Author: sickmouthy

I grew up in a seaside town in Devon where practically the only faces that weren’t white were Chinese and ran takeaway restaurants. The only black people I knew as a child were my friend Ben and his brother, who lived on the same estate at the edge of town as I did, and whose mum was white, and a lesbian. It was quite a combination for the 80s. And so ‘black music’ – Motown, Public Enemy, Miles Davis, etc etc – was my principle exposure to cultures and identities other than my own when I was growing up. I still live in the south west, obviously, and while I work at a university with an international outlook the culture here remains predominantly white, more so than most other places in the UK.

I’ve always felt slightly guilty that I mainly listen to music made by people like me – white men, generally suburban or provincial rather than urban – and not enough by people from different races (or religions, cultures, countries, or gender identities for that matter). I do feel a need to performatively demonstrate my ‘wokeness’ in many ways, to prove I’m not a racist asshole from a backwards part of the country. But that makes it about me, and this is not about me. All white people are part of the problem, because the nature of the problem is systemic and ingrained in our culture. Acknowledge and accept this, educate yourself, be as anti-racist as you can, and try to make things better: don’t think just because you own a Marvin Gaye record that you’re somehow not part of the problem. Black lives matter.

But anyway, the songs I picked:

“We Need a Resolution” – Aaliyah
Ostensibly about a damaged and damaging romantic / emotional / sexual relationship between two people, but nevertheless the title as a phrase in and of itself was one of the first things that jumped into my head. Plus the song itself is a deep and long-standing favourite, a synthesis of artist and producer that promised an amazingly fertile creative partnership, which sadly did not come to pass. Aaliyah’s tragic life story and abuse at the hands of R Kelly feels like some kind of fucked-up metaphor.

“Umi Says” – Mos Def
Another beautiful song that I’ve loved for a long time, but it’s only in the shadow of this shitshow that it’s struck me that the key lyric and feeling of the song is from the backing vocals rather than the lead – “I want black people to be free, to be free, to be free / all my people to be free, to be free, to be free”. The US might have abolished slavery and segregation years ago, but as the documentary 13th by Ava DuVernay brutally reveals, those laws were just replaced with others that prevented black people being truly free and equal. 21 years on from this song, and though there has been a black president the black prison population has increased massively. Black people are still not free.

“New Way New Life” – Asian Dub Foundation
Racism in the UK is as much about Asian lives, and there’s a positivity and hopefulness about this song – 20 years old, pre-9/11, written and released during the honeymoon of Tony Blair’s Britain – that seems almost quaint now, but which is still energising and vital. Integration, progression, celebration: a blueprint for how we could live together.

“The Charade” – D’Angelo and the Vanguard
A masterful moment from an astonishing record, this was released in late 2014, shortly after my daughter was born. The chilling refrain of “all we wanted was a chance to talk / ‘stead we only got outlined in chalk” seemed back then like it could signify a turning point – surely racist police brutality and murder couldn’t continue anymore? But it’s got worse. With every death this song becomes more horribly relevant.

Time seems to move both very quickly and very slowly under lockdown. In fact it’s done that for the last few years – maybe that’s just parenthood. Certainly the last two years feel like they’ve contained too much, both in my personal life and in the world at large.

This was the record I chose to play (part of) at our first virtual meeting under lockdown circumstances some 8 weeks ago – zooming each other, sharing audio, sharing screens, typing comments rather than talking as we listened, no curry, sitting in our own livingrooms/bedrooms/kitchens rather than sharing air with each other. It seemed appropriate for two reasons: firstly, it was the record I’d played most from 2020 so far and as such I was eager to play it to friends and see what they thought. Because that’s what record club is for.

And secondly, in interviews Bejar described it as having been recorded almost under lockdown conditions – singing songs quietly into his laptop in his kitchen after his wife and daughter had gone to bed, sending the files through the ether to his collaborators for them to do similar with drum machines, synthesisers, electric guitars. It struck me that if music is to be made under lockdown by anyone not cohabiting then it must be made like this; via Skype, or Zoom, or Teams, or FaceTime, FTPing sound files, discussing strategies and approaches and influences and intentions via email or IM or even phonecalls. It seemed like a positive example of what can be achieved despite isolation.

Because Have We Met is fabulous, as strong a set of songs as Bejar has done, and in an aesthetic that suits his latterday writing and singing perfectly – slightly motorik, electronic, somehow out of time (redolent of the 80s but not slavish to them), related to but evolved from Kaputt (the opening line steals a reference directly from that album, as only Bejar could) and Poison Season, taking the best aesthetic cues from Ken and expanding them (and with better songs).

Before everything went crazy I listened to this (almost) obsessively; it soundtracked my walk to work day after day. And then…

Emma was talking about coronavirus since before Christmas I think, hooked on reports since word first emerged of deaths in China. She’s a repeat offender when it comes to early-adopting, but this time it was with a pandemic rather than foofy boots or a Swedish rucksack. She knew it was coming and she knew it would change the world. She still says, occasionally, that she worries this could be the virus that actually, finally, does for humanity. For the sake of my children I hope that’s not the case. For the sake of human culture I hope it’s not the case, too, because I would hate for this record (and so many others) to be so meaningless in the face of the apocalypse.

But I’m being dramatic (I’ve had a cider): we’ll survive this pandemic, and adjust some of our behaviours, and we will carry on, and we will make music and listen to it.

I should write about the songs, but that feels trite. I enjoy them. There’s an instrumental towards the end that feels like peak Berlin Bowie and Eno. One is called “Cue Synthesisers” and it does that “Dance to the Music” trick of mentioning an instrument before it joins the mix. Overall it is very smooth, almost soporific, but every so often an electric guitar solo rips through it like… a virus through a populace… and upends everything. The lyrics are Bejar’s usual concoction of meaningless placeholders, repetition, and nonsense that somehow attain a level of pseudo-profundity through their delivery and context. I love what he does. Very Roland Barthes. All aesthetic, for the listener to project onto.

Tonight is only the second time I’ve listened to this record since lockdown, despite having been listening to it twice a day for a while before the world changed. There’s not a lot of opportunity for music in my current circumstances. I hope there is in yours.

Steve Listened: It is in my life, but only a little. Loved the album Nick, and thanks for the write-up. I do hope, as you do, that this is not the end. As the world collapses though this album comes close to a soundtrack to those times, if we are in those times, which I hope we are not….

First record club in ages! At my house! Had some family stuff going on. More on that later.

Trigger warning: Michael Jackson and all that entails, plus men being fucking horrible in other ways.

The recent Michael Jackson documentary was gross. When I was eight I wanted to be one of those kids that went on tour and starred in weird crappy sci-fi films with him. I taught myself to moonwalk (poorly), and “Bad” was the first 7” single I ever owned. I remember writing a story at primary school and wanting something fantabulous to occur, and the wildest thing I could think of was Michael Jackson turning up. The documentary made me feel like I was basically a talent competition away from being molested. From the first allegations in 93 I pretty much always assumed he’d been… up to no good, as it were, but I’m now thoroughly convinced that he wasn’t up to no good accidentally, because he’d had a crazy, sad, fucked-up childhood, but that actually he was a deliberate, organised, hiding-in-plain-sight paedophile, literally turning his house into an amusement park in order to attract young boys so he could rape them, and that the crazy, sad, fucked-up childhood defence is simply not enough, because there is no justification. Someone told me to look at the cover art of Dangerous again, and I did. Holy shit.

Anyway, with that documentary ringing in my ears, I invoked the theme ”What do we do with the art of monstrous men?” and pondered whether or not I could bring myself to play Off The Wall or Thriller.

I couldn’t.

So I played Microshift instead.

Let’s be clear and upfront: I am not comparing MJ to Michael Jackson here. Although those initials are unfortunate.

We love(d) Hookworms – Rob played their debut album ages ago and I think we all went out and bought it. I thought we’d played their second record at DRC too, but I can’t find a piece about it, so maybe I imagined that. When “Negative Space” first found its way onto 6music in late 2017 I was on tenterhooks for Microshift, because it seemed as if they’d gone down the exact path I would have chosen for them to go down. I was as excited for a new record release as I had been in… probably years. Genuinely. I felt like a teenage boy. I wanted to go on a pilgrimage to buy it.

I bought the record on the Friday it came out in early February 2018, the same day as Field Music’s latest album, which I also bought. Oddly enough, I am vaguely connected to both bands via social media, as many people are these days; Field Music via David Brewis on Facebook, where we talk about our kids, as they are similar ages. I think we made friends online after I wrote about them here, actually. With Hookworms it was following MJ on Instagram; he followed me back, and we occasionally conversed about stuff, as you do. He seemed like a decent guy; his heart in the right place, and constantly, vociferously fighting the good fight, especially in the wake of #metoo.

I expected to connect more with the Field Music record, as I knew it was largely about having kids, and how they both ruin(!) and enrich your life. My son was born the Monday after both records came out, so it seemed ludicrously pertinent and timely. But actually it was the Hookworms record that caught me; it may have been about dementia, mental health issues, loneliness, lost love, insecurity, and other such fun, positive stuff, but it dealt with those issues with such sensitivity and insight, and, most importantly, such rich, exploratory, exciting, detailed music, that it offered a level of escapism that I needed in those early weeks of suddenly having two kids. I listened to it pretty much obsessively; my walk to work (two days a week when not driving my daughter to nursery first) is about 45 minutes long, and Microshift fitted it perfectly. It found joy at sadness, and sadness at joy, and it made me feel wonderful to listen to it.

I was as in love with it as I have been with any new record in my adult life. I heard echoes of old favourites (Spacemen 3, New Order, krautrock), and new ones (Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith). I adored the move from guitars-upfront to electronics-upfront. I loved the sound, the layering. I loved the melodies, the structures, and the spacing. It felt like a massive step up from before, in terms of songwriting, production, and confidence. A band moving up to the next level. The reviews seemed to concur.

And then in July my baby son was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer affecting his immune system, and our family life collapsed into some kind of still-unfinished living hell. What had been a difficult first few months with two kids became something else entirely. Time for music evaporated. I watched a lot of crappy brainless action films in the evenings when I was alone, my daughter asleep upstairs and my wife and son in hospital. I listened to What’s Goin’ On once on the M5 alone on the way to the children’s hospital and cried a lot. I followed it with Bridge Over Troubled Water and “Save The Life Of My Child”. I lost touch with Microshift a little, and with a lot of things.

And then in October Hookworms suddenly announced that they had split up because MJ – singer, keyboardist, producer, leader of the band – had been accused of sexual and emotional abuse by a former girlfriend. MJ, who had constantly and repeatedly said “believe victims”. MJ, who had repeatedly hung men accused of impropriety out to dry on social media. His band dropped him like a stone within an instant of the allegations, split, and gave up their promising musical future.

The accusation came in during the worst part of our cancer fight; my son had done two rounds of chemotherapy which hadn’t had the desired affect, and we were in limbo, awaiting news as to whether he’d be allowed to try an experimental new treatment (he was, and it continues to go very well indeed). I was past the first whirlwind of the situation, where sheer momentum and having to basically single-parent my three-year-old daughter, while trying to support my wife (who was in and out of hospital constantly with our still-a-baby son) had carried me through, and I was negotiating a phased return to work. It was, it’s fair to say, about the worst time of my life, and this thing, this beautiful, expressive record, that I had found immense sanctuary in months before, and which I was looking forward to finding even more sanctuary in when I eventually had more time to pay attention to anything but basic survival, was suddenly… I don’t know. Shit upon? Sullied? Tainted? Even if only by suggestion, association, allegation. I had no time or capacity to investigate the allegations against MJ, no ability to try and form an opinion. I didn’t know whether to believe the accuser (always believe victims) or to believe MJ’s statement. Relationships are complex – after the last nine months I know that better than I ever did before, as my marriage has bent, creaked, and been misshapen under immense, indescribable pressure – and things are never simply one thing or another. But always believe victims. MJ said so himself.

So yes, Michael Jackson had an impossible, disgusting, insane childhood, and we should sympathise with him for that. Yes, he made some almost mind-bendingly astounding music that brought millions upon millions of people intense joy. But he also (allegedly) fucked little boys and ruined their lives and destroyed their families. I can hold all three of those thoughts in my head at once. I played “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” in our kitchen the day after the documentary finished and I still enjoyed it. And my kids danced to it, because it is that good that even the first time you hear it you can’t help but dance. But I don’t know whether I’ll ever deliberately put it, or anything else by Michael Jackson, on again. I thought about Roland Barthes, and the birth of the reader and the death of the author. Can the author kill the art? Can the author kill (metaphorically) the reader?

I’ve not listened to Swans in a long time. I’ve listened to The Beatles a lot lately, often with my daughter. Let’s not forget John was a wanker. I’ve listened to Bowie, who did many questionable things as a young man. No Led Zeppelin. A bit of Miles Davis. I remember a glam rock box set being released several years ago and containing no Glitter Band, which is understandable but is also rewriting history in a way that makes my head hurt, because they were undeniably important to that scene. I’ve seen people in bands behave in ways I would not behave first hand. As a young and insecure man I have behaved in ways I would not now behave. I am reasonably sure that you could find hundreds (thousands, probably) of people who have done awful things in our record collection, our book collection, our film collection. As I’m writing these final sentences I’ve put Microshift on. “I still hear you every time I’m down / in a negative space / I can’t believe it.”

To quote Claire Dederer, they are (some of them) monster geniuses, and I don’t know what to do about them.

Anna Meredith came to my attention when she won the SAY – Scottish Album of the Year – for 2016 in the summer, beating the likes of Young Fathers, Steve Mason, Emma Pollock, and FFS. I didn’t know her name, but I did recognise the artwork for Varmints, and the description – classical composer makes debut pop/electronic album – made it sound right up my street.

It starts with “Nautilus”, an enormous, instrumental, Steve-Reich-like horn loop that never fails to get Nora dancing (she’s been known to point at the hi-fi and say “music”, and then get huffy if anything but this album gets put on). It’s not pop music, per se, and not quite dance or electronic either, but it is catchy, and it does make you move. As someone on ILM described it, it is “focused and amazing-sounding”. And it really is; the resonances of the horns and reverberations of the drums are monolithic and cavernous and loaded with detail.

Every single second of Varmints has something interesting going on sonically and/or compositionally; there’s a real feeling of musical depth and richness without it feeling complicated for the sake of complication. It’s been said that one of the joys of [pop?] music is how your brain tries to predict what’s going to happen next (and the satisfaction when you either get it right, or something beautifully unexpected happens), and Meredith surfs that line between comfortable, reassuring predictability and interesting, confounding unpredictability with expert poise.

At first Varmints almost felt too… positive? Too major-key? As if there was no real edge or dissonance to it. But a; that’s not actually true, as there are numerous frenetic / angry / charged / sad moments, and b; even if it was, I’m not sure that’s necessarily a bad thing. “Taken”, the second track and a single that’s found loads of airplay on 6music, definitely felt a touch too… something… in its male-female harmony vocals the first few times I played it (“Taken sounds like Nirvana’s Lithium as performed by an am-dram society” read another ILM comment), but the slashing guitars, tightly-wound synth loops, and odd rhythmic changes, as well as those hard-to-ignore vocals, have seeped into my cerebellum over the months to the point where I now thoroughly enjoy it.

About half the tracks are instrumental, and the album mixes up synthetic elements with cello, drums, clarinet, guitars, and many more different live instruments. The tone shifts massively from track to track; “Something Helpful” is delicate and yearning, but “R-Type” is almost violently repetitive and machine-like, and “Dowager” is tinged with sadness through both the arrangement and the lyrics, while “Blackfriers” is essentially beautiful, plaintive ambient music.

Meredith herself was born in London but moved to Scotland aged two, and has various compositional awards, a Masters from the Royal College of Music, and composer-in-residences on her CV. She’s also released a pair of EPs, Black Prince Fury and Jet Black Rider from 2012 and 2013 respectively, from which “Nautilus”, originally from Black Prince Fury, is the only track to feature on Varmints. Each EP has a rather surprising and surreptitious cover version hidden on it, by the way…

Rob listened: I really want to like ‘Varmints’ a lot. When Nick first played it, ‘Nautilus’ struck me straight away. It does that wonderful, heady thing of starting in one rhythmic groove and then, almost imperceptibly, seeming to shift into a completely different mode. It’s a delicious magic trick, which works as a set-up to a barnstorming tour de force. And then I find myself drifting off. So far, after the opener, I’ve found ‘Varmints’ an easy record to leave. I’m being lazy, I know. I came back to it last year after the reports I heard from SXSW all agreed that Anna Meridith had been the best live act at the festival, with superlatives dripping from every description. And the same thing happened again. Now, having somehow waited 18 months to write this response… it’s time I tried again.

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.