The The - Ensoulment (2024)

I have a sort of knee-jerk suspicion of artists I enjoyed in my early twenties getting back in the booth all these years later, but, leaving aside that no-one wants a Flock of Seagulls reunion album, I should probably be suspicious of my suspicion as a hang-on from the punk rock programming which, for example, dictated that the Rolling Stones were fit for the knacker's yard by 1977; and while there was much fun to be had in upsetting the older generation, Miss You was unfortunately a fucking great record. In fact, even Emotional Rescue was a cracker and the revisionism now seems quaint given that they'd only been going a couple of decades; and Matt Johnson's The The are now cautiously approaching their half-century.

More crucially, The The sound as vital as ever - keeping in mind that even their early records had the quality of an extended world weary sigh set to a pounding bass drum. No-one, so far as I'm aware, ever complained about Johnny Cash or B.B. King failing to retire, and The The was never about upsetting the older generation. If it was about upsetting anyone, it was Johnson's own generation, and his focus has remained fixed even if the man himself has clocked up a few more years; and given the current state of the societal shitshow, it's amusing that you could probably characterise Ensoulment as upsetting the younger generation, at least based on the garbage to which so many of them are seen to subscribe on social media. Lyrically, Ensoulment is on target and at least as caustic as Fatima Mansions at their most blistering. Musically, it's the familiar organic blend of rock, soul, jazz, blues, country, and all the rest without fully sounding like any of them, or like the sort of worthy soundtrack to which spritely eldsters beatifically nod their heads in television commercials for prescription medication. It's pleasant but innocuous on first spin, and by the third or fourth, you can't stop playing the thing and your wife comes in from the other room to ask what you're listening to, and possibly to remind you to take your pill.

Did we ever suspect any of these people would be doing anything this good in the distant future, a quarter of the way into the next century? I had no idea myself.

Glen Glenn - Rockabilly Legend (1987)

It took me some time to get my head around rock 'n' roll, as in the specifically American rockabilly variety developed during the fifties and frequently involving quiffs and plaid shirts. My friend Sean's sister liked Elvis, and so we taunted her by referring to him as Elvis Smellvis, which is funny when you're ten. The rest of my limited understanding derived from Top of the Pops occasionally featuring horrible holiday camp cabaret acts such as Showaddywaddy, Matchbox, and Shakin' Stevens - although the latter should probably get some time off his sentence for an admittedly respectable cover of Ricky Nelson's It's Late, among others. I don't know - maybe it was never so bad as it seemed at the time, but English rock 'n' roll made no sense to me, it being something I would mostly associate with people in Burnley pretending to be cowboys. Rockabilly done right should be hot, sunny, and kicking up clouds of dust. It doesn't work in the cold and the pissing rain.

Additionally, when at the age of twelve-ish I graduated from Wombles albums to punk rock - a more entertaining kind of novelty record - it was hard to keep from being swept up in the suspicion that our natural enemies were teddy boys like Rockabilly Ray at school, who was a fucking idiot whichever way you looked at it.

Then in 1984 I moved to Maidstone, Kent, the next town along from Medway with it's thriving garage scene - if we really have to call it that - loosely in orbit of Billy Childish and his band, the Milkshakes. The Milkshakes seemed like something different in so much as they weren't pretending to be American. Amazingly, they weren't even pretending that it was still 1957. They weren't quite playing the kind of thing I was listening to that year, and yet I couldn't help but appreciate their raw energy and no bullshit aesthetic; and this was around the time that my friend Carl attempted to convert me to the Cramps. I liked the Cramps, but even better were Carl's Born Bad compilation albums collecting all the original music the Cramps had covered, stolen, or otherwise mutated. I listened to Born Bad and suddenly I understood; and one aspect I appreciated about a lot of this music was that, when you got down to it, it actually wasn't trying to be Herman Munster, and the trash epithet didn't really fit and was even kind of insulting, because this was some real heartfelt, quality workmanship.

Glen Glenn's Everybody's Movin' wasn't the greatest cut on Born Bad, but it had enough going on to inspire me to snap up this retrospective compilation when I spotted it in the local branch of Our Price. So far as I can tell, Rockabilly Legend comprises mainly demo recordings, broadcast performances recorded directly from the television set by Glenn's dad with a reel-to-reel tape recorder next to the speaker, and a couple of singles which made it big, but probably not quite so big as they deserved thanks to a spell in the military somewhat curtailing our man ever quite building up a full head of showbiz steam in publicity terms. I've had this album nearly thirty years which is roughly how old some of the songs were when I first bought it, which is a truly weird thought. Obviously I generally tend to review material I've had hanging about for a while in this series of reviews - as opposed to ringtones fresh off the MP3 presses - but why this one and why now is nevertheless a reasonable question.

I knew I would experience a certain quota of country music when I first moved to Texas, although it hasn't turned out to be quite so ubiquitous as you might expect, which is nice because I dislike the contemporary stadium version of country with its radio mics, autotune, and songs making incongruous references to facebook. On hearing that I would be moving here, my cousin said he would have to do me a mixtape of alt-country - whatever the hell that is. I declined the offer because the term suggests bearded individuals who own Sonic Youth records hanging around a raw juice bar discussing Hank Williams, and I think I'd probably rather listen to the real thing, if anything. Nevertheless, country has at last crept up on me - or rockabilly, or whatever you would prefer to call it - when it suddenly dawned on me how much sense this music makes now that I'm living here, as though it's part of the landscape, which I suppose it is. As William Shaw observes in Westsiders:

All music is about geography, in a way. It's either about the place in which it's made, or the place where the maker wants to be.

I still find the notion of cowboys in Burnley mystifying, but over here with the sun, the dust, the possums, and the cacti, I can at last appreciate rockabilly and country as folk music with a profound sense of its place and people, as opposed to an exotic novelty. It somehow explains what I experience as I step outside my front door each day. It feels right, and the discovery of my wife being distantly related to Johnny Cash no longer strikes me as weird.

Anyway, before I disappear completely up my own fundament, let's talk about the actual music. Above all, Glen Glenn favoured a deceptively simple sound which is actually pretty hard to get right in my experience - a raw, acoustic rhythm with wild rock 'n' roll flourishes, yet smooth and even kind of cheery. For all the crap that's been written about rock over the years, and the kind of rock from which almost all else is ultimately derived, it's easily forgotten that this is a well-intentioned music, something which really wants you to have a good time and is supposed to make you happy even with those bluesy origins. Glen Glenn somehow manages to sound both wholesome and worldly, and now that my ears are located in Texas, I realise some of these tracks could have been recorded yesterday, neither six decades nor rudimentary recording techniques diminishing any of Glenn's natural sparkle. I guess it's the mark of a true artist that he can work with a popular form, something resembling a lot of other things which have been around for a while, and yet make it sound new, something fresh and exciting each time the needle hits the record. Glen Glenn packed some serious quality into a career without that much longevity in commercial terms, or by the standards of artists with more extensive back catalogues; and One Cup of Coffee and a Cigarette is easily one of the greatest songs of the fifties for my money, as good or perhaps better than anything you care to name by persons who are better remembered. As titles go, Rockabilly Legend may sound like an overstatement, but it really isn't.

More about the man and his music here.

Lady Gaga - Artpop (2013)

So far as I've been concerned up until very recently, Lady Gaga was just wossername who brought us Poker Face, a song comprised entirely of choruses which sounded like it had been recorded on an expensive phone. It came on the radio at work to bring pleasure only in the knowledge that we at least weren't tuned to the station which played Chelsea Dagger by the fucking Fratellis every seven bleeding minutes. More recently I joined one of those facebook groups you hear about, specifically one in which members post a piccy of the cover of whatever they're listening to at the time, then we all say how we like it too, or we think it's shite, or how our next door neighbour once bummed the drummer or whatever. It's fun, but not without its annoyances, one of which is provided by the doubtless absolutely lovely and well intentioned guy who posts a picture of whatever he's listening to embellished with photocopied paper dollies of famous pop stars stood around the record cover along with a tattyfilarious script of their conversation.

ELVIS PRESLEY: Hey guys, I see Dave's checking out the first Doobie Brothers album.
BARBARA STREISAND: That's a pretty ropey looking copy.
BRITNEY SPEARS: Yeah, I hope he didn't pay too much for it.
ELVIS PRESLEY: Well, the Clash told me it was something he found in his dad's loft, so I guess he didn't pay anything.
BRITNEY SPEARS: Is that right?
THE CLASH: Don't ask us. We were still in the pub.
JOHNNY CASH: I think you mean me. People are always getting us confused.
BARBARA STREISAND: Ha ha!

No. I don't know why either, but to get to the point, our man recently posted a photograph of this Lady Gaga album as subject of imaginary debate amongst cut-out pictures of top poppers. Fuck's sake, I muttered darkly to myself, even more disgusted than usual; and then went off for a listen to some of the album on YouTube just to confirm that it was as shit as I thought it would be. Somehow it wasn't, at least it didn't sound that way on that particular morning, and so I wondered if I perhaps had Lady Gaga all wrong. After all, of the musical artists I rate most highly, my initial impression of almost every last one has usually been what the fuck is this shit?

Weirdly, whatever that not actually terrible track may have been, it sounds completely different on the actual disc, and completely different to the point that I'm not even sure which one it was. More annoyingly, Artpop is Madonna for people who post videos of themselves talking about their top five favourite Manga characters on YouTube and is about as good as I had a feeling it would be, at least in so much as it probably sounds amazing if you're under thirty and fucking stupid...

Nope. Not apologising for that one, and I don't care if I've just turned into my dad frowning at the Sex Pistols - young people are shit. Theoretically they can't all be shit, but I don't seem to have encountered too many exceptions to the rule: useless fuckers forever fiddling with their phones and texting about how all music is pointless now, not like the good old classic rock days of Oasis and Muse, or Andrew Lloyd Webber and Elton John, and old people are always going on about books but you can't learn nuffink from books because that ain't life and there's nuffink wrong with games because some of them have got really good stories now blah blah fucking blah - fuck you, kids. All of you. Develop some fucking discretion.

Sadly, Artpop is post-music, just the sonic extension of a larger, more substantial memeplex incorporating visuals, ringtones, sneakers, YouTube, and marketing strategy. It means well and it tries hard to deliver an authentic experience, but even with the best intention, it remains a McDonald's Fruit Bag™ at heart. I'm trying to pinpoint just what it is that fails to work, that lets the side down, but there's so much going on, and so much which sounds like it should work without actually succeeding that it's hard to identify any one specific turd in the musical swimming pool. Of course, being post-music, it all sounds like it was recorded on a phone, full of flourishes which never could have arisen prior to our developing the ability to move waveforms around on a screen. I'm a huge fan of weirdy electronic techno, and yet what happens here all feels too smooth and easily achieved, and it might almost resemble the Severed Heads -  ordinarily a recommendation - but for the problem that musically it only really does one thing, and it does it over and over. Everything sounds like a crescendo, like a musical analogy of the worst of modern cinema - the tender interlude from The Fast and the Furious again and again and again, all soft focus and a single tear forming in the corner of an unnaturally enlarged cinematic eye whilst five orchestras shit themselves in unison just in case that blind guy living on Pluto missed the point of it being an emotional moment.

I could live with this if Artpop had some dimension other than the celebration of its own artificiality, its own failure to resemble anything occurring in nature, but the rest of the sentence, had I bothered to spell it out, probably depends on how much you care about Andy Warhol, which personally I never did. The sexuality is up front and lurid, better done than the perpetually gurning Miley Cyrus forever holding her flaps apart and inviting you to take a lick, but still ultimately as clinical and calculating as any vagina airbrushed and clean shaven in the name of selling beer, guns, or cigarettes. I quite like sexy music, but properly sexy music rarely spells it out, and Gaga doesn't have the voice to pull it off, in either sense of the expression. She's decent, but then doubtless so are many other X-Factor contestants, and she only seems to do two things, either gushing operatically over musical crescendos or that wearyingly stern now I'm going to shove this up your arse, you naughty boy voice; excepting some bluesy effort towards the end of the disc to which she just isn't well suited. For fuck's sake woman, put some clothes on. We've seen enough.

Artpop is an advert for car insurance, a soundtrack for people who think that the fashion industry is important, techno which misses the great innovation of techno having been its rejection of personality. Artpop probably isn't quite so terrible as I've made it sound, but for something which tries so hard, it's surprising how little it really does.

U2 - Zooropa (1993)

Where did the time go? With each passing year, Bongo of U2 becomes ever further removed from that soulful wide-eyed Muppet Baby version of Joy Division which sounded so fresh and so utterly devoid of artifice in 1980, and ever closer to that which John Doran of The Quietus amusingly described as Smaug the Dragon with a mullet and two grand wrap around shades sitting on a giant mountain of gold, dressed like Che Guevara, talking about us and making peace signs any time someone gets out a camera.

More surprising for me has been realisation of the fact that they were never really so amazing as everyone thought they were. A Day Without Me and I Will Follow sounded like the greatest songs ever recorded that time I first heard them on the radio, but for some reason I never bothered to buy the album. The somewhat overwrought but still reasonably convincing Pride (in the Name of Love) was an - ahem - our tune in the Simon Bates tradition for myself and my first ever girlfriend, but then we were both pretty young and our other our tune was Smalltown Boy by Bronski Beat, so Lord knows what was going on there.

More recently I found that the song which Bongo's humble Oirish farmhands recorded for some Batman film had become lodged in my head, whatever the hell it was called; so screw it, I thought, and promptly Amazoned me a greatest hits disc. Unfortunately it turned out that U2 have had so many greatest hits as to require two volumes of the same, and I was sent the wrong one. No problem I decided, recalling the passion with which I once loved the three listed above, but listening to the fucker was another story. A Day Without Me, I Will Follow and Pride still sounded okay, but I'd forgotten about the rest, all those exhausting anthems, lonesome prairie-scale epics dedicated to being just a straightforward kind of fellah who, much like the Murphy's, isn't bitter, striving for the grandeur of a Thomas Cole landscape but coming closer in spirit to one of those hokey old west paintings full of noble savages and homespun horseback heroes. Never has anything with such celestial aspirations sounded quite so lard-arsed and stodgy, so lacking in basic nutrients as the never ending and pretty much interchangeable wailing ballads which comprise most of U2's back catalogue. By the time they recorded Rattle and Hum, it had begun to seem like even U2 were sick of it, at least revealing themselves to be a competent rock band once someone had taken away their fucking chorus pedal and told them to stop being such wankers.

I have most of Zooropa nailed into the back of my skull because my girlfriend of the time - not to be confused with the earlier one with whom I shared Pride as an our tune - had the album and played it to death. I didn't mind as it sounded good to me, and in fact it sounded so good that we went to see them live at some massive park in Leeds, a concert which I recall as immensely enjoyable despite costing over a hundred pounds a ticket once we accounted for missed coaches and resulting taxi fares. Weirdly, listening to it now, Zooropa still sounds good. The U2 of Zooropa and Achtung Baby - its predecessor - had apparently tired of being the aural equivalent of a plate of school mashed-potato ten miles in circumference and had asked Brian Eno to help them to be less crap - and I believe those were their actual words. I can't be bothered to verify whether or not this is true, but I seem to recall that as the recording for Achtung Baby began, Eno pointed out that the songs were rubbish and made the boys go away and then come back again after they had written some better ones.

Whether or not they did, Zooropa - and this works just as well for Achtung Baby - is a great album because it's a great Brian Eno album. Listen close and it's not hard to imagine Low-era Bowie singing over some of those tracks, or even Johnny Cash - welcome guest vocalist on the closing number, and known in this house simply as Uncle Johnny on account of Mrs. Wax Cylinders being related to him by marriage.

At the time we all thought U2 had reinvented themselves as Nine Inch Nialls, but the truth emerged as they gradually slid back into flag-waving anthemic landfill mode once Brian Eno took his knob twiddling abilities elsewhere. The clues were there all along, of course, particularly in the somewhat soporific Stay (Faraway, So Close) which no doubt tries to contrast its gentle Thomas Kincadisms with wife-beating lyrics so as to make a barbed point, but just ends up sounding like a paean to the admirable docility of women who stay with abusive partners; which is creepy. Then of course there's the politics trumpeted with all the passion of ten adult male Nelson Mandelas but which, on close inspection, mostly amounts to arguments ending well you can believe what you like but personally I'm against the killing of children. I can understand the logic of Bongo believing himself in a position to effect real change for the best, but standing next to Adolf Hitler with a big grin will only ever serve to make Hitler appear a little more humane, and so his band became the Judas goat by which those they purportedly oppose get to feel just a little better about themselves.

Well, that's how it looks from down here.

Even with this in mind, Zooropa remains a great album, albeit a great Brian Eno album.