That whole “music used to sound better when I was younger” theory
JUNE (24-40)
Shopping – You Are A Sort (Don’t Call Me)
“I bet you’d love a bit of Shopping,” my contact writes. And they’re right! I do. This Shopping sounds … well my contact’s description of them being a cross between Gang Of Four, Au Pairs and The Slits ain’t that far adrift, except that this would (by reduction) make them either Delta 5 or ESG, neither of which I’m going to object to. I mean (shrugs), to these ears it sounds like this Shopping sound a fraction too reverent of post-punk (I’m always suspicious of any band that can be so obviously categorised), but give ‘em time, I reckon. They’ve got energy, attitude, a spark. Let’s see if they turn into a Savages or a Divorce.* I know which side of the line I’ll be cheering from.
It’s like when I used to go down the ICA in London in 1982 and watch boys in long shorts perch on bar stools and pluck dolefully at acoustic guitars. You’re looking at me like that’s a bad thing. Normally, I’d agree with you. Of course, normally I’d agree with you. But today? Today we’re just going to have to agree on nothing.
You’ve heard and loved this song before. There’s absolutely no reason not to hear and love this song again.
Camera Obscura – Fifth In Line To The Throne
I love cats.
I’m not sure you know that about me. I love cats, and so badly achingly yearningly STILL miss my main feline, Carla. There’s a picture of her on our wall, right over there. She would make this funny little noise in her throat when we blew bubbles, and had a habit of convincing my mother that only cream (not milk) would satisfy. Of course she would chase my feet in bed. She died while I was in Seattle (’98) after a very long and wonderful life. I can’t recall if it was her or another kitten that once jumped on top of my Dansette record-player just after I’d placed my brand new import version of Too Tough To Die on it, which resulted in a merry old chase through the shared house. I wrote one of the saddest songs I ever wrote about another of my cats, the Little White Kitten – no, not the one that crawled into the washing machine and died after my girlfriend failed to spot it and put the machine on spin (although that was unbelievably fucking sad). This one, I had to take to the vet’s to be put down and while I was walking back home in Willesden Green I composed the whole of ‘Everything’s Coming Up Roses’ in my head. Here, have a listen and remember my cat.
I love cats, but today my love for cats is nothing next to my love for the new Camera Obscura album.*
I love the first Black Sabbath album cos it feels so amateur: unfinished and clunky and full of ridiculous couplets, and (vitally) not scared of ridicule. Songs don’t fit together, most the time. The joins are so obvious you’re afraid you’ll slip through the door jambs. It sounds so raw and half-assed and full of space, silences that – by the time the 80s rolled along – almost all of Black Sabbath’s spawn were too scared not to fill in (mostly with drum fills). The voice, once an abortion, became a code. The Satanic leanings became Satanic earnings.
The French Pop Dream – Eurostar, The Musical
The record label reckons that folk will like the 1st single & video from The French Pop Dream if they also like Eliza Doolittle, Kirsty MacColl, St Etienne. Why yes. Yes I do (with some reservations). And yes I do.
Please don’t get me wrong. I’ve listened to the new album several times over now, always attracted and ensnared by the two aforementioned songs above all, but increasingly caught in its sweetly tangled web of dissolution and despair, continually surprised by previously unheard sounds and snippets of lyrics. I’m not trying to avoid describing it by mentioning the past: just hoping to provide a little context.
This is an absolute belter of a pop song. It’s way fucken better than anything Best Coast ever managed (he says, at random). If you wanna go for a Yank dream-pop band, go for Neverever, not bloody Bethany Cosentino anyway. (I know, I know. You have no idea who Neverever are, they were so 2010. Ah, how quickly time forgets. Ah, how quickly folk wanna be like the newest folk.)
Johnny And The Fembots – Hey! Don’t!
Well. This is absurd. I really need to wake up to myself.
Ooo, ooo I have a crush on you! The new Song of the day is a song for the day from the eminently adorable Palm Springs trio You Me & Us. Like curling up in bed under the covers on a chill winter’s night with a flickering torch-light, a well-loved copy of Cider With Rosie, and a never-ending stream of buttered, salted popcorn. And the opening 30 seconds of Ramones’ ‘Do You Remember Rock’N’Roll’ and Jonathan Richman’s ‘That Summer Feeling’, Moe Tucker’s ‘After Hours’ and Madder Rose’s ‘Swim’ stuck on delicious repeat and shuffle inside your head. (Or indeed perhaps this five-song debut EP from You Me & Us.) Like all the most special, haunting moments of 1993 never dissolved into the ether. Like your first love (but not like your first love at all, because that always turned sour). Magical, like the word has just been used for the first time.
“I am earth and air and fire and water,” she said softly. “I come from the Dark where all things have their beginning. I come from the seas and its tides. I come from the sky and its stars; I come from the sun and its brightness…” – ‘The New One’, Mary Poppins Comes Back, P.L. Travers
The Boy Least Likely To and Gwenno – It Could’ve Been Me
This, my friend, is what some of us call pop music. School yard crushes, minor key melodies (I’m guessing here), call-and-response vocals. A duet, no less. Bags of chips, semi-deserted cafés, grey Welsh days. Suitcases. Train stations. Instruments that burble along merrily to themselves: nostalgia is the calling card of choice. Gwenno was the Pipette that I didn’t know. (See a recent Collapse Board reference here.) The Boy Least Likely To used to write me lovely handwritten letters back when I did the Careless Talk Costs Lives radio show with Jon Slade. So I always listen out for him, despite the beard.
Music like Pins comes dressed in layers. It’s chilly out there: chilly and unwelcoming, and we all need some form of uniform against the furnace of cold and disinterest. There’s a hint of menace. Menace, and fishnet stockings (the two have always been linked in my mind: not an unwelcome association, not at all). Someone is smoking. Of course someone is smoking. Someone is wasting milk. Of course someone is wasting the milk. Look closer. You won’t see anything because that’s not how it works. “Stay true,” someone whispers during the ad breaks in Game Of Thrones and a growing groundswell of support calls back. Stay true! STAY TRUE!
You and me sister, we share a dirty little secret.
This is how we like our music. Female and pulsating with emotion. Harmony-laden but not those harmonies you thinking of, brother. Full of false starts and even falser endings. Gaps that bridge gaps that aren’t there. Menacing and severely intimate, humorous and brilliantly alive. If you don’t tell anyone else, I won’t either. I formed a band in 1981. I say a ‘band’. I use the term loosely. It was a guitar and two voices. I wasn’t able to give vent the way I saw females giving vent, and hence despised myself. One line ran, “See that boy/Huddled in a sleeping bag/Got to keep out the cold”. It was based on real life – sorta. I didn’t have the money for a sleeping bag. Another line ran, “See that boy spend his whole life dreaming/Got to do as he is told”. It was directed at everyone I know, especially my future 51-year-old self. The one living in The Gap, listening to the ladies using gaps to bridge gaps that aren’t there.
Secret Valley – The Night Life
The third song on this cracked golden delight of a cassette album – available for free download RIGHT NOW – is called ‘Streets Of Fitzroy’ and it bears even less resemblance to The Thin Kids‘ ‘Streets Of Brisbane’ then I do to your lover. It borders on romantic, inasmuch as failed hedonism always flatters itself that it borders on romance. There’s feedback and borderline pretension. And if everyone sings like they’re hungover, and if all the instruments sound woozy and splatted with alcohol, it’s because they very probably are.
Kanye West – Send It Up (feat. King L)
However great you think the next song sounds, it sounds even greater when you have six identical versions playing simultaneously, separated by a few-second delay. A veritable West Wall. Would someone mind recording it, and upping it on YouTube for those unable to understand the multi-functionality of Chrome windows?
I’m sorry. Am I confusing you? Here. Have some of this. No no. That’s fine. I know you ain’t gonna listen to any of this, anything which isn’t Grimes or Kanye. I know you’ve just come to laugh at the freaks, the outcasts, those who don’t like their Weet-Bix smothered in sugar and full cream milk, those who pride themselves on searching out routes for themselves. Ah, just throw me the new Game Of Thrones box set and I’ll be as happy with this world of shit as anyone else. Happier. Fucking happier.
Maybe that’s why I’m increasingly turning to Tasmania. I know what it’s like to be ignored.
(continues overleaf)
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