Author: monstershark

When the history of British music is written there’s a fair chance that Cornershop will be forgotten. That’s a shame, a crime perhaps. Many, many bands have made much bigger splashes but much smaller contributions.

Cornershop, like XTC before them, came out of a scene which they soon transcended, going on to make truly original music, blending influences in new ways, testing the limits of their talents and steadily finding sounds that others were missing. In doing so they made their way out into territory that they alone mapped and colonised. This left them seeming outliers when in fact, again like XTC, they are, at their heart, a deeply British band. In their records can be found a sound collage of the last 40 years of at least one, if not more, of Britain’s histories.

By the time they reached ‘Handcream For A Generation’, their fourth album, they were at their most confident. They were buoyed by the success of ‘When I Was Born For The Seventh Time’, a record that had perfected the loose-limbed groove they had been working out over the preceding two and, thanks to a Norman Cook remix, rode it all the way to number one. Four years later, with ‘Brimful of Asha’ still echoing through playlists up and down the nation, they returned with easily their most ambitious album. Whilst it may not have captured anything like the attention of its predecessor, for me it’s their definitive statement, or at least my favourite. It’s a record of pure and flawless pleasure and always the record of theirs I choose, always without hesitation and never to be disappointed. It’s never not a pleasure to hear.

Which is not to say that the pleasures herein are steady and consistent. The wild variety of ‘Handcream’ is confounding, but ultimately one of the reasons to love it. It swerves fearlessly from lazy funk to pulsing trance to pastiche 70s cock rock to playground singalongs to 15 minute Eastern bliss-outs with apparently no grand purpose or scheme. The whole collection wears a huge smile on its face and, like a stick of rock, this attitude is evident wherever and however you slice it. Each song does something different yet all retain a hazy upbeat vibe and none fail to get fingers, feet and heads moving happily.

Zoom in even further and the detail is a microscopic treasure trove. There’s the three different telephone tones used to propel ‘People Power’, the repetition of song titles across several tracks as if political slogans, the moment in ‘Motion the 11’ when the MC stops the session just to make sure the engineer is recording because “this might just be the one”. ‘The London Radar’ straps flight announcement samples together, Avalanches-style, and gets the whole thing airborne like a 70s British Airways advert. Then there’s the simple pleasure of the opening track ‘Heavy Soup’ which introduces the main players and trails several of the tracks they are about to perform, as if this were live at the Harlem Apollo. It’s playful, endearing and pulled off with just enough verve and attention to detail.

Those who waited five years for ‘Handcream for a Generation’ to land seemed to struggle to know what to do with it. The trick was simple, just enjoy it. For me, it’s much better than ‘When I Was Born…’. Here they combine not just happy grooves, but 70s rock, 90s electronica, millennial hip-hop, timeless dancehall and sunrise mantras and the whole melting pot thing has more spike, more juice, more joy, more thrills.

In the midst of all this there’s a subtle, oblique politics at work. Even post-millennium there seemed to be something of an open challenge in the seamless combinations, as opposed to clashes, of sounds, cultures, languages and styles in this record. Although the band make no direct claims herein, the album stands as a state of the sound of the nation address more freewheeling and convincing than any others I can recall from the period.

It’s the Cornershop album I always reach for and in the 12 years since I first heard it, I’ve reached for it a hell of a lot.

Tom listened: Before this evening my knowledge of Cornershop did not extend beyond Brimful of Asha. I liked that single well enough, kind of in the same way as, say, Wake Up Boo, it cheered me up to hear it on the radio, gave me hope that all was not lost with chart music (unlike nowadays, I have to say) but it didn’t occur to me to delve any deeper into Cornershop’s music – I always thought it would be a case of ‘more of the same but less so’.

I certainly never imagined that Cornershop would cover the breadth of musical landscapes in evidence on Handcream for a Generation. In scope it reminded me of In a Bar Under the Sea era Deus and the Beastie’s Check Your Head – high praise indeed. As Rob has suggested, it is charming and fun, like the kid in school that makes everyone else laugh just by showing up, it all seems effortless.

My only gripe was the 15 minute Noel Gallagher sullied jamathon. Some long songs seem vital (Marquee Moon, Halleluwah, Sister Ray), others outstay their welcome. This one could have ended after 5 minutes!

Graham listened: What a revelation this was. I just about knew that Norman Cook had reinvented Brimful of Asha in to a hit but suppose I just thought that might be the only interesting thing Cornershop were capable of. No need to study to hard on this, just sit back and enjoy a groovy, funny, cultural mash-up that ensues from the beginning.

A real, between the eyes reminder, of the value of DRC!

Nick listened: I actually really liked the 15-minute Noel G-powered ragga-drone-groove-thing. As an album this was all over the place and difficult to get hold of mentally, but thoroughly enjoyable. I vaguely recalled a couple of the singles from the time it came out, and recalled it being moderately well-received, but it had pretty much evaporated from my memory over the intervening years. I own When I Was Born… (and recall the shop assistant in Northampton Spinadisc being visibly pleased to sell it to me when I was at university) but have barely listened to it in 15 years, which makes for a weird kind of ‘what if’ sensation with the band when presented with later work which is just as good but not blessed with a seismic hit single (or three; “Sleep On The Left Side” and “Good Shit” were all over the radio way back when, too, if I recall).

We’ve played somewhere North of 200 records since 2 February 2011 when Tom, Nick and I sat down to listen to Bark Psychosis, McCarthy and Skip Spence. Nick’s challenge for this evening’s meeting was to bring back to the group something which one of the other players had already presented. It could be something you wanted to hear again, something you thought we might have more to say about, something you wanted to reexamine from a different angle or, more likely, something you thought we had unjustly talked all over the first time around.

I like to be thorough, so I made a list.

Much as I have genuinely loved hearing old favourites again, or making proper acquaintance with records that had passed me by first time, the biggest effect DRC has had on me has been to introduce me to a huge amount of music I had either avoided to simply not heard before. I’ve been intrigued and pleased to hear absolutely everything everyone has brought, no matter what my preconceptions, except for Marillion who are fucking shit.

So, as I scrolled down the list, I marked out the records I might choose.

I could have chosen something I might have presented to the Club had I not been beaten to it by one of the others, like ‘Hidden’ or ‘Venus Luxure No 1 Baby’ or ‘She Hangs Brightly’ or ‘The Drift’ or ‘Strange Free World’ or ‘Post’ or ‘Silent Shout’ or ‘…Well?’ or ‘Clear Spot’ or ‘Psychocandy’ or ‘Spiderland’ or ‘The Smiths’ or ‘Icky Mettle’ or ‘Knock Knock’ or ‘Third’ or ‘Life’s Rich Pageant’.

I could have brought along something I already had that I thought deserved a second listen and re-examination, for good or for bad, like ‘Let England Shake’ or ‘Richard D James’ or ‘Strange Mercy’ or ‘Spirit of Eden’.

I could have used this as a spur to go out and buy something I really, really liked on first hearing and wanted to get to know a lot better, like ‘Double Nickels On The Dime’ or ‘Oar’ or ‘Another Green World’ or ‘The Modern Dance’ or ‘Drive By’ or ‘New Boots and Panties’ or ‘Super Roots 7’ or ‘Dusty in Memphis’ or ‘New History of Warfare’

I could have bought something I have subsequently hammered on Spotify and given back more substantially to the artist who made it, like ‘Grace and Danger’ (except he’s dead) or ‘Young Man in America’ or ‘The Idler Wheel’ or ‘John Wizards’.

Instead, I decided to choose one of the records I’d first heard at a meeting and then subsequently made the effort to go out and buy.

I went through the master list.

I made a sub-list.

There was one record on it.

This one.

I’m not really sure how this came to be. I’ve loved, admired, been intrigued by and wanted more of dozens and dozens of the records I’ve first heard at DRC. How come I only ever went out and bought one? I guess Spotify explains that to a very large extent, but not completely.

Perhaps what’s happening is an extension of the way we used to listen to and share records with our friends? Given the chance I would always buy something the others didn’t already have covered. They would do the same and, in doing so, we would increase the total span of records available to the community. Why double up on Spacemen 3 when one of us could be taking care of Husker Du? If that long-dormant instinct has been kicked into life by DRC, then that’s pretty cool. Certainly DRC is by far the closest I’ve come to sharing my record owning, buying and listening life with a bunch of others since I left University.

Even this record I picked up almost by chance. Every couple of months or so I have what’s left of my hair chopped back by a local barber who has an MBE but not, tellingly, for his hairdressing. This usually happens early on a Saturday morning and by the time I hit the market town streets there are weekend stalls setting up, one of which has two boxes of vinyl for sale, curated, I’ve always assumed, from house clearances and the like. They’re worth a browse nowadays although pre-DRC I would have scoffed at them, more than likely. As it is, I’m now more than willing to take a cheap punt on something I would have dismissed as 70s AOR or leftfield 80s pop before Tom, Nick and Graham opened my ears. Last Summer I spent £12 on 11 records almost all of which I would have previously overlooked and at least half of which are brilliant. See here: (http://instagram.com/p/Wop2QBSfOh/?modal=true).

I picked up ‘Hejira’ on one of these mornings. I’ve listened to it a whole lot since then and going back to it again this last week has been a great pleasure. I don’t have anything of weight to add to Tom’s beautifully judged write-up from Round 47 other than to say that I’m working through most of the reactions he describes and have been ever since I got this sleek, elliptical and wonderful record, across the street from the barber shop.

It’s not the DRC choice I’d take to a desert island. It’s not the biggest revelation. It’s probably not even in my top 20 of previous choices, but I like it a great deal and it’s absolutely as good a representation as any of the way DRC has had a really big impact on my life.

Tom listened again: Funnily enough this Summer has been one where I have listened to Joni Mitchell and pretty much nothing else. Occasionally dipping back to Blue (which still leaves me cold – a little too reedy and willowy for my tastes) but immersing myself completely in the complex, deep waters of Court and Spark and The Hissing of Summer Lawns, it’s ironic that Hejira is the only Joni album I don’t think I’ve revisited at all. Not because it isn’t magnificent but because I already know it well, whereas C&S and HoSL have languished in my collection collecting dust for nigh on 20 years waiting for the dullard in me to listen hard enough to see the genius they so blatantly are.

Hejira is a VERY different beast to both those records but is just as good and I left the evening feeling a little guilty that I had neglected it so during this Summer’s Jonifest.

Nothing helps a record gain a little extra frisson, perhaps some extra purchase in the long run, more than the sense that there’s some deep-seated reason that you should dislike it, but you just can’t help yourself.

As I recall, I was heavily prepared to find against Elastica. The press at the time did a pretty good job of painting Justine Frischmann as a hanger-on with pretensions. When they weren’t doing that, in what in retrospect was a shocking display of route-one sexism, they were focusing on the band’s magpie tendencies. Where had they nicked this riff from, and whither this drum part? They were classic talentless bandwagon jumpers, surely?

By about the third time I heard ‘Stutter’, none of that mattered. Freewheeling spiky punk pop, wantonly brief and sharp enough to slip between your ribs and cut deep where it hurts. Also, and this may help some, sometimes assumed to be about the drunken impotence of one of the great totems of the scene we were all supposed to be looking up to. It’s a giddy, cocky rush of pure joyful adrenaline described memorably by Spin magazine as “deliver[ing] four brilliant pop songs”. After this, they could be forgiven almost anything. That they followed with the insistent insouciance of ‘Line Up’ and the bopping swagger of ‘Connection’ seemed almost miraculous.

All of which generated enough excitement that even a straight-laced kiddo like me could giddily look past things that would have turned me off alchemists of lesser stripe. An album full of singles, B-sides and stuff we’ve heard before? No problem, I’m happy to have it all in one place. Band being sued by Wire and The Stranglers? Ah well. Who cares when the songs are this damned good?

This point is worth dwelling on before dismissing.

Firstly, fair enough. If you were, or indeed are, Colin Newman or Jean Jacques Burnel and you heard a new band blatantly lifting ‘Three Girl Rhumba’ or ‘No More Heroes’ then you might well dash off a stiff rejoinder of a legal nature. And you would be well within your rights.

Otherwise, forget it. Lifting, appropriating and adapting other works is the essence of pop art and pop music, and Elastica did it with such élan that all we could do was fight to surpress our grins.

QED: ‘Vaseline’, an 80 second track which pares Blondie’s ‘Sunday Girl’ down to its essence and then smacks you in the face with it, twice. It’s a fabulous piece of work. 6 years later Soulwax and Richard X chums were making merry with mash-ups and nowadays it’s impossible to imagine pop without the joyful liberating of old songs in the service of the new. Elastica led the way.

Also, and here I’ll rest, those reference points are exquisite, especially at a time when were were otherwise being encouraged to revere Lennon at his most bloated or anything with a Union Jack slapped unironically across its rickenbacker. If a hundred people went back to discover ‘Pink Flag’ as a result of ‘Connection’ then good job Elastica, say I. If I had to choose between bands reappropriating Wire and bands trying to be Status Quo, I know which way I’d be heading. In fact, I did have to, and I did.

Listening back now, what comes through with full force is the bristling life and energy of this debut album. By contemporary standards it’s nowhere near as arch and contrived, as knowing and detached, as you might expect or remember. It’s a killer, front to back, armed to the teeth with glinting choruses, razor-sharp guitar angles and enough attitude and disregard for safety to make you fear for what it might do next.

Here’s another way it stands in marked contrast both to its contemporaries of the time and to those who have followed. Elastica understood the power of brevity. Their songs do what they have it in them to do, with bags of energy, and then they STOP. Take ‘Annie’, a belter packed with pogo power and head-banging brio. It zings along for 1min 14seconds and then, its business done, it just ends. Where most other bands would be searching for a bridge to take them back to a point where they could run through the whole thing again. Elastica pull the plug and leave an electric aftertaste crackling around the room.

On its release in 1995 ‘Elastica’ became the fastest selling debut album since ‘Definitely Maybe’ and kept that rather niche honour for a further ten years, a demonstration of just how connected the worlds of pop, art and spectacle were with what people were actually anticipating and buying. Almost twenty years later it still stands up tall.

To my mind there were two truly great britpop records, and this is one of them. And tough luck, Albarn and Anderson. Your ‘hanger on’ made the list comfortably ahead of either of you.

Nick listened: Em brought this into our record collection when we moved in together, too. Great songs, great attitude, great production. Yes, it’s ‘derivative’, but I can’t name much music which isn’t. I can, however, name a lot which isn’t as good as this.

Tom listened: I have never considered Elastica as contenders and, as a result, I was pleasantly surprised by their debut which was punchy and sharp. But whilst I can see why Rob would suggest this to be one of the top two Britpop albums (I’m guessing Different Class would be the other one), for me, the best albums by Blur, Supergrass and (if they are can be ‘genrefied’ as Britpop) Super Furry Animals all seemed to have a certain something (playfulness perhaps, identity maybe) that Elastica seemed – on a first listen – to lack. Enjoyable enough though!

Tom’s rules were simple. Pick a letter, pick a number. I ended up with E8 and so began at the beginning of the E’s, counted records until I reached the eighth and then pulled out the first album I came to.

I spend time thinking about my choices for Devon Record Club. There are rules to follow, often themes to be adhered to and I have my own internal standards and checklists that need to be respected. I think carefully about whether my records will surprise, delight or horrify the other attendees. I prepare and curate my choices and one of the unintended effects is that the one person who rarely gets a surprise from them is me. One of the reasons I like the occasional ‘Year of Release’ theme is that it restricts choice and sends me to records I might otherwise overlook.

Before I pulled out my randomly selected album, this felt like the ultimate extension of that. A choice over which we have no choice. Exciting! Well, maybe. One of the things it’s made me think about is what makes a good record to listen to and talk about. That’s because as I counted along the Es, I passed Earth, Echo and the Bunnymen, Eggs, 808 State (misfiled perhaps?) and landed in the middle of Elastica. Their debut album was the seventh record I counted, and thus had ticked by. A shame I thought. It’s a perfect record for generating debate and disagreement and one of the fuels of our meetings is the power of pontification. It’s also a really terrific listen. But I missed it by one, thanks purely to the accident of me filing it before the EPs I own by the same band.

And next up was this, the only record I own by Eleventh Dream Day. One the one hand: perfect. A record I’ve had for 20 years and probably listened to less than 20 times. A new discovery for me as well as the group. Except, I’ve passed it over when scanning the Es over the years for a reason. It’s a decent record, but one surrounded by more immediately interesting, rewarding, ear, eye and finger grabbing choices. It could be a wallflower, hanging in the back waiting for a chance to shine, or it could be just an average record.

Eleventh Dream Day, from Chicago, are, as they say, stalwarts. They formed in 1983 and have been releasing records ever since. ‘Live to Tell’ is their fifth from a list that, to date, numbers twelve. They’ve had generally positive reviews, but after a couple of records on Atlantic, of which this was the second, their shot at breaking through had passed. Clearly they weren’t in it for fame and fortune and have carried on making music together ever since. Inevitably I have to note that perhaps they are most notable as the other project of Doug McCombs, bass player of Tortoise.

‘Live To Tell’ is a pretty good album, full of rousing, alternative rock tunes which bustle through at a fair clip. They’re scuzzy, straightforward and have a little cowpunk stomp about them which is both endearing and energizing. Critics seems to share the view that they are influenced by Neil Young. I don’t get that from the songwriting or the playing, but almost every song has a pause whilst the band step back to make space for a slashing guitar solo. And that’s about that. I like it well enough and I’ve enjoyed listening to it ahead of the meeting. I just can’t imagine it’s going to turn any heads this evening, in much the same way I can’t quite imagine meeting someone who declared “Eleventh Dream Day” when asked to name their favourite band. That’s not an insult, by the way, although I fully accept that it sounds exactly like one.

So, it goes back onto the shelves alongside (spiritually, but not physically) other records, by Razorcuts and Surgery and Rein Sanction and That Dog and Tsunami and Scrawl, that I’ve picked up for unknown reasons and which have languished ever since. Maybe those ones will sound revelatory if they pop out of Tom’s random record generator. We’ll have to wait and see.

Update: I miscounted and the evening before the meeting, with this piece already in the can, I realised that the 12″ of ‘Bring On The Dancing Horses’ had been lurking next to ‘Crocodiles’ all the time. Which meant my REAL E8 was something different after all.

Nick didn’t listen: …

Tom listened to one track: And thought it sounded pretty good. But hasn’t explored any further…

XTC got their hooks into me at an early age. They stuck there, I incorporated them and many years later they reeled me in.

I’ve argued before that everyone has a formative period when they are soaking in music from all around them and that the sounds that make up part of this absorbed fluid are the sounds which resonate the most down the years. Judging by the songs that still make the hairs at the back of my neck stand up, even though I was too young to buy them and have no direct association or specific attachment to them, my sweet spot was roughly 1979 to 1982. Not everything, you understand, in fact probably just a handful of songs, all told, but my what a whallop they still pack.

‘It’s Different For Girls’, ‘One In Ten’, ‘Games Without Frontiers’, ‘Johnny and Mary’, ‘Walking On The Moon’, ‘Mirror In The Bathroom’, ‘Ashes to Ashes’, ‘Geno’, ‘My Girl’, ‘Oliver’s Army’ and on and on. I can place these and dozens of other songs within this timeframe just by the tingly effect they have on some reptilian part of my central musical cortex, where they pulse away forever, immortal, ready to transport me back to the kitchen of my parent’s house where I sat once, bathing in radio.

Some of these songs are by artists I’ve gone on to get to know well and cherish, like Dexy’s and The Beat. Others are total outliers for me. Bowie and Gabriel are major artists but we’ve never connected. I think of XTC as almost the prime example.Their charting singles from ‘Making Plans for Nigel’ through to ‘Senses Working Overtime’ lapped away at the edges of my developing sense of pop music and slowly became beloved years before I ever realised they were so deeply in my head but it’s only in the last five years or so that I’ve gone back and started to spend time with the albums that host these signature songs. In some ways I regret it, as with repeated playing comes a certain wearing away of the frisson, the scent of magic and transportive effect. Also, before I always knew they were there, waiting for me to reach out to them in discovery. Now that’s gone.

In every other way, no second thoughts. The records are rich, vibrant, inventive, playful and a pleasure to spend time with. None of them hit the bullseye quite like those key singles did when I was a schoolboy, but then how could they?

XTC are outliers, related to no-one, reminiscent of few and followed by fewer. They found and kept their space thanks to their twin engines, Colin Moulding and Andy Partridge, and driven by the two they put out 8 albums in as many years, from the buzzing post-punk This Is Pop? of ‘White Music’ through to the lush pastoral orchestrations of ’Skylarking’ (11 in 11 if you count the Dukes of Stratosphear and stretch out to 1989’s ‘Oranges and Lemons’). All this despite the well-documented breakdown that effectively ended them as a touring band.

The nexus for me still sits somewhere between ‘Drums and Wires’ and ‘Black Sea’, when they were spiky, driven, ambitious, unsettled and squirting out taut, telling pop in unique shapes whilst expanding their range and depth year on year. ‘Black Sea’ gets the nod although i’m not entirely sure why. In practice it might be because it’s exactly half way between the pop-zap of ‘Drums’ and the looser more folk inflected ‘English Settlement’. Every XTC record sounds like a step along the way, a mid-point between the last one and the next one. Perhaps the mark of a great band is one who’s best work you just can’t choose.

We talked about singles earlier, and ‘Black Sea’ produced five, although only three of these troubled the charts: ‘Generals and Majors’ is a fine bobbing and whistling bustle of a tune, poking a fairly blunt stick at militarisation but, primarily, giving us an incessantly toe-tapping first single, ‘Towers of London’ is a down-tuned paean to the builders who lost their lives whilst constructing the capital’s skyline, then next to last on the album comes ‘St Rock (Is Going To Help Me)’, a scratching, scathing hooligan of a number, on the one hand all slabs of guitar and stamping baselines, on the other a gleefully snickering poke at male impotence and incompetence.

The remaining 8 tracks are as varied and strong as these, if lacking the weight of 30 years airplay. ‘Respectable Street’ is the true bridge between The Kinks and ‘Parklife’, otften passed over when tracing the lineage, it nails suburban curtain twitchers (“Avon lady fills the creases/ When she manages to squeeze in/ Past the caravans/ That never move from their front gardens”) and stands as a clear signpost to the band’s heritage, which came down more from the Beatles and their contemporary chroniclers of the surreal mundanity of English life than from the Year Zero punks they just happened to be contemporaneous with.

Elsewhere there’s the party-starting nuclear terror stomp ‘Living Through Another Cuba’, ‘Love At First Sight’ and ‘No Language In Our Lungs’ demonstrating two sides of XTC’s pop stridency, the clattering ‘Paper and Iron’ and even an incongruent seven minute closer ‘Travels In Nihilon’ which comes over like a galley-ship freak out and just about manages to earn its place.

I can’t point you to one place for everything you need to hear from XTC (although you could start with ‘Fossil Fuel’, their dizzyingly strong singles compilation). To me they are a band who need, or indeed deserve, to be consumed whole. There’s more than enough for lovers of smart British rock to lose themselves in a back catalogue that really does reward a deep dive. That they never produced a single definitive statement ultimately, to my mind, is to their credit. They were too restless, too inventive, too playful, too damned good to be pinned down in one place.

Tom listened: That XTC are fantastic goes without saying. What it is that makes them so is harder to pin down. They don’t seem to do all that much that’s different to a plethora of other bands but are just off kilter enough to make them compelling. Maybe it’s Andy Partridge’s singing – a kind of back of the throat (but not raspy) my food’s gone down the wrong way kind of warble that sounds awful on paper but is palatable enough in practice to ensure that XTC stand out from the crowd. Maybe its the mix of pop hooks, new wave sounds combined with a whiff of psychedelia (which became more of a pong as XTC grew older). Maybe it’s just that they had the best tunes. Whatever, XTC stood out at the time, released a slew of impeccable singles but, it appears, had strength in depth. Sure enough, Black Sea sounded like a must have – more accessible and less arch than the sole XTC album in my collection, Skylarking. Another Mitchell endorsed cracker!

Graham listened: I used to love XTC as a youngster. Strangely I do not posses anything by them these days. I’m sure in a cardboard box lurking in the loft storage I would find a whole host of C90’s with their albums on, because I definitely used to have them on at home and in the car. So their absence from my collection is as much about media and format changes as it is about my lazy record buying. It was great to be reminded how great and important they were. It spurred me on to think about finding and opening that Pandora’s box of C90’s, to be reminded of what other treasures my tastes of the early 80’s could offer up. They’ll definitely be a bit of Aztec Camera and Orange Juice (like XTC, absent from my collection these days) knocking around in there. If DRC are really lucky, I’ll find a copy of Marillion’s 1984 ‘Real to Reel’ live album! Wish me luck boys!

These days I rarely consider the role of performance in music. Circumstances have dwindled my opportunities to see live bands effectively down to zero. I hardly ever watch music on TV, maybe hitting two or three heritage docs on BBC Four in the space of an average year. I never seek out music videos, even when they are recommended.

I realise I’m missing out on part of the experience. I used to be thrilled by live shows by bands I loved and, sometimes, bands I didn’t know. As someone who spent a reasonable chunk of his adolescence looking like a bargain bucket Morrissey, then a half-arsed Happy Monday, then an unremarkable former member of the Jesus and Mary Chain, I’m hardly unaware of the extra dimension that the look and feel of the band brings to the noise they are making, to the fans ability to identify with and inhabit their music. I’m aware that even if these things seem to have become unimportant to me, the bands I follow are still putting in just as much effort to perfect them, to add layers to their musical core. I’m just not paying attention.

Truth be told, I could’t even tell you what the majority of the artists I like these days actually look like. [Hang on, i’ll test that theory. Bear with me while I look at my records of the year post from 2013…

Well, I reckon I could pick 5 of the 11 out of a line-up. I’m surprised by that, although note that those include Nick Cave, Sam Beam and Bradford Cox, all of whom cut fairly distinctive figures].

This is not a stance or an extension of some philosophical or aesthetic approach – I don’t really do that stuff – it just seems to have happened. I just listen to the music. Nowadays I don’t even really care who’s in the band, or what they’re doing. I’ve never been big on appreciation of the craft of music. I love sounds, but rarely connect the appreciation of those sounds to an appreciation of the skill or virtuosity that may have been necessary to produce them. Come to think of it, not only don’t I know what most of the new artists I like at the moment look like, if they’re in a band I don’t even know what the individuals are called. Even worse, by and large I don’t even bother with song titles either.

Sounds stupid, huh? Maybe it is.

Anyhow. I started talking about performance…

A month or so ago, Baltimore synth-pop outfit Future Islands managed to blindside me and break through all this dead-eyed detachment and, in the space of 3 minutes, force the most focussed U-turn I can remember making in my 30 years as a music lover.

A few years ago Tom lent me a copy of ‘In Evening Air’, their debut album. He thought I might like it. I did not. I hated it. It’s rare that I take badly against a record, but I really couldn’t stand this one. I hung on for half the tracks and then had to finish my walk in silence. It was the voice, swinging wildly from David Bowie to Ella Fitzgerald, sometimes in adjacent syllables, both delivered as if in pastiche by a particularly hammy Lon Chaney. I found it utterly unbearable. I’m not one to shy away from an unusual vocalist. I would choose Mark E Smith, Captain Beefheart, Joanna Newsom and Tom Waits among my very favourites, but something about the shameless artifice of Samuel T Herring’s singing had me clawing for my headphones. It seemed so desperate, so attention seeking. I felt physical repulsed by it. They’ve been filed under ‘not for me thanks’ ever since.

And then. And then. Having picked up (somehow) on some minor internet buzz, I checked out their recent performance of ‘Seasons’ on the David Letterman show. Within about 90 seconds, it all made sense. Within 3 minutes i’d shifted my opinion 180 degrees. I understood immediately that the focal point of these wild growling pleas and distressed torch singer yelps was a frontman who was not the flamboyant dandy I had assumed and feared, but a regular Joe Shmoe battling with his burning desire to express himself through song. It’s a totally compelling performance. Passionate, unabashed, somehow discovering the embarrasing geek that we all fear we might be if given a microphone and an audience and parlaying this into something true and vulnerable and somehow quite magnificent. The hopelessly extreme dad-dancing, the moments when his eyes get the thousand yard stare and it seems he might just crumple right there in the middle of the stage, the futile half-punch crescendoes, the desperately assertive chest-beating. Even the last-ditch death-metal dredging. It all makes sense.

Here it is:

[youtube:http://youtu.be/1Ee4bfu_t3c%5D

(I made the mistake afterwards of checking out ILX to see if others had been similarly affected by the thing. No, they hadn’t. Plenty of people speak up for the band and most cite Herring’s frontmanship as one of the key reasons they’ve always been fans. Others enjoyed once again being able to blankly slap down some enthusiasm, unable to understand why anyone would get excited about “another average synth pop band”. Here’s a tip for a happy life, as a minor aside: avoid internet forums if you want to retain any unfettered joy for something you think may be loveable. Unless your opinions are bulletproof then you’ll come away feeling your affection has been shot to pieces. And if they do happen to be bulletproof to the point of being immutable, what’s the point of trading them with others online?)

Nonetheless, I’ve hammered ‘Singles’ over the last four weeks or so. In many ways Future Islands are just another synth pop band, reaching back to grasp some of the faded glitterball glamour, retrofuturist electronic buzz and sparse despair of the mid 1980s and, essentially, doing a pretty good job of it.

Actually, come on. That’s selling them way short. They do a pitch perfect job, building their sound from an exquisite palette and creating deliciously economical soul pop.

Anyway.

It’s Samuel T Herring’s voice that lifts the record out of the ordinary but, somehow, he takes the rest of the band with him, and reflected in his flailing, wheeling performance – for a performance it is every time he opens his mouth to sing – their sound gains lustre and a spring in its step. Ultimately these are 10 fine songs, short and sharply constructed, by a band who sound every bit the Joe Shmoes giving it everything they have in an attempt to force their way out into some new territory, to create a breakthrough. We suspect they’ll never make it,  and perhaps they know too, but that tension, of the ordinary trying to become extraordinary, is what makes Future Islands such a strangely intoxicating affair.

Nick listened: Otis Redding. Samuel T Herring is clearly (as far as I’m concerned) a massive, massive Otis Redding fan. And he’s lucky enough that his vocal cords are capable of showing that inspiration in a pretty impressive way. After years of cool detachment from synth bands, this emotive, performative juxtaposition is a little surprising (although not quite as surprising as when he went full-on ‘Cookie Monster’).

The album as a whole left me a little nonplussed, but that Letterman performance was off the scale good; people used to perform like that all the time. I love a bit of artifice.

Tom listened: I can see the headlines now:

‘Mitchell In “Changes His Mind” Shocker. You Turn if You Want To…He Has!’

I told you they were good all along, didn’t I?

Now that I’ve picked my jaw up from the floor (I had resigned myself to always having my enjoyment of In Evening Air tempered by the fact that Mr Mitchell and myself were on different pages of the hymn sheet), I will add that whilst it lacked the immediacy of Future Islands’ second album I sensed, on the basis of one play, that Singles has great depth and possibly greater staying power than In Evening Air. The listen left me very tempted but, fortunately for me, I am very tempted by a lot of records at the moment! It is, however, firmly on the list.