Gigomaphone

Some time back I reviewed this album and gave it a hearty thumbs up.

Several months on, I’m still all over it like a rash.

This is utilitarian music and whilst that sounds like more of a slap in the face than a plaudit, it’s this quality that gives it strength. It’s hardy, resilient, nostalgic and retrospective electronic music that’s equally at home pulsing out of the earbuds on a run, as it is as a background to thoughtful work. There are no pesky lyrics to distract or detract, nor are there any jarring changes of pace.

As the hot water bottle of my music collection, this is a standout. Bravo.

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.

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

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

Post rock is different things to different people but it’s also a fairly lazy term to suggest a wide range of styles. An old friend of mine, sick to the brimful of Mogwai and Godspeed! albums once called it, frustratingly, ‘bad jazz’. That definition’s a fine one but by bad, he meant ‘gone bad’, not necessarily poor; instead, jazz that’s slivered off to the ‘dark side’. At least that’s what I think.

There’s a segment of the 15 minute track on ‘f#a#infinity’ by the name of ‘East Hastings’, subtitled ‘The Sad Mafioso’ that reminds me of that description. A sad, poignant guitar strums from a silent start and slowly builds to a crescendo then just as suddently dies back into nothing. It’s rhythmic jazz-licked stuff that becomes a musical monster, more slavering dragon than hep-cat.

I think this is my favourite Godspeed! album. Consisting of three tracks - ‘The Dead Flag Blues’, ‘East Hastings’ and ‘Providence’, it tells a tale of the end of the world - or at least it does for me.

The music is a seething mixture of orchestra and electronic, with a rigid guitar spine. There are vocal samples that foretell doom, numerous ’movements’ within the three tracks that involve fiery progressions from an otherwise melodic idyll of backyard guitar pluck and there’s a cloud of atmosphere in between, all late night smoked over opium dens and broken down arcade parlours. There’s even a 4 minute break for some silence at the end of ‘Providence’ whereafter an end movement ‘JLH Outro’, named for John Lee Hooker brings us to a chin-stroking close.

This, like a lot of their stuff, is demanding but rewarding. Listen to it late.

5/5

Lily lying on a big L

I rather liked Lily Allen’s debut album “Alright Still” (2006), finding it a charming mix of faux-cockney palaver, samples and pleasant enough ska-tinged instrumentation. Through it all, it was a very solid and consistent pop album and that was good enough for me. It had a couple of wet patches but because it was all so charismatic, I was happy to forgive her them.

She was, to me (and I suspect a few others too), like a female Mike Skinner AKA The Streets but more pop-tweaked. Nothing wrong with that, if you do it well and yes, she did it pretty well.

This is, I think, an improvement. In fact, I think this is a benchmark pop album, of sorts.

Alright, stop me now, put out your best cynic’s expression and I’ll take off my peaked sappy-pop cap. It’s probably fair to be cynical but really, there are some treasures here, hidden under this polished commercial flummery. Certainly there is a production team here that has done an excellent job of propping her up, underpins and all and certainly shows off all of her best bits. The music’s glisteningly clean and a sonic grab-bag of genres. We have Lily’s expertly tweaked voice lazily talk-singing over all sorts of stuff – 90s ambient-rave, country and western Appalachian folktronica, The Carpenters (glory!), jaunty gypsy campfire jiggery, ska, earnest piano, even stuff that sounds like a bad late 80s Pet Shop Boys B-side. it’s all just one step up from showroom synth demo muzak but it’s still impressive in its own way.

Where ‘Alright Still’ was a touch rough around the edges, this album has been polished and polished until there’s barely a rough nub left. That’s the deal, if you’re prepared to accept it.

What makes the deal more enticing, though are her bloke-obsessed lyrics which are at times repetitious and predictable but at times quite clever and she makes good use of smart-arse rhyming. It’s hard not to be impressed when on one of the last tracks ‘Him’ when referring to God, she says “I don’t imagine he’s ever been suicidal, his favourite band’s Creedence Clearwater Revival” or on the bright and optimistic relationship song ‘ Chinese’, she sings “… you make me beans on toast and a nice cup of TV and we’ll get a Chinese and watch TV”. There’s a lot of domesticity in her lyrics, just like the first album – tales of break-ups, get-togethers, men being bad in bed, a sincere apology to a girlfriend, shopping and the impressively foul mouthed “Fuck You”, directed squarely at a bigot.

All this is is very familiar of course. ‘Alright Still’ was composed of the same sort of stuff but here, it’s all cranked up – the lyrics are better here, they’re more charming, more amusing and well, definitely more smart-arse.

I like this album, for what it is, although I’ve always been a sucker for cheesy-pop. Take off a point if you’re allergic to this sort of stuff but it really is better than most of the dross out there.

Bravo Lily, you foul mouthed biatch.

4/5

One and a half years ago, I recall laying back in a big soft chair in a particularly sunny patch of an otherwise cold wintry house, reclined and carefully placed so the mild but lovely sun bore down fully over me. Try as I might, I have yet to recreate that particular moment. The angle of the sun is never where I want it, when I want it (that’s a professional irk as well, but that’s another issue), my mindset is not entirely the way it was at that very relaxed moment and I’m never as comfortable as I was then.

As far as ‘daylight lounging’ goes, it was a benchmark that for whatever obscure reason I have never matched.

The soundtrack I chose for that lazy half hour was accidental in a way, but ended up being subliminally woven into the sun-kissed dapple of time, place and memory – Mojave 3’s ‘Excuses for Travellers’ (2000).

I listened to the album a few times after but I was never able to enjoy it in quite that same way, where ‘the moment’ amplifies the enjoyment of music. So much music is so much better in the right context!  

‘Spoon and Rafter’ is admittedly not as good as that album but it is still impressive. There are no sublime idylls in the mid-winter sun here, rather a pair of headphones and computer. I can see the sky and it’s bright blue and there are trees and little birds tottering, but alas, none of the reverie of that defining semi-snooze.

The Mojave 3 sound could be accused of samey-ness, it’s mellow, extraordinarily so, but with enough lift and melody to let the songs emerge from the mellow mist of instrumentation. The sound, like ‘Excuses…’ is folk-like, with a ‘dream-pop’ sound. Everything is very relaxed and rarely does it break into a sweat, although there is a jaunty little moment in ‘Battle of the Broken Hearts’ which pops out here but on most other albums would be a sweet little interlude.

I find it hard to enjoy Mojave 3 as ‘stand alone’ music, where the aim is to actively perceive and appreciate although to say it’s ‘background music’ would be doing it an injustice as it’s much better than aural wallpaper.

Instead, my sunny daydream has reminded me to wait for the moment and let this stuff work its magic where it can exist in that finely balanced in-between state, wafting through the brain as a soundtrack to the moment.

Bring on sunny winter days!

3/5

Easily the least accessible of Herbie Hancock’s catalogue, it’s interesting that this was followed by perhaps his most accessible and recognisable album, ‘Headhunters’ (1973). Sextant’s poor album sales ignited a commercial light that created that monster album but this has more going for it than that.

Granted, it is challenging – awash with gloopy synthesisers and trickling jazz-centric machine noises, a mechanised, funked up evocation of an Afro-Alien tribe somewhere perhaps; it’s extreme fusion-Jazz, an album that stands above much of the jazz-funk flossy mulch that was produced by his contemporaries during that pivotal era.

There are but three tracks, ‘Rain Dance’, ‘Hidden Shadows’ and ‘Hornets’, the latter clocking in at an impressive near-twenty minutes. ‘Rain Dance’ is perhaps the most experimental in nature, quite eccentric, with a liberal sprinkling of electronica peppered about the jazz whereas ‘Hidden Shadows’ evokes dark ‘70s movie soundtracks, with a lusty distorted guitar riff deep in the mix. ‘Hornets’ is somewhere between the two, and again feels as though it’s the brain-soundtrack of the Scorpio Killer in ‘Dirty Harry’, all chaotic sax, drums and a spiralling scatterstorm of assorted instrumentation, both acoustic and electronic.

This is an impressive album although clearly not a lazy listen.

It does my head in.

4/5