Junk/phishing email just received: "You have been selected to benefit from our humble gesture of live changing opportunity"
As opposed to a pre-recorded changing opportunity I presume. Trying to imagine it.
The one advantage of miscategorization: occasionally finding something rather good that you would not have stumbled across were it not misfiled. Great Czech jazz piano. (Does not, as far as I can ascertain, contain any Bill Frisell - the guitarist is one Lubos Andrst - whatever Guvera's search engine thinks).
I really, really like the individual pieces on this, but the whole thing gets a little wearing at one sitting. Needs dividing down into a couple of shorter sessions. I feel a little glutted with austerity.
I'm going to lower the tone here with some rock music, because that is what I feel like listening to after thirty minutes on the telephone in a queue before getting an answer!
Its rare that you come across a record as original as David Rotherays Answer Ballads.
In what is effectively a concept album, characters from 12 classic pop songs are each given their own voice by Rotheray, with brand new lyrics from their own perspective. Finally, its time for Rod Stewarts Maggie May and The Polices Roxanne to give us their say, and this time, theyre doing it with folk! Whats more, a whole host of well-known folk artists are on hand to lend their voices to each song. Overall, this is a recipe for something very interesting.
For anyone unfamiliar with his name, David Rotheray was once a member of The Beautiful South, a band well known for their tongue-in-cheek lyrics. This tendency towards dry humour is continued in Answer Ballads, and despite the dismal backgrounds to some of the characters lives, the wit wins through.
Sylvias Song, for instance, tells the touching tale of a daughter growing apart from her mother. In anyone elses hands, this could err towards the melancholy, but Rotherays Sylvia, performed by Bella Hardy, chirps out cheerfully, Ive got a house and a car and a cat, and I dont need you at all.
With this being an album mixing melancholy lyrics and cheeky humour, it seems only natural that Eliza Carthy is involved! Her track, Maggies Song, is an ode to the title character from Maggie May. Unlike many of the other tracks, this one is unusual in that the tune was written by Rotheray and Carthy together, as Rotheray explains: I turned up with the lyrics, and Eliza and I bashed out a tune together, eye-to-eye over a guitar. Most of the other tracks involved Rotheray either writing solo, or penning the lyrics and asking someone else to write the tune, so perhaps this is why Maggies Song gels so well with the artist and has such a strong Eliza twist.
Another highlight of the album is Billy-Joes Song, performed by John Smith. Its a trip to cowboy-ville wrapped up in a song, and Smith was the ideal choice to perform it, with his gravelly delivery matching the story to a tee.
Indeed, Rotheray went to great lengths to ensure that each character was paired carefully to the ideal voice to portray them. Gemma Hayes was selected for Pearls Song, for instance, as Rotheray was specifically looking for a singer with strong vocals but just the right hint of vulnerability in the delivery. In this respect, his experience with this album must have been a bit like casting the characters for a drama.
Overall, this is an album which will have appeal for a very wide range of listeners, from fans of the original pop songs to avid followers of each of the guest artists involved. What makes this project so interesting is that as well as each song being about a different character, each track has its own character in musical terms, and it is this rare quality which makes it such a compelling listen.
"Polymath James Leyland Kirby must surely have one of the most confounding CVs in the business: he spent years taking the piss out of the music industry with anthems rallying against the (VV)MCPS, he notoriously fell out with various well known record labels for reasons youll just have to google, goaded Aphex Twin with a series of tributes and channelled his love of everything from Falco (Rock Me Amadeus), Chris De Burgh, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Stockport karaoke nights into a stream of increasingly bizzare 7s back in the early noughties.
But at the same time he was responsible for releasing some of the very earliest material from Boards of Canada (Hell Interface: 1997), made a ruck of frankly groundbreaking industrial electronic records, brought New Beat to the worlds attention and, in 1999, made his first album as The Caretaker, a project that would go on to release some of the most loved Ambient/ Lynchian albums of recent times. SInce then hes also produced an incredible suite of releases under his own name, scored various film projects and released three EPs under the Intrigue & Stuff banner which are, for our money, so ahead of their time they might just start sinking in properly by the end of the decade.
All of which brings us to Watching Dead Empires in Decay, a new album recorded under another of Kirbys pseudonyms The Stranger and released on Modern Love, a label that has been close to Kirby through these last eventful 15 years. Its a dream album for the label: perhaps the most ambitious of Kirbys career so far. Its complex, singular, enigmatic, percussive, dark, and you just cant work out how it was constructed. Gone are the sampled 78s of The Caretaker, but it also doesnt exactly sound electronic - you just cant quite fathom how any of it was put together: Field Recordings? Found Sounds? Sheets of metal scraped and hammered? Drum machines re-wired? Its stark and unsettling, haunted, even troubling - but often just beautiful.
It starts with the sharp clang of opener We Are Enemies But Not Here before the woozy percussive crawl So Pale It Shone In The Night sucks you into a bare landscape: somewhere between Eraserhead and Fumio Hayasakas music for Akira Kurosawa. And then there are moments that break through the tension with clarity and familiarity, nostalgia even: Where Are Our Monsters Now, Where Are Our Friends? could have been made by Boards of Canada if they had taken a turn into more noxious terrain back in 1998, while Spiral Of Decline offsets the drum programming youd most likely associate with a Powell record with an oblique sense of timing and space. It all ends with About To Enter A Strange New Period, an unusual, vaporous coda that offers no resolution - it just shuts proceedings down with nothing settled."
I dug out a cdr from 10 or 11 years ago that had some Dead Shows on it and this was one of them - the cool thing being that now this seems to only be available as streaming, and only has New Potato Caboose and Viola Lee Blues available. My version has 5 tracks, including a 28 minute Midnight Hour. This confirms for me why I like downloading so much more than streaming; with streaming you never know when it's going to switch to streaming only or commercially available or just gone.
The instrumental tracks are very pleasant, the singing spoils it a bit for me - not because he sings badly so much as because I don't care much for that genre of singing.
'"Sound Body' by David Toop is an intricate work of enormous subtlety and power with contributions from a wonderful line up of musicians including Clive Bell, Haco, Angharad Davies, Rhodri Davies, Gunter Müller, Rafael Toral, and more."
- Samahdisound 2007.
Just in on Ghostly International / Soundcloud:
1 Simon Scott - Water Shadow
2 A Winged Victory for the Sullen - Ti Prego Memory Man
3 Celer - Nothing So Mystical
4 Black Swan - Passings, Heartbreak
5 Jim Haynes - This is Radio Sweden
6 EN - White
7 Pjusk - Dorsk
8 Fieldhead - 37th
9 Noveller - Bright Clouds Bloom http://www.ghostly.com/releases/smm-opiate
Comments
Junk/phishing email just received: "You have been selected to benefit from our humble gesture of live changing opportunity"
As opposed to a pre-recorded changing opportunity I presume. Trying to imagine it.
Arcade Fire - Reflektor
ETA: Lives up to the hype. Dang this is good.
Craig
This was my first Lou Reed exposure, long before I ever even heard of VU, so for better or worse this is always the first thin I think of for him.
This was the album that introduced me to Lou Reed many decades ago.
Los Campesinos! - No Blues
Like the indie pop of Los Campesinos!? Then you will like this album because it is exactly like all their other ones.
Craig
Yamantaka // Sonic Titan - UZU
Can't decide how to describe this...experimental noise pop? Industrial pop? Pop metal? It's good whatever it is.
Craig
As good as advertised.
Dang, "Torture" is a great song. Depressing. But great.
Craig
The one advantage of miscategorization: occasionally finding something rather good that you would not have stumbled across were it not misfiled. Great Czech jazz piano. (Does not, as far as I can ascertain, contain any Bill Frisell - the guitarist is one Lubos Andrst - whatever Guvera's search engine thinks).
This one, on the other hand, does have Frisell and is the apparent source of the miscategorization of the other one.
To my knowledge this does not have Bill Frisell. It does have A$AP Rocky and SchoolBoy Q, though.
Craig
ETA:
I really, really like the individual pieces on this, but the whole thing gets a little wearing at one sitting. Needs dividing down into a couple of shorter sessions. I feel a little glutted with austerity.
Eta; by the way this links to a downloadable version at big-O-zine; I just can't listen to Sister Ray without a big smile. This is a great version.
followed by
then
I dug out a cdr from 10 or 11 years ago that had some Dead Shows on it and this was one of them - the cool thing being that now this seems to only be available as streaming, and only has New Potato Caboose and Viola Lee Blues available. My version has 5 tracks, including a 28 minute Midnight Hour. This confirms for me why I like downloading so much more than streaming; with streaming you never know when it's going to switch to streaming only or commercially available or just gone.
The instrumental tracks are very pleasant, the singing spoils it a bit for me - not because he sings badly so much as because I don't care much for that genre of singing.
fka twigs - EP2
This little 4 track EP is fantastic. Trip hoppy synth pop.
Craig
A rarity: an ECM disk purchased used in Grand Rapids, MI.
1 Simon Scott - Water Shadow
2 A Winged Victory for the Sullen - Ti Prego Memory Man
3 Celer - Nothing So Mystical
4 Black Swan - Passings, Heartbreak
5 Jim Haynes - This is Radio Sweden
6 EN - White
7 Pjusk - Dorsk
8 Fieldhead - 37th
9 Noveller - Bright Clouds Bloom
http://www.ghostly.com/releases/smm-opiate