Interpol, Bloc Party, the Kaiser Chiefs, Franz Ferdinand, etc. As I listen to more of this, I find myself liking it more, and it’s getting more interesting (“The Zillionth Watt” is an odd, very short track starting with a wave of harps and distorted vocals; the harps drop out, a beat kicks in, and shortly thereafter, we’re into the next big dance tune).

I’m making a mental note not to let this slide back into the vault of forgotten albums.

Telepathe: Dance Mother

At the eMusic bulletin board, one regular user announced that he was leaving, not because of the changes at eMusic, but because he has too much music he never listens to, and eMusic’s subscription model just makes that problem worse. I’m not going to quit eMusic any time soon, I hope, but I can see his point.

I’ve downloaded two albums and an EP from eMusic today (Telepathe and TV on the Radio). I’m halfway through listening to one album, haven’t listened to the others yet, and if I give into the strong temptation to go have some coffee and something to eat, I may get caught up in doing something else and not get around to the other stuff I downloaded. And then I may forget about it.

I downloaded the new Maximo Park and Julian Plenti albums a few days ago. I don’t think I’ve listened to either one all the way through yet. I know I listened to the new Lavay Smith all the way through once or twice. The new Sally Shapiro, two or three times. The new Robin Guthrie and the xx, half a dozen or a dozen times, probably. Robert Hampson — a few minutes of it. Andrew Liles — most of it, once, though I liked it a lot.

As great as it is to be able to access so much music so quickly and easily and relatively inexpensively, as great as it is to hear about an interesting new band or genre and be able to hear some of it right away, it’s breadth at the expense of depth. Downloads from eMusic don’t come with liner notes or lyric sheets. That old experience of opening a record or CD and putting it on the stereo, then settling back with the sleeve/jewel box/whatever to read through while listening to the music, doesn’t happen so often. Now it’s more about downloading something while doing something else on the PC, listening to it for a little while until there’s something else to do, and maybe getting back to it. I do sometimes listen to something while googling for reviews and articles about it, but my interaction with the music and the material I’m reading is more active, less immersive.

I like getting to know an album, getting to the point where as one song ends I’m hearing the beginning of the next before it actually starts playing, having songs pop up in my mind at times when I’m not listening to music. Not that long ago I came across a reference to a guitar solo in a particular David Bowie song. How did that solo go again? I basically played the whole song in my head, from memory — oh, yeah, that solo! But that song is on an album I bought when I only had a few dozen records, and it’s one I still love, so I’ve heard it a lot of times. I can’t do that with anything from the last several years. (The downside to that familiarity is that sometimes the music has made such well-worn grooves in my memory that the album plays through and never really grabs my attention; it’s over before I notice it. That’s why I sometimes like using shuffle, or listening to alternate versions of old favourites (live, Peel sessions, demos, etc) — I actually hear everything again.)

I guess that’s part of the point of this blog that no one reads: it’s about reminding me to listen closely to music, to think about it, to value it.

Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie: Phonogram: Rue Britannia

Sleeper. Echobelly. Elastica. Blur. Suede. Kula Shaker. Oasis. Ash. The Boo Radleys. The more of these names you recognize, the better this book — an omnibus collection of a comic book miniseries — will work for you. (If you don’t recognize many of them, there’s a few pages at the back of the book devoted to explaining who all these people are.)

Phonogram: Rue Britannia is the first collection of Phonogram comics by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie. It’s been described as Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity crossed with John Constantine, Hellblazer — in other words, tendentious and opinionated music fandom meets British supernatural horror in comic book form.

Rue Britannia is about the Britpop moment in the mid-’90s and is full of references to bands from that scene, the good, the bad, and the mediocre. The main character, an arrogant magician who’s something of a John Constantine knockoff, defines himself so much by his musical taste that he knows something is going badly wrong when he starts feeling mildly charitable towards some of the lesser lights of the Britpop scene. It’s an amusing conceit and helps make it clear that this isn’t just a lower budget version of Hellblazer.

The musical references are not only essential to the plot; for some readers, the musical commentary may prove the most entertaining aspect of the book. I think I may be one of them, because Gillen spends more time on making sure you know what the protagonist, phonomancer David Kohl, thinks about music than he does on making sure you get how the magic and the pantheon of gods and goddesses work.

The art is clean and clear, and the original covers of the individual issues are based on Britpop album covers.

Anyone who reads comics and remembers Britpop may find this worth a look. I have a feeling I’m going to find the next one, currently being produced in individual comic form, more up my alley, as Kohl’s not the main character and it’s about more recent UK pop, like the Pipettes and Long Blondes. I trust Gillen’s new phonomancers like the right bands. The one mistake Kohl makes is to class Echobelly among the mediocre rather than the good.

The Beatles: Rock Band

My wife Laura decided to buy this game the other day, and we’ve played a fair bit of it. Looking at it as an example of musical video games, it feels a lot easier to play on medium difficulty than the other Rock Band and Guitar Hero games we’ve played, and the main storyline doesn’t take a heck of a long time to get through. We suspect that this is because a lot of people who’ve never played one of these games before are going to pick this one up for the Beatles angle, and no one wants the newbies to give up frustrated. Visually it’s very striking, and there’s a good selection of songs.

As for the Beatlesness of it… we don’t have a lot of Beatles stuff in this house, because for a very long time I soaked up the Beatles from so many different directions (cartoons, radio, friends’ albums, etc). that it just didn’t seem necessary to actually own any of it. If anything, I wanted to avoid the Beatles. But hearing them in the game, having to pay more attention to the songs, almost makes me want to go out and buy some CDs. Some of the old familiar songs sound fresh and fun, and some that weren’t quite as familiar, the ones I’d heard but couldn’t instantly place from reading the titles — e.g., “And Your Bird Can Sing,” ”If I Needed Someone” — sound almost revelatory. Having listened to so much other music over the years, I can hear connections to other bands and other songs I might not have made before. Which is not to say there aren’t some duds. A lot of the late Beatles songs played in the last level or two of the game sound like self-indulgent jams rather than well-crafted songs. I don’t think I’ll ever develop any kind of appreciation for “I’ve Got a Feeling,” for example. In fact, most of the songs from the last level, the Rooftop Concert, left me thinking the Beatles should have broken up a bit earlier.

Overall, it’s a fun introduction to the music of the Beatles combined with a simplified and streamlined look at their career. I’d kind of like to see the game get opened up a little to include some solo material by the various ex-Beatles, but I really doubt that will happen.

John Foxx: Urban Motets

John Foxx recorded three albums as leader of Ultravox in the late ’70s and four solo albums in the early ’80s before disappearing from the music scene for several years. In the late ’90s he reappeared with two albums on his own Metamatic label, the ambient Cathedral Oceans and a collaboration with Louis Gordon, Shifting City. Since then, he’s released more than two dozen albums, including collaborations with several other musicians, interview albums, live albums, and more.

But there are a few that fans are still wondering about.
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