Pokey LaFarge - Rock Bottom Rhapsody (2020)

Some YouTube algorithm seemed to think I'd enjoy Pokey's Fuck Me Up, so I watched the video clip and I did. In fact, I fucking loved it - a gritty slice of the country that got left behind in the dirt when everyone else signed up for throat mics, autotune and sponsorship deals. I'd never heard of the guy. A month later I came across this album in Barnes & Noble - which is apparently his eighth - and it was the only thing in the store which seemed worth buying so here we are.

I find it all weird and disconcerting. Pokey LaFarge was born in 1983, by which point I'd left school. Rock Bottom Rhapsody, it could be argued, is the music of my father's generation - musicianship, real instruments, black and white photography with colour tint, and yet somehow it manages to avoid feeling entirely like an exercise in nostalgia. It's heavily traditional, I guess, drawing on country, blues, soul, rockabilly, ragtime, honkytonk or whatever you want to call it, and it's anything but a museum piece or an exercise. The playing is expressive without showboating, loose enough to let you know it's alive, and Pokey sings a little like David Sedaris's impersonation of Ella Fitzgerald - with maybe a touch of Ricky Nelson - but his voice is nevertheless perfect and the ease with which it all fits together and slips right into your heart and your veins is astonishing. It's music which still works, which still does its job, and is delivered with so little irony that it may as well be drum and bass when stood next to whatever autotuned vapourtrap monstrosity is ticking boxes on The Voice this week.

This is how all those authenticity twats would give their left one to sound, reminding us of why anyone ever bothered listening to music in the first place. Beyond all the phone connections and satellite links, all the bullshit, this album is what it feels like when you get back down to earth, to the human level, when you think about loved ones and people who died, and the little bit of good you've managed to scrape together for yourself. This album is about the stuff which really matters and about which you may have forgotten, and after the first couple of plays you may begin to wonder how you ever lived without Pokey LaFarge.

David Bowie - Images 1966-1967 (1973)

I had all but seven (I think) of these tracks on Decca's World of David Bowie compilation, purchased for a quid from Dean Howe at school and which was therefore among the first albums I owned; but I'd always intended to buy this double so as to get the extra tracks, and now at last I have. Life is too short to be without a recording of The Laughing Gnome in some form.

So that's another one ticked off the list, but one which has brought a weird realisation: these silly novelty records may actually have constituted Bowie's greatest work, even if it's easily forgotten once you get to spinning later, less patently ludicrous offerings.

I never quite got the idea that Bowie was attempting to bring about a marriage of pop music and theatre because it sounded like one of those meaningless juxtapositions persons such as myself suggest without actually having thought about it - imagine Splodgenessabounds covering the Swans, and so on and so forth. Additionally, it has long been my contention that theatre is mostly wank, and mime in particular - so that's a side of Bowie to which I've never really paid much attention, which is probably why I never noticed despite it having been staring me in the face all along.

Most of these tracks are novelty records, which isn't in itself a bad thing, but which I've tended to regard as Dave desperately trying to squeeze out a crowd pleaser and secure fame and fortune prior to taking himself more seriously with Space Oddity and all which came after; but the form is no more opportunist than anything he did later, despite sounding like it wouldn't have been out of place on the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang soundtrack. That's the theatrical quality he was talking about, I guess - songs as short stories, but stories told by multiple characters in ludicrous situations as distinct from, She loves you yeah yeah yeah, or even the more prosaic storytelling of country music which tends towards the autobiographical or is at least less likely to wear an orange wig whilst pretending to be from outer space. I suppose you could argue that Sgt. Pepper's inhabits roughly the same territory, but this phase of Bowie's career owes more to variety, even sixties lounge music than to rock and roll, which is in turn reduced to just one of a number of costumes worn when the narrative requires; and yes, I have indeed heard of Anthony Newley, obviously.

That which distinguishes this music from pure novelty is the sheer range. Beyond the chocolate box psychedelia of Come and Buy My Toys or She's Got Medals - none of which are to be sniffed at, I might add - we have the likes of London Boys - which just plain tears your fucking heart out - We Are Hungry Men - which somehow tackles eugenics and population with such incongruous and chilling effect that I'm sort of surprised Von Thronstahl haven't covered it, and which presumably foreshadows The Supermen, Bewlay Brothers and others of its thematic type - the Pinteresque Tony Day, and of course The Laughing Gnome, which is just fucking brilliant and I don't care what anyone says. Yet everything here superficially sounds like something which should feature a bowler hatted sixties cat winking and grinning at the camera with that lush big band production, all sweeping strings and pizzicato for emphasis.

We forget this material was as good as it is because we often forget, in our rush to be all grown up, that great art can be cheery, populist and silly without subtracting from whatever the hell it's trying to say; and so these songs have spent most of their collective existence as the pissing about from before the good stuff with no-one quite sure whether it was an album or a stack of singles or a compilation or a greatest hits without any actual hits and a photo of some completely different glam rock bloke on the cover. This is a shame because, as I say, I've a feeling this may actually have been his greatest work. Listen to the opening bars of She's Got Medals and tell me different.

Paranoise - Ishq (2001)

This was originally submitted to Ed Pinsent's Sound Projector for review, but I get the impression Ed found it a bit fishy and so passed it onto me for target practice, along with pages of off-putting photocopied press material explaining just how amazing the band were. Sure enough, it looked like something in need of a good clip around the ear - world music earnestly sampled over prog rock, guitar solos, Terrance fucking McKenna, and five white guys cradling cute ethnic instruments on the back cover doing that face which Sting sometimes does to let you know that he's in touch with the ancient rhythm of the spheres and just recently met this really amazing old guy halfway up a mountain in Baja California…

Oh - and the full name given on the cover is the Ancient Ecstatic Brotherhood of Π, with the Π presumably being mystic shorthand for Paranoise. Anyway, that was a whole two decades ago and Ishq gets a second go because, against the most dour expectations I've possibly ever harboured, it still sounds fucking amazing. I doubt there has ever been such a gap between what I anticipated and what I actually experienced. Musically Paranoise are competent as fuck and fairly proggy with all sorts of funny time signatures, but with killer songs, really beautiful stuff which, just as the press release claimed, invoke Led Zeppelin's Kashmir amongst other things. In fact a lot of Ishq reminds me of that era of Led Zeppelin, back when heavy rock really was heavy rock rather than metal, but there's an occasional hint of something jazzier, maybe the more new-agey end of the Killing Joke back catalogue, even fucking Styx on the particularly monumental I Own; and what differentiates these songs from anything else to which that description may loosely apply, is the use of samples. Ethnic wails selotaped to a beat are nothing new, as the Severed Heads, Moby and a thousand others are my witness, and as with others who've been down the same road, I have to wonder about this sort of thing which, at worst, seems like cultural tourism with traditional vocals sourced from Kenya, Bulgaria, Morocco, Afghanistan and elsewhere, united seemingly by their lack of electricity and plumbing. I believe othering is the term, but I'll refrain because it's a neologism favoured mainly by complete wankers, and because Paranoise at least credit those they've sampled as co-writers, and because the blend of pounding mathematically weird rock and native voice is frankly fucking dynamite. If you're going to do this sort of thing, you really have to get it right, and Paranoise absolutely nailed it on this record.

Of course, the message of Ishq is ecological, anti-corporate and aspires to revolution, so the use of indigenous voices - those most trampled upon by the guys we're singing about - is appropriate, even bringing a balance to the narrative it might not have had were it just five white dudes from Connecticut singing about how they don't like Nestlé. Additionally, great use is made of spoken pieces by Noam Chomsky and environmental activist Vandana Shiva, with only Terrence McKenna's drippy Woody Allen impersonation letting the side down - not that what he says is without value, but as usual he seasons his testimony with psychobabble. Still, a minute of rolling eyes and pulling faces is easily overlooked in context of something which rocks this hard for a full hour, which states its case with such conviction and confidence, and which doesn't really sound quite like any other record I can think of. I somehow imagined one of the more self-important of Sting's solo works, but got a more worldly Physical Grafitti without the kiddy fiddling.

A Cold Smell (2020)

Here's another various artists compilation from Sweden's AUT issued as, from what I can gather, an edition of sixty-one cassettes, so any recommendation I might make about you rushing out and buying one will be redundant by the time you read this. I've already seen one going for twenty-five bucks over on Discogs. We're therefore in the territory of I've heard this one but you haven't, so apologies in advance.

The shame of it is that A Cold Smell may even be their best release yet, at least of those I've heard. Contributors include the mighty Lars Larsson, Dom Goda Djuren, the Woodpeckerz, BJ Nilsen (who some may recall from collaborations with Z'ev and Chris Watson), and a whole host of persons unknown to me. Additional confusion has arisen from my inability to say for sure quite who is responsible for which track. There seem to be more tracks on the first side than are credited on the cover, and, for example, I thought I was enjoying Kroppen's Delvis Definitivt when it mumbled something about a Marlboro Man, which is actually the title of the one which follows and which is by Facit & Felicia Lindgren, so who knows?

Well, maybe it doesn't matter because the whole thing is good from start to finish, and the tracks are sequenced in such a way as to make for a thoroughly satisfying whole. There's a lot of variety here, although there's a sort of logic following one track leading into the next which, for some reason, actually reminds me of listening to Gristle's Second Annual Report for the first time. It's not that you would be necessarily justified in calling this an old school industrial compilation, but there's a shared aesthetic here and at least a few bits of technology taken from roughly the same shelf. Assuming Maskin's Att Ge Bort Blommor is the thing I'm thinking of as the first track, we open with a wonderfully pensive bit of lo-fi for primitive drum machine and brooding bass, possibly actually two basses, which makes me think of Suicide for a much colder climate. This segues into something completely different which nevertheless makes perfect sense as the next track, and so on and so forth with contributions alternating between hypnotic post-krautrock, noise, neoDada sound collage, and all sorts. The whole adds up to something greater than just disparate bits of music jammed together, something like the soundtrack for an imagined film, and very musical but not always by means you might expect.

...and good luck finding a copy. Sorry. If nothing else comes from this review, all I can say is that it might be wise to keep one's eye peeled on what's been coming from this label so as to avoid disappointment next time.

Not sure, but you could probably do worse than keep an eye on their Soundcloud page.