Bastard Fairies - Memento Mori (2007)

Fucking Hell. I knew nothing about this lot beyond that We're All Going to Hell is a cracker, so I look them up on the web, discovering that they were briefly an internet phenomenon of some magnitude, and also that they're no more due to Yellow Thunder Woman passing away just over a year ago at the age of forty. I therefore say again, fucking hell.

We're All Going to Hell blew my knackers clean off when I first stumbled across it on One'sTube - currently at 193 thousand views and rising - and being only loosely internet savvy, it's somehow taken me nearly fifteen years to nab the album, possibly because it seemed unlikely that it could deliver on the promise of that one song; but it does. Of course, it does.

There were two of them, a bloke from England called Robin, and Yellow Thunder Woman, which was actually her name due to Native American heritage. The music reminds me a little of the Eels, or at least how the Eels should have sounded, wrapping crushingly acerbic commentary in a pill so sweet that it's dancing around with flowers in its hair - acoustic guitar, bubblegum, apple pie, pseudo-McCartneyisms, country stylings with a touch of blues, occasionally incongruous electronic touches, and what sounds like a Casio SK1 preset on the chorus of Hell, and yet lyrically it's almost X-Ray Spex at their most scathing. The Day the World Turned Bluegrass, sort of...

There's no single element which makes the whole because everything is good, and it's difficult to imagine how this combination of words and music could be improved; but special mention should probably go to Yellow Thunder Woman who sang with a voice sweet as golden sunlight and yet powerful as an industrial laser, and natural - without any of that warbling vocalisation bollocks you hear when a singer has nothing but technique; and she's brown bread, which is upsetting.

I don't know what else to say.

 

 

Nocturnal Emissions in Dub (2022)

Not entirely to be confused with the one I wrote about back in 2016, this is a fancy physical pressing of the best material from the two previous albums, neither of which were available on vinyl, all beefed up by Dougie Wardrop of the Bush Chemists, if that name means anything. If the idea of Nocturnal Emissions recording dub reggae still strikes anyone as a bit odd, it really shouldn't, and this slab of black plastic blasts away what doubts may be entertained pretty much as soon as the needle finds the groove, settling into a fairly distinctive variation on the digital rasta sound which eventually became dancehall. Like I already said, it's something in which the hand which crafted Viral Shedding is clearly heard, particularly in the bass, but which absorbed a different set of influences from its south-east London environment in a variant timeline.

Nigel has done this sort of thing before, specifically hopping from one genre to another without really being too bothered about messing up the neat progression of the unfolding discography, hence occasional forays into drum & bass, techno, world music, whatever else he felt like doing at the time; and he's one of the few artists who seems to get away with it, thus avoiding looking like Jonathan King's rap album (which hopefully doesn't exist but who fucking knows). I would guess he succeeds because those areas into which the Ayers toe is occasionally dipped seem subject to the same sort of creative considerations as inform the core Nocturnal Emissions material, namely that the pushing of boundaries is actively encouraged.

Being a vinyl record, I listen to this one over speakers rather than headphones or earbuds - as I tend to use with CDs and downloads - and all its digitised sine waves and evidence of programming really come to life through the warmth of analogue reproduction. It may even be one of the best of Mr. Ayers' four plus decades in the biz.

Left Hand Right Hand - Hidden Hands (2022)

I was aware of the existence of Left Hand Right Hand back in the nineties and yet somehow they completely passed me by. I had a track by them on the fifth Impulse compilation, the excellence of which I noticed only fairly recently when digitising said tape in the hope of capturing the goodness before the oxide crumbles.

Hidden Hands gathers tracks from across the broad span of their career - some new, some old, some previously unreleased - and thus seemed almost as though it had been tailor made specifically in response to my curiosity. Its release also brings the realisation that Karl Blake has been involved, which is embarrassing because I've vaguely known Karl since we were both in bands we no longer enjoy talking about, back in the aforementioned nineties - different bands we no longer enjoy talking about, I should probably stress. Also, there's a Clock DVA association with frequent collaboration from Charlie Collins - whose work is always worthy of investigation, plus the drummer from In the Nursery back when they used to be Joy Division with cowbell.

Anyway, now that I'm finally up to speed, Left Hand Right Hand are intensely rhythmic in the sense of existing somewhere between Test Department, 23 Skidoo, Muslimgauze and records one tends to find in the World Music section. There's a lot of pounding, many polyrhythms, more than a trace of free jazz - albeit without the chaos - plenty of atmosphere and actually not very much in the way of electronics; so the disc takes the listener from crushing rhythmic force to market places in north Africa to the far east and back again. The most striking element, however, is how these tracks share a very distinctive common identity marking them as something apart from any of the names I may already have mentioned. Even when the most incongruous sounds are weaving around the massed drums, tablas, plastic tubes and what have you - distorted guitar, haunting clarinet, ambient noise - there's an epic scale as though everything heard is framed within the gilt outline of some vast nineteenth century landscape painting. I found myself reminded of Ben Hur and Egyptian masses grunting and groaning whilst hauling monolithic rocks on more than one occasion.

Better late than never, as I keep finding myself saying.