Author: monstershark

A fine and crafty theme set by Tom when, at the end of the last round – ‘Instrumentals’ – he decreed that next time we should bring a record by an artist that had been referred to previously in that evening’s typically meandering and haphazard discussion. This made easy work for Graham, who had openly flip-flopped between two instrumental choices and then promised to bring his second (‘Laughing Stock’, a justified second best to ‘The Four Seasons’ in my book and not even anywhere near being an instrumental) to the next meeting. The rest of us went scurrying to our mental notepads. I ended up with an unworkable shortlist of Nils Frahm, Earth, Sun Kil Moon and Sonic Boom – all of which are too long, and one of which I’m not even sure was mentioned – plus Mekons, J Dilla and Flying Lotus. So, after typically scant deliberation, it’s over to Steven Ellison, for it is he.

I only have two Flying Lotus records, this one, his third, and it’s predecessor, ‘Los Angeles’. I like both a great deal and they seem to straddle a crucial bridging point in the career of this Californian producer and composer. ‘Los Angeles’ is a solid collection of woozy, glitchy instrumental hip-hop, shot through with a certain nervous, questing energy. I used to like putting it on as background music when we had guests, partly because every so often someone or other would urgently ask me to turn it off. It carries hidden traps and toxins.

‘Cosmogramma’ is a huge leap forward. Right from the get-go ‘Clock Catcher’ this is an urgent, overloaded and thoroughly urban music. Beats tumble over one another, live and electronic instruments vie for attention and the resultant sounds are fleeting and dizzying, hard to catch.

The complexity, or at least the sheer pace and density, of some of these compositions is outrageous and, for all that it harks back to the past, whisking together jazz, funk, soul, disco, electronica and hip-hop, the sheer teeming mass marks this out as music that could only have been made in the 21st century. Once you’ve been through ‘Cosmogramma’ a few times, enough to be able to draw breath as it plays, there emerges a tantalising, twisted tension at its heart. For me, this is a jazz record as much as anything else. In spirit always, and directly in sound at times, it pushes for the sort of wildness and controlled chaos that drives the Coltrane record Tom brought to our last meeting (Ellison, as it happens, is grand-nephew to John and Alice Coltrane). Unlike ‘Los Angeles’ much of this album consists of live performances (including from Ravi Coltrane, John and Alice’s son) and the torque that drives the record comes from the rub of these freewheeling live takes against the meticulous, painstaking work that Ellison, a laptop composer at heart, must have put in, beat by beat, second by second, to stitch this, his vision, together.

I know from previous conversations that Nick has a problem with the sound of ‘Cosmogramma’ and hopefully he’ll elucidate in his comments. Something about the sound being too compressed. He’s always banging on about that sort of stuff. To my ears the congested sound is in its favour. One of the breakthrough moments I had when I first got this record was when I realised that this wasn’t supposed to be an exquisite soundscape sculpted on state of the art machinery, instead it sounds like standing on a busy street corner and tuning in to the music flooding from car stereos, shop fronts and headphones. It’s a possible flip-side to ‘In A Silent Way’, a record that always struck me as the sound of a city at 3am. ‘Cosmogramma’ is the noise that is absent from ‘Silent Way’ and vice versa. It’s the sound of the same street corner at 3pm. The album conjures the warp and weft of a heaving city. It bristles with uncontainable life. And like a modern city, it is replete with alleyways and flyovers, heaving with life and stories and a breathing rhythm all of its own which only begins to emerge after you have lived within it, and continues to change every time you step into it.

Nick Listened: Emma refused to let me buy the last Flying Lotus album, going so far as to take it out of my hands and put it back on the shelf in HMV. “You’ll only moan about it being compressed” she said, almost certainly correctly. On paper FlyLo appeals – experimental electronic music with a big dose of jazz being right up my alley – but the empirical (phenomenological?) experience of actually listening to his records always gives me a headache. At a guess this is because of the crazy compression and side-chaining he employs to make his music (very deliberately) sound the way it does. Which, as Rob describes, is a busy, schizophrenic, distracted, urban sound. Which some people love, but I generally do not; I prefer records a bit more suburban, or rural perhaps, with space and light amongst the component parts. The juxtaposition of fractured, melting beats and dense, layered electronics and jazz on display here is dizzying when everything pumps together.

I’ve actually come to enjoy Cosmogramma quite a lot over the years, following my initial instinct to recoil from its extreme surfaces (although I still can’t deal with the follow-up at all). The second half eases up a little, becomes a little more spacious and easy to inhabit. Interestingly, Rob played it on vinyl, the limitations of which mean you literally just can’t push things as hard as on CD (the needle would jump right out of the groove), although a side-effect is that you need to change disc on this relatively short record three times. So yes, I’d probably listen to it more if it was less in-my-face, but it is a pretty damn good record just as it is.

Tom listened: Flying Lotus is one of those names that has been bandied around for a few years now, its profile ever more prominent since 6 Music and Pitchfork latched onto Cosmogramma and have never really looked back. Despite this, I had never knowingly heard anything from Cosmogramma before and listening to it tonight, that isn’t all that surprising – this didn’t strike me as the sort of album that you’d be pulling individual ‘songs’ from very often and there was certainly nothing remotely like a chart hit to be found in its incredibly densely packed grooves.

I wasn’t really sure what to make of this to be honest – I don’t knowingly share Nick’s misgivings but I suspect that that may be solely because I don’t have the skill or knowledge to identify them. I liked parts of Cosmogramma for sure but there was something about the jarring nature of the tracks – the way they seemed to hurtle one into the next – that made it feel quite alienating on a first listen.

To sum up…intriguing, beguiling  and difficult in just about equal measure as far as I was concerned.

The Haxan Cloak is Bobby Krlic, a musician, composer and producer from West Yorkshire, by way of Brighton. His eponymous debut album was recorded in his parents shed, with Krlic playing every instrument, a remarkable feat considering the end result which is the sound of a strong quartet performing a sludge metal opera based on a Dennis Wheatley novel.

2013’s ‘Excavation’ is a thematic continuation of that first record. Krlic has talked about them as a pair of concept albums over the course of which a central character moves from life through death and into something beyond. If death is the final frontier, then judging by ‘Excavation’ its territory is utterly unrecognisable. Where the debut record could have been a dark and foreboding piece of contemporary chamber music, this sequel is an entirely different experience.

It’s black as pitch, a chasm with a floor that can only be detected by the echo of bass depth charges as they ripple up from below. The palette is electronic, and throughout are scattered semi-familiar sounds that serve partly to lull the listener by presenting something familiar, before casting it into the void. There are beats, emerging and enveloping, but rather than convey motion or structure they drift in like the sound of a slowly extibguishing heartbeat, or the skitter and scratch of twitching neurons.

It’s difficult to describe ‘Excavation’ as a listening experience. The sense of both space and detail that Krlic creates is overwhelming. Listening to it on a system with significant bass output, as we did this evening, the record seems to surge out into the room and construct an entire world around you. There are sub-structures being built just below the range of normal hearing, entire sections of the music that play out in the bones and the skin and the walls and the floor.

The intention may be dark, but it’s beautiful too. If you buy the concept, then there is comfort to be drawn from staring into the abyss. If you don’t, then this is still a compelling and overwhelming achievement.

Tom listened: Well, I’m not sure the word ‘enjoy’ can really be used in the context of Excavation, but I came to within a whisker of it, especially as the album progressed (in some of the later ditties, the sounds of the record began to mix with something akin to a tune…in the loosest sense, admittedly).

In my response to Nick’s record from this round, Dawn of Midi, I compared it to John Coltrane…and I thought I may as well extend the comparison to this. Because it struck me on the night that both The Haxan Cloak and Coltrane are/were primarily interested in challenging their audience, and themselves, by pushing the boundaries of what we previously have perceived music to be. But whereas Coltrane looked to stretch the music beyond what had come before, Krlic is using sound and texture and a kind of lack of musicality to much the same effect. So whilst Coltrane played loads of notes – too many for some perhaps (according to Nick, Miles Davis struggled with Coltrane’s later output), The Haxan Cloak play next to none and, whilst this would normally be a bit of a turn off for me (and, to be honest, it was at times), Excavation reminded me of music just enough to keep me interested.

That said, if it had those horrible throaty death metal vocals over the top, I would have run a mile!

For our last round Graham brought a record that he claimed stood out like the proverbial sore thumb in his collection. Furthermore he then attempted to give the rather self-serving impression that he didn’t quite know how it had got there. And so the theme for this next round was set as ‘Outliers’: records that don’t fit the mould, that sit uncomfortably on your shelves.

I was pretty stumped. Half the records I own are one-offs, but none of these quite seemed to fit the bill. I started at the beginning of the alphabet and tried to pull out things that I might be able to squeeze into the theme. I only got as far as the early Cs before confirming my sense that whilst my collection is significantly comprised of one-offs of some sort or another, and whilst the reasons I took them in might be odd, illogical or hard to justify, I still made a conscious choice to give them a home, and now none of them are outliers. They’re all mine.

I have hundreds of records by bands for whom only one album made it in, and subsequently I never looked to them again, either because the first one never clicked or because it really clicked hard and that was enough to fill some specific gap for me. Some of these would be good candidates for re-examination and presentation to the DRC jury (‘Beach House’ by Beach House, ’The Noise Made By People’ by Broadcast…).

I have records by bands that stand as wonderful one-offs in my collection (say hello to ‘L’Etat Est Moi’ by German Pavement stylists Blumfeld). I have records I got because the band was supposed to mean something, or because their name gave me an echo of some possibly-real, possibly-imagined connection to someone I really did like (I have two Band of Susans records which I’m pretty sure I haven’t heard right through, and which I think were taken in because of some imagined link to Sonic Youth or Big Black). I have loads of records I bought because some aspect of them – the cover, the name, the label, the hometown – led me to assume that they would sound like someone I already loved (step forward Arcwelder).

I have genre one-offs, or things close to. Nothing in my collection sounds exactly like the sweet country folk of Laura Cantrell’s ‘Humming By The Flowered Vine’. Equally, there’s nothing in my collection, and perhaps little in the world, that sounds like Chris Morris’s stupefied late-night horror ‘Blue Jam’, (erroneously filed under ‘C’).

I have always made musical choices and connections based on half-heard recommendations, imagined family trees and ill-informed hunches, and I have no desire to change that. Nothing is a genuine outlier in my record room.

So, in the end I went for something I didn’t put into my own collection.

A couple of years ago, after a number of failed forays through my parent’s house looking for it, I asked my Mum what had happened to their record collection. I can’t recall her exact words but, to cut to the chase, she’d binned it. Whilst I would have loved to get my hands on the singles (“Oh, it was just a load of old rubbish like the Crystals…”), I knew the albums pretty well from a decade of idly thumbing through them and I knew there wasn’t anything in there I was likely to want to go back to. My time with the Houghton Weavers was definitely a primary school thing, and my time with Don Williams and Roger Whittaker is hopefully many, many years away in the opposite direction. I’d previously rescued their only Beatles and Beach Boys records (that’s one compliation by each, by the way) so this left just two albums for which I immediately felt sharp pangs. I went out and bought them both. They were gaps I needed to fill, for reasons I didn’t quite understand.

The first was The Carpenters ‘The Singles: 1969-73’. Much as I looked down on them as soon as I had a few of my own preferences to climb up onto for a vantage point, the songs of the Carpenters suffused my childhood as much as any group. They were ubiquitous on national and local radio and it seemed every house that had a record player had this album. We can happily list the reasons not to like them, but there are great songs, beautifully sung on this record.

The second was ‘Legend,’ an early-seventies compilation of key tracks by Buddy Holly and the Crickets. This sounded around our house more than it did over the airwaves, but I liked it at the time. The music seemed elemental, which is not to say primitive. The songs are simple enough in outline, but their spinning together and outwards of country and western, rhythm and blues and rockabilly into the still emerging forms of rock and roll and pop music is beguiling and bewitching. Tied to a period when the teenager was beginning to exert primacy over culture, but before Elvis and the Beatles had truly ripped the lid off and released the sexual energy that was powering these new phenomena, Buddy Holly’s songs are still sweet and pretty rather than brazen and challenging. Despite that, on close listening the detail of their constructions are often remarkable. Without galloping advances in technology to fuel infinite experimentation, this band used their minimal resources to create music with deft space, unusual rhythmic underpinnings and perfectly minimal instrumentation.

To some they may now sound like distant relics, and Holly as an artist who can be dismissed, but this is a body of work full of fine, foundational, sweet and inventive music. This may not be the record you would take to a desert island, but if you had a guitar and you could play and sing these songs, then I wager you’d be pretty happy.

Holly himself was an alluring figure. Both a straight-up kid next door and a heart-throb, he was, I have always assumed, the Elvis that your parents might have allowed you to sit with unchaperoned. Although his lasting image may be slightly gawky (thanks spectacles!) he was actually knock-out handsome. In my childhood mind all of these opposing forces were coalesced in the conflagration of his death. In fact, come to think of it, his may have been the first famous death I was aware of. I remember staring at a picture in the gatefold of him laughing astride a motorbike and thinking “Wow! He looks a bit more dangerous than that other guy in the thick-rimmed specs” and then wondering how someone like that, someone that young, could be dead. It’s interesting to reflect that the cover of ‘Legend’ appears to depict a man immortalised in his mid-late forties, the age of the audience being marketed to when this compilation was released, whereas the few photos inside show a vital, living, breathing teenager. Buddy Holly died aged 22.

This was definitely the first record I remember my Dad buying and bringing home and evangelising for. All the music here was recorded in the late fifties (1956-59) and so this was my father gleefully going back to the music that was making waves when he was young, a feeling I know myself and cherish all too well. This is a record that connects me to my father as a music fan and a young man in ways I cannot quite articulate.

Tom listened: Simply one of the most genuinely enjoyable listens I can remember having at record club – the simplicity of the compositions are breathtaking, songs that are barely there and yet are totally captivating. I loved every second, even if he seemed to lose a little umph once he moved to New York and stuck a load of instruments over the top of the songs – sometimes people don’t recognise that they are on to a good thing! Would have loved the have heard side three – hopefully I will as I fully intend to get me a copy at some point in the near future.

Graham listened: Well as well as winning the “WTF is this doing…” theme prize, Rob also wins the “shatter all preconceptions round”. I expected this to sound twee and lightweight like I remember it sounded coming out of a MW (that’s Medium Wave, for the ‘Kidz’ out there) Radio during the 70’s. It sounded just as the others describe. Just lucky for the others I threw out my ‘Bill Haley and the Comets’ album some years ago, not in same league as Buddy.

Nick listened: Very little to add given all the affusive praise above – the quality of this music and fascination of its creation really can’t be denied – but what was really fascinating to me was how many of these songs I recognised but, especially with the later ones, didn’t recognise as Buddy Holly, because they were just so different sonically to the early twangy guitar stuff. Also the insanity of referring to ‘early’ and ‘late’ material when there was only really months in between them.

Or, What Happened After We Fought the Class War.

I’m going to make no bones here: ‘This is Hardcore’, the difficult follow-up album that was greeted with confusion and consternation on its release, is Pulp’s masterpiece.

I’m going to assume that you’re familiar with at least the final three albums released by arguably the only truly great band to ride the Bullshit Britpop train all the way to Success City. If not then, seriously, stop reading this, go and listen to them all several dozen times and when you’re done, why not take a long hard look at yourself? Seriously! What on earth do you think you’re doing with your life? Time is running out. You need to address your priorities.

‘Different Class’ is a great, great album, and its highlights stand right at the top of the heap of the very best songs of the 1990s. But it has longeurs. It has some skippable tracks. It feels, after all these years, a little worn out. Relatively speaking, ‘This Is Hardcore’ has youth on its side, having been released three years later. However, in content it’s a much, much older record.

‘Different Class’ was a vicious, scabrous, righteously spiteful, uproarious record, and ultimately one with concern for people and society at its heart. ‘This Is Hardcore’ is a stunned, desperate record, reeling in the realisation that there may be very little that can be done for those same people and that there may, ultimately, be no one who can help us. It’s the sound of the party being over, even if it’s still going on, and you no longer know why you came. The queasy feeling when you’ve been out too long for the good of your health and you realise you are stuck, unable to get yourself home. It’s the sound of coming to terms with life, rather than kicking out at life. It’s arguably a hangover record, but more accurately a record for a mid-life crisis: the ultimate hangover that never goes away. It’s a grown up record, and by the time is was released in 1998, we were all grown up.

‘A Different Class’ used sex and cool as weapons in an insurgent class warfare, as Cocker’s avatars seduced theirs ways into the hearts of men and women, lodging there like a destructive shard of ice and destroying those who were economically and politically inaccessible to him. Now, as the follow-up record begins, with ‘The Fear’, even these options, these forms of agency, are closed down. After an eerie guitar line pumps green, backlit fog onto the stage, the album opens with these words:

“This is our music from a bachelor’s den/ the sound of loneliness turned up to ten/ a horror soundtrack from a stagnant water bed/ and it sounds just like this…

This is the sound of someone losing the plot/Making out that they’re okay when they’re not/ You’re gonna like it/But not a lot…

Incidentally, this bracing opening was used for one of the most exhilarating concert openings I’ve ever seen, in the Manchester Apollo, November 1998. Through the aforementioned green fog, Cocker appears in silhouette, the familiar wiry mantis, loveable but to be watched. He sings the first four lines and then, as the next verse begins, out jerks an exact replica. For the first half of the song there are two identical Jarvises gyrating about the stage. More than just a neat trick, this device perfectly portrayed the paranoia and fracturing uncertainty of this piece of work. I can’t find any footage online, which is a shame. I can’t remember many other specific moves pulled by live bands, despite having seen thousands, but this one has stayed with me for the best part of two decades.

Across the rest of the album we meet protagonists trying to come to terms with domesticity, with now failing and depressing sexual exploits, with growing older and, hanging like a spectre across the back of every frame, mortality. The title track, that leering, pre-stunned, descent into red velvet hell, can be read in a number of ways. For me, it has always been life itself that Cocker is describing, through the warped lens of the mechanics of sleazy pornography.

You can’t be a spectator, oh no…/This is hardcore/ There is no way back for you

Then there’s a song like ‘Sylvia’, which reads as a skyscraping plea for forgiveness to someone poorly-done-to by her culture, but also an apology from Cocker as self-appointed narrator for her and her ilk:

Who’s this man you’re talking to? Can’t you see what he wants to do?…
He don’t care about your problems. He just wants to show his friends.
I guess I’m just the same as him – I just didn’t know it then.
I never understood you really & I know it’s too late now.
You didn’t ask to be that way. Oh, I’m sorry Sylvia.

Or there’s ‘A Little Soul’, a sputtering torch song from one generation to the one coming up behind it:

You look like me/Please don’t turn out like me…

If that’s not enough, the closing track, ‘The Day After The Revolution’, more or less brings down the shutters on the whole enterprise. Check the lyrics out at PulpWiki http://www.pulpwiki.net/Pulp/TheDayAfterTheRevolution.

All this would be so much solipsistic mooning about if not for the quality of the songs. Track for track, ‘This Is Hardcore’ is the most inventive, the richest, most rewarding set of songs the band ever produced. With veteran producer Chris Thomas remaining in the control booth, the sound feels simultaneously warmer and more forceful. It’s a confident sound, providing dark irony for a record about the loss of confidence.

Ultimately, this is an accessible, welcoming but still challenging album. It’s life-affirming, even if it’s main achievement it to delineate some of those things life simply cannot hope to overcome. Although it, perhaps mildly, confounded expectations on its release, with hindsight it was exactly what this most pleasing of bands should have done at this point in their long career. It still stands as their crowning work.

Graham listened: Simply an incredibly powerful record and one deserving far more attention than the couple of listens I gave it on release. Not what I was expecting when it came out, but sensed it needed more listening, but it felt like a challenge at the time. It killed on this particular Tuesday night!

Tom listened: Right. Tricky one this! As I wrote up my Triffids blogpost I couldn’t help but compare it to This is Hardcore – a record that sounds, on first acquaintances, mired in the execrable (to me) self-congratulatory sounds of Britpop. That first song is a dead ringer for Suede. Every other song sounds like Ziggy era Bowie or Transformer era Lou – uninteresting starting points for a musical movement if you ask me but intractably connected to the melodies and soundscapes of Britpop. I have even gone back to my beloved Radiator and C’Mon Kids albums since to see if they sound awful and…well, let’s just say that time hasn’t been kind (especially with the latter). So This is Hardcore caused me problems – on that first listen I just couldn’t see past that bloody scene.

Luckily, Rob had a spare copy. He was keen for someone else to have it. I put my hand up first. Partly because when Rob says something is great…well, he is usually right (but don’t tell him this). Partly because I have always had this suspicion that a lot of fantastic music played at record club has passed me by because of our format. In many cases, one listen just isn’t enough for me. So I have listened to This is Hardcore a few more times now and, you know what? It really is magnificent. Bloody hell, looks like he’s right again (even though some of it still sounds perilously close to Suede).

Dan Deacon sets his stall out early on ‘Spiderman of the Rings’, his first widely distributed album, released in 2007. ‘Wooody Woodpecker’ takes the (near) titular cartoon cackle-bird and turns his laugh, processed into high and low versions, and layers it into total cacophony. It’s hilarious, then overwhelming, then a little scary, as when something that seems good feels like it might actually be really, really bad. This fun house could actually be run by an escaped madman. It’s impossible to know whether to classify this as bubblegum pop or total noise war, and there aren’t that many opening tracks that straddle that particular dichotomy.

His deranged approach to music making is what makes this a wild and intoxicating world in which to spend time. Deacon, as evidenced here, is a maximalist by gleeful instinct, always piling stuff atop more stuff and pushing it all to the point where the heap starts to break down and collapse in on itself.

Reference the synth line in the middle section of ‘Wham City’. It starts like a simple-enough high-pitch oscilloscope tone and runs this way for a few bars. For the second pass Deacon adds more variation, the peaks are higher, the troughs lower, the oscillations more varied. By the third and final run through these ups and downs have been whipped into a crazy sonar jack-knife switching back and folding in half upon themselves. This sequence repeats for a number of minutes, a clear testament to an artist who will push from statement to over-statement to sheer lunacy in three easy steps. Note that this passage is but one in the middle of a 12 minute epic which is more notable for the schoolyard chant that runs throughout it and which I reproduce here as it epitomises and encapsulates the qualities of Deacon’s music better than I ever could.

There is a mountain of snow, up past the big glen
We have a castle enclosed, there is a fountain
Out of the fountain flows gold, into a huge hand
That hand is held by a bear who had a sick band

Of ghosts and cats
And pigs and bats
With brooms and bats
And wigs and rats
And play big dogs like queens and kings
And everyone plays drums and sings

About big sharks
Sharp swords
Beast bees
Bead lords
Sweet cakes
Mace lakes

O ma ma ma ma ma ma ma ma

Deacon is a kid in a candy store who has quickly scoffed all the most additive-laced sweets and is now smashing his way into the toy store next door to grab the cheapest musical instruments he can find to make havoc with. Dance music is his milieu (although he has also worked significantly in contemporary classical) but glee is his mode.

His live shows are legendary. He regularly sets up his Heath Robinson collection of gear on a low table and floor level in the middle of the audience and just goes from there. It’s this simplicity of approach that drives Deacon’s music like a pounding little heart. That he uses these simple starting materials: joy, enthusiasm, a grab-bag of music-making equipment and a willingness to put the pedal to the floor and builds such insanely overwhelming music from them is very impressive. That he manages, in the midst of all this, to make music so deliriously convincing is a near miracle.

Tom listened: It has struck me, whilst reflecting on Spiderman Of The Rings, that what Dan Deacon manages to achieve is really quite remarkable. The playfulness, chaos and (seeming) naivety of the music on offer immediately brought to mind Animal Collective at their loosest and least structured. But Animal Collective have always sounded to me like adults trying to be children – Dan Deacon doesn’t sound like he is having to try at all. And I think the reason why is the fact that, unlike AC, Spiderman of the Rings is shot through with a sense of humour; a charming silliness that a five…or fifty…year old would appreciate (give or take five years here or there that describes me and my son, Kit – we both connected with the album straight away). Other words that spring to mind are bonkers and gleeful and neither are a bad thing as far as I’m concerned.

In short, the boy Mitchell produces another cracker from his treasure trove of alternative sounds and noises.

Graham listened: Basically what Tom said. Started off thinking this is a bit all over the place, but it charmed me fairly quickly after that. Uplifting and playful at the same time, is quite a trick.

There is something to be said for stripping things down.

Plato believed that essential attributes make an entity what it fundamentally is. Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers believed that every song they composed as The Chic Organisation had to have a DHM (Deep Hidden Meaning) without which no song could endure. And if it’s good enough for both Plato and Chic…

Both were talking about the central core without which any being or endeavour was insubstantial, unreal, worthless. Plato and Aristotle tried to define the fundamental Forms, the eternal and unchanging qualities from which earthly beings could be constructed. Chic worked hard to incorporate Deep Hidden Meanings in every song and then, in order to further investigate the elements of which great music consisted, they took the breakdown from the stage onto vinyl and out into the clubs of New York, deliberately stripping down tracks for their listeners, then reconstructing them just to show what Forms they were made of.

We all feel the fundamental truth at the core of these ideas of fundamental truth. We either know or, through conditioning, are made to feel, that there is an elemental being made of simple, pure components, burning strong at the heart of our particular stew of physical, emotional and psychological characteristics. Somewhere, we assert, I can find the real me, the fundamental me. If only I could get far enough away from the rest of you. If only I could get even closer to the rest of you. If only it were quieter. If only it were louder.

Since the Enlightenment, when God fell from the heavens and landed badly, we’ve been working towards a conception of a human spirit that we are certain, bristling as we tend to with self-impressed confidence, can burn just as brightly as He once did. We have become more important to ourselves and as this has happened we have sought, generation after generation, to know ourselves better, to strip away the meaningless garb we hide ourselves beneath and find the true, essential us, the us that we believe must be the best us.

It took more than 300 years but, in 1978 we seemed, as a species, to be getting very close.

Firstly, Chic, those philosophers of the essential, released ‘C’est Chic’ which contained both ‘Le Freak’ and ‘I Want Your Love’. It doesn’t get all that much better than that.

Secondly, Elvis Costello released ‘This Year’s Model’, which I love and listen to lots and like better than ‘Imperial Bedroom’ which I have heard once.

I also like PJ Harvey’s second album, ‘Rid Of Me’ more than I like her last album, ‘Let England Shake’. ‘Rid Of Me’ always seemed to me to be one of the closest approximations we have of an artist’s true heart. It’s raw, sometimes literally. It’s direct, both in content, construction and sound. Its intent, in part, is also to say, ‘this is me, and this is how that feels’. I think it’s one of the most important records, if we can consider any records important, of the last 30 years. If we can’t, then i’ll settle for it being one of the most telling.

‘Let England Shake’ is a work of art. It’s impossible not to admire the deft skill and sheer brute creativity that went into it. It should, as an aside, have been soundtracking the last 12 months as we commemorated the 100-year anniversary of the Great War. In hindsight it seems surprising to me that it didn’t. I must write some more ‘Disappointed of Devon’ letters…

It’s a great, great record and one of the records I would be happy to put forward as evidence that rock music can be as mighty an expression of what it is to be human as any of high culture. But, it’s an artist creating a piece of art for us to stand and look at. ‘Rid Of Me’ is an artist creating herself. I love them both, but if ‘Let England Shake’ is PJ Harvey’s finest expression, then ‘Rid Of Me’ is PJ Harvey’s essence.

Graham listened: Having not been about for ‘Let England Shake’ in Round 2, I can’t comment on any comparison. But after tonight I suppose I can best summarize by saying, “The buggers have finally worn me down, can I borrow some PJ Harvey please?”

Tom listened: Having listened to Rid of Me on a mate’s crappy car stereo not long after it was released (and never again), I was convinced it was an album I did not care for. Too abrasive and harsh for my tastes, I was much more drawn to PJ Harvey’s parched and spindly third album ‘To Bring You My Love’, which I owned on cassette and enjoyed immensely…until we no longer listened to cassettes any more (when did that happen?).

Well…for the first half of the record I sat there all smug and relieved that memory had not played tricks on me and that the album was almost exactly as I recalled. Really raw and uncompromising – just the sort of thing Rob loves but a bit too much for me. However, flip the record over and a very different beast is revealed – at least that was how it seemed to me. By the end of the listen, I was more or less converted and thought that I could probably even learn to love the more raucous songs on the album over time…in fact, I would probably agree with Rob that this album is probably much closer to the soul of the person that is PJ Harvey than any of her other albums.

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!

Bring ‘not an album’ pleaded Nick. To me that sounded dangerously close to an invitation to bring another personal grab-bag compilation. I thought about bringing a rubber duck instead, but I’m out of practice, and anyway, for a while I’ve been wondering how it might be possible, indeed whether it would be wise, to bring ’69 Love Songs’ to Record Club.

Even as someone who has forced my fellow clubsters through the hellish collapsing drones of Sunn O))), the abrasive electronic power tools of emptyset and the exquisite hyper-extension of ‘Disintegration Loops’, the thought of playing a joker and making them sit through the whole of this 1999 album seems, well, a bit much.

That’s not to suggest that it’s a difficult or testing listen. Far, far from it. One of the most striking things about the collection is just how easily it slips across the ears. Sure, some of the tracks are sub-60 seconds, and there’s a marginally higher-than-average percentage of ukulele-strummed numbers, but nothing on the record feels like it was dashed off just to provide one more tick in Stephin Merrit’s self-created quest to write 69 love songs. Take any selection of 12-15 of these songs, jumble them up and you’d have a perfectly delightful album. That Merrit chose not to do that and instead to put what for most other musicians would equate to a career’s worth of music onto one single release, is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this project.

Understandably, variety is key. There are twirling whirlers like ‘Absolutely Cuckoo’, mournful waltzes like ‘I Don’t Believe In The Sun’, campfire ballads like ‘All My Little Words’, charming metaphorical foot-tappers like (trust me) ‘Chicken With Its Head Cut Off’, oblique geographical allegory’s like ‘Reno, Dakota’ and perfectly weighted indie pop like ‘I Don’t Want To Get Over You’. All in the first 6 tracks.

The rest of the record lays out an almost endless banquet of all things in between, from the heartfelt to the pastiche, from experimental digressions to direct hits. Throughout Merritt displays his cool wit and sophistication, and mastery of those disparate styles he chooses to adopt. He has famously said that “’69 Love Songs’ is not remotely an album about love. It’s an album about love songs, which are very far away from anything to do with love.” That’s a cute point, but it just about holds. There’s a knowing distance maintained as he sings about how we sing about the way we feel about being in love, either never approaching his own heart or, if in fact he does, hiding it very well.

’69 Love Songs’ is comfortably the longest album I own, clocking in at a good 50 minutes (e.g. another full-length album) longer than ‘Have One On Me’. It feels to me like one of the great occluded landmarks of modern alternative music, a record most people know exists but few have journeyed to see. That’s a shame. It wears its conceptual foundation very lightly. I’ve never listened to the whole thing in one sitting, but rather than a feat of sheer quantity, it’s the consistency and care that comes over each time. ’69 Love Songs’ could have been a dumping ground. Instead it’s a treasure trove.

Tom listened: Although we listened to 69 Love Songs from Graham’s ever more distant dining table, I managed to hear enough to be intrigued. After all, I didn’t get Jens Lekman’s ‘Oh You’re So Silent, Jens’ at all on first listen and that ended up being one of my top listens of the decade. And so, listening to one third of 69 Love Songs and hearing many echoes of Mr Lekman (in fact Karen guessed it was Jens upon stumbling into the house half way through) and really liking it very much indeed, it struck me that 69 Love Songs could be the biggest single treasure trove of music available, especially if the songs endure as well as those by his Scandinavian soundalike. Lashings of Okkervil River too, which is no bad thing in my book. But, don’t forget, this pre-dates both, and maybe was the blueprint for a sound and modus-operandi that was quite prevalent throughout the noughties.

But, for me, the most impressive feature of 69 Love Songs is that it really doesn’t sound at all like it should. I always imagined that this would be like an elongated bed-fellow of Alien Lanes or The Commercial Album; charmingly messy with gems appearing every so often, peaking through the chaos; attention deficit disorder indie. That couldn’t be further from truth. These songs are fully formed, laboured over. Time has been spent getting them ‘right’. It’s a monumental effort and one that would, surely, have left Stephin Merrit thinking ‘where do I go from here’. I have no idea what he did before or next. And, unfortunately for him, I imagine that those who own 69 Love Songs probably think that this is more than enough Magnetic Fields for one lifetime (and I mean this as a statement of fact rather than, in any way, a criticism).