Mozart Estate - Tower Block in a Jam Jar (2025)

 

If I'm in the habit of writing bollocks, what follows may be worse than usual on the grounds that Tower Block excavates and rerecords more or less an entire Go-Kart Mozart album with knobs on, namely Tearing Up the Album Charts from 2005 which, naturally, I somehow never picked up and haven't heard. Our boy felt that said album somewhat slipped under the radar and was thus deprived its due, which is obviously true in my case; so here we are again for the very first time.

Where Go-Kart Mozart was designed as a portastudio band - which makes perfect sense when you listen to the music - the Estate has a bigger budget with production values closer to Denim; so I guess the Estate is an automotive expansion rather than a feature of urban planning. You probably know what to expect here, which is what you get, and yet it's still weird and disconcerting because why would you do this?

Renovating the past for the sake of the future, is the answer given on the cover, which sort of makes sense. Tower Block in a Jam Jar isn't some beardy return to the rich songwriting traditions of Nick Drake, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, or Scott Walker so much as an unreconstructed defense of Micky Most and whoever wrote the lyrics to The Humphreys Are About for the Unigate television advert. It's nostalgia for all the stuff you've been trying to forget, and a reminder that while those who weren't there have come to view the seventies as David Bowie and Marc Bolan giggling as they apply glitter to each other's faces, it was mostly Barry Blue, Watney's Red Barrel, and getting your head kicked in on a Saturday night. It's nothing to do with current notions of cool. It's brown and orange with rounded corners because Chicory Tip existed whether you like it or not, which is kind of refreshing. Mozart Estate embrace and celebrate the grim, and I mean the showbiz smile so false that it hurts grim rather than the artistically grim, as most vividly embodied in the cheerfully harrowing A Lorra Laughs with Cilla. This album is weird, beautiful and horrible all at the same time, and is the opposite of everything the machine has been selling you for the past four decades.

Mozart Estate - Pop-Up! Ker-Ching! and the Possibilities of Modern Shopping (2023)

Ever since Denim ground to an unceremonious halt in that Paris underpass, whenever that was, I've been waiting for Go-Kart Mozart to deliver on the promise of Back in Denim. I know Go-Kart Mozart were a different group - sort of - and one for which disappointment might even be considered a central theme, but then I'm nothing if not an optimist*. Anyway, I've been listening to Mozart Estate for about a month now, and I think he's nailed it this time.

Surprisingly, and despite the glaring similarities, the Estate does indeed seem to be a slightly different animal to its pram-wheeled forerunner, occupying a reasonably comfortable midway between the airbrushed studio stomp of Denim and the bargain bucket novelty of the intermediary incarnation. I'm fairly certain the drums, for example, are programmed, but you have to listen closely to tell and the Bontempi organ has seemingly been relegated to the cupboard under the stairs. It's mostly business as usual, I suppose - songs which sound like seventies television commercials, chirpy sub-Beatles jingles, the potential influence of Mike Batt, and everything with a synthetic fibre sheen of the artificial so squeaky clean that it's initially quite hard to listen to; but the themes are even darker than usual, with the grinding squalor and despair thrown into contrast as sharp as a Stanley knife at the cup final by unrelenting jollity, and yet with nothing I can identify as either cynicism or irony. There's the typically unsavoury view of the homeless alongside a cheery homage to Poundland, Vanilla Gorilla which seems to stand in praise of white van man, the thoroughly unsettling I Wanna Murder You, and pretty much every track delivers a distinct whiff of the unsavoury with its broad showbiz grin.

I'm about to do something crazy.
You'd better give the cops a call.
The things I need to express,
Are all against the law.

Nothing specifically invokes Savile but this record nevertheless feels somehow like Consumer Electronics with tunes, and not just tunes but a full stage show with glittery dancers filling the slot between Doctor Who and Brucie's Generation Game. Pop-Up! Ker-Ching! and the Possibilities of Modern Shopping is potentially the most horrible record you've ever heard and probably qualifies Lawrence as an actual genius.

 *: This is patently untrue.

Neu! (1972)

My introduction to krautrock was Glenn Wallis selling me a massive pile of albums in one huge job lot back in the nineties - forty, maybe fifty of them incuding Neu!, Kluster, Kraftwerk, Conrad Schnitzler, Faust, pretty much everything. I hadn't actually expressed any real interest in the form beyond that some of it sounded okay from what I could tell, but Glenn was converting to compact disc, needed the money and was asking just a few quid per album. I guess he'd reasoned that it was better that I should benefit than for him to get a few quid per album from some shop which would then have them all in the window for treble figures the following week. Vinyl Experience in Hanway Street had a bit of a reputation for such transactions, for example.

Really, I agreed to buy the collection more or less based on the idea that what I'd heard sounded okay and might turn out to sound amazing on closer inspection, and if so then I'd already have a ton of the stuff and wouldn't have to go through the rigmarole of tracking it all down. However, the collection was such as to stop up a sort of mental bottleneck in my listening habits, meaning I never quite got around to giving any of it the attention it probably deserved because there was so fucking much of it and anyway, maybe I was busy listening to - off the top of my head - the first Denim album that week; which is probably why it's taken me nearly thirty years to get to grips with this one.

I'm a little weary of hearing about how everything can now be traced back to krautrock and how I was listening to krautrock when none of you lot had even heard of it and so on and so forth, not least because it gets in the way of the music, and the music is - in this instance - pretty great and a lot more accessible than might be suggested by its reputation.

Neu! was formed by two members of Kraftwerk who decided they didn't want to be robots, and continues the original, somewhat more organic spirit of the same, combining the machine with the music but without negating the human component. It's possibly not actually that far removed from either Pink Floyd or similarly flared psychonauts of the musical abstract of similar vintage, but my reference points are limited to Neu! essentially being Throbbing Gristle's Second Annual Report five years earlier but without either the darkness or Porridge's ego getting in the way. It's very much the same sonic exploration with effects transforming music to noise, subtracting nature from the sound, and predating Neubauten's road drills by at least a decade. As a whole, it really is a sonic sculpture, and it still works because I guess it was so far ahead of the curve that it could have been recorded yesterday. Where Gristle may have invoked castration and other unmentionables, here we have - pure and unalloyed - the sheer euphoria of strange new sounds which take our thoughts to places previously unvisited.

It wasn't to last, and Dinger in particular perpetrated some truly underwhelming stuff under the same name in later years, but this remains arguably as startling and joyous within its field as did Never Mind the Bollocks in its own; and the reputation is, for once, fully deserved.

Stereolab - Switched On (1992)

Music used to be much better than it is now, back in the good old days. Music is now rubbish. It used to be great, but now it isn't.

The debate, such as it is, rages on - if the term rage can really be applied to a discourse which chunders along with all the vitality of piss dripping from the leaf of a stinging nettle. My cousin or niece or whatever the hell she is opined as much on facebook a while back. People today don't know what proper music is, she boldy suggested. My dad made sure we only had proper music in my house when I was growing up, classics like the Jam, the Who, Oasis, Ocean Colour Scene…

She's young, so I left it.

More recently, YouTube suggested that I might enjoy a twenty-minute sermon on the subject of why music used to be much better than it is now. The address is delivered by one of those YouTube pundits I generally try to avoid, a person identifying himself as Thoughty2. His avatar is a picture of himself scratching his chin, having thoughts, because that's what you do when you have thoughts. You scratch your chin and maybe raise one eyebrow a little. For a small fee, one can subscribe to Thoughty's private feed and gain exclusive access to what he describes as mind-blowing videos such as These Ancient Relics Are so Advanced They Shouldn't Exist or Who Was the Most Terrifying Pirate of All Time? The one about how music is now shit opens with Thoughty courageously flying in the face of the consensus by suggesting that Justin Bieber isn't as good as the Beatles - really going out on a fucking limb there, boy - before informing us that this has now been scientifically proven in a laboratory. I don't know what that scientific proof could be because I stopped watching after three minutes and I don't really care. I'm guessing it will be something about tonal complexity, harmony, and how the brain responds, which strikes me as different to saying that I'm Henry the Eighth, I Am by Herman's Hermits is objectively superior to World War 303 by Rozzer's Dog.

I have a problem with this sort of gormless nostalgia, which is after all only a variation on Peter Kay endlessly chuckling over discontinued chocolate bars - it's important because I remember it. Just like the ontological significance of Curly Wurly, music is a largely subjective experience which as such cannot be meaningfully quantified in any sense other than how it may do more or less of something done by some other piece of music; so it is therefore surely best judged in terms of how well it does whatever it sets out to do. Whether whatever it has set out to do was anything worth doing is another thing entirely, and there's probably not much to be gained arguing over it unless you're a complete fucking twat. Maybe Britney Spears is quantifiably more shit as an artist than, off the top of my head, Pink Floyd; but then ...Baby One More Time, still sounds decent to me, while Pink Floyd still sound like four hairy hippies having a really slow wank which they will later describe as amaaaaaaazing spelt with thirteen letters. The argument that Pink Floyd are quantifiably superior to Britney Spears makes as much sense as saying ...Baby One More Time is a better record than The Medium was Tedium by the Desperate Bicycles purely because it sold more.

The thing is that persons such as Thoughty and his ilk are people with no Elvis in 'em, as Mojo Nixon would have it. Their purpose is to commodify nostalgia and sell it back to us as a superior brand on grounds equivalent to the notion that it shifts 25% more grease than the products of leading competitors.

So nostalgia and the invocation of things past has always thrown me. I've enjoyed music which recreates some previous form, but I've never been entirely comfortable with the idea, and I still can't quite shake the feeling that Stereolab were only ever the krautrock Showaddywaddy - which isn't to say that I dislike them. In fact I have about seven or eight albums - Switched On, and then - tellingly - various things picked up at CD & DVD Exchange, because for some reason CD & DVD Exchange always has a ton of old Stereolab in the racks. I inevitably own albums by Neu! and La Düsseldorf and the rest, so I know where Stereolab were coming from; and I used to write to Tim Gane back when he was in the Unkommuniti, and that krautrock chug was already evident even on those tapes he recorded in his bedroom in homage to H.P. Lovecraft. Yet of all the albums, I've listened to Switched On a lot, and the rest only every so often when I'll dig one out and wonder whether it was as good as Switched On, which it never is. It's not even like the others are as repetitive as I tend to remember them being. Each album sounds a little different, representing some subtle variation on a theme, but the differences are such that it always feels as though someone found a previously undiscovered clip of 1970s Open University and a whole new seam of retrofuturism ripe for exploitation; and you begin to wonder if anyone in the band was ever told off for accidentally sounding like something which happened later than 1975. Maybe this sonic resuscitation of forgotten sound is justified as a one-off exercise in working within certain limitations, but an entire back catalogue?

Denim got away with it somehow, or got away with a variation on this sort of necromancy, but there seemed to be a peculiarly militant purpose there. Billy Childish justifies what he does by arguing that if something still works, then you may as well put it to use, which is after all why so many blues records still sound powerful half a century later; but I just don't know with Stereolab. There's a track on Sound-Dust which sounds like fucking Lily the Pink, which is just being cunty for the sake of it, if you ask me - which you sort of did by virtue of your having read this far.

It's all bollocks.

Switched On was the first Stereolab record I heard, given to me for my birthday by my girlfriend of the time, and I didn't really listen to it until a few nights before we were about to split up, nearly a year later. She was moving away and I knew it wasn't going to last much longer, which was probably for the best but it was a weird time. I was confused, upset, couldn't sleep, and I stayed up one night listening to this record over and over until about four in the morning; and it sounded perfect, almost happy with a profound twist of melancholia, a feeling which couldn't even be described in words. It's in the drone and the repetition, the contrast of the chug with sweet voices, and the key change which takes three or four minutes to build to a peak and then pulls your heart out when it flips over. None of their other records ever came close for me, not compared to this one; and that is what music is about - not some wibbling crap longing for the security of the familiar because it's scary out there, or mathematical equations supposedly proving that Bob Dylan is 87% more betterer than Stormzy because he doesn't need to say cunt or bollocks to express himself. I couldn't give a shit what Switched On does in terms of musicology or whether anyone else in the universe gets the same out of it as I do. I only care what it does when I listen to it.

See also all other music ever.

Neon Hearts - Popular Music (1979)

Here's a name which first lodged itself in my consciousness whilst watching Look! Hear! back in the early sixteenth century - as I believe I may have mentioned here - and it's somehow taken me thirty years to get hold of the album, a fancy red vinyl reissue by this point. Initial impressions, or at least this century's initial impressions are of a band resolutely of their time - sleeveless t-shirts, eyeliner, thousand yard stare, and honking saxaphone, and yet the shock wears off with just three plays as Popular Music nails itself very firmly to your soul.

Neon Hearts really are peculiar - a sort of punky Roxy Music with glam splashes of maybe X-Ray Spex or Cockney Rebel, and a strangely well spoken lead singer swooping all around the lyric with a wink and a smile much in the spirit of Neil Innes, of all people - or maybe Neil Innes with a hint of Adam Ant back when he still used to scare the life out of everyone. Specifically Tone Dial - as he is called - does that thing Neil Innes used to do where you can't actually tell if he's sincere or taking the piss in massive quantities. There's a mild preoccupation with the artificial, manufactured, and generally fake - as the name implies - and so we have Popular Music, the title track and single which should have been enormous. I recall a maxim about how the best way to have a hit on fabtacular seventies radio was to write a song about it, and Popular Music ticks all of the boxes so hard it almost foreshadows both Alan Partridge and Denim, right down to the preposterous exclamation of great song! Amazingly, and against all odds, the other nine tracks are at least as strong, and have since become so firmly ingrained in my mind's ear that it feels as though they've been there all along, and that I've crossed over into an alternative universe where this lot turned up on everything from Whistle Test to Cheggers Plays Pop.

Neon Hearts seem best remembered for having spawned Raven, Killing Joke's late bassist; and I have to say it's quite a pleasure to see him tarted up like the one with the earrings from Mud on the cover, given his later presence as a hurhurhuring chorus to Jaz Coleman describing Boy George and other purveyors of - ahem - pouffy music being marched off to some hopefully figurative gas chamber. So, much as I've loved Killing Joke, I've had my reservations, and this sort of redeems one of them. We really should have embraced the Neon Hearts when we had the chance. I guess you could say we fucked up.

Another one I bought from the very wonderful Overground Records, if you're interested.

Wreckless Eric - amERICa (2015)

Wreckless Eric made a huge impression on me at an early age, and at least a couple of years before I actually knowingly heard any of his records. Most of my taste in music is fairly firmly rooted in me and Grez raiding his older brother's bedroom when we were teenagers. Grez's older brother - or Martin to his friends, that being a category which didn't include us - had all these amazing albums by people we'd never heard of, Alternative TV, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Faust, the Residents, Skrewdriver…

Well, it was All Skrewed Up which I believe predates the racist phase, but let's not get off the subject. Amongst Martin's records were several by Wreckless Eric, notably that legendary 10" album on brown vinyl; you know the one. If you don't, might I suggest euthanasia followed by reincarnation and then trying your hardest to get it fucking right next time around? How many 10" brown vinyl albums have there ever been?

Assuming we all know what I'm talking about, I maintain that the aforementioned 10" is blessed with one of the greatest covers ever. Eric looks like he's drunk, about to fall over, but really doesn't give a shit because he's having an amazing time regardless; and then there's that jacket, some funky print of eagles soaring across what probably isn't silk - all very New Faces or Opportunity Knocks and yet somehow so punk rock as to make most of those King's Road clowns look like ELO. Whether you ever regarded Wreckless Eric as punk rock probably depends on where you were stood at the time, but I guess it's okay if we keep in mind that the point of punk rock, at least according to some Sex Pistol or other, was not to destroy rock 'n' roll so much as to take it back to its roots, to take it back from all the bouffant hairdo fuckers who'd lost sight of what it was supposed to do in the first place, Geoff Lynne.

So, in accordance with my vaguely punky roots, I still find myself getting ready to sneer at the slightest suggestion of artists working past their sell-by date, but it's just a knee jerk thing, and it really doesn't apply to Wreckless Eric; because this isn't a comeback album, nor recapturing the glory days, nor sensitive sound recordings of all his new forest pals in Papua New Guinea, nor a true return to form as the perpetually misleading promise always has it, nor our man dabbling with ambient sludgestep; because amERICa is simply a new Wreckless Eric album and that's all you should need to know.

May as well cover the full distance and take the remaining few steps up my own arse, seeing as we've come all this way.

It took me a couple of years, but I chanced across the brown vinyl 10" in a second hand place in Norwich, and I bought it because Grez and myself had never got around to actually playing his brother's copy, for some reason. I bought it because I recognised the cover and I knew it would be good, as indeed it was. In fact it was more than just good. It was one of those greatest album ever recorded deals, or that's how it seems when you're in the middle of listening to the thing, playing air guitar in front of the bedroom mirror and miming along to Reconnez Cherie. It's difficult to pin down what made Eric seem so unique, and why I can't help bristling a little whenever I hear that pub rock song by Denim. He has an ear for a tune, and a weird little voice which sounds more like one of your mates than anyone you'd expect to hear on a record, and somehow it all comes together with such raw honesty that it would hurt if it didn't also have a decent sense of humour - it's something along these lines. Stand Wreckless Eric next to almost anyone you care to mention and the other person will look like a fake, a part-timer, an idiot with no idea what he or she is doing; and the crucial detail is that unlike so many rock 'n' roll hall of fame bores, Eric just gets on with it. He really is all about the craft unhindered by bullshit of any stripe. I had an argument with my mother about Shakespeare, her position being that the works of Shakespeare are the greatest things written in the English language because, whatever it is you wish to express, there will always be one particular way to say it which works better than all the others, and which is the most fluent; and so everything Shakespeare has said has been the best way to say that thing. I'm still not that bothered about Shakespeare, but I take the point and I'd say it applies just as well to the songs of Wreckless Eric. In terms of the heart, it doesn't get better than this. It speaks to me about my life, I suppose you'd say.

amERICa is Wreckless Eric's response to his having moved to the United states, which speaks to me about my life with particular resonance because that's what I've done too, and I know exactly what he's talking about. There's a faint country twang, but it still rocks like that bloke in the print jacket, and the honesty is both funny, painful, and even a little sad, just like on the best soul or blues records; and Transitory Thing nearly tears my fucking heart out each time I play it. Bloody hell. At the risk of hyperbole, amERICa might even be the greatest album ever recorded.

Mex - Intense Living (1981)

Mex should require no introduction, but then by the same token the Annoying Orange shouldn't be president, so if he does then I refer you to the reviews I wrote as reproduced here and here so as to avoid having to repeat myself.

Intense Living was the second album and it's a huge pleasure to have it remastered and on a fancy compact disc and everything. As with Alternative Pop Music, it's still a little rough around the edges and I suppose might be termed lo-fi if you want to make a virtue out of the fact - which always struck me as a bit pointless, personally speaking; but the material and the sheer joy and punky spirit of the whole enterprise - or possibly post-punky spirit - should compensate for how difficult it is to hear Cliff Silver's wristwatch ticking away during the quiet parts. Where the first tape was mostly just Mex, so far as I recall, this one was Mex aided by the aforementioned Cliff Silver from Sad Lovers & Giants, and with a live drummer - or possibly a tape of a live drummer - and it's very different. In fact, it was very different to every other tape I bought that year.

I seem to recall my corner of 1981 involving a lot of long coats, many of them worn by myself, some sucking-in of the cheeks, and a fairly austere embrace of the return to year zero proposed by punk, or by some elements of punk. In the mean time, Mex had added shameless disco to the ingredients of his pop perfectionism, and not even the studiously cool kind of disco favoured by chiselled Mancunians with trumpets. I'm talking walking basslines, wah-pedal funk, flares, glitter balls, and a synth borrowed straight from the Open University Department of Television Signature Tunes. Add to this Mex's occasional Duane Eddyisms and somewhat whispy - at least on this occasion - vocals, and the result was a tape which just didn't sound like anything else in my collection, and didn't even seem like it was trying to sound like anything else.

Some of it has dated, I suppose - the short-wave radio twiddling of Alien Transmission - but not in a bad way, and the whole nevertheless sounds as great now as it did back then. If you require references, it might be argued that the first Denim album had something of Intense Living about it, and there are bits which remind me of LCD Soundsystem; but I'm reaching, because neither of those were ever embedded in my consciousness quite like Sea of Green, Full of Eastern Promise, or Keith in America.

Genuinely wonderful.

Buy one here.

Go-Kart Mozart - Instant Wig Wam And Igloo Mixture (1999)

You know how you have first flushes of love tunes, those songs you will forever associate with a certain time when you began seeing a certain person, or possibly even having it off with them? If not, just bear with me. I kicked off with U2's Pride (in the Name of Love) which happened to occupy the pop parade just as I became involved with my first ever girlfriend. My second vaguely proper relationship arrived nearly a decade later and was scored to American Rock by Denim, which is possibly a bit of an odd choice, but is at least indicative of just how much I loved Denim at the time.

Naturally I had high expectations of Lawrence's next thing, and yet I've never quite got to grips with Go-Kart Mozart. I know it's supposed to be a sort of no frills Fine Fare yellow label version of Denim or something, and therefore has a bit of a pound shop stench as an inherent part of its musical genome, perhaps even as its mission statement; and having wasted at least twenty years of my life recording tinny novelty songs on crap equipment, Instant Wig Wam And Igloo Mixture should be a shoe-in for me.

I like the theory behind it, although the term theory suggests deliberation when it's probably mostly just gut instinct. Go-Kart Mozart is the Island of Misfit Toys of rock, the true face of our history. Stewart Maconie and other Spangle-gobbling revivalists have fooled us into accepting a version of our childhood in which Ziggy Stardust often read the six o'clock news, Faust were on Blue Peter every day, and On the Buses was funny.

I recently spent nearly a year writing a novel set in 1975, and part of my research constituted a month by month account of major news items, what was on the telly and what we were listening to. It was weird and slightly depressing, because whilst it's fun to remember the cool stuff, by sheer numbers it was mostly Barry Blue, Mike Batt, Jimmy Savile, and Kenny on Top of the Pops all in their matching jumpers with K on the front; and Go-Kart Mozart is assembled from this material, all the crap which we've written out of history, the details which will never, ever be remembered as cool, the stuff which just wasn't funny or charming enough for any of those I Heart the 70s shows. Musically this is the sort of gear which even fucking Stereolab wouldn't touch with yours, mate.

Accordingly, for all the dinky Bontempi tunes, Instant Wig Wam And Igloo Mixture feels oddly like one of those power electronics albums which pulls no punches in its mission to drive you to take the record from the turntable and fling it out of the window in disgust. It feels peculiarly extreme, particularly Drinkin' Um Bongo which combines African bloodbaths with cartoon juice box nostalgia to genuinely unsettling effect. It inhabits a world in which homosexuality is limp of wrist and will probably tell you to shut that door, and it writes an opera around Birmingham's Bull Ring shopping centre without so much as a smirk. It would make more sense if it was all done for chuckles, but it feels weirdly in earnest, which is itself funny, I suppose. I might like it more had it been recorded as a Denim album, although I suspect that may be missing the point, whatever it was.

Forget all those post-industrial types churning out album after album of self-conscious Dadaism, this is one of the weirdest things I've ever heard, and I still can't tell if I even like it or not.

The Tears - Here Come The Tears (2005)

Almost regardless of quality of music, I usually experience varying degrees of unease with anything veering too close to nostalgia, specifically anything which sounds a little too much like it's pretending that a day spent twiddling around with state of the art analogue sound synthesisers will conclude with a well deserved pint of Double Diamond and the latest hilarious episode of Mind Your Language on a brand new Grundig colour telly; but then again I have a lot of time for Stereolab who are in essence the krautrock Showaddywaddy, I always preferred the Dukes of Stratosphear to XTC, and so far as I'm concerned Back In Denim is probably one of the greatest debut albums ever recorded.

Accordingly whilst I was very much a fan of Suede at the time, and even to the point of seeing them live more than once, I always had reservations, at least regarding the level of acclaim squirted in their direction. Sure they were good, but I couldn't help wonder whether there might be a subtext to the praise as a nation of geezers in skinny jeans breathed a collective Hurricane Andrew scale sigh of relief to have the guitars and drums and some bloke pretending to be David Bowie back after the wilderness years of homosexual synthesisers and that weird thumpa thumpa rappers' housey music or whatever the fuck that was supposed to be. It was a bit like Roxy Music crossed with the Smiths but without having to hold your nose while Morrissey reads out yet another list of everything which has ever failed to meet up to his exacting standards. Moreover, whilst there were some great songs, and Bernard Butler is clearly a talent, he tends to write arrangements in the sense of Burt Bacharach rather than tunes in the sense of Steve Jones serving up big chunky chords and then burping the word bollocks in your face. Subtract the trimmings and Butler is - at worst - some bloke endlessly noodling away in a guitar shop, which is probably why Coming Up was always my favourite Suede album.

I found this one in a cardboard box outside someone's house in Landells Road in East Dulwich. There were a few books, odds and ends, and a stack of compact discs most of which were decent. Either someone had moved, or been forcibly moved out as a relationship imploded, which if true would be appropriate given Brett Anderson's preferred subject matter - the poetry of the depressing details, unrequited love and discarded rubber Johnnies gathering dust under the bed. As kitchen sink drama, it seems appropriate that the music to which he scores his tales of almost-woe should carry a faint whiff of 1974 or thereabouts, the years during which it had become obvious that there was no bright future ahead, yet with mainstream culture still grinning away in fat day-glo lettering as though there might be; and if that's too wanky a way of putting it, let's just settle for stating that the music really does its job, nostalgic or otherwise.

Having spewn forth from the Butler spigot, Here Come The Tears takes a few plays to do its job. As ever he noodles so much that it's difficult to really latch onto what he's doing until you've given it a few spins, but it's worth it when you get there, and his lack of immediacy should not be confused with predictability. Anderson as ever pushes the lyrical details so far that they border on parody, or would do were it not for the delivery which dares you to laugh at such small, inevitable horrors as the bin bags in which the clothes of a dead partner are left out for collection by the Salvation Army. It's inevitably not so immediate as Coming Up, but still at least as good as anything these two did together as Suede.

So there you have it.