Month: January 2015

I guess, if truth be told, I have put off writing up my blog on Ekstasis, mainly because I don’t really know what to write about.

I could write about the music itself, which is exquisite; complex in structure yet often simple in sound, it conjures up, almost exactly, the image on the cover of the album – opaque, stately, almost classical, and calming in a monochromatic way. This is not music that grabs you by the lapels and demands your attention. No, this is music that creeps up on you, ekes its way into your affections bit by bit until you realise, one day, that you are in love. But writing about music is boring, so I won’t do that.

I could write about Holter herself; about how she grew up in Los Angeles and then went to university in the same goddam town (who does that?) to study musical composition. But if I were to do that, you would all be thinking, ‘surely she isn’t feeling it for real, surely it all sounds like some anodyne textbook exercise, unemotional, distanced, detached’. And in some ways, you would be right, but you would also be so, so wrong. And I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea about Julia Holter because:

a) She’s lovely.

b) She makes unbelievably beautiful music.

So I won’t be risking you getting the wrong impression about Miss or Ms (don’t think it’s Mrs) Holter by writing about her either.

I could write loads about the first track off the album, Marienbad, which is, it turns out, a spa town in the Czech Republic. But nothing I write about this incredible piece of music could do it justice – even if I could find a way to adequately describe the way it twists and turns and segues and never repeats and has a breathtaking hook that takes her four minutes to get around to – well, you would still need to listen to the thing because it’s much, much better than my words can do.

So I’m going to leave it at this: Ekstasis is a brilliant, amazing, magnificent, stupendous, exquisite, spellbinding, fragile, innovative album….and, by my reckoning, is one of the very best albums that I have heard this decade/century/(hell, let’s go for) millennium. And I know this as it is just about the most difficult record to listen to that I own. ‘Hang on’ I hear you cry, ‘haven’t you wittered on before about Trout Mask Replica and Sun Ra and The Red Crayola and John Coltrane. Surely Julia isn’t in the same ballpark?’ And I’d have to agree with you, because Ekstasis is nothing but a pure pleasure to spend time with. ‘So what do you mean?’ you’d remark, somewhat exasperatedly. So, I’d chuckle a bit and go on to explain that with four short sides of 45rpm vinyl, Ekstasis takes more effort to tee up and play through than almost anything else in my collection bar A Gilded Eternity by Loop…and I can’t remember the last time I bothered to listen to that! The fact that Ekstasis regularly finds itself on my turntable is surely proof enough that this is a remarkable work of art, one that I can not recommend highly enough and one that I have found very difficult (as I am sure you’ll agree) to describe.

Buy it.

Rob listened: As Tom worried about being unable to write about this for a week and a bit, my memory of it has faded sufficiently that I too now have very little to write about it. I did really enjoy it at the time. We talked a lot about who it sounded a little like, or more who it seemed to share a compositional palette with. The names mostly bandied around were those of artists whose work I tend not to connect with quickly and over time either come to dislike, or to admire as exhibition pieces, rather than living, breathing music. I thought ‘Ekstasis’ sounded divine though, and somewhere, off at some wild perpendicular, it created a hitherto un-noticed overlap in my musical venn-diagram, just between Oneohtrix Point Never and Grouper. And there it will stick until I have time to love it properly.

Nick listened: It’s much easier to listen to on CD; you just put it in the machine and press ‘play’ once, and 60 minutes later you’re feeling content and blissful.

I bought this after Tom played “Marienbad” at us a couple of years ago, but I must confess I’ve not listened to it a huge amount since then. I should do; it’s lovely. As is her follow-up, the slightly earthier, brass-tinged Loud City Song, which I listened to quite a bit more. I’ll go back to this; I want to go back to it. It’s beautiful.

And slapped wrists for Mr Rainbow for once again suggesting, in a roundabout way, that studying something and being trained in it somehow means you don’t have, or somehow lose, ‘soul’ or ‘authenticity’ or ‘passion’, which is crazy talk, you old punk. (I’m aware that Tom is about the least punk person I know. And also not old.)

Immediately I feel as if I have to start making excuses for The Wedding Present and, after some further consideration, I begin to realise that every time I feel this way it says a great deal more about me than it does about the music I’m inappropriately apologising for.

But here I go again.

The Wedding Present are one of the great British bands of the last 30 years. It’s my feeling, possibly misguided, that they have fallen from the pantheon and that at least one of the things that made them so distinctive initially and that really does make them remarkable, was responsible, erroneously, for their fading from such watery limelight as UK indie rock affords. Put another way, I think that the general sense was that they were a band with one trick and that, once experienced, it wasn’t worth sticking around to see the same trick performed all that many more times. I may be wrong but, if we assume for a second that I’m not, here are the problems with that:

1. They really weren’t a one-trick act.

2. Even if they were, it was a really, really good trick. The sort of trick that has seen respected playwrights in, through and out the other end of lauded careers, their reputations made, cemented and then maintained.

But they weren’t.

Let’s look at them as a musical outfit to start with. ‘George Best’, the debut album that established them in 1987, is a frenetic updating of the mid-80s jangle-pop template, bringing back the speed melodies of Buzzcocks and adding Gang of Four guitars that shredded fingers and eardrums. They may have come out of a scene that boasted The Field Mice and Tallulah Gosh, but The Wedding Present were hard and fast and different.

Then, rather than repeat this successful formula, they developed at an impressive pace. Their second record, 1989’s ‘Bizarro’, updated the formula, adding in extended, often drifting, structures and stuttering-stumbling rhythms often still played at breakneck speed but now creating foundations for songs which more closely echoed the awkwardness of their protagonists.

And then they went to Pachyderm Studios in rural Minnesota to record ‘Seamonsters’ with Steve Albini. Listening back to the album now it’s easy, and lazy, to conclude that they were grabbing onto the coat-tails of the increasingly prominent US underground scene and trying to ride them all the way to an updated sound and new audiences. Certainly the music they came back with now seems relatively well-worn and familiar in it’s tone and structure, 20-odd years down the line. That’s not how it went down back then, as I recall it, and I remember just how jarring and unexpected the ‘Seamonsters’ material sounded back then. However my recollections are extremely partial, so let’s pause for a moment to look at the timeline.

The band started working with Albini in 1989, basically off the back of ‘Surfer Rosa’ a record that David Gedge judged to have the balance between rock power and pop hooks that he was looking for. One of the first things they recorded together was a cover of ‘Box Elder’ a track by the then genuinely unknown Pavement. The Wedding Present version was released as a B-side 4 months before the release of Pavement’s second EP and fully 2 years before we were all wearing out ‘Slanted and Enchanted’ and considering ourselves cutting edge.

‘Seamonsters’ itself came out within a few weeks of Slint’s ‘Spiderland’ and a few months before ‘Nevermind’. So, the move from parochial Leeds to wild and widescreen USA was a heartfelt, radical and visionary move for a band who could quite easily have stayed home and ploughed their existing furrow for all it was worth.

Musically it’s a complete statement, raw and yearning, aggressive and unhinged, nuanced, powerful and evocative. Whilst it’s never more than four guys bashing away on guitars and drums, and it boasts none of deliberate artfulness or formal experimentation of some of the other landmarks of the period, it surpasses many for commitment, and instinctive execution. The record rocks and rolls and surges and howls and has speed freak-outs and stunned silences. There is emotion in guitars and drums, and by this point The Wedding Present knew how to wring it out.

So what about that one trick of theirs? How was that bearing up by 1991?

David Gedge is one of the truly great lyricists in rock history. That he chooses to use an apparently restrictive form is no matter (and no constraint for him) and ditto that he sings almost exclusively about the intimate, internal moments in the lives of ordinary people. His approach – he most commonly sings one half of a real or imaginary dialogue, leaving the listener to fill in the other speaker’s words – sounds disarmingly simple, (it isn’t in the slightest – just try it for yourself) but it creates such rich poetry. Take the chorus to ‘Corduroy’. How much of life and love is packed into these words and how many scenes spin away from them?

I’ll make you laugh / When you see this photograph
It’s not from that day / I threw all those away
It’s just some boy / Probably dressed in corduroy
He grew up fast / But you’ve not changed at all

What’s most immediate about Gedge’s words on ‘Seamonsters’ is how obscured they are. He adapted his singing voice in the run up to this album and the result was challenging, and then, additonally, his vocals were placed way down in the mix. Even now, after 24 years, words and phrases are only just coming to the surface. There’s something strangely fitting about that. For words which were written as if stolen from private, often imagined, conversations, having them emerge as if coalescing from the fog of memory makes them more powerful still.

It’s only dawned on me recently just how unflatteringly Gedge painted his protagonists/himself (the songs are in the first person, so we have to assume) in these early records. Regardless of how you may remember them, the songs on these first three albums are not about the unrequited love of dorky dreamers. Instead they’re about jealousy and petty, bitter jealousy at that. If you looked at these half-conversations from a neutral distance, he wouldn’t be the Lovelorn Hero, he’d be the Weird Outsider, almost the Stalker.

Even the snatches of studio dialogue that were included in some of the ‘George Best’ era releases seem deliberately chosen to make Gedge appear snippy and defensive. It’s also interesting to note that for a songwriter for whom lyrics were such a distinctive and important element, his words are not reproduced for the listener. This makes a release like ‘Seamonsters’ all the more mysterious and unfathomable, but it also speaks to Gedge’s self-effacement.

Ultimately, I wonder whether it was this very modesty and unassuming nature that made it relatively easy for us to move on from The Wedding Present. We should have been raising them to the rafters.

Footnote: Readers who are familiar with the band’s career will of course note that ‘Seamonsters’ was in fact their high water mark in terms of both sales and critical acclaim, rather than a neglected work. I did tell you I was wrong before I started.

Nick listened: I’d never knowingly listened to The Wedding Present before, and was pretty ignorant of their narrative; by the time I was getting into music properly and reading the weekly music papers they seemed like they were irrelevant, a spent force, a leftover from a previous era (that had only been about 18 months before; the way we experience cultural time fascinates me). Which is crazy, because a; so were Nirvana and My Bloody Valentine, amongst others, and b; The Wedding Present were still releasing records in 1994-1997, which were my peak ‘wow’ years.

With no expectations, I enjoyed this quite a lot. I suspect the songs are of the sort that take a while to unfurl and dig their grubby hooks in – Albini’s recording and mixing, and Gedge’s mumbling and misery, being the key reasons why that’s the case – but the sound – caustic, low-key, quintessentially Albini – is one of those things that just work as catnip to me. Would like to hear again.

Tom listened: I really wanted to go back and spend a bit more time with Seamonsters before writing about it..but I haven’t got round to it, so my initial reactions are all I have to go on.

I really didn’t get a handle on this at all. That’s not to say that I didn’t like it, far from it in fact! I sensed that this could have been great, but the relatively low volume at which it was played on the night coupled with the ridiculously low in the mix vocals meant that it felt as though I was listening with an upturned bin full of cotton wool over my head.

I wanted to hear David Gedge’s words (they’re always worth hearing, in much the same way as Alex Turner’s are – that straightforward Northern bluntness and humour runs through his songs and elevate them) and enjoy the bluff tones of his wonderfully flat singing voice. And it was a shame I didn’t because although this was an album full of fine pop tunes, The Wedding Present have always offered more than that and, on the night, I just couldn’t make that extra bit out!

Like Nick, I find the whole ‘Album Of The Year’ thing a bit hard to get my head around – it’s not so much the process of choosing a favourite from the albums I own as much as thinking about all the albums I haven’t heard, or even heard of, that I am supposedly placing below my chosen one. I always thought that album of the year lists would be much more informative if the producer of the list were to indicate just how many albums they considered when making their list. After all, non-inclusion of an album could mean it’s a stinker…or, more probably, it simply hasn’t been taken into account. The thought that my number one (out of five!!) would be weighted just a highly as someone who has got to know a hundred albums in 2014 makes the process flawed to such an extent as to surely render it worthless.

To illustrate my point, I thought I would bring Timber Timbre’s fifth album, Hot Dreams. It was released on April Fools Day yet I only became aware of it for the first time when I saw it in The Drift’s album of the year list in November(!)…at number 100. And that was it as far as I could tell (my interest in the album was actually piqued sometime later upon listening to an enthusiastic review by Anthony Fantano at his website, The Needle Drop) – having kept abreast of the majority of better known websites’ end of year lists, despite the misgivings I outlined earlier, I failed to find Hot Dreams in any other ‘best of’ list (even The Guardian newspaper, who gave the album top marks in their review and described it as a Lynchian masterpiece overlooked it in their albums of the year list). Which must make it just about the ‘least successful album of 2014 that featured in an end of year list’! Quite an accolade!

But listening to Hot Dreams reinforces to me just how arbitrary the whole thing is. Whilst not top of my list (FKA Twigs’ LP1 is head and shoulders above anything else I’ve heard this year), Hot Dreams is a fine, fine record. Cinematic, beautifully constructed, cohesive and supremely atmospheric, it is surely worthy of a bit more attention than it got. I’m not making any grand claims for Hot Dreams, it won’t change your life, I doubt you will be naming your kids after the band members and it is unlikely that it will come to be seen as the wellspring of a new genre ten years down the line but, as Nick wrote when he was commenting on Buffalo Tom’s Let Me Come Over, music doesn’t always have to shift the world off its axis; sometimes providing the listener with what is, ultimately, just an enjoyable, transformative and captivating forty minutes is enough. And that’s something that Hot Dreams does for me in spades; from the leaden, ominous opener of Beat the Drum Slowly, to the ever evolving and creepy Run From Me, via the towering peaks of The Grand Canyon, The Low Commotion and, perhaps the most beautiful song I heard in all of 2014, the album’s title track, the only thing that stops Hot Dreams being a stone cold classic, for me, is the final instrumental track, The Three Sisters, which has, so far, failed to capture my imagination in the way the rest of the record has.

But, minor quibble aside, Hot Dreams is surely an unlucky record from an unlucky band that deserves greater recognition than last place in the ‘Great 2014 EOY Lists Competition’ (especially when you consider how said competition was won by a fine sounding, but pretty unremarkable, album of guitar based rock music).

Rob listened: Loved it. Also, I shared Tom’s confusion as to why this record didn’t get more plaudits and wider coverage during the year. I assume it’s something to do with Timber Timbre trading in well-established tropes and genre-signifiers. (SARCASM ALERT!) Understandably this would put them way behind The War On Drugs. It’s a shame because sometimes bands try new things for the sake of doing so when, judging by the outcomes, they probably shouldn’t have bothered, whilst others find some new angle through which to approach well-worn surfaces and in doing so make those shine anew. So well done Timber Timbre for breathing dry, desert air into Lynchian balladry in the Tex Mex dramamine dancehall, producing a work that sounds like John Barry soundtracking Jim Ballard’s ‘Earth Is The Alien Planet: The Musical!’

I liked it a lot.

Nick listened: I’d never heard of Timber Timbre before tonight, and I imagine that was part of the problem in terms of end-of-year plaudits; some stuff gets pitched at critics (and audiences) as potential end-of-year-bait from the moment “Auld Lang Syne” dies down, and other stuff just doesn’t get talked about at all. I received PR emails and Jiffy Bags full of promo CDs and photocopied press releases for years (I still get the damn emails) and I still don’t fully understand the mechanics by which our collective tastes are made. There’s a PhD thesis to be written on the cultural mechanics and social psychology of it. (There’s also the simple mechanic that album reviews are written by individuals, and lists are compiled by groups who often simply haven’t all heard the same records; the freelancers writing for The Guardian don’t sit around sharing an office, for instance; I doubt many of them have ever even met.)

Anyway, I’m not sure I got all the subtleties of the Tex Mex signifiers – to me this was kind of like early Portishead (in terms of atmospheres and partial sonics, if not post-hip-hop mechanics) transposed to anywhere in the States. I enjoyed it, but it’s not so much of a catnip-y sound for me as it obviously is for Tom and Rob. What I did love was the saxophone – I wish there’d been more of Colin Stetson. But nonetheless, an intriguing, well-crafted record that I enjoyed listening to, and which didn’t deserve to be ignored the way it seems to have been.