Frequencies - Blame Frequencies (2016)

I was at junior school with Sean, the bass player. I lived on a farm. Sean and my friend Matt lived in nearby villages. We'd spend most of the summer holidays commuting between our respective houses on bikes. Sean was the first person I knew with a record by the Sex Pistols, also Tubeway Army and Cheap Trick - which was an interesting development being as we'd spent at least one summer prior to that formative moment playing the Wombles album into a flexidisc. I mention this just so you know this is unlikely to be an impartial review.

Sean and I lost touch for a couple of decades, then hooked up again more recently, which has been nice, bringing the unexpected discovery that those early friendships have ultimately proven more enduring, and more fun, than most of those made in more recent years. Apparently the stuff you believe yourself to have in common with people isn't always what you actually have in common with them, but enough of memory lane. Let's give the disc a spin.

Sean gave the disc a spin - several spins in the end - as the three of us sat around shooting the breeze at his house, filling in a couple of decades worth of gaps, the usual stuff. I hadn't been aware of his musical inclinations when we were children, it being something which just kind of grabbed him in his twenties. There was, for me, a moment of unease - as there usually will be when your old friend gives you a blast of his band and you're scared it's going to be the worst music you've ever heard, and fuck it you're going to have to say something nice; but thankfully it never came. The music, I soon realised, sounded good. Then we played it again, there being just seven tracks on Blame Frequencies and I realised it sounded like something I would listen to out of choice - which is pretty good going. I have a fair few all-time favourites which didn't really sound like anything until I'd been playing them for at least a week.

I kept thinking of Led Zeppelin as we sat listening, not that it sounds anything like Led Zeppelin, but it has that same breezy quality they had in their gentler moments, like a spring morning captured on tape. Listening now and hence probably closer, Led Zeppelin doesn't work at all, although it retains that elusive early morning sparkle, invoking an era before rock bands channelled themselves into whichever genre got the bums on seats, before anyone was really trying to sound like anyone else, when you might hear an accordion or even bagpipes on a record despite a painting of Satan on the cover and the band logo in sheet metal lettering. The bass slaps and throbs, funky as anything. The guitar illustrates with metal chords, jazz chords, or the sort of frenetic chopping that famously got James Brown up off of that thing; and the vocals are golden, soaring up from the music with everyone else perfectly balanced in their own corner of the sound. It's beautifully put together - tight, clean, clear, and no flab. This is probably what you'd call classic rock these days, except I wouldn't because it seems a little insulting, implying a revival or preservation of something we used to enjoy, and Frequencies shouldn't be defined as such. Their myriad influences were, I would guess, never more than starting points, and none of them seem obvious;, although if it helps, Blame Frequencies also reminds me of Porcupine Tree in so much as that they too invoke what you'd probably call classic rock without sounding like revivalists, beyond which, the comparison is vague, more to do with mood than anything.

Anyway, I have no idea how you would get hold of this disc should you be so inclined, and it seems the band no longer exist in quite this form, a shift of line-up having regrouped as something which will probably be called Squoove, which I may have spelled wrong; but they play live, and I'm sure there will be other discs so - I don't know - keep watching the skies, I guess.

Porcupine Tree - In Absentia (2002)

This review might come out a bit lopsided due to Porcupine Tree's Steve Wilson being a friend of a friend. Specifically my friend Carl has worked on quite a few of the guy's record covers, and so I've met Steve Wilson around Carl's place at some point or other. I wasn't really sure what Porcupine Tree were supposed to be beyond assuming them to be something to do with everyone from Japan who hadn't been David Sylvian, and I didn't quite make the connection. Conversely, Steve knew of Konstruktivists - of which I was once a member - and had read a few things I wrote in The Sound Projector magazine, so that made me feel satisfyingly famous. I also knew he'd had something to do with remixing old Muslimgauze tracks, so he seemed an interesting if fairly quiet sort of bloke. I had no real idea he was some massive stadium-filling megastar until an old friend from school mentioned that Porcupine Tree were one of his favourite bands, thus allowing me to showboat with the I know that dude routine whilst experiencing simultaneous astonishment at how big this group actually were without my having had the faintest idea.

Porcupine Tree - my wife pointed out that the name suggests one of those bands formed by Andy Dwyer in Parks & Recreation: Mouse Rat, Scarecrow Boat, Teddybear Suicide and the rest; and for no particularly good reason I'd assumed they would probably sound a bit like Japan, which they don't; and Steve Wilson has supposedly been known to read my blog posts, so thank God it turns out that Porcupine Tree are actually decent. Admittedly, I probably wouldn't bother writing anything if In Absentia resembled Jonathan King out-takes, but all the same it's nice that I won't have to lie.

Eight or nine plays in and I'm amazed at how good this record sounds, and how it works very much like a single piece of music in an almost symphonic sense. Of course that's probably not such a surprise for something so obviously evolved from progressive rock roots, but the surprise is how the term progressive has been taken literally as a challenge so as to yield something genuinely new, genuinely forward looking - as opposed to twiddly fingered nostalgia for bands playing songs about Bilbo fucking Baggins. In Absentia retains the best elements of its tradition, the folksy acoustic morning dew sparkle of Jethro Tull and mathematically peculiar time signatures of such conviction and raw emotional power that you don't immediately notice the structural eccentricities. In addition, the contrast of crushing digital slabs of overdriven metal with the softer, more ethereal elements - not least Wilson's fantastically evocative voice - are captured with startling clarity, and so what might otherwise sound like an exercise in studio jiggery-pokery carries itself with a beautifully organic sense of pace.

Somewhere in that paragraph is probably a clue as to why the first comparison which came to me was Ray Davies of all people, not quite the same kind of storytelling, but a similarly wistful quality which goes somewhat further than Radiohead having a bit of a sad. In fact this is what Radiohead probably imagine they sound like.

It's not a happy album, and it in fact sounds like the anatomy of a breakdown in places, without quite invoking the sort of melodrama which needs to spell it all out in case you missed something. It's Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea rather than a self-harming character in a Neil Gaiman comic, and that's probably about as close as I can get it, which is why this is a piece of music rather than an essay. We've all had days like this.