song of the week 18: my bloody valentine - when you sleep

High time we had some GUITARS in these here parts...

song of the week 15: beach house - norway

More music this week courtesy of those nice folks at Rough Trade. I'm still periodically dipping in to their massive Best 100 Albums of 2010 Spotify playlist and one of the gems I've uncovered in so doing is Beach House's Teen Dream.

Reckon this is a highlight:



(That's Victoria Legrand, niece of film-score great Michel Legrand, on the kind of breathy vocals which the French seem to do so well...)

songs of the week 13 & 14 respectively: helixir - summertime; pro celebrity golf & jay glaze - three sinister syllables (part 2)

So... you set out from work on a Friday evening, it's nice and sunny, you start walking east. Like a moth to a flame, Rough Trade East record shop draws you in. There's nothing you can do about it.

You go inside, stare at the displays, maybe recognise a handful of names (the Strokes have got a new album out, you've heard of them!). You wonder: given that you spend so much time listening to music, how is it that hardly any of these names ring a bell with you?

You do a tour of the listening posts. The staff have added some blurb to a label on the front of each CD but you realise that this in no way describes the music within. It's commendable in some ways that there's no convoluted pigeon-holing ("acid/metal/P-Funk", "thrash lounge"), no lazy comparisons with other bands ("think Cocteau Twins meet Chic", "part Radiohead, part Right Said Fred"). But this can be frustrating when you're trying to get to grips with a lot of music in the space of a half-hour shopping trip.

Anyway, you pick some band names you like the sound of and listen to the opening few tracks of three of four of the albums... Hmmm. You've heard some interesting left-field electronica on Tom Ravenscroft's 6Music show lately so you grab a couple of CDs by artists you've never heard of and which sound... well, different. Face it, you could do with plugging that gap in the dubstep section of your collection.

You reach for your wallet and head for the till...

world of twee

I notice that on its weekly new album reviews page, last Friday's Independent awarded a solid, if unspectacular, three stars out of five to the new offering by a band called Stornoway. Probably fair enough: from what I know they're solid, if unspectacular, purveyors of generally inoffensive tunes. Reviewer Andy Gill's parting shot though is that "they can't rock and roll for toffee". The general tone of what he says seems to suggest that he'd like to add "...and you kind of wish they did, frankly".

But Andy, there have been many, many bands who in their time have been totally unable to rock and roll. And as far as I'm concerned I'm not sure we would have wanted it any other way.

Besides all the glitzy New Romanticism and power pop around at the time, in the early 1980s a number of bands were quietly making names for themselves in a kind of off-shoot of the indie canon which was being established during these years. These were bands who had none of the testosterone-fuelled swagger and posturing of the leather clad metal rockers of the early seventies, none of the phlegmy vitriol of the punk rock explosion. Yes, they had guitars but none of the meaty riffs which had been rife in the previous decade. They played chords in the form of rhythmically percussive syncopations or delicately jangly arpeggios, sometimes in a gentle, almost Latin style.

These were bands usually made up of whey-faced (often Scottish) young men--occasionally women--wearing long tweedy coats with collars turned up against the wind and the rain. Regulation hairstyle (both sexes): long at the top--often quiffed--and short at the sides.

As if to celebrate the general wilful rejection of machismo, fans of this music, typically self-deprecating, proudly labelled it "twee".

And some of it was pretty good...

• Orange Juice - Falling and Laughing (1980)
• Everything But The Girl - Night and Day (1983)
• Aztec Camera - Walk Out to Winter (1983)
  
• Bluebells - I'm Falling (1984)
• Go-Betweens - Bachelor Kisses (1984)
• Lotus Eaters - First Picture of You (1984)
• Wedding Present - Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft (1987)
  
• My Bloody Valentine - Strawberry Wine (1987)
  
• Bradford - Skin Storm (1988)
  
• Blue Nile - Headlights On The Parade (1989)
• Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas (1990)
  

More recent decades have continued to produce their share of "tweeness" and hoorah for that. Here are some of the bands who held out against the Mancy swagger of those brash Oasis louts during the Britpop era:

• Lush - Sweetness and Light (1990)
  
• Blueboy - Boys Don't Matter (1994)
• Bluetones - Slight Return (1995)
  
• Belle and Sebastian - If You're Feeling Sinister (1996)
• Trash Can Sinatras - How can I Apply? (1996)
• The Sundays - Summertime (1997)

...and here are some from the last ten years or so. These days they're sometimes Norwegian, like the Kings of Convenience. Occasionally, like the Postmarks, they're (whisper it) American.

• Spearmint - Scottish Pop (1999)
• Kings of Convenience - Toxic Girl (2001)
• Camera Obscura - Lloyd I'm Ready to be Heartbroken (2006)
• Postmarks - Goodbye (2009)

I've just finished reading "Falling and Laughing" (see also above) by Grace Maxwell. It's the fantastically uplifting account of her partner Edwyn Collins's recent return to music-making and a life of at least partial normality after suffering two massive strokes in 2005. It seems that in their early days Orange Juice used to revel in the Twee philosophy:

They used to say they were 'anti-rock'. In the early days, Glasgow audiences used to chant 'Poofs! Poofs! Poofs!' at them. They liked that just fine. There was a campness in their delivery, deliberately affected to annoy the manly men of rock.

Take it away Edwyn...



(Spotified--more or less--here, if you're wondering...)

sweet catatonia (2)

Cerys Matthews has had her ups and downs.

Catatonia made some great 90s indie--"Mulder and Scully" and "Road Rage" for starters--but at the height of the their fame the band self-imploded amid reports that Matthews was sinking into one of those drink and drugs hells you read about now and then in the tabloids.

After moving to Nashville to put her life back together, she seemed to be back on track in 2003 when her first solo album, the "country-tinged" Cockahoop received an amount of critical acclaim.

She rather slipped off the rails again in a few years later with a toe-curling onscreen romance on "I'm a Celebrity... Get Me out of Here!" (I'm a big fan, obviously), but she's now rehabilitated again as a regular weekday DJ on BBC 6Music.

A couple of weeks ago her new single, "Arlington Way", was (unfairly I think) dismissed by Radcliffe and Maconie as a "Warwick Avenue" wannabe. (It's named after a London street. It's sung by a Welsh woman.) I quite like it though.

I have also, coincidentally, spent many happy hours in the Shakespeare's Head pub in this same London thoroughfare. It serves Courage Best and has a free jukebox.

(There's a rather glossy official video if you want--also a Welsh language version of same (!)--but I prefer this TV studio clip where she sings it live in front of what I'm sure is an appreciatively discerning GMTV audience.)



Also recommended:

Cerys Matthews - 08 Seed Song.mp3

Found at: http://www.filestube.com

See also: Sweet Catatonia (1)

shrag. v. t. to trim, as trees; to lop

Shrag, The Tender Trap, Arthur and Martha @ The Lexington, 2nd April

Arthur and Martha are big on synths, drum machines and other electronic gubbins, including an unwieldy theremin. Bleeps and bloops ensue. They in no way sound like Hot Chip however. Song title of the evening: "Squarewave to Heaven".

The Tender Trap: Women sing and play keyboards and drums standing up. Men play guitar and bass, also standing up. (Is that that bloke out of Nirvana on guitar?) The addition of two extra woman backing vocalists recently has filled out their sound a lot since last time I heard them, and their "ba-da-ba ba-da-ba"'s remind me of Stereolab and Teenage Fanclub. Which cheers me up.

Shrag: Energetic, occasionally profane, "jagged post punk". Again, men play guitars and bass and women sing, play dinky electronic keyboards, but also shout a lot and kick a considerable amount of ass on the drums. Great stuff. Hear more at their lastfm page.

and the award...

...for best use of guitars in a single in 2009 (so far), goes to the Britpop-tastic Pull In Emergency...



Bit of a ropey band name though...

live stuff: howling bells at koko's, 25/2/07

Thoroughly enjoyable night out, my first visit to Koko's in Camden. Howling Bells with their girl plus guitars line-up remind me a bit of the Sundays, which has got to be good...
- see the set list etc ("Stein then revealed her opinions on potatoes and Britney Spears"-- ahem, quite...)
- listen to the album

sweet catatonia

I've been listening again recently to some of my albums from the nineties: the first two Garbage albums and Way Beyond Blue and International Velvet by Catatonia. ("Not," according to Wikipedia "to be confused with Katatonia, a Swedish metal band". Er yes. Thanks for that.) There's some good stuff on these records. Garbage fizzled out after their first album really, although I really like "You look so fine" on Version 2. Such a great arrangement. Catatonia had some excellent songs too, were much more than another Britpop band. On the look-out for Welsh music up in the hen wlad fy nhadau last weekend, I spotted the new Cerys Matthews album and decided to take a punt on it, having heard the single a couple of times. Really good. Again, some great songs, more acoustic than the old Catatonia stuff but thankfully supposedly not as "countrified" as her first solo album, Cockahoop. Best tracks: "Seed song" and "The Endless Rain".

Some more Cerys stuff from a cursory google:
- an interview from the BBC Wales site
- her myspace page
- official cm site
- the Guardian low-down

live stuff: how does it feel to be loved? 13/04/06

The How does it feel to be loved night at the Windmill is always good value with some decent bands in an indy-jangly-guitar-with-girl-singer type vein. Tonight starring: Tender Trap ("headspinning melodies from ex-Heavenly/Tallulah Gosh act", the drummer plays with The Magnetic Fields and the bass player is my mate Stan!), Fosca (lead singer who looks like David Sylvian c.1982 and sounds like Robert Smith), and Strange Idols. Good stuff.