Author: sickmouthy

Used to be fun but now my kid has cancer.

Liars – WIXIW: Round 37, Nick’s choice

Since Rob played They Were Wrong, So We Drowned at us almost a year ago, I’ve been wanting to properly re-evaluate Liars, who I’d dismissed circa Drum’s Not Dead rather too quickly. When I heard that they were releasing a new album earlier this year, and that it saw them fulsomely exploring electronic music, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to tackle my preconceptions.

So I bought WIXIW (pronounced “wish you”) on day of release, and dove in enthusiastically. I’ve not been disappointed – alongside Field Music it’s probably the album I’ve listened to most this year, and it’s very definitely amongst my favourites. It feels to me like an important record, somehow, like it has a purpose and a point to make. I thought I’d passed a point of caring about “importance” in things like that, but Liars and Swans are making me doubt that I have.

Eschewing “rock” instruments and textures almost entirely, Liars recruited Mute label boss Daniel Miller to produce WIXIW, and his lifetime’s expertise in and knowledge of electronic music apparently awed (and almost overwhelmed) this otherwise seemingly pugnaciously confident trio. The resulting album, whilst sonically extremely confident and accomplished, is spiritually and lyrically conflicted and ambiguous: Liars here vacillate between the desire for proximity and intimacy, and solitude which borders on solipsism, and the cumulative effect is of a record full of and beset by doubt. The doubt that subsequently infects these songs seems to be about the creative process as much as it is outside relationships.

I’m fascinated by WIXIW, by the way its looped synthesisers, found-sounds and rhythms simultaneously attract and unsettle you, by the way its lyrics seem both obstinate and unsure (“I refuse to be a person”; “I wish you were here with me… / wish you would not come back to me”), by the way it marries beatific near-ambience (The Exact Colour of Doubt) with unrepentant, electro-shock-therapy 21st century punk (Brats). A handful of the songs seem straightforward accessible, with hooks, refrains and rhythms to tempt you in (the afrorementioned Brats, No. 1 Against the Rush), whilst others trade in complex, obfuscating structures (the title track) or spooked textures and messages (Ill Valley Prodigies), adding to the sense of doubt and duality.

Liars’ closest sonic and spiritual cousins on WIXIW are, rather unsurprisingly, latter-day Radiohead, and the vocals and melodies here are occasionally redolent of specific moments of that band’s career (one lyrical melody in particular reminds me of Amnesiac-era b-side Cuttooth), but there’s something edgier, more outsider, about Liars. I’ve delved backwards from WIXIW into Sisterworld, intend to reacquaint myself with Drum’s Not Dead as soon as our CD collection is unpacked after we move house, and I have another three albums to investigate after that. Exploring them from a distance, I’m rather disappointed not to have been along for the ride since the beginning.

Tom Listened: I was very taken with this (however you spell it/pronounce it). As opposed to other Liars records I have heard (records 2 and 3 in their discography), WIXIV seemed really accessible and friendly, even warm…which is not something I would have thought I would ever be writing with regard to a Liars album. Whilst it is probably a tad less intriguing than Drum’s Not Dead or the other one with the very long name, it seemed a much more enjoyable (in its purest sense) listen to me – kind of like comparing Clear Spot to Trout Mask Replica. I’d take the latter to my desert island but I have played the former far more times and am much fonder of it.

For some reason, and I am can not put my finger on why, there was something in the sound of WIXIV that reminded me of Tame Impala, but seeing as Liars are definitely not a retro-psych-rock outfit, I can only imagine its Angus Andrew’s Antipodean origins that are creating any vague similarities, most likely in vocal style.

Rob listened: Liars are one of my favourite bands of the last ten years. Any band that makes successively startling records, with no hint from album to album where they may be heading next, is surely a treasure to be clasped to the collective bosom. I’ve been trying really really hard not to buy records this year, and as such ‘WIXIW’ is at the top of my Christmas List and had remained deliberately unheard until this evening. I found myself deliberately failing to listen closely, deferring that particular pleasure, but the album sounded every bit as intriguing and mesmerising as Nick describes. I got lots and lots of echoes of ‘They Were Wrong, So We Drowned’ which is possibly my favourite of the preceding five albums. Whilst it’s a first to hear an album of theirs that seems to have such overlap with a previous effort, this simply serves to put a double underline underneath the first item in my letter to Santa.

Graham listened: I am a dinosaur.

Perhaps to expand a little, I mean the above in relation to all electronic/dance type music since the early/mid 1990’s. I nearly had a moment with The Knife and Fever Ray and its the closest I have come to an eureka moment. While choices like this continue to challenge me, I seem to be immune to the stuff and I’m gonna have to face it (apologies, but my anxieties around modern electronic music has led to me suffering a Palmerism).

I’m in no position to comment really but enjoyed listening to this and maybe if I had been at Round 18 I could have appreciated more the distance of travel from Rob’s offering earlier on.

Owen Pallett – Heartland: Round 36, Nick’s choice

Heartland is another record I’ve been hankering after playing at DRC since we started, and my determination to play it is what inspired me, mischievously, to set us a theme of ‘Concept Albums’, aware of the horror which that phrase inspires in Tom and Rob.

Because that’s what Heartland is: set in a fictional land called Spectrum, it concerns a young, violent farmer called Lewis, who is plucked from the fields and anointed for some higher purpose, embarks on an adventure, realises his status as a character within a song, rebels against his god / author (who is, of course, called Owen), who he then kills, and, possibly, assumes control of his own destiny. Or something. Sonically, Heartland is like a techno-classical soundtrack to the most amazing all-night role-playing session ever, and it’s also amazingly, beautifully listenable. It’s one of my very favourite records of the last few years, and I played it for months and months almost as instrumental music, before I even started taking in the narrative conveyed in the lyrics.

I’m lucky enough to know Owen Pallett (in an online sense) from his posts on ILM and his Twitter. We talk online reasonably frequently and occasionally exchange emails too, so I thought I’d ask if he’d like to say a bit more about Heartland for the benefit of our little club. Being a gracious and amenable individual, he did just that. This is what he said.

Owen writes: When Heartland came out I tried to have my cake and eat it too. I made a concept record but then asked that people ignore that fact; all I said was “Lewis is a farmer living in the fictional world of Spectrum.” So I spent most of 2010 being asked to explain the plot…

There have been some very detailed explanations online that people have written, parsing out all the references and annotating everything. At first, I thought I might do it myself, a la Barthes’ “A Lover’s Discourse”, but then I thought that’d deny listeners the pleasure of figuring it out for themselves. And they did; check out the Alpentine website for some pretty concise breakdowns, and Nick Thornborrow, who wrote an amazingly insightful and beautifully illustrated comic that offered up his own wordless interpretation of the events.

Lewis and myself, just like Barthes and his beloved in “A Lover’s Discourse”, are the same thing. Written by the same person, so it’s a false dialogue. The final track, “What Do You Think Will Happen Now”, is meant to allude to this falseness of the narrative: Lewis is doing this Puck-style “give me your hands” monologue which is actually a critique of quantitative listening, of aggregation, the fact that numerical critique leaves no room for human shit, human dirt. It’s not a very Lewis-y monologue, but what has been? Our voices are entwined and inextricable. Then, my own voice, entering halfway through and saying “oh my god get me out of the house I’ve been working too long on this record”, becomes the more concrete statement, and the theatre disintegrates.

There’s meant to be a liminal quality to me and Lewis; the whole record could be entirely set in a fictional world, or it could be me singing about my own issues. The most liminal moments are where voices are overlaid: “What Do You Think Will Happen Now”, and also “Oh Heartland, Up Yours”; I hoped that the sentiment “My homeland / I will not sing your praises here” would echo as being about both Spectrum and Canada, which has its own issues.

Lewis’ execution of Owen can be taken in many different ways. Is it a rehearsal of an in-real-life suicide/murder, like Mishima’s “Patriotism”? Is it symbolic of a cutting off of one’s dishonest narrative voice, the voice that lets a rhyming dictionary shape his meaning? Is it meant to be a commentary on in-real-life atheism, the physical execution of that which is said to govern you? Or a Boulez-style patricidal version of modernism? I thought about it from all these viewpoints and in the end, I just went with what sounded coolest, onomatopoeically. That’s kind of the burden of lyric-writing, you’ve got to make it sound good!

Musically, I wanted to try and create an arrangement language for this album that didn’t sound like Glass or Bach or Shostakovich or any other typically “Classical” composer. I didn’t fully end up succeeding; The Drift attempts the same thing and gets further than I did. But I tried it out.

So I basically tried to interpret various synthesis ideas and re-imagine them as orchestral music. “Midnight Directives” and “The Great Elsewhere” feature arrangements that are transcriptions of generative music patches I’d built in Max/MSP. “Flare Gun” and “Keep The Dog Quiet” both feature heavy noise gating and unnatural panning, which I wanted to sound more like Planningtorock’s “Have It All” than Prokofiev.

When I play “Lewis Takes Action” live I run my violin through a ring modulator at the end: for the recording, I transcribed that solo with all the resultant overtones reflected in the winds and strings. “Lewis Takes Off His Shirt” has the orchestra behaving like it’s controlled by an eight-step sequencer. “E Is For Estranged” begins with an approximation of ‘white noise’ with a comb filter running through it. I hoped that listeners would be like “oh, OMD, Cluster, I get it”, instead of “sounds like Gershwin!!”

I listen to albums with the lyric sheet in my hand. I work hard on my lyrics and I don’t like listening to records where the voice is mixed louder than everything else. If it seems like arrogance to think that listeners would sit down and decode this album like a puzzle, I’d just say that this is just the way I listen to albums, repeatedly, trying to figure them out. Conversely, I hope too that people could just put it on and enjoy it!

Tom Listened: I have owned Heartland for a few years now but, as I have it on CD, I have only ‘listened’ to it whilst driving (I don’t tend to listen to CDs in the house – why settle for second best when you can indulge in some prime vinyl?). It’s not really driving music! Whilst there are some great songs on Heartland that are enjoyable enough to let wash over you whilst your mind struggles to cope with the stresses of negotiating British roads, I now know that it requires proper, close attention to get the most out of it and that is something I haven’t really given it as yet. Listening at Record Club, it made a lot more sense but I still feel some way off a proper understanding of how the songs work, in both lyrical and musical capacities, and it’s the sort of record where my lack of comprehension bothers me. I sense it just needs more time and intend to give it that if I ever remember to bring the CD in from the car!

Graham Listened: Given my selection for this round, I probably have no right in commenting on the artistic merits of any of the other selections. With Heartland I don’t feel at all qualified to comment as I haven’t begun to scratch at the surface of it all. Reading the lyrics alongside the first listen of an album was a throwback to my teens and something I haven’t done since. Like Tom said, this needs very close attention and should have just let it wash over me and then picked up the lyric sheet later, trying to immediately tie the story to the music was too much. When I put down the lyric sheets I began to enjoy the music far more and will need to approach a future listen far more carefully.

Rob listened: Nick’s not good at keeping secrets and I figured out fairly early what his choice was going to be. I listened to ‘Heartland’ a couple of times in the run-up to the DRC get-together, enough for it to start to become penetrable, for detail and texture to begin to emerge from the gently babbling brook. I enjoyed it yet more when we listened to it this evening.

It’s fascinating to read Owen’s thoughts – huge thanks to him for taking the time and to Nick for soliciting them. One of our recurrent discussion points is whether artists intend the depths and complexities that we as listeners subsequently find in their recordings. I guess the answer has to be ‘it depends’ but it’s pleasing to know that in some cases, and in this case in particular, incredible care and detailed preparation and planning has gone into the conceptual construction and lyrical execution of the finished work.

The Knife – Silent Shout: Round 35, Nick’s choice


After playing Karin Dreijer Andersson’s solo debut at our last meeting and explaining my strained journey to liking Silent Shout by The Knife (Fever Ray’s parent-group, if you like), it seemed like an obvious choice to bring that album along last night, so I did. Since our last meeting I reckon I’d had the extra half a dozen listens I predicted I’d need to really, really like it.

I bought Silent Shout not long after it came out in February 2006, enticed by the rabid hyperbole being thrown its way on messageboards and blogs. The idea of atmospheric, intriguing Scandinavian dance music seemed like it would be right up my street, and, indeed, I loved the opening title track from the off. But it stopped there. Something about Silent Shout rubbed me up the wrong way, and I took against it vehemently, and cast it out. Or, at least, let it gather dust on the bottom-shelf (had The Knife been called The Spatula or The Baster, they’d have been situated on a higher shelf, at approximately eye-level, and thus harder to ignore, perhaps).

Partly I think my antipathy was to do with the thickness and density of the sound; in early 2006 I was at the height of my anti-compression campaigning, and I think I was looking for spacious, intricate, architectural sounds more akin to The Box by Orbital than what Silent Shout actually offered. Something nagged me about it; I wanted to understand what the fuss was about, to catch a glimpse of what I was missing and worm my way in. When I loved the Fever Ray album from the off, my desire to get Silent Shout only intensified.

Though it’s just as creepy and strange as The Box, Silent Shout gets there by different means; by and large it’s an album of direct, thumping, dancefloor-focussed electropop, irresistible beats and synth riffs (just get a load of the crazy, hook-laden opening to Like A Pen, which could be off Debut by Björk), but that thick production allows an array of startlingly cold, unnerving, and edgy textures and melodies in almost by the back door.

And then there are the voices; processed, performative, unrecognisable and alien. Both Karin and Olof sing, but it’s often hard to tell who is who, or if either of them are even human, let alone what the actual words they’re enunciating are. But when you do start to notice the words (or, you know, look at them in the sleeve), and you realise that you’ve been dancing to a song about domestic abuse or tapping your steering wheel to a song about childhood alienation. It’s… discomforting, to say the least.

But that’s Silent Shout’s genius, like a lot of great music; it has the push-me/pull-you dynamic that we’ve talked about before at DRC, beats and hooks to lure you in, textures and atmospheres to make you feel uncomfortable. Finally, I get it.

Tom Listened: Silent Shout was, in many ways, the record of 2006 – it topped numerous end of year album polls and signaled a new sound in electro-pop. Compared to, say, last month’s Junior Boys album the glacial fragility of Silent Shout produces an effect that is a million miles away from the bedroom environment that much of this genre evokes. It’s impossible to listen to Silent Shout and not think of snowy wastes, dark days and interminable nights, howling, icy Arctic blasts and mile upon mile of impenetrable evergreen forest. It’s a fantastic album, one that I listen to rarely, have always admired and, in a similar way to Nick, feel an ever increasing affinity towards as my understanding of it improves.

Rob listened: I knew nothing of The Knife until ‘Silent Shout’ topped the Pitchfork end of year poll in 2006. I bought it straight away and was entranced by it from the first listen. The skipping arpeggios of the title track, the clanging factory propulsion of ‘We Share Our Mothers’ Health’, the spooked domestic doom of ‘From Off To On’, the heartbreak of ‘Still Light’. It’s a wonderful record, one of contrast and coherence, motion and emotion and one of my very favourites of the last ten years.

Graham listened: Really enjoyed the atmospherics of this and some clever touches when it did the unexpected on a few tracks. I’m not sure I was getting the landscapes it painted for some of my colleagues but it oozed subversion and tension with hooks that keep you listening.

Fever Ray – Fever Ray: Round 34, Nick’s choice

Despite the massive acclaim, I didn’t like Silent Shout by The Knife initially; something about the production put me off, the density of it. I know it’s meant to be oppressive and strange, but it’s also meant to be pop, or catchy at the least, and the weight of the sound, the saturation of it, made me take against Silent Shout at first. I’ve grown to like it more over the years, and feel like I’m probably just half a dozen plays away from really, really liking it now.

But the debut solo album by one half of The Knife, Karin Dreijer Andersson, clicked with me straight away, even though some people consider it to be even weirder, more oppressive, more unnerving and obtuse. The beats are less directly dance-oriented, the synthesisers and electronics more about atmosphere than about hooks, and, crucially for my ears, the production opens up, explores space and textural richness, and in doing so creates an almost tangibly beautiful landscape for Dreijer’s strange songs.

Because the songs on Fever Ray’s eponymous debut are nothing if not strange, concerned with the oddness of domesticity, observations and tales about both childhood and motherhood, lyrics about watering neighbours’ plants, about dishwasher tablets, about riding bicycles. Dreijer sings of living “between concrete walls / in my arms she felt so warm”, presumably a reference to her new status as a parent when she recorded the album.

In some ways, Fever Ray’s album is like a weird cousin of Kate Bush’s Aerial, an album concerned with washing machines and children and maintaining sensuality despite (or because of?) these intrusions on adult life. But, as ever, I’m not focussing on the lyrics, as strange and beguiling as Dreijer’s vignettes may be: I’m taking in the pure sound of it. The slow-burning, thrumming introduction of If I Had A Heart; the beautiful final third of When I Grow Up, synths and guitars intertwining like lovers; the sparse, crepuscular vistas of Keep The Streets Empty For Me; and Karin’s vocals throughout, digitised, filtered, altered, made massive, cavernous, android and unreal even as she sings about the most mundanely human topics possible.

Fever Ray is an incredible debut, an incredible record, the kind of thing that rewards attention and only gets better over time. I like it more than any single thing by the renowned group it’s an offshoot of, to the extent that thinking of it as a side-project, or solo excursion, seems ridiculous.

Tom Listened: Rob lent me this album a while ago. I turned a cursory ear to some of it and was happy to return it to him knowing that I could cross it off my intended purchases list. While listening to it at record club I worked out what the problem is with it (as far as I am concerned anyway). It’s sequenced in such a way that the most accessible songs appear later on in the album. In this day and age, it is so rare for this to be the case that I reckon I unfairly dismissed this as being too bleak (Silent Shout was darker than my sensitive soul can cope with anyway) to bother with without ever having reached the latter half of the record.

Well, giving this a proper listen last Wednesday, I can now see what all the fuss is about. I think I’ll always find Karin Andersson’s vocals to be a bit too ominous/alien for my taste (that acceptance speech thing doesn’t help) and I struggled to see the beauty in the tracks when it was pointed out but I did enjoy this much more than I thought I would and could see it really clicking in with a few more listens.

Nick responded: See this is one of those odd things about music and ears and brains and stuff; I’ve always thought that Fever Ray started with its catchiest songs (at tracks 2 and 4) and then got darker and more impenetrable from there!

Rob listened: Whoever said ‘Silent Shout’ was supposed to be catchy pop? It’s a nightmarish glimpse into a forest world of dark desires and degenerative disease, and quite brilliant for it.

However, I can’t say much about ‘Fever Ray’ that Nick hasn’t already covered. For me it’s an almost perfect record in conception and execution. Eerily familiar yet tantalisingly alien, Karin Dreijer never puts a foot wrong. The sounds are melt-in-the-mind perfect, her vocals a woozy, half-remembered dream and the whole package one of my favourite records of the last ten years.

Graham listened: Another new one on me and connected with it pretty much straight away. The use of synth and electronic sounds to create the atmosphere and feel of this album intrigue me opposed to the way their use on a lot of electronica/dance alienates me. Evoked some familiar atmospherics to that of early Cocteaus but also more weirdly I was reminded of the type of feel Depeche Mode were after with Songs of Faith and Devotion, strange?

Bloc Party – Silent Alarm: Round 33, Nick’s choice

Bloc Party are an odd one; this, their debut album, was a brilliant electric shock to me at the time, but subsequent records have really sullied the memory. Looking back from seven years on, Silent Alarm now feels flawed; over-stuffed, over-long, a victim of its own self-importance, as manifested in Kele Okereke’s lyrics, which somehow became even more pompous and ridiculous on the band’s second record, A Weekend in the City. (Their website at the time described them not as a band, but as an “autonomous unit of un-extraordinary kids reared on pop culture between the years of 1976 and the present day.” Of course.)

Saying that, despite the fact that it’s about three songs too long and ludicrously self-serious in tone, Silent Alarm also thrilling; as well as the obvious postpunk and mid 00s indie signposts, there’s a big bite of Airbag by Radiohead running through Bloc Party’s sonic aesthetic of cacophonous, tumbling drums, tactile basslines and lightning guitars, pushing them further into genuine modernism than many of their unashamedly retro peers. So Russell Lissack’s guitars swerve from the spiky signature of post punk to a keenly emotional, effects-laden futurism, while Gordon Moakes and Matt Tong together make a furiously propulsive and hysterical rhythm section which prevents Silent Alarm from ever seeming anything less than utterly contemporary.

The problem is that it’s very easy to take Bloc Party as all aesthetic, all bluster, and little heart. Blue Light, This Modern Love, and So Here We Are offer tantalising glimpses of genuine emotion (still driven by too-fast rhythms which prevent that emotion ever seeming mawkish), but the likes of Price of Gas, Plans, and She’s Hearing Voices, whilst exciting to me seven years ago, now seem gauche and clumsy. Such is the folly of youth, I suppose.

Rob listened: It was good to hear ‘Silent Alarm’ again, although telling I suppose that I haven’t gone back to it since its release. This slight return reminded me why. I recognise Nick’s description, and there are moments when Bloc Party seem about to perform a magical musical alchemy, taking the approach of spiky post punk and forcing it through modern sounds into a new, twisted shapes. Guitars careen and the voice swerves but, ultimately, the breakthrough is not achieved. Like the listener, you sense that Bloc Party could sense what they were close to creating, but they just couldn’t reach it.

Nonetheless, ‘Silent Alarm’ couldn’t have been a better opener for what turned out to be an evening of Post Punk Through The Ages.

Graham listened: This was the first time I have ever given Bloc Party any considered listening. My traditional response has been to turn them off/over whenever they appeared on radio/tv. Just never really understood the mix of sounds/rhythms, with the end result it all sounded too awkward to bother with. For the first time I have now moved on in my appreciation of them. Listening properly without too much distraction finally lowered my defences to the point that I could begin to understand they were trying something quite clever.  By no means converted, but will aim to give them a fairer listen in future.

Four Tet – There Is Love In You: Round 32, Nick’s choice

I love Four Tet pretty unconditionally and have done for over a decade; in 2001, when I returned from university and discovered Audiogalaxy, Everything Is Alright, from his second album, Pause, was the first song I ever downloaded via the internet; I wish I could remember what prompted me to do so, as I’d never heard anything by him before. Not long afterwards, I bought a CD copy of Pause, and I’ve bought every album since, gone back and acquired Dialogue, his debut, and seen him live a couple of times too. He seems to have released records in parallel with Caribou, and they seem to have trodden similar paths (they remix each other regularly).

In 2003 his live show consisted of him sitting at a laptop and destroying his music. Given that I love his music, I didn’t enjoy myself; it seemed bloody-minded, wilful, and solipsistic. Eight years later we saw him at the Caribou-curated ATP festival, where he played a rapturously received set. It was a remarkable transformation, helped no doubt by his long-term residence as DJ at the Plastic People club, where, it seems, he must’ve learnt how to communicate with and move an audience.

There Is Love In You, which was my nominal album of the year in 2010 moves from Four Tet’s “folktronica” (I use the term reservedly) past, where electronic methods and acoustic instrumentation combined joyously, into much more pure electronic textures. The Ringer EP from 2008 had signposted this move fabulously, but still had a hint of experimental insularity about it, whereas There Is Love In You is fully warm, open, communicative, and, most importantly of all, beautiful. When I first heard it, I described it on a forum as “blissful end-of-the-night house, or end-of-the-breakwater ambient, or middle-of-the-city techno”. I stand by that.

Kieran Hebden (as his mum knows him) essentially builds up layer upon layer of intricate melodic loops and sequences, generally underpinning them with late-night four-on-the-floor rhythms, and very occasionally elaborating them with vocal snippets. It works both as music for dancing to and music for listening to; I can attest to it making a beautiful soundtrack to summer walks or bike rides (only ever on dedicated cyclepaths, kids – never use headphones on the roads!), but it also makes for wonderful gazing-out-of-the-window music on misty autumn days. Tracks like This Unfolds and Circling are just intensely pretty, and strangely emotive too; he finds that space between joy and melancholy with what seems like great ease.

Tom Listened: As far as I am concerned, Kieran Hebden shot himself in the foot when I went to see him play at the Exeter Pheonix a few years ago. I have never felt angry at a gig before – disappointed… yes, bored…plenty of times…never angry though. But Four Tet were trying it on. At the time I owned two Four Tet albums – Rounds and Pause – and I liked both, not unequivocably but enough to be looking forward to the gig. Just before the gig Hebden had teamed up with veteran jazz drummer Steve Reid and in concert the two of them produced seemingly random noise for the best part (or worst part) of an hour and a half. It felt like the audience were the butt of their own in joke and I lost a lot of respect for the man that night.

I honestly don’t think I had listened to Four Tet since then…so imagine my disappointment when Nick played There Is Love In You and it turned out to be so fantastic – better to my mind than either Pause or Rounds, loads to explore, lengthy songs to get lost in, a (gentle) funkiness that runs throughout the album, even some vocals every now and again. I’d love to see Four Tet performing proper songs like these in concert, but whether I would be prepared to risk another hour and a half of cacophony is debatable…at least if you buy the album, you know what you’re getting!

Rob listened: I’m shocked to learn than Nick illegally downloaded Four Tet’s music and I hope the police track him down and give him his just desserts.

I love ‘There Is Love In You’, from the beautiful, glowing opening vocal loop to, erm, the end, by which point I’m usually too far gone to worry about what the songs are called or what’s going on at all. It’s a weird record in that respect. I’ve listened to it much more than ‘Pause’, the other Four Tet record I own but in some ways I feel I know it less. Without listening back I can’t recall many of the musical moments, other than that opening vocal, name any of the songs or really bring much of it to mind at all. I confess I use it as a warm and thoroughly pleasant background soundtrack whenever I need to reach for one and it works perfectly. I love the fact that it still evades me. It makes me feel like I won’t wear it out any time soon.

Graham listened: It must be an age thing. I can get the “groove thang” with records like this and it will draw me in when I’m listening, but just don’t feel the need to listen again. I’ve even experimented with some purchases myself with the same results. The hooks and melodies that are devoured by others are wasted on me. I can understand the complexity and ingenuity that go into composition, but maybe I still perceive such music as a threat to establishment rock?

David Bowie – Low: Round 31, Nick’s choice


Many years ago as a gauche 18-year-old I interviewed a band for my fanzine, and asked them all what their favourite song was. The drummer replied “Life on Mars”, and was incredulous when I had to ask who it was by. A couple of years later I decided to properly investigate Bowie. I knew he was a cultural behemoth, a chameleon, and I knew he’d worn a bad shirt and danced with Mick Jagger when I was a kid, but beyond that I hadn’t a clue. His catalogue was remastered and reissued on CD at about the same time (1999) which was serendipitous, and I picked up a handful of his 70s albums – Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, Diamond Dogs, Heroes, and Low.

Ever since then I periodically binge on Bowie, not out of adoration or affection but out of curiosity; I want to get him, to understand what his significance and genius is. Sure, there are songs from across his catalogue that I enjoy (and plenty of them), and even some that I’d profess to love, but I always feel like I’m observing and attempting to comprehend rather than being excited or nourished by his music.

And Low is the album that I have most wanted to love, that I’ve spent most time thinking about, listening to, trying to get to grips with. It’s his running-away album, where he escapes (or tries to) from LA, from drugs, from stardom; his first album done as himself rather than as a character (maybe), the first of the Berlin Trilogy (even through most of Low, “Heroes”, and Lodger wasn’t actually recorded in Berlin), a truly experimental record in that the songs are the result of experiments much of the time. It’s the Bowie album that ought to be catnip to me, but I’ve spent more than a decade not quite getting it.

This year I’ve spent more time with Low than ever before, and finally, after reading Hugo Wilcken’s 33 & 1/3 book on the album, I think I’ve finally cracked it. Certainly, knowing more about the context that brought Low into being – the drug-chaos of Station to Station (Bowie: “I know it was recorded in LA because I read it was”), the idea that Low was a realisation of the destructive behaviour patterns Bowie had become entrenched in, a documentation of his physical escape to another place (side 1), and then an exploration of his “self” in that place (side 2) – opened Low up to me in a way that just listening to it in a vacuum, decades after its release, never quite had.

Learning about the dynamics of the album’s recording was informative too; the importance of the way Tony Visconti, Brian Eno, Carlos Alomar and David Bowie worked together (Eno as collaborator, not producer; Bowie as conductor and composer rather than “song” “writer”, perhaps), made the songs structure and sound make more sense – the long passages without vocals, the way side 1 is more like glimpses of songs than full songs, the R’n’B rhythm section, crazy synthesizers, metallic guitars. It’s not right to call the second side ‘ambient’ – the instrumentals there have more going on than true ambient music, and whilst they lack the vatic beauty of Eno’s most sublimely minimal work, they’re imbued with more emotion (if confusion is an emotion).

In many ways Low is similar to Another Green World (which came out two years before), but where Eno’s record is pastoral and rural, Bowie’s is arguably cultural, urban. Of course it’s not quite as simplistic as that, because nothing ever is, but Low is definitely a record about interiors – of buildings and cities and ones’ own mind – whilst Another Green World describes landscapes. (Ironically, Another Green World was largely recorded in central London, whilst much of Low was produced in the French countryside.)

Low sounds stranger, deeper, more affecting and more groundbreaking to me as time passes. It seems to predict a huge amount of postpunk and new wave, music that sprang up, according to historiography, in the wake of the punk revolution that came to wash away the indulgence of 70s superstars like Bowie. But between Low and Tom’s choice on the same evening, we were left pondering if punk was really as necessary, and revolutionary, as we’re told it was?

Tom Listened: As Nick has suggested, Low rewards a measured approach and definitely requires a careful listen. This is head music of the highest order and the more I’ve learnt about Bowie’s intentions with regard to Low, the better it has sounded. Listening at record club, the instrumentals at the end of the album really shone – there is so much more going on than I realised and I am keen to immerse myself in them some more. I guess this is a problem I have with CDs – the last few songs on an album get played far less often than the initial tracks. I listen to vinyl side by side, very rarely lifting the needle half way through. Sure, I could alter the way I listen to CDs…but for some reason I find it very hard to skip to a track that is two thirds the way through and start there. I digress…getting back to Low, a fabulous album, in my book just a notch below Station to Staion in the Bowie discography but wonderful just the same.

Rob listened: I missed the boat when it came to Bowie. By the time I was switching on to music the airwaves were full of ‘Modern Love’ and ‘China Girl’. I already knew I wasn’t interested in Phil Collins, so why would I bother with Bowie? None of my friends at school, college or university were into Bowie so whilst I was exposed to the Beatles, Beach Boys, Velvet Underground, T-Rex, Hendrix and Nick Drake, no-one ever pressed a Bowie album into my hands and the boat slowly sailed away.

I’ve tried to go back to him. I own ‘Low’ and the three albums that followed it. They’re okay. ‘Low’ certainly sounded better at DRC than when I’ve listened to it half-heartedly previously. Still, it’s cold music, at least to my touch. I find much to be impressed by, much to admire, but little to spark a fire in me and little to engage other than, through familiarity, the singles. Perhaps that’s a clear signal that I just need to give him more time. Perhaps i’m just six months behind Nick, as I’m sure I am in so many ways. For now, however, I really don’t think I get enough from Bowie to bother trying much more. I understand his influence, his boldness, his at times unbridled creativity but I just don’t care for his music enough. This makes me a philistine. Whatever, I’ll live. For now i’m with Alan Partridge.

Interviewer: “Who’s your favourite artist?”
Partridge: “David Bowie.”
Interviewer: “Oh yeah? What’s your favourite album?”
Partridge: “Erm… David Bowie’s Greatest Hits?”

As for punk and it’s perceived ‘necessity’ or lack of (which seems to have been an undeclared theme of the evening) it’s a false debate. It happened. It was influential in its own way. Much of the music we love wouldn’t have been the same without it, much perhaps would. If you’re happy to trace the influence of the Beatles (or Bowie or whoever) and claim, quite correctly, all sorts of influence for them, then you can’t just nominate other bits of musical and cultural history and decide that everything would be the same if they hadn’t happened.

Graham listened: Like Rob, when I was starting to discover alternative/indie music, Bowie appeared to me to be wholly mainstream/corporate. I’ve always viewed him with some suspicion and questioned whether his chameleon like changes are driven by his art or clever commercial marketing. I’ve never been able to get my head round the way his music can span such a breadth of style and quality (to my ears anyway). Not that he’s bothered but I don’t trust him. My angst has just been compounded by ‘Let’s Dance’ coming on the radio. I’m therefore really annoyed that this was such a surprising and great listen.

Michael Head and The Strands – The Magical World of the Strands; Round 30, Nick’s choice


Tom challenged us to bring a track that was “the same song” as something on our album choice for our latest meeting; queue much pondering regarding what might constitute something being “the same song”; cover versions, remixes, live takes, Peel Sessions, re-recordings, reprises, songs that evolved into other songs.

I thought about bringing Screamadelica and I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have from Primal Scream’s previous album, to show where Loaded came from. We all thought about Tricky’s interpretation of Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos by Public Enemy. Rob mentioned the relationship between Tricky’s Overcome and Massive Attack’s Karmacoma. I thought about Red Sails from Lodger, which is essentially a track from Harmonia’s Deluxe (except that I’ve already played Deluxe at a previous meeting). I considered Sly and the Family Stone’s Higher from Dance to the Music, which was re-worked two years later into I Want to Take You Higher.

This got me thinking about what makes a song, what the central essence of the art is; if with classical music the score is the essence, and if with jazz the live performance is the essence (Teo and Miles obviously obliterating this notion from 1969 onwards), then, with rock/pop, is the recording the essence? Apparently Boys Keep Swinging and Fantastic Voyage from Lodger both (very deliberately) have exactly the same chord sequence and structure, while Move On is the chords from All the Young Dudes played backwards! Then I thought about Kanye West rapping over Curtis Mayfield’s Move on Up, and the Jamaican Dancehall trend of MCs singing different ‘songs’ over the same backing tracks. I thought about The Stone Roses flipping the tape of Waterfall backwards, mumbling over the top of it, and pretending it was a new song.

Then, after considering and discarding so many things, I looked at my pile of DRC potentials, and was struck by an album I’ve been meaning to bring since we started, which features an instrumental reprise of a song from a previous incarnation of the same group.

Unsurprisingly, I’ve written about The Magical World of The Strands before, telling the stories behind its strange conception. Track six is a reprise of Undecided from Shack’s previous album, Waterpistol, and offers strange echoes of Mick and John Head’s past.

The Magical World of The Strands itself is a beautiful, strange record, in thrall to Arthur Lee’s Love, The Byrds, Nick Drake, The Beatles, and pastoral English folk music, yet somehow hermetically sealed from the world around it, a wistful, delicate, lovelorn universe of its own. It’s a damaged album made by a recovering heroin addict, which is nonetheless amazingly crafted and emotional. The songwriting on display is never less than exceptional, and, in Something Like You, reaches the kind of peak that very few composers of popular song can even comprehend, let alone achieve; it’s a near perfect love song.

The Pale Fountains, Shack, The Strands, and then Shack again: Michael and John Head have tried time and again to break into the public consciousness and always been denied. It’s a shame, because this record is exceptional.

Rob listened: I enjoyed parts of this, but, I dunno. I never really got the Shack as Great Lost Band thing. I saw them supporting The Fall in, I guess, the late 80s and they never really caught fire for me. I’ve given ‘HMS Fable’ a couple of goes over the years but… it’s all a bit meh. I found the sound of ‘The Magical World…’ really rather sweet, and the back story intriguing. Two or three of the songs really managed to nuture a lovely glow particlarly, if I recall correctly, the one John sings. However, I never really got Love either, I don’t get bands who set out to create pitch perfect recreations of bygone bands and sounds (and I could certainly picture one N. Gallagher nodding along appreciatively to this) and ultimately I didn’t get this, at least on first listen. Referential, reverential but not, i’m afraid, revelatory.

Tom Listened: I have been keen to hear Shack related music for a long time now – I remember Uncut magazine going nuts (not Nuts magazine going uncut – that’s different!) for HMS Fable at the time of its release but The Magical World didn’t really do it for me – in fact my feelings towards this album very closely mirror Nick’s in relation to Satisfied Mind by The Walkabouts. A pleasant enough sounding album and possibly one that will reveal itself over time but, in direct contrast to Love’s Forever Changes (which it didn’t much resemble to be honest), it didn’t leave much of an impression on a first listen (for the record, I absolutely hated Forever Changes the first time I heard it, but it intrigued me nonetheless and went on to become a favourite album of mine).

Simon and Garfunkel – Bridge Over Troubled Water: Round 29, Nick’s choice


An ILM thread polling the tracks on this album got revived about a week or so ago, and made me pull the CD off the shelf for the first time in probably years. I was amazed that I’d missed the thread first time round, only in January this year, as, and I know this is something of a Devon Record Club cliché by this point, it’s one of my favourite albums ever.

So much so, that Bridge Over Troubled Water is one of the few albums that I also own on vinyl, having stolen my dad’s copy of it many, many years ago when I was a teenager. It’s probably the first “album” I was aware of as a child; I can’t recall a specific memory regarding why (unlike the way I can remember hearing Do You Know The Way To San Jose on oldies radio in the car whilst in the carpark of a supermarket in Newton Abbot on a Saturday morning); I just have a really strong feeling that this is the case.

I bought a CD copy whilst at university, and listened to it a lot. I remember, on buying my first hi-fi that could really be pumped loud, being struck by just how raucous songs like Cecelia, Keep The Customer Satisfied, Baby Driver, and Why Don’t You Write Me were, compared to the aura of quiet, mature melodicism that I’d thought the album had when I first heard it; actually, almost half the album consists of rollicking songs about drug dealers, whores, vagrants, teenage sex, adulterers…

Crucially, though, it’s also about friendship, and changing friendship, and what happens when friends drift apart, as they often do. From the drama of the title track opening the album by laying oneself down in aid of a friend, to the literal ‘goodbye’ of Bye Bye Love (and the ‘so long’ of Song For The Asking), it seems clear, with the gift of hindsight, that Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were coming to the end of their time together. So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright is pretty obviously not about the architect (“I’ll remember… all of the times we’d harmonize till dawn”), while The Only Living Boy In New York (maybe my favourite song on the album) is clearly about Art Garfunkel’s nascent acting career and its effect on the duo, beautifully aligning regret for what was with a sense that it’s probably for the best.

Throughout the record the melodies are astonishing, the harmonies beautiful, and the arrangements fascinating and moving, from the Peruvian instrumentation of El Condor Pasa to the exuberant, defiant brass of Keep The Customer Satisfied, the 50s-tinged rock’n’roll signifiers of Baby Driver, the strange, beautifully swooning arrangement of The Only Living Boy In New York, and the extraordinary, melodramatic climax of the title track. One of the greats.

Rob listened: I’m starting the think my fellow DRC members are conspiring to destroy all the relics and icons of my musical bad faith, one by one. I loathed Simon and Garfunkel from an early age, without ever having heard them properly. I can’t remember why. I suspect something to do with the gingham-skipping lyrics to ‘Scarborough Fair’ and having heard ‘Feeling Groovy’ once to often (once, probably) and been left faintly nauseous by the experience. Sure ‘Sound of Silence’ was beautiful, ‘The Boxer’ rousing and ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ enough to bring a tear, but the rest was worth a shoeing from a punky young fuckwit, wasn’t it? Well yes, but of course, no. This sounded depressingly great. Please, please, let no-one show up with Pink Floyd next week. I need something to cling to.

Tom Listened: I used to love Simon and Garfunkel. I had a copy of their greatest hits on  a tape that I probably went on to wear out. I also had a thing for Paul Simon’s solo output but despite this I had never heard BOTW the album in its own right.

Then, as I settled into my twenties, I began to explore a lot of other music that was made in the late 60s and early 70s – Astral Weeks, Pink Moon, Sister Lovers, Starsailor…dare I say it…Pet Sounds. And all of sudden Paul Simon’s records seemed much less enticing. They seemed to lack the sophistication, complexity or brutal honesty that these other albums possessed and yet were trying to chart similar musical territory. I wanted singer/songwriters to provide a glimpse into the dark night of the soul. Simon and Garfunkel sounded too polite, almost antiseptic in comparison. So I kept Graceland, took the others to the charity shop and no longer have a tape recorder.

It was interesting hearing this after all this time. I already knew about two thirds of the songs and was impressed by the grandeur of the title track, liked The Only Living Boy In New York and found the rest OK…polite and a little antiseptic if I’m honest (and not a patch on Pet Sounds – ducks and runs for cover).

Graham Listened: Second round in succession that Nick has picked and album I’ve owned, even though this one was pinched from my parents collection. Around half of this album is deeply implanted in my brain from the radio 2 playlists of the 1970’s which echoed around me as a child on the wireless in the kitchen, the radiogram (how old am I ?) in the lounge and in-car hifi of our Ford Escort MkII. This is the first-time in over 20 years I’ve actually listened to this album and it is simply magnificent. The brass sections and orchestration still sound fantastic and listening to it all for the first time on a good audio set up was a real pleasure. I’ve never followed Paul Simon’s solo career, though I can recognise its worth. A worthy adversary of an album to some of the overrated offerings by other American artists of the time (..ahem).


Björk – Post: Round 28 – Nick’s choice

Post is another one of the CDs I’ve stacked up as potential record club choices over the last few months; sans theme, and with the gut feeling that we’d pretty grossly underrepresented music by women at our meetings, it jumped to the top of the pile.

(Tom did a quick tally by looking through our blog analytics last night and concluded that he’d brought seven records by women, Graham had brought four, I’d brought three [including Post], and Rob had brought only one [Melt Banana!]; 14 is a pretty poor showing considering we’ve played getting on for a hundred records at DRC now.)

I bought Post in late 1995 from Woolworths in Dawlish, after being wowed by It’s Oh So Quiet (both the song and the extraordinary Spike Jones video). At the time it was the first album I’d bought by a female solo artist; the first, in fact, not by a band of boys with guitars – Screamadelica was the only record already in my possession that did anything other than play straight rock songs, pretty much. I was mocked for buying Post by some friends, for stepping outside the horizons limited by the Smashing Pumpkins, Stone Roses, and Pearl Jam that seemed to make up their tastes.

I’m glad I did though, because Björk was a pretty powerful gateway drug into other musical worlds; I remember reading an interview with her at around this time where she compared guitar music to potatoes, and said she preferred to consume a varied musical diet than just eat mash and chips all the time. This seemed exotic and enticing to me at 16; at 33, it just seems like common sense. (After all, who wants to eat the same lunch every day?)

Apparently, Post is (lyrically) about moving to London from Iceland, and the combination of excitement and apprehension that this inspired in Björk. Musically, it’s about… everything, almost, from the irresistible, semi-industrial groove of opener Army Of Me (written to admonish her younger brother, supposedly), the beatific techno-love-song of Hyper-Ballad, the big band theatricality of It’s Oh So Quiet, the luscious, modern fairy-tale of Isobel, the grinding trip-hop of Enjoy; there are so many textures, ideas, approaches, and emotions to take in. I feel like I’m still getting to know it all these years later.

I have a strange relationship with Björk; I respect her immensely, and love a whole great big chunk of her music (especially Debut, Post and Homogenic) but she’s not someone I listen to all that regularly – I never turn to her music as default listening for some reason, and, looking on my iPhone, there aren’t many songs by her in my most-used playlists. So I’m resolving to use the choice of Post at DRC as a catalyst to spend some more time with her music over the next few weeks. Who’s going to recommend my good b-sides?

Rob listened: I think ‘Post’ is one of the best records ever made. I don’t think there’s anything more I can usefully say. Perhaps I could add that i’d like to be locked in a box with the high-end sounds from Hyperballad for about 30 years, but you probably wouldn’t understand. Nick: Thanks a million for bringing this. I have quite a few b-sides and remixes from the Debut/Post era. I’ll try to dig them out if you’re interested.

Tom Listened: I really admire Bjork. She’s a true visionary, a singular artist, one who is undoubtedly making the music she feels with scant regard to her record buying public – like all the best recording artists over the years. And I admire her music too – she is incredibly creative, original, technically skillful and imaginative. The trouble is I just don’t connect with it – there is no emotional hook for me and I can find her voice hard to take in large doses.

I was really interested to hear Post. It was always the Bjork album I most wanted to check out. I’m glad I’ve now heard it in full and it was, in many ways, a remarkable listen. But, for me, it lacked memorable melodies and a rawness that I am often drawn to in music (and which I found in abundance on The Sugarcubes’ debut Life’s Too Good). So I guess I will continue to admire Bjork from afar rather than up close for the time being.

Graham listened: Strangely I had completely forgotten that I already owned this album. As soon as it started I was instantly reminded why I bought it, and how good it really was. It has so much depth and variation and is simply brilliant. Thanks to DRC, its back in the CD player in the car!