Wednesday 18 January 2023

New York Dolls - One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This (2006)



It was nice that Morrissey got them back together, but I didn't spend much time thinking about the subsequent reunion album, at least not until Robert Dellar told me I should give it a listen. The Dolls had seemed so chaotic and explosive first time around that I had trouble imagining how their second wind could bring forth anything I needed to hear, and those first two albums would surely prove a fucking tough act to follow; and besides, the Dolls without Johnny Thunders struck me as an unrealistically optimistic proposition.

Nevertheless, Robert was right.

One Day features just two of the original line-up but is unmistakably a Dolls album sitting reasonably comfortable behind Too Much Too Soon. They sound inevitably older and wiser, and with a bit of an uptempo Springsteen lilt on a couple of numbers, but it's definitely the Dolls regardless of line-up variations; and it works because it refuses to simply impersonate how they once sounded, moving forward into the new century on its own terms. So while there's nothing quite so apocalyptic as Frankenstein or weird as Stranded in the Jungle, the wasted-glam boogie thing rocks as hard as ever with the soul and doo-wop elements still working their magic. One Day also brings in a country tinge I never noticed on previous recordings, but which makes perfect sense; as does the bizarre guest appearance of Michael Stipe for Dancing on the Lip of a Volcano.

That said, none of this would amount to quite so much were it not for David Johansen's unique lyrics and a voice which has retained every last drop of its original power; and I doubt anyone could mistake Dance Like a Monkey for anyone other than the Dolls. Honestly, it doesn't even sound like a reunion album so much as the work of a group who just happened to have stepped outside for twenty-eight years.

Wednesday 11 January 2023

The Apostles - Best Forgotten (2022)



It may resemble the out-takes and rarities of a band no-one heard of, whose biggest hits only ever reached the same quota of ears as will this lot, but it isn't. The Apostles caused a minor kerfuffle roughly contemporaneous to the emergence of anarchopunk as something with legs, playing the same venues, going through the same channels, making use of the same DIY aesthetic, but otherwise entirely in a class of their own. They were political, arguably moreso than many of the anarchopunk bands through being unafraid to point out the inevitable hypocrisies and contradictions of such scenes; but they tended to focus on the personal, the day to day stuff of life in the late twentieth century and why many of us felt so completely dispossessed by the world we were born into and amongst our supposed peers. In this sense, the most obvious comparison would be with early Alternative TV, except the Apostles were more musical, despite having to learn on the job in terms of instrumentation, and somehow they sounded like the most important realisation in the world, the feeling you get when you're completely out of options.

Those early tapes, notably 2nd Dark Age, wormed their way into my subconscious like nothing has really done since - wrist-slashingly bleak and yet somehow uplifting at the same time, the ray of sunlight giving definition to the sort of depths which made Joy Division sound like just some rock band. Typically, although those early tapes were pretty much just a couple of them stood in front of a tape recorder trying not to sound crap, sometimes with a drummer, sometimes with the cheapest drum machine they could afford or borrow, they somehow never quite achieved the same intensity in any more expensive setting, and certainly not with any of the legitimate studio albums on which the drumming is reduced to someone tapping a biscuit tin with a pencil in the next room. Chris Low, drummer to a later incarnation who put this thing together, comments that by the time he joined he had a feeling that the Apostles' best days were probably already behind them, and sadly he seems to have been right, even though it's hard to say why.

These two slabs of lovingly pressed vinyl comprise what can fairly be described as ropey recordings, songs and pieces of music which are played well, possibly not perfect, and with flaws and screw ups up front; but you can hear everything you need to hear for the tracks to work, and the sheer power of this stuff - even forty fucking years later - is terrifying, heart breaking, and a shitload of other adjectives ramped up to eleven. In all honesty, I don't think they ever bettered any of these recordings in terms of the raw emotion pouring out of the speakers. The only explanation I have is that possibly they spent too much time working on their own strengths and in doing so, lost sight of them. The playing isn't perfect and the lyrics occasionally clunk but it doesn't matter because this is rock (just about) as it was supposed to be - no bullshit, no showbiz, no sales pitch, just music that would reduce a statue to tears and so much honesty that it hurts.

I should probably mention that I was myself in a band with two former Apostles in the nineties, so can't really be described as an unbiased source; but I recall thinking that Andy Martin was one of the few people I've known who could genuinely be described as a genius*. Best Forgotten reminds me why I thought that.

*: Although part of that genius unfortunately involves shooting himself in the foot on a fairly regular basis, thus eschewing the problem of the Apostles acquiring an enduring following - which would have been a good thing because it hopefully would have meant more records in better studios.

Wednesday 4 January 2023

Pixies - Doggerel (2022)



Finding myself hard pressed to say anything about Doggerel apart from that it's great, I rummaged around online to see what proper reviewers had said, which was probably a mistake. Everybody seemed to think it was great whilst wrestling with a sneaking suspicion that they probably shouldn't because the Pixies formed way back in 1756 and this one sounds like the others, which is saaaaaaad, and hey, you should really check out the new albums by Bad Sounds, Spring King, and Vant*, my man.

One such review reads:


Opener Nomatterday is a multi-sectioned track that sounds like post-punk by a band who arrived late to that genre's pier. However, it does land on some compelling passages and is a promising introduction to an album that regularly runs out of steam. It's difficult to touch on these and future criticisms without first pointing out the unfortunate and potentially triggering ageism inherent in this type of cultural criticism. A group, even one as consistently professional as Pixies, will always be held up to younger versions of themselves, to purple patches in their career that bloomed from the high-performance levels occasioned by the advantaged position of young adults in the entertainment industry.



Ugh. I guess I'm not the only one who struggled for something to say, but it's all bollocks. Stick the record on the turntable and close inspection, or not even particularly close inspection will reveal that it rocks, and it rocks at least as much as the Pixies have ever rocked.

It's that simple.

It sounds a little like the other records in that it sounds like the Pixies, and I realise it's boooooooring how they didn't add bagpipes or fill the first side with twenty minutes of musique concrete recorded at the bingo in an old folks home, conservative hacks that they are; but it doesn't matter because it rocks. True, there's no Monkey Gone to Heaven here, which is because that's on one of the other albums, and it has plenty of great tracks which are only on this album, and which rock. I really can't overemphasise that last point.

Sure, you get what you usually get with the Pixies - folksy tales of the weird and wonderful with arresting imagery, a faint hint of the Latin, big screen sunsets, screwy time signatures and nothing quite so predictable as to feel like it's going through the motions. If you wanted something else you probably should have bought a different record. If you bought this one, stick it on, crank it up, and rock the fuck out. It's not difficult to understand.


*: I use these three to invoke the general idea of new bands with fucking stupid names championed by beardy arseholes on the grounds of their being new, although I'm well aware they're probably considered old school by now, each churning out comeback albums, and I'm so out of touch that it's embarrassing; not that I care.

Wednesday 28 December 2022

Level 42 - Level Best (1989)



Having bought this, I realise that I've never knowingly met one other person who ever liked Level 42, such has been my social circle. I therefore have a possibly false impression of them as existing somewhere on the Sting-Lighthouse Family spectrum, something beige and tasteful which Alan Partridge would have in his car, and of course there was that album which came with a free pair of driving gloves…

The Wikipedia page refers to jazz funk and something called sophisti-pop, but I don't care. The hits wormed their way into my consciousness before I had time to form any of the usual objections based on the presumed existence of anything called sophisti-pop, and those selfsame tunes have stayed there ever since; and yes, weirdly there were enough of them for a greatest hits album. There are six or seven on here which I don't recognise, which still leaves more than just The Sun Goes Down and that other one.

As you may recall, it's all very smooth and sounds fairly expensive, but all that ostentatiously complicated slap bass, jazzy electric piano, and pitch perfect vocal harmony is dynamic rather than just tasteful for the sake of it, with all those extra notes working the sort of profoundly emotive melodic power you usually only get with a symphony orchestra, depending on what it's playing. In other words, at least with the likes of It's Over, Leaving Me Now, or The Sun Goes Down, the thing wrenches your heart right out of your chest before you've even had chance to admire the razor crease in its chinos or the expertise with which that cocktail was mixed. I'm not kidding. The way those notes fit together in the chorus of It's Over is genuinely fucking astonishing to me, enough to bring a tear to the eye even when you haven't actually split up with anyone, or noticed the line which appears to run:


Don't look for me around this town,
'Cause I will be so far away, you'll never find me anywhere,
And I won't take no souvenirs,
No perfume, no pictures, no brassiere…


Thankfully that isn't what he's singing.

There's some degree of cheese, I suppose - the token song about a flying saucer encounter, and of course the massively futuristic Micro Kid whom older listeners will recall as having had megathoughts, whatever those were, and Hot Water is built upon that chuggy rhythm which I assume has since been made illegal because no-one does it these days; none of which seems to matter because this lot somehow made all that shit sound amazing - not so much the Shriekback of the golf course as Kool & the Gang with a rocket up their arse.


Wednesday 21 December 2022

The Grid - Electric Head (1990)



The Grid somehow passed me by, which is strange with hindsight. I loved both Soft Cell and Dave Ball's extricurricular activities, the solo album, Decoder, English Boy on the Love Ranch, and even those fake house compilations put out by Psychic TV - which were almost the Grid, give or take some small change. I sort of liked what I heard of the Grid, but was otherwise distracted that year and it felt a little like progressive house; and I suppose I like some progressive house, technically speaking, but it always made me think of certain individuals who spent the best part of the eighties pretending to be Front 242, reinventing themselves with backwards baseball caps when the rave scene happened despite previously having avoided house music like the plague. At the risk of sounding sniffy, if your club experience was mostly confusion and the dance floor given a wide, wide berth, it usually shows in whatever you were trying to pass off as your - cough cough - ravemaster megamix.

Coming clean here, the above paragraph probably contains clues as to why I missed out on a few things that I might have enjoyed had I given them a fair crack of the whip; but better thirty years late than never, I guess. First impressions of Electric Head suggested my initial prejudices had been partially justified in that it sounds sort of as I expected it to sound - like something I could have done myself; but the more I've listened, the more I've realised my judgement is based on it failing to do something it never set out to do in the first place. The Grid weren't, so far as I'm able to tell, thinking house music or techno or rave or whatever. They were just making the music they felt like making, regardless of where it sat in relation to any existing scene, or to anyone else, and the strongest connection to anything else is probably back to Jack the Tab. Are You Receiving could almost be a 242 outtake, but otherwise there's one fuck of a lot of Soft Cell DNA in these beats and basslines, and particularly in the flourishes of cornet, the soulful touches, and Norris' sparsely applied vocals occasionally threatening to do an Almond. So it's just electronic dance music, instrumental pop or whatever on its own terms, and the opening paragraph is merely evidence of my own tendency to overthink things which, on close inspection, are actually very simple.

Sometimes I really wonder what the fuck is wrong with me.

Wednesday 14 December 2022

Jake the Flake (1998)



I'm not sure whether we're still whining about rap artists supposedly glorifying violence or whether that was just a nineties deal with older white men who preferred their world music socially responsible and preferably well behaved. In any case, Jake ticks one fuck of a lot of those naughty, naughty boxes because - as you may notice if you look closely - he was telling it like it is, or was but almost certainly still is. It's no good asking people what sort of problems they have in their lives if you disregard the answers you don't like.

Anyway, Jake is from Flint, Michigan and has been a member of the Dayton Family at various points during his career. I don't know much about Flint beyond what I've learned from Dayton Family records, but I gather it was a tough place to live even before anyone noticed the water was poisoned but decided it would probably be okay because it was mostly working class black people holding the shitty end of the stick. Jake the Flake's debut is mostly concerned with what you had to do to get by in Flint back in the nineties, so it's kind of brutal if you're unaccustomed to such stories, but it's also absolutely real and therefore should be heard.

The mid-west sound of the time seemed to draw from west coast influences but with a harder, electronic edge - not quite Front 242, but maybe something from the next studio along with more emphasis on gospel, soul and end-of-the-line blues, and of course the rat-a-tat delivery which seems to distinguish the region from elsewhere on the rap map. This is a hard album, and powerful, and there's not much being glorified, although neither does our man give a shit about apologising for anything; and just like the Flint water crisis, as the evening news is my witness, we still haven't learned a fucking thing nearly a quarter century later.

Thursday 8 December 2022

Megatonewelle - Mirfield Pads (2022)



This is Paul Tone, who was associated with both Smell & Quim and Swing Jugend way back in the dawn of time; and I actually had the impression that Megatonewelle was Paul in collaboration with someone else, except I can no longer find the facebook message stating the case, apparently having dreamed that part; so I've no idea, beyond that Neil Campbell contributes to Crystal Airfield, the last of the four tracks.

Well, whoever it is, it's not at all what I expected given the lad's resume. Initial impressions deposited the phrase like a cross between Tangerine Dream and Throbbing Gristle into my head, but I'm trying to get out of the habit of reviews amounting to this sounds like a cross between the Swans and Splodgenessabounds or similar because it's lazy and rarely helpful. Spacious washes of sound combined with busy sequencer invoke the sort of ethereal scale one might associate with new age efforts, but this does something slightly different, hence my subconscious having been reminded of Gristle's abrasive chug. The chug is particularly compelling on the first track, Barry N. Malzberg, named after a science-fiction author I'm not aware of having read, but who John Clute describes as powerful but gloomy, a voice in the wilderness, speaking in wisecracks, which seems to fit.

The twenty-three minute Crystal Airfield on the other hand verges on krautrock with its motorik rhythm and soaring e-bow guitar, assuming it is e-bow I'm hearing.

For all I know, we may be experiencing a glut of this sort of thing right now, but being no longer fully cognisant with what's going down with the kids on the streets, I have to say it's been a long time since I heard anything like this, specifically anything which strikes me as being like a cross between Tangerine Dream and Throbbing Gristle, although neither does it really sound entirely like an exercise in nostalgia. Mirfield Pads is dreamlike, pensive, spacious, and moving. It also sounds a little bit expensive, which makes a pleasant change from the usual.