Re ‘It’s Alright, It’s OK’: it’s actually really not.
Not at all.
Look, someone needs to tell you! No
other fucker seems to have done it so I guess it’s down to me. I
appreciate that you’re trying to invoke the spirit of ’69 with the
B&W footage, the haircuts, the sound, the words… but this is 2013. I
know – because you’re opinionated and articulate enough to shout about
how despicable the Tory cunts running the country are in interviews -
that you’d welcome change. But it’s not going to happen by rifling
through faded snapshots of the glory days of protest and holding them up
to view, hoping that some of the cool of those mediated images of
counter-cultural youth will rub off on our hopelessness and inertia.
I don’t want to go back to the 60s and
70s, however cool they look from here. They were also sodden with
homophobia, sexism, racism, every other ism in the book. And despite the
cosmic threads dude, I wouldn’t want to be a mini-dressed flower girl
or a doe-eyed muse: the archetypes open to women 40 years ago are beyond
stale. Let’s not pilfer from the past for our revolutionary ideologues,
be they hippies, striking miners, riot grrls or Suffragettes; let’s
acknowledge them, incorporate their more pertinent points, learn some
lessons and move the fuck on. Find some fresh ones. It truly is the only
way we’re going to set anything ablaze.
The way things are now is new. The way
people are being controlled, set against each other, demoralised and
bled dry may have much in common with past eras of repression but let’s
have some historical specificity here; this moment is unique and
terrible and needs unique and terrible action to counter it.
Retro-gazing is counter revolutionary, Comrade. Get with the programme.
Plus, really? *That* sound again? Make something new. Please. In that Guardian
interview you speak passionately about how you see music as a
revolutionary force, as psychic resistance, but that there song is the
sound of utter resignation, the sound of middle-aged people giving up on
sex. It’s the sound of a life crunching to a halt in the
acknowledgement that anything glorious that it has ever been is behind
it and it’s only by the eternal pointing out of that one shining moment
when it thought it was astounding that prevents it from sinking into the
mud of mundanity. It’s leather trousers worn by men in pubs. It’s an
OAP still piling the remainder of his hair into his Teddy Boy quiff,
which has over decades thinned to the point where it’s just a flimsy
hint, a ghost of a style. It’s a desperate gathering of youthful
signifiers to shore one’s existence up against death. (Which does not,
in case you were under any illusion to the contrary, work.)
2011 was a wonderful year for music. For listening to music, dancing to music, thinking about music, writing about, watching, falling in love with, dropping what you were doing, grabbing your keys and running full pelt after music. It was for me, anyway. And I haven’t heard a fraction of what was released last year; I don’t know a quarter of the records mentioned in the big intermag end-of-year lists, and the ever-tiddlier sub-genre lists of The Wire etc. send me into a vertiginous panic. There’s simply not enough days in the week or weeks in the year to listen to enough of this stuff to make any kind of coherent omniscient pronouncement on 'music in 2011'. Given that we can only ever experience music subjectively, personally, partially, through our own skewed and faulty ears, I might as well just tell you what I heard this year and why it made me happy.
And it was mostly pop. Girls making pop. Very few of the bands I loved this year consisted of four white boys with guitars, although that template has been responsible for some fairly monumental things over the last four or five decades. Maybe it’s finally as redundant as it ought to be, that kind of monolithically gendered/racialised noise. The world is busier, brighter, cleverer, oh yeah, far too clever for that particular shape to be a likely mouthpiece for any kind of zeitgeisty blurt. Is that what they mean when they lament The End of Rock? Well, sod that, rock can, if it must, go on and on and it can mutate itself quite happily thank you very much. Rock’s not dying. And as time rolls onwards in its capriciously non-linear way, rock is ultimately as unpindownable as any musical genre; try to draw definite lines and it squirms away from you by throwing up EMAs and Planningtorocks and PJ Harveys all over the place.
If I were going to draw what I listened to this year into rough circles of scribbly convergence, I’d go further than the "pop, mostly girls" and say "pop, mostly girls, of Scandinavian origin". Make of that what you will. Make a new mask for Karin Dreijer Andersson out of it or a big red cloudwig for Bjork. I've no great socio-cultural analysis of why that might be to offer and no particular knowledge of the pop histories of the countries involved: this is going to have to be a pick'n'mix type affair, as flawed, simplistic and unfair as any such grouping of disparate acts tends to be.
I’ve already written about Lykke Li’s wounded rhymes so here’s a rundown of those other Scandi-pop goddesses that have blasted sodastream bubbles through my 2011.
Stockholm's Those Dancing Days started the year with a bounce but sadly their frenetic, giggly, day-glo puppy-scrap of a second album turned out to be their last, as they split up to do other things (including going to university) with 2011 hardly begun. It's worth checking out not only Daydreams And Nightmares but also their first gem of a single, 'Those Dancing Days', recorded in 2007 when they were still at school. It is teenage thrill embodied in sequins and squelchy keyboards and barely manages to hold itself together in its headlong rush to the finish. It's a song continually on the verge of being wrong - out of tune, out of time - but finds absolute joy on that brink. There's maniacal drumming (courtesy of the pretty much the cutest drummer of all time, Cissi, who pounds her kit with all the messy verve of a toddler launching itself at chocolate cake) and lyrics that chirrup with the delight of being "high on life, high on love... living for music, living in a dance". How much more pop could you want?
'Fuckarias', their first single of 2011, finds TDD stomping on solider ground, four years (and not just any four years but those which bump one painfully, wonderfully, from child to adult) older, wiser, more proficient but thankfully just as ferocious and which, whether through youthful gawky genius or second-language-itis, has lyrics as magnificently wrong as you like: "You're an uninvited clown/A foolish puppy with a too long tongue/You stumble and fall, you're the worst of them all/You're in my space, get out of my face". Fuck what's right, let's dance.
Icona Pop, in contrast to TDD, have just left the starting line, are on the B of the bang, with no physical product at all yet as far as I can see, just a handful of perfect synth-pop digital darlings, bristling with smart and sass and tunes. Never mind about albums, ‘Nights Like This’ and ‘Manners’ are ace on their own. There's some of TDD's sheer enjoyment of sound, particularly in the way they revel in the parps and stabs and swoops of aged synthesisers, but considerably less of the speed. "Manners!" they chorus "Take a second look and you'll see / There is no-one like me!", a mixture of threat and promise in a perfectly adroit pop package: "You'd better reconsider/You will never do better!"
I saw Robyn at Bestival, wowing a hillside of festival partyers with peculiarly solipsistic takes on her icy pop songs; she has that trick of throwing such awkwardly heartfelt shapes – the kind you’d usually keep behind teenage bedroom doors – that you don’t know whether to cringe or cheer on her courage in laying her heartbreak out, stadium-huge, for us all to gawp at. I'm going for cheer, because she's such a remarkable performer and her songs slot so neatly and fittingly into canonical synth pop that you’d think she was already the global megastar she dances as if she were. Both 'Dancing On My Own' and 'Call Your Boyfriend' have jaw-dropping videos, controlled desperation writ large in spikily dramatic narratives of the kind that swamped the charts in the 80s.
I also saw Björk at Bestival. Lucky me. It was a contrary thing; she didn't use the huge video screens at the side of the stage to relay her performance to the back of the enormous crowd, instead filling them with Biophiliac squiggles which, while disconnective in some ways (it meant most of the thousands gathered to watch her couldn't see her flamboyantly peculiar outfit or the skittery dances of her massed female chorus or the strange, custom-built instruments the music was blossoming from) also had the effect of making the experience less gawp-at-the-popstar and more lose-yourself-in-the-music. If you could do that and stop pining for the hits – which it was apparent not everyone could – then the show was an incredible, immersive, gorgeous thing to be part of, a sweeping up of people and notes and colours and patterns and grassy hillsides on the Isle of Wight into a big wowy beauty. A synaesthetic, meterological trip of a show. It certainly had me believing that 'Crystalline' (whose pretty icicle showers shatter into THE most remarkable Aphexy percussion coda: complexity and order and counterintiutive marvels measured out in rattling beats) was the most beautiful music in the universe. And oh my god! 'Declare Indepence'! One of the few non-Biophilia tracks of the set and the best grimy distorto-bass line since 'Dr Buck's Letter', thumping up from the stage in fat curls across the crowd, sending visible shockwaves up through the dancing bodies. A song to make you open your throat and howl. Fucking wow.
I Break Horses do the Austra/Zola Jesus/EMA kohl-eyed noise’n’pretty schtick that I'm a sucker for. There are muzzied vocals and urgency and swoons aplenty, and on Tom Rowland's dark and delicious remix of 'Hearts' they are a bleepy-bleeped-heartbeat away from swirly perfection. I suspect they’d be headswimmingly monstrous live.
Sacred Harp are, er ... strange. Strange good and strange confusing and sometimes strange really quite fucking alarming. If I said "impro jazz, classical, film scores, pop, Fever Ray, experimental, prog rock" at you all in a fevered rush it would – quite rightly – make you wary and possibly irritated. So instead I will tell you how (adopted Scandinavian but originally Dutch singer and main Harp) Jessica Sligter’s vocals slip and slide out of key and out of easy melodic tropes with infinitely precise control. She sings like comfort is a dirty word. She sings like a cat stuck in Mike Oldfield’s recording barn. Like a dryad stranded in the big city, caught between marvels and mayhem. By hooking her calculated tonal mis-steps around our ankles and sending us lurching into unknown territory, Sligter gives us a ride that thrills, bothers and allures. Marvellous stuff.
One of the strangest musical experiences I had in 2011 was trying – and failing - to listen to highly-praised Brooklyn-based indie rock band (ouch: there's a phrase guaranteed to strike ennui into the heart of any music lover) The Antlers. They've been getting good reviews from the usualsuspects and are playing on sought-after bills. But an unfortunate convergence of band names in the last couple of years - Deer Tick, Deerhunter, Deerhoof, Chrome Hoof, Crystal Antlers, Crystal Fighters, Crystal Castles, Crystal-Antlered Wolfdeer etcetera etcetera - didn't help my confusion about who they were or what they sounded like so I did what I usually do when tipped off about a band: opened a YouTube video in a new tab and carried on replying to emails, browsing Facebook, reading online newspaper articles.
The odd thing about listening to The Antlers was that time and again the track would run its course and I’d notice eventually that it had stopped. It had run its course without leaving a single trace and I’d failed dismally to discover why it was being promoted by whichever media entity had brought it to my attention, where to locate its particular click or to contextualise the damn thing ... so I’d “huh” a bit to myself and press replay, try again. The track spun itself out over and over; I’d get distracted by whatever else the internet was shimmying in my direction and I’d get to the end of the song none the wiser.
This happened five or six times. The track was sliding down the wall without sticking at all. Not a single little clawy hook to lodge itself in my head, no grit, no grain, no grab. Every time the song finished I’d be left as ignorant of who and what had just played as when I started. If forced at gunpoint to say something about the Antlers I could have bodged a line about white boys and guitars - I knew it wasn’t Chinese funk or an orchestra of theremin – but that was about all.
It was disorientating.
I gave up eventually. Yes, I could’ve stopped all that email-reading and smart-arse Facebooking to focus entirely on the song but really! If after six plays of a song you are left with absolutely no idea what it sounds like it has surely failed some kind of crucial test; it could perfectly well have stopped me in my frittering tracks and forced me to sit up and pay attention to it. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t have hummed back the tune to you: I was left without any recall of the tone of the thing. Immediacy isn’t everything but however much you may loathe Fleet Foxes (I don't) you’d have been able to say “tremulous man sings pretty folk rock backed by multi-layered vocal harmonies” after a single listen to ‘White Winter Hymnal’, no probs. The Antlers? Er...
I did try to get a grip on those slippery cervine bastards a couple more times during the year, letting other tracks of theirs run past me, but even though I have (as a good conscientious music crit) listened yet again this morning, I’m still left with a great big smear of meh where I should be getting a picture.
I am prepared to admit the fault might be mine; there's got to be a reason why other writers are getting the thrill. Maybe I have faulty Antler antennae. Maybe my whiteboysandguitars receptors are failing. Maybe I have a psychic head cold which has reduced The Antlers’ delicately-flavoured aural bouillabaisse to wallpaper paste. Maybe highly-praised Brookyln-based indie rock bands are actually Doctor Who aliens that can’t be looked at head on, whose features turn to generic lost-in-a-crowd blankness when observed and have the power to beam positive reviews into the heads of music reviewers. I must've been wearing a tinfoil hat that day.
The Antler Effect is not restricted to this one band: I am similarly un/effected by Noah And The Whale and Grizzly Bear inter alia, despite the fact that NatW’s (insert appropriate adjective here; since I can’t recall what the hell they sound like, I’m obviously not the woman for that job) rock has sold by the warehouse-load and that both Grizzly Bear and The Antlers have had streams of positive words written about them while I’m left standing all forlorn at the side of the dancefloor.
I'm still willing to be convinced on The Antlers. It's perfectly plausible that I'm missing something remarkable and need a critical prod to set me right. But until then I'm left thinking that if music isn’t extraordinary I can’t be bothered with it. There’re billions of songs in the world and not enough life left to listen to the merely average: I'm going to limit my remaining ear-time to songs I can crush on desperately, songs I'd want to wrap around me forever, songs whose names I’d remember in the morning.
Quite apart from anything else this is a pretty clear example of why we still need music writers to take such aurally-challenged dolts as myself by the hand and show us the dance moves one careful step at a time. It’s entirely irrelevant to my ability to appreciate the Antlers whether or not music is readily available on the internet, whatever the guy from Spin wants to froth about.
Having the notes at hand to hear isn’t even half the story.
Here are some (not six) of this year’s (or not) highlights, picked today over all the others I’ve forgotten at the moment, probably just because it’s sunny out. The clankingindustrialgrindiwannadie column will have to wait for another day.
Well, just listen to them! Aren’t they fantastic? Aren’t they? How much more pop could you squeeze into those two songs? Bursting with the stuff. Nicola’s chanting of “L! O! V! E!” and her sliding moans: aoooh ... The ridiculous boingy break in the middle. The fabulously under-glossed, kid-querulous vocals with their precisely slippy attitude to tuning. All ace. And Lady Chann, feistiness personified, clippity-clop hoofbeats behind her, twisty tune unfurling above, drilling the words into the head of anyone who’d dare disagree with the persistence of a small neon woodpecker: irresistible.
PATRICK WOLF – House
It starts like some tune from years ago, a shimmery electropop school disco number, all keyboard skirls and slow growing glory. Wolf’s vocals, dark and glossy and mannered, reminding me of the chanteurs of my childhood, the twinkling Billy, the Orchestral Manoeuverings; you can just see the billowing white shirts, the floodlights, the DRAMA. It heads off into its own thrum, whirling gracefully about the chorus like that unselfconscious arms-wide-open dance you’d do at 15 when your heart was swelling fit to burst with the nowness of it all.
It turns out to be about settling down into domestic bliss, in a lovely house, with Suffolk stone and love all around, delighting in the turning of the seasons and the laying down of roots and even in the certainty of eventual death. Perhaps it takes the recognition of cold oblivion to relish the ordinary warmth of life.
Not very rock'n'roll. But very wonderful.
MECHANICAL BRIDE - Umbrella
How to do a cover version. Make it anew. Change the mood. Give something sassy and pop a chiming melancholia, so the words that emerge through the bells and the piano lines and the strings are those of heartbreak and pleading, drenched with longing for the rain which will come, which will inevitably come. Oh, and be good. Sing like you're warding off disaster.
I don’t love this more than Rihanna’s version, but I do love it alongside it.
Ella, ella, ella, ay ay ay…
KING CREOSOTE & JON HOPKINS – Bats In The Attic
I know nothing about either of these men. Almost nothing. One is Scots. One is an electro kid. They make this, this gentle folky howl of a song. It’s beautiful. “And no doubt it's the white flour in my diet, it's going to be the death of me, sweet drumroll for those embittered big ideas. It’s such a waste of all that we had. It’s such a waste of all that I am,” he sings. It would make granite weep.
SWIMMER ONE’s remix of WITHERED HAND ‘Love In The Time Of Ecstasy’ is not from this year but is so marvellous that you should hear it anyway. It’s another apparently ‘folk’ song given the electro treatment, opening it up and sharpening the edges. This one is deliciously unfolky in its tropes. Which is all to the good.
“Why did Nirvana ever bother to play here?
Hey there, I don’t want to stay here ...
And this town, this town is killing me now, I can't believe I waited so long,
From the shopping trolleys on the riverbed to the sound of the bass bins booming
Can I see your face in this acid light of another suburban evening?
As I roll my eyes up to these dirty skies till I count the days till I am leaving”
Actually, it’s another Scottish folk song. So many good things from Scotland at the moment. The growly feline gorgeousness of Pumajaw (whose forthcoming album will surely get its own moment of glory). The afore-mentioned Swimmer One (pulling influences from Jane Siberry, Kate Bush, the Pet Shop Boys and sounding just like themselves). Those foul-mouthed darlings, Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton, both separately and together, here covering Slow Club. Yup, my heart is yours, you Scots, ‘unfaithful servants of filthy, fucking language’, as Mr Withered Hand says.
And if it’s not Scotland, it’s Canada.
BRAIDS – Native Speaker
Braids are great. Even better to see them live, to know how young and dorky they are, how all four (two boys, two girls) are brow-furrowedly engaged in constructing the sound. Which is math-boy clever but has a big pop heart, filled with loops and samples and uneasy noises and twin delayed guitars rippling through it all.
“ … and what I, and what I found is that we we're all just sleeping around.
All we really want to do is love.”
(This version isn’t quite as punchy as the recorded one but it’s worth it to see them. Watch the keyboard player making the noises at the beginning and the singer trying – failing – not to swear. God, they’re adorable.)
ORCA TEAM - I'm Waiting
Here's a perfect 2'11'' of icy pop. "The sound of a surf made of tears crashing on the glacier shores of Antarctica" says Mike whose record label, HHBTM, releases Orca Team (excellent name). It's haunting, removed, in the sense that it comes at us through walls of chill fog or from the past or from the darkness outside the party. Being cynical, pale and definitely no California Girl I quite like the idea of cold surf music. It's rather a startling video, too.
EVERYTHING EVERYTHING – Man Alive
This could be it. This could be it. Doom on you, as my kids are fond of saying, doom on you, all those who insist that pop music now is only endless rehashes of the past, that there’s nothing new, that the olden days were the best and kids today, eh, kids today, Simon Cowell, Simon Cowell, BeiberBeiberBeiber. Fuck that and nyah nyah nyah to you: if this could have been released at any time other than NOW (2008 at a push, given that the magnificent single, ‘Suffragette Suffragette’, came out at the end of that year) then I challenge you to name it. (Yep, this is a round-up of 2011 and I am making a point about modernity, so what if the album came out last year? These are my ears, all right?) ‘Suffragette Suffragette’ is key, of course: it has growlingly macho basslines that periodically come crashing in between the verses’ perky stabs of synths like a hot drunk, shirtless man sweeping glasses from a table and swings from swagger to fey in a breath, while the remarkable Jonathan Higgs sings in the shrill, lust-raw tones of a man totally overwhelmed by the rules of sexual connection.
“My death throes, this – indefinite pose, her flesh codes – inconceivable – oh suffragette, suffragette I wanna be outlawed and AWOL – no alphabet can be used yet no cassette is available – oh, I dunno how, I dunno how I’m going to reset my whole radar – forget, forget … Who’s going to sit on your face when I’m gone? Who’s going to sit on your face when I’m not there? ( … And the ball's in your court; in the court, your balls)”
Oh the words! So many words. I don’t know when I last pored over the lyrics on a sleeve like I have with those on this clever, brilliant album. Self-aware po-mo bunnies that they are, Everything Everything know the mechanics of a pop song and are happy to turn it in on itself and unlock the cogs when necessary. Man Alive is spiky enough to unsettle and delight, whether in the chill/cool manner of their fellow-silverspacesuited-travellers Metronomy, the jerky XTC-isms of Field Music or the muscular restlessness of Wild Beasts (Two Dancers and its sexed-up dynamics rather than the newie, mind), but there are enough moments of absolute, glorious beauty (yeah and yer actual TUNES) to allow it a seat in the category of swoonsome rather than simply sorted. Cos they know what’s what. They have a political canniness that so many fêted bands don’t at the moment, apparently not being able to pull their self-satisfied heads from their sunkissed Brooklyn arses long enough to notice the world collapsing. Everything Everything know that it’s all about the collapse and the horror, but it’s also all about the sex, because humans keep on with that even as the walls fall in on them. Witness the bombsite jitters of 'MY KZ YR BF':
And you’ve got to keep on at it with them. Keep yer ears peeled. It gets better the deeper your go; you’ll get your nightvision soon enough and then the subterranean depths will glitter for you. Promise.
And, let’s not forget, they performed at Glastonbury wearing taupe boiler suits and bright yellow wellies. Good work, lads.
The final 75 seconds of BRIGHT EYES’ final song on The People’s Key. No, scrub that, make it the final 10 seconds. Just them. ‘Course you have to listen to the rest of it too, otherwise it’s meaningless; instead of being a floodgates-opening epiphanic distillation of Conor Oberst’s latest project it’s just a word. But, whoa, that word. It gets me. That deep grainy old man voice. The world-weariness, the rolling of the ages, the peace. “Mercy,” he says. “Mercy.” This album might sound like a big jaunty potluck pop feast but it's actually an elegy for the awful, fallible, wondrous humanity. How fucking sad it all is, how random and disastrous, the broken hearts, the broken world, the staring into the abyss, but how beautiful that humans carry on. Hold hands. Fight. Carry their love with them.
Mercy.
"One for the righteous, one for the ruling class,
One for the tyrant, one for the slaughtered lamb.
One for the struggle, one for the lasting peace,
One for you
And one for me."
***
As for writing about music, the site I read more than any other (except for Collapse Board, naturellement) is the UK’s DrownedinSound. And the DiS writer I read more than any other is Wendy Roby, who breezes through the weekly singles column in a style so apparently mannered, ickle-girly and sugary you’d want to brush’n’floss afterwards. First time I read anything by her I hated it. HATED IT. Why would a woman caricature herself in such an extreme way, as if childishness, incompetence and petulance were hard-won laurels to be flaunted? It seemed the height of self-disempowerment. But she introduced me to good stuff. The fact that she’d write ‘exactly’ as “HEGGS ACKERLY!” or drop an “Oh, how perfectly dread!” into the mix like a flighty female Bertie Wooster mattered less the more I read. She name-checked Dave Eggers last week, and I had an “Ah ha!” lightbulb moment.
However, her style is utterly her own, and that’s surprisingly rare in the great grey tides of internet opining and has got to be to her credit. She refuses to pander to notions of tick box reviews; she’s as likely to describe how the circumstances in which she was listening to the single in question (at her mum’s house over roast dinner; on an iPod while riding her bike; moping over a broken heart) have affected her appreciation of it than bore on with facts. So I like her a lot. I’ve come to terms with the girlieness, because why the fuck not? The world has enough cock-led gonzo lads writing about music via the aggrandizing of their own drunken exploits, why privilege that style over something explicitly feminine? There’s room enough. She might be whimsical but she’s no shrinking violet. She is astute, bright, funny, inventive, fierce, sorted. As a comment under her column had it recently, “I enjoyed reading about these songs much more than I enjoyed listening to them”. Tick.
DiS has its other gems, despite having a readership that shows its best side on the lively community discussion boards but bays like unfed hounds when denied simple things such as descriptions of what the music sounds like or a proper appreciation for back catalogue. So my next nominee is Chris Trout, who was recently called a “douche” by a disgruntled reader for not providing the standard review fare, instead handing over a meandering, witty, critical disquisition on the state of music, far more interesting than trotting out the usual. Here’s the debate which ensues when the readers try to tell him how he ought to review records: it’s a fascinating argument about what is expected from criticism. And them readers aren’t ever going to win. Also, check out his own website, which, among other highlights – it’s all worth reading - has a wonderfully constructed, intelligent, cantankerous, funny (really funny) dots-joining take on last year’s best albums; it’s not in any way a list, mind, more a rambling autobiographical essay about loving music. Anyone – that’s you, that is – needing to read why Arcade Fire “are as punk rock as a battered shoebox full of gerbils dipped in Crazy Color at their own request” start here. I dare ya.
Finally, here’s a quite astounding piece of writing on my other favourite UK site, The Quietus. Neil Kulkarni has written here on Collapse Board before so you might already know what a passionate, funny, insightful writer he is. (Ngaire-Ruth describes reading his stuff as "like skateboarding, while hitched to a rare, classic car, driving, at speed, in zigzags through bustling city streets". Quite so.) This (another autobiographical essay) is fantastic: a three-part look at life growing up in Coventry as a second-generation immigrant through the music he listened to and loved. It’s like nothing else you’ve read. So go find it.
PS: Do musicians writing about cooking count in the listeners writing about music stakes? You get to the same place in the end anyway, whether you start off from pate or Pavement. So, here is Luke Fucking Genius Haines' food blog, peppered liberally with excellent swearing and copious amounts of booze while talking you through rabbit stew and Hawkwind. "Leave the whole fucking shebang cooking on a low, low heat for another hour, or until you hear 'You Shouldn't Do That' bursting out of your kitchen at the end of CD2 of Space Ritual. If Hawkwind are saying 'You Shouldn't Do That', I'd listen to them, cos whatever you're doing must be pretty bad if Hawkwind are telling you to stop doing it. The stew is done".
Compare and contrast with Steve Albini's food blog, which shows him - as if we needed telling - to be as meticulous in his cooking as Haines is slapdash. But quite as equally entertaining and often just as filthy: "Most of the red meat I've eaten recently has been grilled by Tim Mydhiett in his back yard. He masters a beautiful ceramic egg barbecue oven and tends to rub things on his meat* before sticking it in there*. Lately he has been using a rub of finely-ground espresso, salt, pepper and sumac, and it has been exceptional every time I've had it ... I didn't have any sumac so I used the other spices for a whiff of the exotic. Yma Sumac was a Nice Jewish girl from the Bronx named Amy Camus anyway".**
*You'll have to go to the blog to get the footnotes.
A REVIEW OF WILLIAM D DRAKE - THE RISING OF THE LIGHT (ONOMATOPOEIA)
A fair chunk of music that has been produced this year could be classified as music for people who don’t like music. A fair chunk of all pop music ever has been. You know the type. When I was a student everyone had to own Bob Marley’s Legend and Born In The USA. That was how it was. Produce the cassettes and you get to wear your keffiyeh down the uni bar. Not that some of it isn’t good – draw your own Venn diagrams here – but the music that gets sold at petrol stations has a particular flavour to it. I mean, if you’ve only bought a couple of albums in the last six months and you’ve picked from Fleet Foxes, Adele, Lady Gaga or Eddie Vedder and his faux-rustic, common man, back to basics ukefuckingleles, you’re consuming music in a very different way to someone who devours it for breakfast, lunch and tea, whose pulse beats faster at the thought of the filthy shouty racket that the best new band in town will make tonight and who can actually literally feel their mouth watering when they read enticing reviews of new releases (please tell me that’s not just me).
Everyone I’ve met who likes Cardiacs has LOVED music. Every single one. There is no such thing as a casual Cardiacs fan. They have the hunger on them. Music isn’t an optional extra, it’s the centre, the hub, the pivot around which everything else wheels. They get the shivers, they get the buzz. They don’t get Death Cab For Cutie from beside the till at BP before a long journey home to see the folks.
I’ve got to confess I’ve had my problems with Cardiacs in the past. Sometimes I’ve found their wackiness so teeth-gratingly irksome I’ve wanted to gnaw my feet off rather than listen to a minute more. It was so bloody wearisome, all that snickersnackery bouncing around. I wanted to put it under a blanket and sit on it. It had the same effect on me as Camel. Or Yes. Made me snarl. But recently I got roundly (and deservedly) berated on Facebook for dismissing a documentary on prog rock that someone had posted a link to. Pfft, not watching that, I smirked; it’s all codpieces and public school boys being pleased with themselves. Twattery that prizes ‘technical proficiency’, that chill passion-killer, above gawky inventiveness. Boy music. Clever-clever fancy footwork that does not ring my bell, no way, no how.
Which, behind the facetiousness, betrays a common-enough repulsion for anything that doesn’t conform to a class-conscious, post-punk directness; to an authenticity (whatever the fuck that means) which pays homage at the altar of down’n’dirty rock’n’roll by spurning silly time-signatures and mock-classical tomfoolery. Punk gobbed on music in 1977, so the story goes, and washed the streets clean of the degenerate, self-satisfied dross that the likes of ELP and Rush were wanking out over the album charts; freed us all to scorn the stomach-turning excesses of prog in favour of DIY attitude; got virtuosity stomped on by rough & ready’s size 12 DMs. Grrrwk: take that, velvet waistcoats! Sppplaf: take that, unnecessarily fiddly flute solo!
Well, the story is distorted rubbish. I was wrong about prog. Yes, it can easily be caricatured as indulgent wankery, but, as a savvy friend of mine said, it is actually as much about an attempt to find beauty as anything else. And that’s a quest worth following to the end of the line (even if it does involve whole symphony orchestras and unnerving facial hair). There’s nothing inherently pompous about being difficult; nothing gobworthy about ambition.
Cardiacs isn’t exactly prog, anyway. It’s been called pronk – a hybrid punk/prog beastie, combining prog’s proficiency with punk’s spikiness - which is going to have to do as a defining something, but there’s an anti-Cardiacs vibe at play in the press that is tied up with the anti-progism that’s been so evident in (un)critical thinking about music for the last few decades.
Nor is it boy music, not by any definition of the term that you care to make up on the spot. The audience for the Cardiacs-associated bands I saw last weekend was as gender-mixed (and enthusiastically engaged) a crowd as I have seen at a gig for years. Women musicians and fans abound in the Cardiacosphere. And a Cardiacs song which employs tricksy time-signatures that flick the rug out from under you just as you’re finding your feet in its patterns is going about the business of bending, breaking and re-making the rules in a contrary multi-coloured glory, not about proving how clever it is, as the most boyish of boy music seems intent on doing.
That story is wrong about punk rock, too; there was a good thick strand of fun and silliness to punk and its aftermath (think of Captain Sensible, if you must, but also of X-Ray Spex who were quite capable of being daft as well as furious) but somehow the Great Punk Creed that obliterated the cred of prog has managed to create a situation today where joyless fucks like Kings of Leon get lauded for their grittiness and the pogoing loons have been forgotten. How did worthiness win out over moshing? History is a peculiar business.
Of course Cardiacs’ music is clever. Of course it is fiddly. It is jagged. Silly. Playful. Roaringly scritchy. Stop-start-stop-go-go-GO widdliness to end all widdliness. It is, oh god, fun. It is jaunty. Jaunty. For fuck’s sake. A word that should make one and all wash their ears out with Pussy Galore. No leather kecks here. Nor cool, neither, not a drop of it. But what there is, is joy. And snatched beauty, so much better than the complacent here-it-is-on-a-plate kind. And songs that skitter hither and thither in wild abandon to make untidy girls in stompy boots and flowery dresses shake their hair on the dancefloor and laugh like maniacs. What the fuck was ever wrong with joy in pop music? When I stopped worrying about the whimsy and started feeling the noise, it all made sense. I got the scritchiness bug.
So to this: if you’ve never heard (of) Cardiacs and their tentacular side projects you have the chance to experience the record I am nominally reviewing here something like afresh. Virgin ears if not a virgin cultural perspective. William D Drake was a key member of Cardiacs for, oh, decades, and he has made a record this year with his new band which is as unlike Cults or Adele or Odd Future as is a giraffe. It’s not young, it’s not radical, it’s not provocative, it’s not innovative, it’s not ever going to be top of any pops, it’s never boring and it’s the very opposite of inoffensive (which isn’t, obviously, the same as being offensive) and it’s certainly not hip. In fact, you can be pretty sure that this is music is as unhip as anything you’ve ever encountered so far in your musical listening career.
Which is no bad thing. So let it go.
There’s an obvious connection in The Rising Of The Light to a distinctively English strand of Sixties pop, to songs such as ‘See Emily Play’ or The Village Green Preservation Society; here are those jocular organs, that mock-pomposity and wry delight in an aesthetic that is now doubly-archaic (the support band at Drake’s recent gig, Crayola Lectern, which includes ex-Cardiacs man Jon Poole among its members, played the Cardiacs’ only cover, that of The Kinks’s ‘Suzannah’s Still Alive’; they also played Robert Wyatt’s sublime ‘Sea Song’, so do, as they say, the math).
Don’t expect very much in the way of yer actual straightforward songs; not a lot of beginnings, middles and ends here. These are unfurling carpet rides of pieces, littered with snatches of hornpipes and jigs, which make sudden switch-backs from tremendous thumping keyboard tunes to howlingly naff fairground skirls, which in turn are interrupted by choral interludes belted out in absurdly over-blown but glorious trembling harmonies. There’s no casual conforming to expectations of what makes a song, which is all to the good, if you can haul yourself over the perkiness stumbling block and stop hoping for the easy comfort of a returning chorus.
‘Wholly Holey’ skips and hops from the beginning in a roil of oompahpahs. It’s quite ridiculous, really. And, look, there’s the falsetto and harmonies nicked from Queen’s A Night At The Opera, all lawns and lemonade, as English as raised eyebrows and politely furrowed brows. The elegiac ‘In An Ideal World’ has a melody-line to bring spring to frozen earth, wound through waves of rippling piano by a hurdy-gurdy (well, yes, of course).
My taste leaning more towards the stately than the jolly, I found myself skipping ‘Zeigler’ (which makes an interlaced pattern of too-pretty reels and chunks of wilfully awkward discordant piano) third time round. But Drake writes tunes and lines to make you ache, most delightfully in ‘Me Fish Bring’, which is quite, quite lovely. It’s a pastoral sentiment bomb, deploying clarinets and honey-sweet melodies and images of wafting smoke and lambs grazing in fields to thump the hell out of cynical old (or young) hearts. Oof.
For all the layers of reference, all the self-conscious playing with musics past and paster still and the grandiose, tongues-both-in-and-out-of-cheek choral tub-thumping, the album roots itself nicely with Drake’s voice and lyrics: he’s got a perfectly decent but down-to-earth voice and sings of cups of tea and jacket potatoes and the nicknames lovers give each other. Homeliness in the midst of bombast. How very - again - English.
This is music that has utterly abandoned the urge to now-ness. If you don’t find that refreshing and admirable, then do feel free to go hang with Tyler and his hipster nemeses. I don’t know much about Captain Beefheart or the Penguin Café Orchestra, some of the more obvious benchmarks I probably should be leaning on here. I’m not all that up on the post-punk that informed Cardiacs’ jagged freneticism either. I stood in the queue for Drake’s gig yesterday and all around me clever beautiful women were talking to be-T-shirted men about King Crimson and Brian Eno. Seriously. I felt a bit dim. If you absolutely must have a contemporary comparison, think of Sufjan Steven's utterly remarkable 'You Are The Blood', which has a similarily contrary attitude to genre and structure, pulls wholly disparate threads together yet does gorgeous so well. Course it doesn't sound anything like this.
So never mind the context: this is a simple plea for you to pin your ears back and listen. An appeal on behalf of the Cardiacs party to put aside prejudices and engage with what these musicians are trying to do, to make. That’s what it’s all for, isn’t it, this wordy stuff? To coax you into sharing the thrill. And now I get it. I GET IT. This music here is about beauty and joy and delight. It cares not for fashion or convention or status. It’s for people who eat their music whole.
You’d hate it.
Postscript: Beautiful, grinning, gentle, kaleidoscopically-talented, furiously energetic, fucking all-round lovely man and Cardiacs leader Tim Smith had a severe stroke in 2008 from which he is still recovering. In all likelihood, there will be no more Cardiacs. He is very much loved; there was a tribute album made last year to which the likes of Ultrasound, Katherine Blake, The Magic Numbers etc. contributed cover versions of his songs, the proceeds going directly to his care. If you want to check out his songwriting, there's a place to start.
It’s a slight thing. Eight tracks, quite as pale and wan as a Thom with an H should be and certainly nowt to do with last year’s big ‘n’ bashy alterno drama queens, the never-knowingly-understated National and Arcade Fire, although it’s likely to get - has already had - quantum amounts of furore even compared to their comprehensive lauding. And it’s pretty much what you thought it would be.
If you loathe Thom Yorke’s toothached keening, you’re not going to love this. If you want something as awkwardly fruggable as 15 Step, the geek glitch dance par excellence, you’re going to be disappointed. If you wanted hairpin changes of direction: this freewheels straight down the line. I speak as someone who long ago caved in to loving Radiohead. I started off with hate: obvious, white boy guitarery with misery dripping out the sleeves of their raggedy shirts, when what I wanted was ferocious girls making space music. But they grew on me, because they were very good at the misery and, despite the Yorkeian whine, their songs clicked, from the early whole-hearted anthemic gush to In Rainbows’s bitttersweet computerics.
What I like about the best Radiohead tracks is that they have tunes, whether they’re to be found in post-OK Computer wispy numbers like House Of Cards, or muscular oldies like The Bends’ Black Star. So that’s what my ears are yearning for on their first introduction to King Of Limbs. That’s what my ears always yearn for. Of course, any other jonesing for rock’s traditional components on the part of my ears would be dashed, since this is, as Everett True pointed out, rock eviscerated. No gutsy groove. No verve. As free from swagger as cabbage. I don’t think that necessarily has to be a problem, unless that’s all that you look for in music: some of my favourite bands have been quite as bloodless as Radiohead and probably half as clever. There are some tunes here, despite the exsanguinated chittering: some that are even hummable. Just about. Codex, a plaintive puppy of a track, has a melody that winds itself up slowly with brass and piano until you could just about hug it. Or drown it in a sack. Give Up The Ghost layers the wails prettily enough but sounds so like much of In Rainbows for it to be not worth the bother, not even for the extra-achey loop pile-up it makes of itself by the end of the song. (And fuck knows if he’s singing “Don’t hurt me”, “haunt me” or “hate me”: eminently kickable all three.)
The odd thing about The King of Limbs being released all of a journo-confounding sudden is that we’ve had blurbs the world over stumbling over themselves to apologise for the rough draft reviews, all the while panting that this is a record that needs consideration, time, repeated listens to pick out the speeshulness: nice work, Radios. And while it’s true that on my TWENTIETH go round, I am hearing the bones of it better, the fact is I don’t want to have to do this. I don’t want to wait for the click. I don’t want to have to listen on Bang & Olufsen speakers in order to hear the genius: I want the genius right up the front. I want a bit of flash and grab. I want swoon. How bleeding shallow.
And then there’s the Lotus Flower video; a video of just Thom, just dancing, and best watched with eyes closed, as someone astutely put it. It is extraordinary in the obvious respect that Thom Yorke Superstar looks like a complete twat in it. He knows he looks like a twat. Either he doesn’t give any kind of shit about the godawful cringe of it all, or he does but is self-hating enough to welcome the shame. What he makes of the Dad-dancing is nudging beautiful in its compulsive terribleness and its peculiarity. I can’t imagine Bono doing the twisty spazzballet moves that Yorke pulls there. I can’t imagine Win Butler doing them either, no nor Matt Berninger (he can't resist a wink to the camera: aw, vulnerability fail, Matt) ; not a single one of them earnest big band megacunts would be able to ace the commitment to twattery that Yorke has managed here. Because they are far too self-consciously cool. Too armoured by half. Too much in with the beautifuls whom Thom Yorke is never going to crack. He, bless him, is still the weirdo. And for that, at least, I admire him.
But the truth is that I don’t really want any of this. I have enough already. It doesn’t make me want to dance or shout or fall in love or howl to the moon or fling myself about (not even in a gimpdouche Yorke style. Oh no.): it makes me wanna mope. And here we are in 2011, the world burning, the new and unprecedented and stupendous all around, and the very last thing I want to do is mope.
They've been getting 
