Month: October 2016

We don’t have enough techno.

We have just enough techno.

I don’t know whether this is techno.

We don’t have enough.

I bought this Andy Stott album because I couldn’t hear it anywhere else. I bought this Andy Stott album because I saw the cover art from ‘Passed Me By’, the EP that preceded it, and somehow thought it was related to the first Death Grips album. I didn’t buy either of those, but I did buy this one because I couldn’t hear it anywhere and that really got under my skin.

I waited and waited until I found it on vinyl and I bought it and I didn’t know what it sounded like. Reading techno reviews is really hard if you don’t know a lot about techno and how techno reviews are written. I don’t know if this is techno but I know that the reviews seemed to suggest that I should buy and so did the cover and so I did.

I didn’t know he was from Manchester. I didn’t really know he was a label mate of Demdike Stare. I don’t know what Demdike Stare sound like, and I can’t hear them anywhere either, but I once heard their name pronounced in a surprising way on the Guardian Music podcast, and I came to associate them with dark, subterranean musics that I was able to listen to like Haxan Cloak and Emptyset.

Maybe one day I’ll buy some of their records too, just to hear them. The very thought.

This record is genuinely terrific. It starts with hazy loops and a voice, Andy Stott’s piano teacher apparently, intoning, “Touch… Touch…” and from there it grows. All organic adjectives are appropriate. This is rhythmic music beaten out on skin and deep muscle. It has heft and density and life. It is simple and yet it moves, articulated. It is at once delicate and tough enough to withstand whatever you might throw at it. It’s dancing, to its own bruised logic, whether you are asking or not.

The record it reminds me of more than any other is ‘Maxinquaye’ because at the time, that masterpiece seemed to me to have been thumped out on sheets of leather. This is human music made to affect the calculations of a machine. It pulsates and flutters and writhes and goes on in ways that no machine could. It is resolutely grey and full of touches of breathtaking colour.

I recognise that having to buy records just to hear them is a luxury problem.

Tom listened: My memory may be failing me…but I think this is probably the first time since we’ve been meeting that I have felt compelled to listen to an album again prior to writing my response.

Lately, I have become a little frustrated with my writing in that by the time I come to responding to an album, all I can recall is the feeling the music gave me, rather than the music itself. So that has been what I have tended to write about. Which is no good at all.

Furthermore, how many times does a record make sense the first time around? Having bought Swoon by Prefab Sprout yesterday, I must have played it about three times over already and it’s only just starting to reveal itself, as my mind, or ears (or whatever else it is that sorts this out) has begun to understand the structures and patterns that, at first, seem to be almost random or haphazard in nature. A cursory half-listen over a curry with chatter seldom does the job, as far as I am concerned.

So I have turned to Youtube for help. And it’s a revelation, the album eliciting the same feeling I got on the night yet sounding nothing like how I remember it. For a start, the vocals feature much more prominently than I had previously thought. The album feels much, much more human than my memory would have me believe, much warmer than Haxan Cloak and Emptyset (a fact I did recall correctly…unsurprisingly). It’s minimal but there’s just enough  going on to be entrancing; there are moments of great beauty, moments of ominousness (but never threateningly so), and Luxury Problems actually grooves, in a nod-your-head rather than fill-a-dance-floor kind of a way, through the course of its 50ish minutes. So, to sum up, I had thought this was a great record and it turns out I was right. Hurrah! It is just a different great record to the one I had previously thought it was!

How do you write about Jeff Buckley in 2016? When so much water has gone under so many bridges, when so many imitators have drained his legacy, assuming that a sensitive falsetto is the key part of it? How do you even listen to Jeff Buckley in 2016, given all this? It’s nearly 20 years since he dove into the Mississippi and never climbed out.

Jeff Buckley was the first name mentioned at our “I can’t believe we haven’t played this already” meeting a couple of weeks ago, by Tom, but still no one played Grace. I’d thought about Buckley, and ummed and ahhed a bit, but decided not to bring him along to that meeting (everyone would much rather listen to U2, I thought). It then felt kind of obvious to bring him along to the next one, for which there was no set theme. So I did.

I bought Grace on CD in Newton Abbott Our Price (remember Our Price?) shortly after he died in 1997. I’d have been 18, just. It’s one of the few records that I can remember impacting me on first listen. Stupidly, at that age, I wasn’t into solo artists because I had a bizarre notion in my head that they’d all just sing unaccompanied by anything other than an acoustic guitar (for at least the majority of their songs), and therefore be insanely boring. Because otherwise why not just be in a band and have a cool band name? (It’s fair to say that I was quite fixed in many of my ideas about music – and other stuff – when I was younger.) But it was obvious from the first few seconds of “Mojo Pin” – that low hum, the twining guitar, the sashaying drums – that this wasn’t some bozo with an acoustic guitar and nothing else.

Like many people back then I became a little obsessed with Jeff Buckley; I hammered Grace until I’d internalised every vocal and instrumental nuance and climax, bought up old live EPs and CD singles, and waited impatiently for the unreleased songs that would emerge, almost exactly a year after his death, as Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk. (But not, it must be said, the ragtag gaggle of hodgepodge compilations that have followed over the years.)

I haven’t really listened to Jeff Buckley much in the last 15 years or so; like many artists I gorged on in days gone by I haven’t felt the need to because of over-familiarity. Also, with Buckley in particular, but with several other late-adolescent favourites, there’s a vague sense of guilt at the emotional indulgence of listening: Grace is a very, very dramatic record, full of heightened emotional states, whooping climaxes, and histrionic expressions that are coupled with very few direct referents and very little clear sense. Which is to say that I have pretty much no idea what most of the songs here are about, but good grief they don’t half make you feel.

A lot of modern ‘crescendo rock’ (read Elbow, The National, Radiohead, Coldplay, Snow Patrol) turns its tricks by repeating and repeating with added elements and intensity. This can be penetratingly affecting, but it can also be deeply dull if the purveyor isn’t incredibly skilful. One of Buckley’s masterstrokes on Grace is his ability to build to enormous, overbearing, wailing crescendos without repeating himself much if at all; “Last Goodbye”, the obvious big single, for instance, manages to get to its destination without really having a proper chorus or phrase that’s repeated more than once, even though it feels like it must do.

A lot of modern ‘crescendo rock’ also utilises lyrics that are opaque to the point of being meaningless, and that’s no different here, for the most part. Buckley was a massive Smiths fan, but there’s none of the multi-layered humour and self-analysis that Morrissey was so great at. Sure, some of the couplets (when paired with that voice and these arrangements) are strikingly memorable (the “please kiss me” line from “Last Goodbye”), but they’re counterbalanced by a stream of adolescent clunkers (“she is the tear that hangs inside my soul forever” from “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over”). But these wracked, intense demonstrations of emotion are forgivable, ignorable even, because (again) of that voice, and how fulsomely and convincingly Buckley throws himself into the songs.

Also, a lot of the time I simply don’t have a clue what lyrics Buckley’s singing, such is the fervour with which he bends vowels and consonants and syllables out of recognisable patterns. (In 2016, of course, you could just look-up the lyrics on the internet, but in 1997 that wasn’t so easy.) (Are they in the sleeve? I can’t even remember.) (They’re ultimately not that important.) (And music writing that leans on literary analysis of lyrics just plain sucks, anyway.)

Like an intense, body-shaking adolescent sobbing fit (or a big teenage wank), Grace gives catharsis but can leave you feeling spent and a touch guilty for letting yourself go to the indulgence of release. Revisiting it has been fascinating; I’ve no idea what I’d make of a record like Grace if I were to encounter it new today, but I’m very glad I got to it when I was 18.

Tom listened: Funnily enough I dug Grace out of my collection and gave it a spin a month ago for the first time in probably more than a decade having heard Lover, You Should Have Come Over on the radio.

It sounded as fresh and accomplished (I can think of no better word to describe Grace) as it ever did; the singing, playing and songwriting being top drawer throughout. It also, crucially for me, transcends all those copyists Nick has already relatively comprehensively listed that came along in the slipstream  – to put it bluntly, when it came to making this sort of music (to my mind ‘this sort of music’ sounds like The Bends rather than Amnesiac), Buckley was simply the best. Sure, there are a few cuts I would cull from Grace, but the vast majority of the record still sounds as revelatory as it did twenty years ago when it first exploded onto the scene.

Taking advantage of a theme free and underpopulated evening I chose, as the deadline was looming, the 1 hour and 39 seconds of aural bliss that is, it turns out, The Avalanches first (as opposed to only) album, Since I Left You.

Released in 2000, for me no other album signified the coming of the new millennium quite as effectively. Bright, busy, supremely optimistic and breathtakingly well conceived, Since I Left You seemed, at the time, to mark a new dawning, a fresh way of doing things. Surely the shape of things to come! Taking our lead from the album cover, we waited, with baited breath, for the tidal wave of copyists; the magpies, the hoarders, the new collagists, imitating the mother lode but, inevitably, never improving on it. But they never really came, sunk without trace!? So we waited for the Avalanches themselves; to follow up their gargantuan first effort…and we waited, and waited, and waited! Internet rumours came and went, as they tend to do, but the offerings were piecemeal; the odd song here and there, guest artists occasionally letting slip that they had been allowed in to have a play but still nothing. And then, just as we were giving up, Wildflower was released and finally, Since I Left You had a sibling…sixteen years on! What does it sound like? I don’t know because, I’ve never heard it! I haven’t felt enticed because, and I guess this might be partly why we waited so long, Since I Left You is as close to damn it to perfection that I really don’t feel I need anything else like it.

I realised, as I was considering writing this blog entry, that Since I Left You is probably the only album I own which I really, really love yet know practically nothing about. After all, I can only recall the names of two of the songs, and can’t really hum, or even remember anything other than the occasional musical motif, a whiff here and there, the tiniest of shards, gleaming yet gone in a flash. Since I Left You (the song) and Frontier Psychiatrist are so anomalous (in that they are recognisable as songs in their own right) from to their bedfellows that even though they are both awesome pieces of music, you do end up wondering whether they belong with the rest of the stuff on the album. Because, if they weren’t there, Since I Left You would play out a bit like a dance orientated, poppy version of one of those albums we’ve had at record club every so often (The Necks and William Basinski spring to mind) where the music twists and turns and morphs and mutates over time, shape shifting imperceptibly yet definitely. But, in contrast to the minimalism on show in these other cases, the movements here are from one beautiful groove to the next, gradually and seamlessly blissing out as the end of the trip looms into view. I own the vinyl version of the album and the only breaks in the musical theme (apart from the aforementioned singles) are the end of the sides…I almost wish I owned this in some digital format instead, just so that that continuity could be preserved!

I don’t listen to Since I left You all that often but, whenever I do, it feels like a real treat. As for Wildflower, I am pleased for the Avalanches that they have managed to move back towards, if not into, the zeitgeist but I can’t help feeling that there is something inherently cool about those rare cases in popular music where a band comes along, releases a single classic album and then buggers off never to be seen again. For sixteen years The Avalanches were one of those bands; now they just seem a little bit more ‘regular’ than their fantastic debut album would suggest.

I ran through my vinyl, pulling out albums that seemed to me we should surely have reached within our first 350 choices. I found a dozen or so and then I stopped. It’s a testament to how wide and deep we have dug over the past few years that so many of the absolute staples haven’t registered yet. From this shortlist, the Velvet Underground stood head and shoulders above the rest. Tom’s comments are accurate: we really haven’t invoked the Velvets anywhere near as much as we might have been expected to. Off the top of my head, our top ten most mentioned are along the lines of CAN, The Beatles, Danny Baker, Coldplay, Rick Wakeman, Pink Floyd, Husker Du, Tim Buckley, Mark Lanegan and Steve Albini. I’d say there were a couple of names in there, three at a push, that could claim to be as influential as the Velvet Underground, especially when looking specifically at the music our past 94 rounds have demonstrated that we love the most.

So, one way or another, it does seem surprising that we’ve never had then before.

After my initial sift, my thought was to bring ‘White Light/White Heat’ which I considered the tabula rasa of alternative rock music, the point at which the Velvets cut loose from all restraint and flew into the stratosphere, breaking the mould and setting rock and roll free for generations of wild-eyed punks to capitalise. Then I listened to it, and enjoyed it as ever, but wondered whether it was something that bore re-presentation. As part of my deliberation I checked back in with ‘The Velvet Underground and Nico’, my theory being that this was essentially a record that could have come from any number of the emerging pop rock acts of the mid 60s. I also feel a lingering antipathy to it because, frankly, Nico’s voice has always left me cold. I understand that it leavens the sound here in a really useful way but, well, I just don’t like it.

Within a few minutes I was reminded just how disconnected I had become from the album, and just what a masterpiece of sweet and sour, concision and experimentation it was. And also, just how much wild, breakthrough sound it contains.

About half the record could quite easily have been recorded by Dylan, or the Doors, or Brian Wilson, or some other boundary-pushing iconoclast. Then there’s the half that just… couldn’t. ‘Venus in Furs’, as thrilling as ever even aged 50. The guitar that slices through the second half of ‘Run Run Run’ like a chainsaw, like nothing else anyone had ever heard before. The drone and majesty of ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’. And ‘Heroin’, a shockingly beautiful masterclass of expressionist music-making, structure, form and intent all working in perfect, chaotic harmony.

In short, having left it on the shelf for 10 years or so, I was knocked sideways by just how brilliant a record it is, from start to howling finish.

I can’t believe we haven’t had it already.

Steve listened: I can’t believe you haven’t had it already, having come in late in the story of DRC. It is a classic but feels so out of place for 1967, the year of its release, given the subjects of some of the songs. It feels more like the realism and come-down of 1970s after the optimism of the hippy revolution had died down. Far grittier and sharper edges, less fluffy and more dirty spoon and from the bad end of town. New York and not San Francisco. Listening to it again was a great experience and reminded me of how I came to hear it for the first time. A wonderful record.

Tom listened: Of course Rob is spot on when he says that much of The Velvet Underground and Nico sounds like nothing else that had come before. And thinking about it, nothing else since has really embraced that buzzsaw guitar playing to quite the same effect. It is surprising that we hadn’t already had this album, yet I have never come close to selecting it as I don’t…whisper it…like it very much. With the exception of the majestic All Tomorrow’s Parties (I actually quite like Nico’s glacial tones) I just can’t click with it, and truth be told, never have…even though I spent a few years in my twenties trying to kid myself that the opposite was the case. I did love White Light/White Heat though, although that fire has dimmed over the years, and the third album has its moments and a great atmosphere…but throughout their career Lou Reed’s ego, lack of self-regulation (some of their songs go on way too long) and inability to write a deft melody line has ensured that, as far as I am concerned, The Velvet Underground have stayed a band that has been easy to admire but hard to love.

My choice for Nick’s ‘I Can’t Believe We Hadn’t Had This Already’ round elicited a disapproving sneer from our illustrious and sage leader when he walked in, late, to the strains of Belly of the Beat…or Kill VS Main…or some such.

It appears that my choice was ill conceived in that:

a) We had already had a couple of songs played from it at the Xmas round up last year (technically only one as far as I am concerned as Realiti is not on my version of the record and I, therefore, don’t consider it as part of the whole).

and

b) It’s only been around for about ten months.

Well, I see the first point as an irrelevance (we’ve never played the album) and I see the second point as…an irrelevance too! The irony is that Grimes has been mentioned far more times at record club than the band that made Rob’s record (I’m not going to give it away by mentioning it by name) and, hence, of the two, I am much more surprised it hadn’t yet been featured at the club. As a side note, I’m not surprised at all that neither Nick or Steve’s albums had passed us by up to this point!

But, seeing as Art Angels is a work of genius, a signpost to the future of pop music, an enduring classic (I’d put money on it) in its infancy, I felt it was about time somebody did the decent thing and took it along. It is also one of only a handful of records that everyone in my family is nuts about…well, maybe not my parents, but my wife and kids seem to love it just as much as I do.

And it’s not hard to see why. Because what Grimes is doing on Art Angels is stunning. Listening closely tonight to Belly of the Beat, trying to see what it is that makes the record so special, it struck me that it is the production (Claire Boucher did everything on this album, including the engineering!) that is particularly breathtaking. One of the albums shyest tracks, Belly of the Beat is, ostensibly, an acoustic strum laid over a programmed drum beat with some typically sweet vocals floating eight miles high above the instrumentation. Strip away the production and you’d be left with something lovely…but unremarkable, perhaps. Listen closely, however, and you’ll hear the workings of what is, surely, one of the great minds working in music today. Sounds come and go in torrents, gush and then recede, swirl and distort but, crucially, never feel forced or over-considered. The song itself never really does much, there’s no rousing singalong chorus, no real hooks, but it also never repeats, never gets lazy, constantly keeps you guessing and, consequently, leaves you wanting more. And more is what you get, because each and every song (even the weird little ones, the grit in the oyster, if you will) sound amazing. Art Angels is such a complete work, 45 minutes of aural, and cerebral, bliss, art masquerading as pop. I worry for Grime’s next album because it may never appear this natural, this unforced again. With Art Angels she’s pulled back the curtain, revealed the magic and, in the process, made things very difficult for her future self.

But worrying about something that may never happen makes no sense at all and so whilst I wait to see what her next move will be, I plan to wear out my copy of Art Angels whilst regularly reminding Rob of how it’s actually a much better album than a scuzzy 50 year old relic with a banana on the front. Whoops. I may have just let the cat out of the bag!

Steve listened: No need to get all defensive…It’s a great album although I wouldn’t have said that it was a classic one that we have failed to listen to yet, whereas a certain recording with a banana cover…is. I would also argue that Mr Cope’s entry into the world of music also fits that bill. But here’s me being all defensive of the other choices when Grimes’ album is, I agree, a pop masterpiece. It’s also a possible intersection in the musical Venn diagram between my tastes and my children’s. So, I will inevitably buy it and listen to a lot…..in the car.

Rob listened: We’ve only had 8 or 9 rounds of DRC since this record was released (slowing up guys…), and 3 or 4 of those had prescribed themes. So, on balance, I can very well believe that we haven’t had ‘Art Angels’ yet.

Which is not to say that it wasn’t a welcome arrival. I bought it when it came out, on the strength of the blistering ‘Kill V Maim’. I loved the album but never really allowed it to sink it’s hooks into me, and without the early attachment, it has sunk out of sight. Hearing it again reminded me how laser bright, mercilessly catchy and gobsmackingly inventive it is. Hearing all three wrapped up in one package is very, very rare and so I concur with Tom, this is a special record.

Glad we didn’t have to wait any longer.