WC - Revenge of the Barracuda (2011)

Not really having a finger on anything you could describe as a pulse, I'm not quite sure what's been happening with this guy since Revenge of the Barracuda. I can state with some certainty that he isn't President right now - more's the pity - and I don't think he's hosting any game shows, but otherwise I have no idea. I get the impression he still hasn't quite achieved the kind of recognition which would justify a magazine cover, at least not without being stood next to Ice Cube pulling a face; and so the only thing I can really say for sure is that this is a great album.

The name is pronounced Dub-C, in case you were wondering, therefore sparing us any comic misunderstandings involving Charles Hawtrey. He was one third of Westside Connection, with Ice Cube and Mack 10, and has been looking more and more like one of rap's most underrated as the years have passed. Rap, lest we should have forgotten, wasn't really designed for albums, not at first - being more about tunes spun in the park then quickly onto the next one while we're still squinting at the deliberately obscured label trying to catch the name of what the hell we just heard. Most rap artists have trouble filling an album, particularly since the advent of the compact disc, without a few duds being snuck in under the radar. Exceptions to the rule are just that - exceptions, but even those rare artists who manage the occasionally consistent album have rarely kept it going for more than a year or two; except for WC, so far as I can tell. Every single album has been great, no filler to be heard, and - Holy Mary mother of God - even the fucking skits are funny!

So let's have a listen to this one and see if we can't work out how the magic happens. There's probably not much joy in attempting to identify the greatest rapper who ever lived, so I won't. It probably isn't WC, but he's nevertheless in the premier division with an immediately recognisable voice no-one could possibly mistake for that of anyone else. It's the rhythm, the way he twangs those syllables making the words jump and pop like an instrument, combined with an above average wit, dexterity, and a weirdly jovial menace. He sounds like he'd be a fun guy to hang out with, but you really wouldn't want to get on his wrong side.

Combined with what I guess must be an ear for just the right sort of track, WC shines as few others have done without really doing anything obviously different to anyone else. Most rap albums, or most of those that don't quite get there, are usually let down by substandard beats which, as I say, never seems to occur with this guy. The west coast bounce harks back to p-funk ancestors without getting bogged down in mere karaoke, slow, soulful, but with a hard edge, never getting drippy, modern touches without ostentatious displays of weirdness - it all adds up to something almost stately, even mythic without having had to try too hard, and which packs one fuck of an emotional punch; and yet it's still music for those cars which go up and down. I'm hesitant to describe anyone as a genius, but as the single factor common to at least three other albums as great as this one, WC seems like a contender.

Wreckless Eric - Transience (2019)

I'm trying to think of any other individual who has managed to keep on chucking them out for four decades without any evidence of sag. I'm sure they exist, but excepting Billy Childish no-one springs to mind right now - and obviously I'm excluding bands on the grounds that they can replenish themselves with younger members as the older ones kick the bucket or otherwise run out of steam. Eric seems to have had about ten quiet years in there somewhere, but you'll have a tough time identifying the comeback point on your wall chart given that I'm not convinced he ever fully went away, and the pinnacle of his musical career seems to be what he's doing right now, at least since AmERICa.

If you're familiar with any of the arguably better publicised stuff from before the internet, you'll know what to expect up to a point, and this is quite clearly the same man who recorded Reconnez Cherie and Whole Wide World - the uncertain warble in the voice, a faint trace of punk rock without being a dick about it, the suggestion of everything held together by sheer force of will, songs which sound as though they've been punched in the face so many times that they've stopped noticing, but above all the suspicion that nothing can keep this man down. The rock and roll basics have evolved into something approaching psychedelia without getting too affected. The distortion of songs about to collapse under their own weight on Construction Time and Demolition has been further developed into something which might look like a significantly more pissed off Jonathan Richman covering mid-period Beatles whilst trying to drown out the noise of Stereolab rehearsing in the next room, at least if seen from a fast moving vehicle - but that's just because language sometimes lets us down, leading to sentences which look like the one I've just written. Without even being particularly lacking in cheer, Eric's music seems to capture that frame of mind where you're so irredeemably fucked off or bewildered or otherwise beaten down by the forces of everything which is shite in the world that you can't even be bothered getting upset over it, not anymore; and so there's something weirdly comforting here, like he's the only one in the entire firmament who could possibly understand.

To be fair, as a fellow immigrant, an old bloke and another former resident of the Medway towns who moved to America, it could simply be that I'm suffering from overidentification with someone in the same boat, or at least a similar boat, and the previous paragraph is at least as ridiculous as I suspect it may well be; but whatever the case, Transcience really nails it for me, describing a lot of my present existence, particularly how it feels and why half of it makes no sense - the dead ends all over the place, and those tiny fucking houses. I've a feeling this means that there probably isn't anything useful I can say about this record except that it's genuinely wonderful, and Eric is probably the Bob Dylan of my generation, or someone of equivalent stature who didn't end up hanging out with that complete knob from ELO.

Nicht Gut - Grönland (2019)

Here's another cassette tape from AUT, the label which brought us Att Förstå Ensamhet and Beppria Bepria, amongst other goodies from Sweden. Nicht Gut released a couple of cassettes through what I assume must have been their own Some Fun label back in 1984, neither of which I've heard, and this is in any case all new material representing a resumption of activity. I haven't been able to find out much about the author or authors, beyond the possibility of it being the work of someone with the surname Jansson, presumably not the creator of Moomintroll, so I'm left with only the terrifying prospect of writing about the music. Grönland feels a little like a film soundtrack, comprising abstract but not quite ambient music of electronic derivation, but I'm probably thinking Chris Carter more than Tangerine Dream. It's also fairly expensive sounding, which makes for a pleasant change in the context of my usual listening, although is not overtly digital. Also, it's a mixture of longer pieces with shorter, some as short as five or six seconds, reinforcing the suspicion that some of this was probably composed as soundtrack material, even if we're only talking imaginary films.

In any case, it's lush and enveloping, wrapping the listener in an intoxicating world of sound with apparently little effort, which is enough to get me excited at the possibility of Nicht Gut's eighties material having a reissue, which apparently might happen.

C.W. McCall - Black Bear Road (1975)

Having spent the first decade of my life in a rural area - specifically growing up on the farm which eventually became the set of Teletubbies - trucks, trucking, farm machinery, and country music loomed larger than they probably would have done had I grown up in some more urban setting. Amongst my school friends were a significant group of three - Paul and two other kids, both named Tom - who seemed particularly attuned to the rural automotive current and would spend hours yacking on and on about trucks, engines, mileage, differential gearboxes, and so on. They were quite naturally way ahead of the curve when CB radio kicked in.

To get to the point, Paul was one of the first kids I ever knew, living on the farm along the road from ours and so we were friends at a very young age, and he taped me a few tracks from this album once I got my first tape recorder. Having long since recorded over the tape, I spent years wondering what this music had been - admittedly without breaking much of a sweat in my efforts to find out given that it was clearly the work of the guy who recorded Convoy - only finding out in the late nineties that it was an album called Black Bear Road, because er… Nigel of Nocturnal Emissions kindly ran me off a tape of the record, somewhat substantiating his claim of never having been particularly industrial.

Now finally, I've splashed out on my own copy of the fucking thing; and I knew it wasn't my memory playing tricks. I knew it was worth getting hold of.

Peculiarly, it turns out that C.W. McCall may be considered an early form of idoru, a virtual entertainer, an image serving as a front for the men behind the music. He began life as a trucking character in a television commercial for Old Home Bread, eventually developing a life of his own as the creation of William Dale Fries Jr. with music written by Chip Davies. The strangest realisation for me is that it could be argued that Black Bear Road - which sounds so ruggedly authentic that I've actually had to wash the dust and grit from myself after listening to the thing - is actually so manufactured as to make the New Kids look like Bob Dylan; therefore fuck!, beyond which I guess it doesn't matter. The first six tracks, side one plus Convoy, represent what country music does best, or did best before it turned into that rhinestoned spangled autotune shite we have now: crafted, populist, full of soul, genuinely funny and witty when it's cracking the jokes, homespun and sentimental without quite tipping over into parody - what white people had instead of blues music and very much a parallel to the extent that it's difficult to miss the common ground now shared with rap: urban folk tales told amongst a small community using a language very much exclusive to itself, private jokes, quick talking, plenty of blues and telling it how it is.

Unfortunately, whilst none of the last four numbers - tracks seven to ten on side two - are terrible, the drop in quality following Convoy is weird and dramatic. We start with a record where no two tracks sound the same, powerful heartfelt music which makes you feel as though you're there, songs so strong that you forget you're listening to any particular genre; then suddenly we have four b-sides, songs which do a job and tick certain boxes, but which sound like every other seventies country record you've ever heard whilst channel hopping past a commercial break for some fifty disc golden oldies boxed set aimed at retired persons.

I don't know how the album could end as it has, but maybe it doesn't matter, because few artists have ever recorded anything as powerful as McCall's Ghost Town, and probably never will.