ABBA - The Magic of ABBA (1980)

I thought ABBA were amazing when I was a kid, definitely the bestest since the Beatles. Naturally I fancied the blonde one and have vague memories of some formative fantasy involving the Beatles reforming so that they could play a concert with ABBA, which would be the bestest concert ever, at the conclusion of which I'd somehow cop off with the blonde one, despite my being merely ten. ABBA was proper music, and so Matthew and myself would quietly sneer at Sean who was still listening to the Wombles.

My dedication waned as the years passed, particularly once I'd discovered Devo, but endured at least enough for my collection to include a scratched 7" of Knowing Me, Knowing You procured from a bargain bin at some point. Later when I joined Academy 23, Andy Martin developed some weird theory about my being a massive fan of ABBA and would entertain himself by imagining my visitors astonished and scandalised as I blasted them first with Coil, then all those ABBA albums like the crazy, unpredictable character he had apparently mistaken me for. The joke got on my tits after a while. I had one scratchy single and, in any case, had never particularly liked Coil.

ABBA's legacy was further diminished by Mamma Mia!, or the fifteen minutes I manged to watch of the DVD, wherein ABBA songs somehow punctuate the saga of Meryl Streep seeking to identify the father of her daughter, Karen from Mean Girls. It could be almost anyone, it seems, because Karen from Mean Girls was conceived during a train full of Ruperts pulled by Meryl Streep at some ghastly seventies sex happening.

Nevertheless, here we are. I always liked the idea of a greatest hits album without ever quite getting around to buying one. Friends and relatives now routinely present my wife with stacks of their old, unloved vinyl records which she paints and transforms into decorative objects, and the latest skip delivered to our door included The Magic of ABBA. It seemed a shame to turn it into another ornament given the record being in excellent condition, and given that we already have a whole garage full of Mantovani and the like.

Yet somehow I find it genuinely weird listening to this thing in 2020, having failed to truly pay attention to these songs since they seemed like the only real competition for the Beatles. ABBA wrote decent songs for sure, but with hindsight it sounds as though they may have been inadvertently responsible for that sparkly sound everyone assumes came from the Cocteau Twins, beloved of television and advertising executives around Christmas - the musical equivalent of Thomas Kinkade's twinkly winter scenes. The twin vocals are strange too, overproduced possibly with Phil Spector in mind, only really working when one individual vocal takes the lead and otherwise coming close to a forerunner of autotune.

Wankers will of course object on the grounds of it being cheese and just a bit of fun and I should lighten up and what's wrong wiv me and it's just a bit of fun; but I don't know. ABBA don't sound terrible, but being less shit than Mud or the Rubettes is hardly a recommendation, and no golden moment has endured without something getting in the way - never mind the Eurokitsch of Fernando, Chiquitita and their like, even the good stuff sounds strange. I can no longer listen to the proto-metal of SOS without my brain hearing Little Frank singing, but with my cardboard hands it would be no good; and Does Your Mother Know just seems a bit Jimmy Savile: yes, I would indeed like to shag you, but I'll politely decline your kind offer on the grounds of your being twelve, if it's all the same.

The darker, more haunting tracks, The Name of the Game and Knowing Me, Knowing You still just about manage to foreshadow Joy Division but seem to be exceptions to a generally underwhelming rule. This really should have been better. It's true what they say about how you can never go home.

Amoeba - Watchful (1997)

I reviewed this one back when I was writing stuff for Ed Pinsent's Sound Projector about a million years ago. I encountered my review once again just a couple of weeks back and, aside from wondering why Ed even printed some of the garbage I submitted, it occurred to me that I'd done this album something of a disservice, so here we are again. I'm just trying to be a better person.

To be fair, I suspect Ed sent this one my way having formed the initial impression of a tasteful new age soundtrack for coffee bars, or at least this was how it looked to me. It's certainly constitutes a type of which there were a shitload back in the nineties - young poetically inclined men with black clothes and cellos presenting musical analogies to the cover of a Sandman comic painted by Dave McKean; and yet for all that Watchful ticks boxes which shouldn't ordinarily be ticked, two decades later it still blows you right off the sofa, out the window, and into the yard.

Musically we're not talking anything too unexpected - double bass, brush drums, pseudo-Spanish guitar and whispy vocals preventing the subtle loops and digital wash of sound fully descending into ambient territory. It's probably not a surprise that half of Amoeba were probably better known for hanging around with Lustmord, although frankly this is better, and sufficiently so as to give me cause to wonder whether better than Lustmord might not be considered an actual genre in its own right, although of course there would be one fuck of a lot of acts under that particular umbrella, possibly as many as all acts.

Watchful haunts the listener, or it has haunted me, creating vast spaces within which one cannot help but pick out fascinating details, then suddenly you're listening to an actual song, something which tugs at the heart like the dream you wish you could remember upon waking; and the bass and the melody sound like the saddest thing in the world. I suppose there were a lot of similar acts in the nineties. I used to hang around the World Serpent office nosing around their stock to see what had come in, and aside from the obvious names, there were always a couple of goth-neofolk-darkwave hopefuls I'd never heard of - yet more poetically inclined men with black clothes and cellos, some mediaeval woodcut on the cover and a band name which was clearly trying way, way, way too hard. The Soil Bleeds Black was probably the funniest of those I'm able to recall; and Loretta's Doll*, of course…

Anyway, to get to the point, this is what I suspect all of those bands wanted to sound like; and in 2019 it reminds me of nothing so much as the more wistful bits of Kate Bush's back catalogue. That's a recommendation, obviously.

*: I don't know, but I'm willing to bet that she probably wasn't from the Barbie & Friends Malibu Beach Gift Set.

Headyello - Road to Elsewhere (2019)

Being somewhat out of the loop, I have no idea whether this is what people are presently referring to as noise, or whether this sort of thing is fairly commonplace for those with digits on cultural pulses, so bollocks to thee and thine should I give cause for sneering at my Grandpa-esque observations.

I generally don't do downloads, and yet here we are once again and not regretting the experience. Road to Elsewhere was approximately recommended to me as the work of a fellow Texan, and although Fort Worth is at such a distance that I've only been over that way twice this decade, it turns out to have been a good recommendation. As stated, I don't really know if this counts as noise, although if it does, symphonic noise seems as reliable a term as any. My initial impression was of random electronic farts, squirts, and bursts of tape hiss in the vein of factor X or maybe the nineties version of Nocturnal Emissions, and if there's a harsh element, it's to be found in the composition rather than the actual sonics. The album, which we may as well refer to as an album, comprises two lengthy pieces of respectively twenty minutes and half an hour duration. It's mostly found, treated sound from what I can tell, snatches of radio, telephone maybe, the buzz of a starter motor interfering with a tape recording, quiet sound sources peaking and distorting as the needle swings into the red, mains hum, things which sound like memories of the engine rumble on a childhood car journey. Excepting bursts of pop hits overheard, there's nothing musical, and yet the arrangement lends this whole thing a sort of tonal progression which becomes apparent with repeat listening. Loops cease to sound any more like loops than would be refrains repeated for the sake of a chorus in a more regular piece of music, and the rumble comes to complement the squeak and the squeal in much the same way as a cello might underpin the higher strings in an orchestra; and all the while Road to Elsewhere retains its sense of chaos, certainly nothing so twee as noise regimented as music. It's emotionally quite powerful is what I'm trying to say here.

If none of that makes any sense whatsoever, then I suppose you could say it's Max Ernst's Europe After the Rain as distinct from Jackson Pollock splashing it all about like Henry Cooper; and if that doesn't make any sense, maybe just take the plunge and listen to the thing.

Stop it and buy one here.

Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention - We're Only in It for the Money (1968)

I'm out of my depth here, never really having had much to do with Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, or anything from the long-haired end of the sixties. It either hasn't grabbed me, or hasn't had the opportunity to grab me for one reason or another, which has never really felt like a problem given that I've always had plenty of other stuff to listen to, and I don't trust anyone who feels their record collection must include a representative selection of everything. It's not a fucking competition.

Nevertheless, I'm beginning to feel I've been missing out where Frank Zappa is concerned. I always liked the idea of the man, but never knowingly heard any of his work until the late, great Andrew Cox gave me this for Christmas. Given that Andrew passed away back in 2009, it's probably fair to say that it's taken me a while to click with the record, although in my defence there have been a few years spent in transit and without a turntable between then and now.

It seems Zappa viewed the long-haired end of the sixties with suspicion equivalent to my own. Scratch anyone who feels the need to tell you just how laid back and far out they are and you'll invariably find Joseph Goebbels somewhere underneath.

Obviously this one was taking the piss out of Sgt. Pepper, or what Sgt. Pepper seemed to represent, but ran much deeper than mere sarcasm, revealing a healthy distrust of utopian sentiment as being no more revolutionary than the hula hoop or the beehive hairdo; and if it fails to offer an alternative to turning on, tuning in, and dropping out, that's because it doesn't fucking have to because it's not chess. If you don't want to know that you're being used, then that's your tough shit.

Musically, Money goes along with certain conventions of its era, subverting ragtime, doowop and others to the cause of its opprobrium, then glueing all the bits together with an avant-garde sensibility hinting at musique concrete and the weirder end of jazz, but with a precision and targetting which can be mistaken for neither. There's none of that saggy far out shit here, no aimless giggling at its own reflection, but neither is the record in any sense mean spirited. Frank doesn't want to piss you off so much as he wants you to wake the fuck up - which is probably why you'll laugh your ass off with this record, at least if there's any hope for you.

I guess this is approximately where Devo got started, and certainly the Residents, or at least that's how it sounds to me. I'd say that I wish someone had told me, but they sort of did.