Category: Pop music

Well, Nick wanted quiet, so I thought I would bring something that is barely there, in a literal sense as well as sonically.

In fact, Aldous Harding is barely anywhere….a record that neither Rob or Nick had heard of is rare indeed. A record that hasn’t got an Allmusic review is hallowed ground. In fact, Aldous hasn’t even got a wikipedia entry, which must mean that either she doesn’t actually exist, is less than two years of age…or that she is from New Zealand.

Which of course, isn’t the case. Not EVERYBODY I take to record club is from New bloody Zealand! Having researched extensively by, y’know’ reading books and stuff, it turns out that Aldous ‘Keith’ Harding was born in Chipping Sodbury in the year 2000. Solely proficient in the playing of spoons, it is actually her pet chimp, ‘Mr Crumble’ who takes the lead on most of the guitar solos on the album. The jury is out as to whether the music on this, her eighth album, is ‘black’ or ‘death’ or, indeed, ‘black death’ metal but the pounding drums and terrifying vocals have to be heard to be believed.

No matter how many times I hear it, her hidden track cover version of Showaddywaddy’s Under The Moon Of Love never fails to move me to tears. A departure from her earlier work, Aldous Harding the album has a pop sensibility that underpins every damn note on the record – imagine Tribe of Toffs’ John Kettley is a Weather Man crossed with Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell…III, and you’ll be close to the overall sound of the album, the chiming guitars from Crumble coalescing with Harding’s finest cutlery to produce sounds that echo glories past but are, frankly, unlike anything else in recorded music. Don’t believe me? Well do yourselves a favour and go buy yourself a copy of this fine slab of vinyl and then get back to me if it isn’t one of the best things you’ve heard all year!

PS Aldous…If you ever happen to stumble upon this ridiculous piece of writing (and with your internet presence I doubt you will), I most humbly apologise. I actually think your album is a wonderful, wonderful thing; one of the most delicate, arid and quietly devastating records I have heard in a long time.

My post is really just a silly way of pointing out how over-reliant we are on the internet, how rare it is that we can stumble across gems like this, whilst knowing so little about the person who made them. My discovery of your music (with so little to go on..thank you Marc Riley on 6 Music), and the time I have subsequently spent with your songs, has brought me great pleasure.

Rob listened: In accidental keeping with Tom’s conceit of obscuring his real thoughts on this record with some other writing, a veritable palimpsest if you will, I wrote up and, I thought, published some rather erudite comments on Aldous Harding a couple of weeks ago and they seem, on my return, to have disappeared.

It was quite refreshing to hear a record none of us had heard of, including Tom more or less, and which was practically unfindable online. No preconceptions, no-one telling us what to think. Just like the old days, perhaps. The record turned out to be an intriguing listen, working inside a range but within that displaying wilful variety between tracks. ‘Aldous Harding’ was a fascinating counterpoint to the Grouper record. One is an artist who obscures her true intentions underneath layers of fog and reverb. The other makes it difficult to know her by skipping around wildly between styles and approaches, within a crystal clear sound. I hope the internet discovers Aldous Harding soon.

About half a year ago I set the theme that at our next meeting we had to bring a record by someone who had been discussed at our previous get together. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Often the records that we are not playing – but talking about – sound like they could be even better than the fodder we are consuming there and then. We also like to play ‘Spot the Influence’, aka ‘This sounds a bit like…’ incessantly, although I have to admit that I am probably the biggest culprit in this respect, so names crop up regularly but often only a couple of us actually know what they sound like. I thought it might be fun to try to connect together two consecutive evenings in this way, join the dots and hear what all the fuss was about. It sort of worked too, but perhaps would have been even better if we hadn’t done the politician/teacher thing of having the summer off and could actually remember the conversations we had had!

In the event I am not sure why I brought up Spacemen 3 at our previous meeting but I think (and I am very happy to be corrected on this)  it might have been at the point where Rob’s Haxan Cloak offering went all poppy and something there reminded me a little of Playing With Fire’s gargantuan, and somewhat idiosyncratic, centerpiece, Suicide. Suicide (the track) is an obvious tribute to Martin Rev and Alan Vega’s band of the same name but filtered through the haze of a very different cocktail of mind expanding substances. Whereas Suicide (the band) played mainly hushed, barely there, pitter patter pop (with the occasional bloodcurdling scream admittedly), Suicide (the song) is a full on aural assault; a pummeling, repetitive onslaught that needs the volume to be set to 11 to register the full impact. Seeing as the rest of the album is really nothing like it, and recalling the effect that The Haxan Cloak had on us, I can only assume that the connection was made in this way.

Funnily enough the majority of Playing With Fire is much closer in spirit and sound to Suicide’s eponymous debut album, especially its more blissful songs like Cheree and Girl. And to my mind, this is where it really hits it stride – minimal electronica with hushed vocals and pulsating drones sounding far more radical and enthralling than the somewhat tired, adolescent sloganeering and ‘Stoogeslite’ riffing of the ‘big’ hit single Revolution – which, as Rob pointed out on the night, really hasn’t worn all that well over the intervening 27 years. A staple of indie discos at the time, perhaps that’s where it should have stayed!

I bought Playing With Fire at the time of its release and was immediately hooked. I loved the sounds (which were unlike anything I had heard before) and, curiously, I was also really drawn to the coolness of the band. Being staunchly anti-drugs, I had no time at all for friends and acquaintances who dabbled, yet here I was, thrilled to be listening to a band who openly promoted the use of hallucinogens! This inconsistency made little sense to me but was something I felt deeply at the time. Thinking back now, it was almost as if, through listening to Playing With Fire, I could experience the effects of the drugs (which always fascinated me) without having to sell my principles or take the risks. The Spacemen were taking the trip to the other side and reporting back with what they found there. Cool.

Of course, that all sounds like total bobbins to me now and, to be perfectly honest, my feelings towards the record have diminished as a result. So Spacemen 3 are no longer ‘my favourite band…like…ever’, Playing With Fire is no longer the coolest thing since sliced bread and, it turns out, the ‘other side’ just happened to be a record that had been released a decade earlier and still sounds more dangerous, revolutionary and groundbreaking. Yet, despite these misgivings, I would attest that Spacemen 3’s third album is (on the whole) a damn fine listen that has held up surprisingly well over the intervening years and still manages to sound reasonably cool even in 2015.

Rob listened: An absolutely seminal record for me, this. Several years ago to this very day I arrived at university with my Fall and Pixies tapes and my poster of Morrissey’s shaved armpit. I assumed everyone else would be in tune with me and I was wrong. No-one liked the Smiths, The Fall hadn’t crossed their radars and PiL were an irrelevance. Instead, at least two of my new flatmates both had ‘Playing With Fire’ posters blu-tacked to the flaky paint on their bedroom walls. This was the club the new kids were in, and I was clueless. I was even more bewildered when I actually heard the record. No raging punk rock guitars. No cinder-throated vocals. No pounding percussion. Actually, no percussion to speak of at all.

Now, several years later, some of these sounds are the most evocative in recorded music. That spectral, bending guitar. That sobbing reverb, eked out with a dancer’s precision. That bronchial farfisa organ. Or was it a vox?

‘Playing With Fire’ is one of the handful of records that completely changed the way I listened to music and rewired what I looked for. The space, the pace, the mood were all things I had never come across before and, after some considerable time to be fair, I was intoxicated by it. Tom’s brother and I used to lie on the floor in the dark listening to ‘Suicide’. It was about the most transportive thing I did during those three years.

And now? Well, it still sets my spine tingling, although I’m not sure how well some of it holds up. As Tom has intimated, some of it really doesn’t. ‘Revolution’ really did used to sound like the barricades were being kicked in and now it just sounds impotent. It’s probably fair to class Spacemen 3 as baton carriers, taking the message from Suicide and the Velvets and keeping it alive for another generation to make more of. Nonetheless, there are things that they did that still sound like no-one else has ever sounded. And when those guitars shine out like warm sun-rays over the horizon, man, it transports me.

Nick listened: I bought copy of this while at university, more than ten years after it originally came out and a good couple of years after I’d fallen in love with Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentlemen… and then explored their previous two albums with great eagerness. I’d read about how influential Spacemen 3 were, and heard “Hypnotized”, which, of course, sounds almost exactly like early Spiritualized songs (Pierce has seemingly spent 30 years rewriting the same three songs with vaguely different arrangements). This, however, sounded 50% like cheap demos of early Spiritualized and 50% like someone loading computer games on a ZX Spectrum in 1983 from cassette tapes. Completely underwhelmed by its “psychedelia”, I sold/gave away/lost my copy.

So hearing it again was intriguing; the criticisms still stand – it is cheap and rudimentary sounding – but they matter a lot less to me now; there’s something really interesting here now, that, with 15-odd years more experience and understanding racked up in my listening, I can appreciate as having been potentially pretty seismic at the time. From what I’ve read I suspect I’d like Recurring more than this, but thanks to Tom and Rob’s enthusiasm I’m now intrigued to explore further, and find out what I dismissed all those years ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the end my decision to bring Coltranology Volume 2 to Record Club was sealed by my reflections on Rob’s offering at the previous round. I was so taken by Buddy Holly’s greatest hits that I more-or-less immediately acquired a copy of his second album; an album which is spectacular in its raw, unfettered simplicity. I have listened to it a lot since I bought it, becoming dangerously addicted in the process. But, as our themed night grew ever nearer, I had to go looking through my collection for an instrumental album (we had to find some way of stopping Mitchell singing along) and I thought the fact that John Coltrane was making music so complex and demanding at roughly the same point in time that Buddy Holly was releasing his music would make for a neat comparison. So I chose the second volume of Coltrane’s little known 1962 live album, Coltranology. Coincidentally, I also really like it!

In comparison to today, music must have seemed to offer so little choice back then – looking back it seems as though the options were rock’n’roll, easy listening or jazz. And whilst I can now appreciate the skill and innovation of Holly’s simple tunes, I am sure I would have gravitated towards jazz if I had been consuming music at the turn of the 60s, drawn to its outsider attitude and thrilling  unpredictability, whilst simultaneously sneering at the ridiculous sappy pap on offer elsewhere. But, funnily enough, my 2015 self and jazz have a far less easy relationship than I imagine I would have had had there been so little to choose from and I have numerous jazz albums in my collection that I have no desire to go near again, with or without barge pole.

I recall Graham writing, in his response to Fiona Apple’s The Idler Wheel…, that he either likes an artist to stick to the rules or completely break them, suggesting that Ms Apple did neither. I guess I’m the opposite, preferring those who tinker, bend and shape their music away from the familiar, whilst still providing a safety net of familiarity. That’s probably why I am drawn to this live album from 1962 rather than Coltrane’s slightly safer earlier output or the cacophony he whipped up on his later, perhaps more heralded, albums. The four tracks on Coltranology Volume 2 constantly teeter on the brink of collapse but, crucially for me, Coltrane reins in his instincts to go entirely stratospheric just enough to provide sufficient structure to give the listener something to hang on to, to look forwards to, to recognise! Maybe it’s not as groundbreaking as what was to come next, but I know what I would rather be listening to! Coltranology Volume 2 was the first John Coltrane album I acquired and, whilst I have gone on to add Meditations, Giant Steps and A Love Supreme to my collection, it is the runt of the litter that I find so hard to resist, offering, as it does, just enough light and shade to make it captivating, thrilling and, to my mind at least, accessible enough.

Rob listened: I know where Tom is coming from. Much as my own musical devotions have mostly been shaped by the lean, brutal simplicity of rock and roll, had I been around when the form was being hewn out then I would probably have been too much of a jazz snob to have given it any headspace whatsoever. Which would presumably have left me a jazz aficionado who missed out on ‘Sister Ray’ and ‘Trout Mask Replica’ and yes, even the Haxan Cloak. As it goes, I dabble a (very) little in Jazz, but with a gleeful lack of knowledge, which I value in this context.  Some of it I really like, some of it I would like to like, some of it I admire, some of it I can’t take seriously. I heard an edition of Sound Opinions recently that offered ‘A Rock Fan’s Guide To Jazz‘. Therein, John Corbett talked about his breakthrough with Jazz being the moment he realised there was nothing to ‘get’. From that point he just went with it, dived deeper into the stuff he liked and stayed away from the stuff he didn’t without trying to figure any of it out. I can dig that. At the same time I can totally buy Steve Albini’s famously dismissive views on the form. However i’m feeling on any given day, what never fails to amaze me is just how wild some of this stuff still sounds, 50 or 60 years after it was recorded.

The first side of this record was as crazed as the most wilfully abrasive black metal or disembodied electronica. The second side was a bit more beautiful. Put together, they made a fine listen.

Nick Listened: Writing this months after the fact – my own fault – makes remembering what I thought of this record pretty difficult. I remember it seemed pretty muddy in terms of sound quality (old live recording, vinyl), and that I thought this probably detracted from its impact a little. Bits, as Rob suggests, of the second side were really quite beautiful, bits of the first side had that jazz thing that I don’t always quite get, where it genuinely sounds like people are playing entirely different things from each other, and I’m not – despite owning and loving a lot of jazz – quite musical enough to get what they’re doing. Interestingly, Miles Davis (who I rarely suffer from that problem with) described Coltrane (in an interview in about 1982) as a ‘selfish’ musician, something which made sense to me. I’ve always preferred Miles to Coltrane; the latter seemed to quest further and further into himself, looking for new intensities, while the former seemed to be always moving outwards, looking for new canvases to paint his trumpet over.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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