What a brilliant burst of cod-spy thriller soundtrack lounge croon bombastic orchestrated melodramatic bedlam this is. The Arctic Monkeys last album was something of a damp squib really, although it contained a little bit of quite decent material, but it seemed like a band who just made an album without really thinking about why.
Listening to that album, one track which really struck me was this one:
At the time I thought ‘bugger me, Alex must be developing a bit of a Richard Hawley fetish’. Both being from Sheffield this didn’t seem too far-fetched, and as much as I was left underwhelmed by most of Flourescent Adolescent, it piqued my interest for their next album. I never expected this though!
Instead of a slightly 50s-sounding Monkeys album Turner and his pal Miles Kane have gone all the way and more, producing an album a radio DJ apparently described as “more Scott Walker than Scott Walker”. I don’t really know much Scott Walker, so I couldn’t tell you how much sense this makes. Quite how they recorded this in a fortnight is beyond me, but hearing something like this, even a scratch and hiss fanatic like myself finds himself thinking ‘now that’s what Big Production is for’. It could be the soundtrack to a dozen stylish sixties films, or a dozen spy movies: theatrical, grandiose and really ambitious.
It’s brilliantly successful too, a real rattling, swooning pleasure to listen to, although I have a minor, nagging caveat. For all the music of the Artctic Monkeys sometimes left me a little cold, it was generally saved by Alex Turner’s baldly honest lyrics and incredibly deft turn of phrase. The turn of phrase is still clearly at his command here, but the writing is much more artful, which sometimes makes this album feel like more of a stylistic exercise than a heartfelt musical one. They are exploring, and fair play to them, few bands could manage anything half so inventive, nor so enormously excellent, but there are times when it seems slightly more like a project and less like a mission.
You can forgive an album for getting a little sticky towards the end when the first two-thirds of it are as good as this. I’m still in a surprisingly country vein at the moment, although this is less smooth than the excellent Christopher Denny.
There’s plenty of archetypal, wistful country music here, at times witty and at times angry or even downright unnerving (Burning Red & Blue). Slipping from vaguely close to the sort of dustbowl drifter tale that I seem to fall for at every opportunity, to a kind of gentle, rolling alt-country that you could even imagine being wasted on Radio 2, it flirts with being a bit nice, but always maintains enough nasty to keep well away from the saccharine.
It’s odd actually, it’s by no means a sweet, easy country album, but at the same time it rarely has that kind of tense edge that would mark an album as ‘indie’ or ‘alternative’ in that vague and badly-defined classification system I keep stashed away in my gin-addled brain. He doesn’t write happy songs at all, but there’s little bitterness in his gorgeous delivery which makes for an oddly detached listen. It sounds more like he’s reading someone else’s stories than recounting anything that might have scarred him personally earlier in his life.
The album does tail off a little towards the end, but to complain about that would be a bit mean-spirited, because until tracks like the mealy Ramona come along, the rest of the album is such a joy you can’t begrudge him the slight lack of stamina. And, of course, the delivery is good enough that they aren’t jarring anyway, and you can drift off to do whatever it was you were doing before.
It’s a bit late to be pointing out great gigs taking place tonight, so I hope you’ll excuse my tardiness today. Such tedious annoyances as real life and having a proper job have rather irritatingly inserted themselves squarely in the path of the blogging juggernaut that is Song, by Toad and brought production to a grinding halt for the last couple of days.
So, erm, this week then. Well I am on gig-verbot for the next little while because I have been paying scandalously inadequate amounts of attention to my midget companion, and that won’t do at all. For either of us. So once this week is over there will be lots of nice things done with Mrs. Toad to try and make up for my negligence. No-one wants to be the sort of husband who fails to pay attention to that which is most important to him, no matter how much one might get caught up in exciting projects. In other words, no-one wants to turn into a prick, now do they. Although I my case the ‘turning into’ part might be questionable.
Tuesday 13th May: Isosceles, Sportsday Megaphone & Envelope at the Ark.
The Ark might be the worst venue in Edinburgh, but Isosceles are clearly worth seeing. Jumpy synth-pop with plenty of tunes and a really good spread between vocals, synth, and bass as to which provides the best bits. A actual group in every sense of the word. I don’t know anything at all about the other two, although Sportsday Megaphone sound quite promising from their MySpace page. Isosceles - Watertight Sportsday Megaphone - Bikini Atoll
Wednesday 14th May: Inspector Tapehead, Molly Wagger & Flying With Penguins at the Wee Red Bar.
I know little enough about all of these bands, but Inspector Tapehead include Jonnie Common from the superb Down the Tiny Steps in their number, so that is pretty much all the information I need to go along. That and the fact that this is a Trampoline gig of course, and I have yet to see a Trampoline lineup that was any less than fucking superb. Inspector Tapehead - A Fillet of Bozo
Thursday 15th May - Willard Grant Conspiracy & the Pilgrim Orchestra (incl. Howe Gelb) at the Queens Hall.
This gig gets me all shaky with excitement. The Willards have produced three or four of my favourite albums of all time, and Howe Gelb is hardly a slouch either. Two of Americana’s most prolific collaborators coming to town, and I’d steal a ticket off a defenceless old granny if I had to. WGC’s new album The Pilgrim Road is out now too, even more reason for giddy excitement. Willard Grant Conspiracy - Evening Mass (Live)
Thursday 15th May: Eagleowl & Emily Scott at the Collective Gallery.
You know how highly I think of Eagleowl, and Emily Scott is someone who I have mentioned scandalously little on these pages of late. She recently finished runner-up in King Tut’s monthly Your Sound Artist of the Month, and has a lovely, delicate folk album to her name, to be bought from her MySpace page. Definitely one to check out. Emily Scott - Humming Song
Sunday 18th May: The Mae Shi at Cabaret Voltaire.
I learnt about the latest signings to Moshi Moshi, the label which can do no wrong at the moment, from Tim at the excellent Daily Growl. They are meteroically up and coming indie synth-popsters with bags of energy and exuberance. I am really looking forward to seeing them in the flesh and finding out if the hype matches the goods. The Mae Shi - Lamb & Lion
I don’t know how it happens exactly, but I guess most people don’t become music obsessives overnight. It took over five years for me to truly lose the plot, I think, and it didn’t start all that auspiciously.
The first time I remember really wanting to buy an album, as opposed to listening to various things my parents played, was Duran Duran’s Seven and the Ragged Tiger. I was about eight at the time, and loved The Reflex when I’d heard it on the radio. My Mum liked Duran Duran too, so we went out one day and bought the album.
I don’t remember the extent to which I loved it at the time, but I do remember a very formative bonding experience as Mum and I went home and sat down especially to listen to it for the first time. Mum and I are very similar - both incredibly fucking stubborn - and we didn’t always have the easiest of relationship because we tended to lock horns an awful lot until I chilled out a bit in my mid to late teens. It still happens occasionally, but rarely in an even remotely serious way. In any case, it was good to sit down and experience that first listen excitement together back then.
It was mostly Mum’s music that I really got into to begin with, actually. Duran Duran was the first, but I liked her Tina Turner stuff (I loved 1984 at about that same age, too, mostly for the ’savage claw’ reference, although I had no idea what it meant), as well as being really into Born in the USA by Springsteen. It wasn’t until we moved to Singapore when I was about eleven that things really started to kick into gear though. Basically at that age, I was into pop, I guess, but Singapore was when it changed.
Things started very dubiously indeed. I seem to recall really liking both La Bamba and Never Gonna Give You Up (in all seriousness). I got quite heavily into Erasure - Two Ring Circus and The Innocents - and The Pet Shop Boys, as well as, erm, Michael Bolton, Fleetwood Mac, Bruce Hornsby & the Range, Meat Loaf and even some Phil Collins. Don’t ask, because I don’t know.
By the time I left Singapore I was fourteen and the tide had comprehensively turned, however. I don’t know why or how it happened, but it did. For some reason I shifted away from the slightly camp and occasionally downright vapid radio pop towards some things that were clearly a sign of things to come. I started making mix tapes for the first time too. I may have gone to Singapore as a pop slut, but by the time I came back to Vienna I had become what I suppose would be recognised these days as an embryonic indie kid. I had no precedents exactly, so it wasn’t indie that I got into, but my music taste certainly began to lean towards the more boisterous and the slightly more difficult, as well as developing a significant taste for Americana.
Before we returned to Vienna I was already a huge fan of The Pogues, The Waterboys, The Hothouse Flowers, was getting much more into Dylan and some of the easier Tom Waits, some Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne and The Eagles. I was making a lot of mixtapes by this point and by the time I got back to my old school, on the verge of turning fifteen, I was sharing tapes with some of the girls I got on best with (it was always the girls back then, too).
By this point I started buying a lot of my own vinyl. I bought stuff by U2, more Springsteen, Lloyd Cole & the Commotions, the new Pogues album, The Men They Couldn’t Hang, Bob Geldof & the Vegetarians of Love, and REM. Mixtapes were now a pretty big deal, in that way they are at that age, and I started to get more obsessive about traipsing to record shops and digging out things I was looking for in particular. After three years back in Vienna, until the age of seventeen, I began to resemble something more recognisable as a normal British teenager, although I was still much more MTV than NME, which we just didn’t have over there. I’d got into Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, more REM, more U2, Billy Bragg, Kirsty MacColl, bought my first Nick Cave album, started exploring more Tom Waits, bought The Stone Roses, Talking Heads, and all sorts. I’d still never bought a 7″ single though, but they just didn’t really sell them in Austria.
In the Summer of 1993, before I went off to univerisity at seventeen, I started to earn enough money to buy CDs consistently for the first time, and I spent much of that summer in the newly opened Virgin Megastore in Vienna, haunting the listening post. I bought Morrissey, The Manics, Blur, The Tragically Hip, The Harvest Ministers, The Lemonheads and the Levellers.
By the time I went to uni in Manchester I think I was pretty much all the way over the edge, and had become a music fanatic. I spent loads on tapes (cheaper than CDs and less unwieldy than vinyl, which was vanishing at the time) of albums by James, The Lemonheads again, Radiohead, Mudhoney, the new Pearl Jam and Bjork. I also saw The Pogues live in concert for the first time, and on the way out the support band, who I’d missed, were handing out cassette samplers, so I took one. They were called the Newcranes, and I still have it. It’s good, too. I also, that year, bought an album by a group called Engine Alley solely on the basis that Steve Lillywhite, who produced them, had also produced Kirsty MacColl, The Pogues and early U2. I even went to see them by myself at a pub called PJ Bells on Oldham Street, now long-since extinct.
And there, I think, the story ends. Or starts, depending on how you look at it. Once you’re hoarding promo albums by support bands, going to gigs on your own and buying albums solely on the strength of the producer, then I think it’s safe to say that you have gone over to the dark side. You are now an obsessive, a collector, a hunter, a scavenger and a hoarder, a total fucking bore, an addict. Whatever you want to call it, I was one by then. And fifteen years later I am only getting worse.
The missus and I got pished and did a podcast! Huzzah! It was a lovely Summery day on Wednesday and we sat out and had a meal in the back garden and then when it got chilly we came inside and did a podcast.
There’s not much of a theme this week because I can get a little bored of them, and from time to time it’s nice to just throw some tracks together that you like. And then get hammered and ramble on about them at interminable length. Sorry about that.
01. Lemonjelly - Nice Weather For Ducks (01.47)
02. Elbow - Station Approach (10.47)
03. The Eighteenth Day of May - Cold Early Morning (19.07)
04. Aberfeldy - Tom Weir (25.56)
05. Tiny Tim - Tiptoe Through the Tulips (27.47)
06. Uncle Moon - Pepper (34.41)
07. Lo-Fidelity Allstars - On the Pier (41.32)
08. The Boo Radleys - Find the Answer Within (48.17)
09. The Libertines - The Good Old Days (56.41)
10. The Undertones - Teenage Kicks (65.51)
11. The Von Bondies - C’Mon C’Mon (68.11)
12. The Builders & the Butchers - Spanish Death Song (76.41)
13. The Walkmen - The Rat (82.59)
14. Calexico - Corona (93.33)
15. Lloyd Cole - You’re a Big Girl Now (106.46)
In many ways, I am a little surprised to like this. It’s a little more country than almost anything else that I listen to. It also has just a touch of the soft classic rock to it at times, just a touch mind, but enough that I wouldn’t expect to like it this much.
Why do I like it then? Well his voice is gorgeous: quavering yet strong, almost brave sounding, if you can imagine what that means. There’s bits of Elvis and Dylan in there, and even a little Jeff Buckley; vulnerable yet bold.
Musically it’s really quite country, as I said, with bits of The Band and that kind of rocking country folk music - the sort of stuff that inspires a fair bit of Ryan Adams’ work. It’s not always entirely successful, or at least, some of it genuinely is too country for me, but for the most part the sad beauty that pervades most of this album transcends any genre barriers I may harbour and seeps gently and achingly into that feeling of nostalgia you can sometimes get for a life you’ve never actually known.
