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.

 

 

Eels - Beautiful Freak (1996)

Strange how this one sits in amongst the other CDs very much like the same awkward orphan exiled from Tim Burton's island of broken toys it effects to be in half of the songs. I dig it out every once in a while but it still sounds the same, sort of.

As I recall, back in 1996, I'd spent a couple of years drifting away from whatever was going on in music due to the temporary extinction of vinyl. Then my friend Eddy gave me his old CD player in the hope of getting me to shut up about it, and I found myself buying compact discs with only vague clues as to what I was buying, and from places like Woolworths. I'd heard Susan's House on the radio and wasn't convinced, but they'd been on telly playing Novocaine for the Soul and it had sounded pretty decent.

In many ways Beautiful Freak is flawless, a perfect album. It does everything it sets out to do and does it well. It's well recorded. You can hear everything, and it has an interesting dynamic balancing sampled rhythms against double bass, electric piano and so on; and I want to love the thing, but somehow it just doesn't ever quite get there. The entire enterprise feels too easy, too obvious.

It feels different in 2020 to how it did in 1996 being that I now live in Americaland and recognise the actual grinding small town poverty rather than just the general sense of misery, but nearly a quarter century later it still feels approximately like Steven Spielberg's version of Nirvana, a sonic counterpart to all those meticulously trashy urban living rooms of Close Encounters and the rest. Musically it's Americana via the Velvet Underground given the inevitable trip-hop production of the time with the shuffling percussion and everything, and lyrically it would be fine except for trying just a little too hard here and there. The title track, My Beloved Monster and Spunky may as well be a teenager trying to freak us out with drawings of scary clowns and sound like they were imagineered to be played over the closing credits of Tim Burton movies. The seemingly endless juxtaposition of cute, folksy and weird becomes exhausting after a while.

Nevertheless, just like the sad puppy it aspires to be, it's somehow difficult to resent the thing. It's fucking catchy and even when it's pushing the existentialist Buffy buttons, it either doesn't realise it's doing it or is doing the best it can, having no other avenue of expression, and I definitely remember having days which felt like  Novocaine for the Soul. Steve Albini might have been able to save it from itself, but never mind.