Gigomaphone

Thanks to SubPop for releasing a sampler of 14 MP3s. Check them out - some great tracks in there.

After living, breathing, digesting and possibly even excreting their landmark album, ‘Aja’ (1977) over a period of several months last year, I was unsure about taking the follow-on step to ‘Gaucho’. Aja, for the uninitiated, is an unashamedly jazz-rock-’of-it’s-era’ album, resplendent with enough virtuoso session musos to poke several large sticks at several large things. There are a few moments on the album that young Gen-Y whippersnappers would scoff at and maybe even deride because they sound like something you might hear on midweek AM radio.

In the early 80s.

To some, myself included, that’s a good thing and in the case of ‘Aja’, it would have been damned near exceptional early 8os AM radio, such is the musical polish and, more importantly, depth of that album.

Steely Dan music has always been music played by people who know how to play their instruments, even if that does include a soaringly dated saxophone. But all things in context.

‘Gaucho’, expands this glossy universe. Whereas ‘Aja’ was tight as a drum and sounded beautiful, there was still some grit in amongst the golden syrup brass sections. ‘Gaucho’ is all tight and beautiful and there’s precious little grit. This is burnished to within an inch of it’s musical integrity because just a bit more spit and polish and this could have tipped over into self-parody. Pleasingly, they stopped where they did.

‘Gaucho’, the title evidently a tribute to Keith Jarratt, is the crystalline sound of early cocaine LA, all Santa-Anna winds and red-orange dusk over the city. It is an entirely evocative album; it’s hard to imagine such a finely polished collection could trigger the imagination but it does, and does with emphasis. There’s no track on here that jumps out specifically, as they all seem to traffic along in a cohesive, sheened whole.

I didn’t really take to this album at first. I could still hear ‘Aja’ everytime I played it and the opener, ‘Babylon Sisters’ just sounded derivative. After awhile, I came to accept that it is, indeed, derivative but it’s this quality that makes it strong. ‘Gaucho’ draws on an already excellent body of music and it’s only uniqueness is that it’s without doubt the most glistening of the Steely Dan canon.

I like it a lot.

Aja 5/5

Gaucho 4/5

It’s true that I excite easily but there’s good reason for it with the release of a new St Vincent album ‘Actor’. Initial listens confirm the inclusion of heavier, guitar-fuzz elements, perversely scrawled over the melodic, lush backdrops. I enjoyed the quote somewhere… to paraphrase… ”like scrawling a cock and balls over a Rembrandt”.

The same chamber-music choral embellishment is all there, the same pencil-sharp, pastel tone voice, the intricate arrangements. Full review may follow in due course but for now, it’s time to return to the mix.

hi, this album is realy cool :-). it is reall new and they are btr than empore of the Sun. they are are also beter loking lol. their songz are sic and so is their hare. i like their voices a lot 2. they sound a bit like boys and girls at the same time ;-). i have electric Feel as my ring tone. my friend dave tries to dres like the one with the longer hair but he doesn’t look much like him. dave’s older brother is 22, his name is Steve (but we coll him jingo ROTFL) and he went to meridith to c them but he sed they were fucking shit becuz they just played guitar fro ages and u couldn’t danz 2 it :-(. the best songs on this cd is electric feel, kids and time 2 pretend. i downloaded all them from itunes. mum paid for the,. i am a fan of them on facebook and i am a member of their fb group 2. i went to a party last week and when they played kids we all started dancing on the table. dave took heaps of fotos on his iphone and we uploaded them to FB strait away. older people like them 2, my gf tanya’s cousin is 28 and he thinks they are cool and even bougt and Daves dad plays them in the car sometimes which sux but they are still cool lol… anyway download those 3 songs i sed cuz they are sic, bye…

Tight as a drum, Microcastle is like a fusion of mid ’90s hazed out dream-pop and well schooled punk and it’s very, very good. That said, albums like Microcastle don’t pop up too often. Reading at first like a playlist of short but punchy and melodic proto-punk cuts, the album expands into more dreamy atmospheres, with the guitars taking a back seat to a swathe of ambient pulsewidth. It then concludes with three or four seriously good tracks, all bound together with miasmic guitar and swirling atmospherics.

Whilst this has been plonked in the ‘dream pop’ basket by some, it is far broader and darker than that and there’s much more of a foothold here. There is an elemental punk ethic going on within the mix but it’s a buffed over sound, more ambient than noise but not mush- not by any stretch.

Deerhunter hail from Atlanta, Georgia, USA. I must admit I’d never heard of them before but it would seem I’ve caught them at about the right time as this is by all accounts their tightest and most focussed effort yet. Recommended.

5/5

Cool cover

There was a time post 2000 or thereabouts when a plethora of tedious ambient chill out compilations came pouring out of every achey breaky nook and cranny; regurgitated twaddle like early -90s Enigma, endless, sapping pourings of the Art of Noise classic ‘Moments in Love’ and a host of William Orbit and Endorphin styled offerings whereby classical music was dressed up with icy synths and post-Oxygene beats. All very depressing.

Around that time, I saw the name ‘Lemon Jelly’ appear on some of this stuff too and largely wrote it off as more of the same crap. Turns out I was only partly right.

‘Lost Horizons’ is actually quite good, like the pre-teen duxette of the school is actually quite good. It’s overwhelmingly pleasant and quite samey. It’s a handy thing, though that the samey is not loud,obnoxious, dissonant samey but after eight tracks of lush, melodic, guitar inflected electronica with all knowing studio vocals (made to sound like cool samples but in fact not that at all), I could have done with a bit of obnoxious.

Of course, there are some highlights: ‘Ramblin’ Man’, the meat-in-the-sandwich of which involves a wise old travelling sage recounting all the places he’s been surely owes a debt to the grimy KLF classic ‘It’s Grim Up North’ and it’s amusing to this reviewer at least, that one of the places he’s been is ‘Adelaide’, intoned with a particular note of finality.

With ominous segueway, we’re led into ‘Spacewalk’, which is also nice, but the inclusion of a fake astronaut sample, again, mars it somewhat, pun or thereabouts excused. ‘Nice Weather for Ducks’, evidently a hit of sorts in its time, is however, not so strong, being reliant as it is on a cheap children’s UK TV broadcast sample (that old chestnut) with a groove structured around it, to a snug fit. I got tired of the sample (the Prodigy’s ‘Charly’ anyone?) and was too busy tooth gnashing and fidgeting to enjoy the rhythmic bass and drums flowering around it.

All that said though, this is a good album - it’s solid, dependable and technically sound but ultimately a bit forgettable too. Maybe ‘lame’ would be too strong a word. Music for invalids, like warmed curdy milk or, erm lemon jelly.

‘The Staunton Lick’,  used to wonderful effect in the dying minutes of the cult serial ‘Spaced’ and quite probably Lemon Jelly’s greatest track, is not to be found on this album. That’s a shame as it could have done with at least a Staunton Lick or two extra.

3/5

When I got the call saying that there was a spare ticket to Birds of Tokyo I wasn’t sure whether it’d be my thing. I’m not overly familiar with the current Australian music scene, but figured that this would be as good a time as any to try to get back into it. Fortunately for me Janelle also likes to support all of the acts that are on the bill, so we got to the venue a bit before the doors opened. After convincing security that it was, in fact, OK for me to bring my camera in with me, we went and got a beer, found some seats (yes, I’m old now) right behind the mixing desk and sat and waited for the show to begin.

I wish I could remember what the name of the first act was.  It was a one-man show with a sequencer playing some music while he sang, quite well actually. I think there were three stories told, but because I seem to have live-gig-music-amnesia, I can only tell you that one of the songs was about going out in Noarlunga. He spent quite a bit of time in with the crowd and it seemed like he was quite comfortable with a mostly-empty venue…and probably has to be.

I hadn’t heard of Trial Kennedy before the night. I started to think that it might be a Dead Kennedys tribute band. Or something that wouldn’t be anywhere near as good as a Dead Kennedys tribute band. Turns out they were a tight band with good vocals. I’m not used to seeing tight bands. Most bands I’ve seen in my punk-influenced life have barely been able to play their instruments, let alone play them at the same speed and with the same timing as two or more people.  To see a band with a singer that could sing was also a novelty.  The guitarist tried/did some Santiago-esque wailing on the guitar, and it mostly worked - just like when I saw Joey try himself at V-festival a couple of years ago. I would go see Trial Kennedy again, without doubt.

My experience with Birds of Tokyo is limited. I’d heard the tracks that JJJ decided were most worthy of being on high rotation a few times and I’d listened through the album a couple of times. I’d picked up the song titles to songs like “Wild Eyed Boy” because the song title is repeated over and over in the lyrics, but for most of the other tracks I had no idea. Without harping too much on what the bands I used to go and see used to do on stage, I’m also not used to bands who basically just stand on stage blasting out highly accurate music with awesomly executed harmonies. Being used to punk band members thrashing around on stage, it was a surprise that all the harmonies were, in fact harmonious and performed at the right time. Bands like NOFX and No Fun At All do harmonise quite a bit, but whether or not they happen at a live show depends on whether the mic has landed somewhere near the singer’s head when they all fell over during a particularly exuberant thrashing-about.

It took a long time for the crowd to really warm to the music. Whether that’s because we’re in Adelaide, they were all too busy recording video on their phones to put on YouTube or because the band started playing slower songs so they could finish with the more crowd-surf-friendly songs I don’t know. I would have liked another hour or so of Birds of Tokyo, provided I could have got some caffeine into me, and I think the rest of the crowd would have enjoyed it too - if the level of excitement kept increasing at the same rate security might actually have been required on the night after another hour or so.

On the last track or two Trial Kennedy and what’s-his-name from Noarlunga joined Birds of Tokyo on stage, and proceeded to tape up the lead-singer. Which I think was a nice gesture, especially since they didn’t even try to make him fall over by taping up his ankles or anything.

I will go again if they make it back to lil’ ol’ Adelaide.

Here are my photos from Birds of Tokyo on Saturday night in Adelaide. Review to come.

If memories are like spongy squelches from a Roland TB303 acid box then the personal musical era during my mid twenties is one very long acid track.

Back before a mate painted his old car KLF style, with the LFO logo (see Warp Records LFO not the poxy boyband that crops up post-most internet searches) and not long after I picked up New Order’s classic ‘Power, Corruption and Lies’, I spent a small summer basking in the warm acid-bath of this enduring piece of musical embroidery.

Manchester’s 808 State emerged head-on into the furnace of early acid house, with two musical power-plays – “New Build” (1988) and “Quadrastate” (1989), both deleted for a number of years and a reinstated a few years back. Both albums were very much a product of the insular and narrow wedged scene that was acid-house – driving, pulsing, mono-dimensional slabs of music that slugged you over the head whilst you danced or mused your way through the travails of the late ‘80s.

‘90’ was a different beast though. Whilst the music here is, at heart, acid, there is a lovely sense of melody and place to it. The ‘melody’ bit is obvious whereas the ‘place’ is entirely personal. Memories may indeed be acid drops but the acid drops here evoke a wealth of memories in return. It would seem, based on the widespread appreciation of this album that I am not alone in this regard.

There are a number of highlights although the money shot on here is without a doubt, ‘Pacific 202’, the most recognisable and user-friendly version of this track. It’s soaring saxophones and gorgeous chord-hover strike right to the core of the acid house movement and reveal a beautiful, beating heart beneath all the bleeps, tweaks, pulses and squelches.

The State went on to release a very good follow up album - ’Ex:El’ (1991) although there were signs on that one that all was not necessarily pure in their musical intent any more, a fear confirmed with the release of the woeful ‘Gorgeous’ (1993) although this was all redeemed later by the noodling but worthwhile ‘Don Solaris’ (1996).

As a snatch of rare genius, ‘90′ is the business though. An unmistakeable classic of its genre.

5/5

Here’s the full set of Big Day Out 2008 photos from my Flickr photostream.