Plan B magazine » Reviews

Harvey Milk: Life…The Best Game In Town (Hydra Head)/Kayo Dot: Blue Lambency Downward (Hydra Head)

Noel Gardner — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 17:45:50 +0000

A lot of people are gonna tell you that these two styles of music can never coexist peacefully, that this is no time for fence-sitting, and your colours must be nailed to a mast post-haste. Jesus! This is 1973, not 1943, and if you want to listen to Black Sabbath and Van Der Graaf Generator one after the other then you can. And if it earns you a few days sitting on your own in the sixth form canteen, at least you’re still cooler than those bozos who like Slade, right?

And then I got off the bus and it was 2008 and there were a ton of independent labels like Hydra Head who can blossom into enough of an ‘institution’ to release whatever they like. Carcass-dragging quasi-doom slugfests and high-intellect jazz-prog: buy (into) both. If you need an enemy, how about dreary dickbags who claim there’s nothing exciting happening in rock at the minute?

A hitherto unlikely comeback record from a band who bucked Athens, GA expectations in the mid-Nineties by playing sardonic power rawk instead of twee psychedelia, the logo on the cover of Life…The Best Game In Town is not Harvey Milk’s but Iron Maiden’s. A photo of a wall upon which hangs a Killers poster and a sombrero, it’s the only sleeve of 2008 thus far to make me actually laugh.

‘Death Goes To The Winner’ features, for most of its tenure, a single note and some incomprehensible vocals that sound like a police radio picking up a redneck argument. It’s as cacklingly, casually obnoxious an opener as the corresponding efforts from Shellac’s Terraform or Melvins’ Gluey Porch Treatments. Later, ‘Skull Socks And Rope Shoes’ comes closer to Eyehategod than most manage – dragging, black-veined Sludge – and when ‘Good Bye Blues’ reveals itself to be a rendition of the Looney Tunes ‘That’s All Folks!’ theme, it brings home Harvey Milk’s understanding of the silliness of rock music. The rest of the album demonstrates that that they’ve listened to and adored a vast amount of it.

Kayo Dot come bearing metal credentials, earned by way of their previous incarnation – Maudlin Of The Well, signed to John Zorn’s Tzadik label – and a split album with Japanese doom extremists Bloody Panda. Most of this notion evaporates on contact with Blue Lambency Downward, their third album proper; you wouldn’t have to be a frash-til-death purist to question whether there’s a metal riff on the whole album. What we find in its place, fiddly jazz-rock and oddball prog, is more than acceptable: not quote-unquote heavy, but possessing serious chops and atmospheric knowhow.

Although there’s that same itchy, querulous feel that Soft Machine and Matching Mole crystallised in the Canterbury prog scene, Blue Lambency Downward‘s territory is closer to Morricone’s dusty villages. ‘Symmetrical Arizona’, the 11-minute closing track, is Bill Frisell-styled guitar doodles
drawn out to the extent where there are frequent blips of complete silence – rendering that old jazzers’ chestnut about ‘listening to the space between the notes’ yet more literal.

For the purpose of this review, ‘smart people making great music unconstrained by outside pressures’ is a hot new genre. Just off to listen to Slade while I think of a snappier name for it.

This review first appeared in Plan B Issue 36, August 2008. For back issues and subscriptions, go

Plush: Fed (Broken Horse)

Frances Morgan — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 17:45:33 +0000

my creation has drowned me
Fed has a false beginning. A sole electric guitar riffs absently through a melancholy blues progression; heads upwards; pauses; then, boom. Full band. Full colour. Tracking shot of a lonely figure walking through morning streets that are – suddenly – filled with light, movement and crowds; a sunburst of horns, strings and percussion, and all the world’s a film, each step’s a swagger.

somebody told me i was great – was it my mother?
Fed had a false start. Intended as the second album by Plush, aka Liam Hayes, the Chicago songwriter whose 1998 release More You Becomes You was a pared-down re-imagining of the deceptively accessible songcraft of Harry Nilsson and Jimmy Webb, Fed fermented and expanded under its creator’s increasingly elaborate designs. Hayes had a vision for his album that would broach no compromises – echoing, perhaps, the obsessive creative excesses of his Sixties and Seventies reference points as much as their melodic dexterity – and the project faltered through budgetary constraints, to be released exclusively on Japanese label After Hours in 2002. Drag City, in 2004, released Underfed, a stripped-back, no-horns version of the album that is spare and rueful, pragmatic as Fed is rococo and ornately melancholy. Fed’s first widely available release – six years after it should’ve been on every radio – is cause for celebration, and slight trepidation. It’s not easy listening, even if it sounds like it.

woke up today, said who’s gonna be my keeper?
Fed is a solo record, and not a solo record. It’s a solo record the way a Judee Sill record is a solo record: both are almost monomaniacal in their vocabularies, but somehow they’ve persuaded heaven’s choirs (or Earth Wind And Fire’s horn arranger) into the studio with them; populated reel-to-reel tape with an entire idiosyncratic universe. In that context, what does ‘solo’ mean? An ‘honest’ acoustic set, or an intricate baroque vision; the sound of a mind jumping ahead of itself, unable to hold back from adding that extra shading, that final overdub? On ‘Greyhound Bus Station’, horns punctuate every bar, mariachi flourishes marking points that don’t need to be marked in a song that’s about loose ends, journeys and questions (“What’s it gonna be…?”). Yet the over-illustrative flourishes, heard here in full over Fed’s 14 tracks, take on a hallucinatory quality, shimmering like half-heard, lysergically-recalled funk from a sun-smeared radio.

do do do-do-do do…dah dah-dah-dah dah
Fed is not a great lyrics album, but you only notice if you stop to pull the lyrics apart. They seem often to be about the process of creation itself, with all its insecurities, disappointments and flashes of self-belief. When another enters the frame, Hayes’ words focus and darken: “Open the door and see that face that makes you live alone, I hope you come through,” he sings on ‘Born Together’. Mostly, though, I think of The Beach Boys in 1973, doing ’Sail On Sailor’: a chugging, soulful, persevering song whose lyrics are superfluous, whose sadness
is palpable, whose overall affect just kills me.

you felt what you felt, you read what you read

Fed is a lost classic, because it got lost. Not so much because it’s a classic: fuck classics. Classic records deal in absolutes, but you can know Fed off by heart and still sometimes forget which song is which. By its conclusion, the album becomes a mirage-like procession of vague hooks, loping riffs, little licks, big vistas. ‘Having It All’ forms an instrumental coda to ‘What’ll We Do’, then reappears as the album’s outro: you’re suddenly aware of Fed as whole work, song cycle. But the focus is diverted, multiplied; and the music scatters, runs glittering through your fingers: “They say, isn’t that the way that it feels, isn’t that the way that it feels, isn’t that – the way that it feels?”

This review appeared in Plan B Issue 36, August 2008. For back issues and subscriptions, go here

Stanley Brinks: Dank U (Ciao Ketchup)

Everett True — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 14:01:57 +0000

“With a song I come to you/Like a troubadour/With a simple serenade/That, and nothing more” – ‘One Song’, Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs.

These words are actually unsung in the movie, the song cutting straight to the whole “One love/I have but one love” denouement, excising the build-up, the detail. It’s a shame. The introduction conjures up a wandering minstrel, doomed to travel, looking for fair maidens to seduce with a few well-chosen chords, but of course Disney has never been renowned for its complexity. It’s a shame, because these opening lines have, for years, put me in mind of the brothers Herman Düne, and in particular André since he flew the coop at the start of 2007 to wander solo.

But it’s hard to see André’s musician-soul being contained long within the parameters of a group: he has too much, um, individuality. And, unlike the princely hero of Snow White who believed fervently in the destination, André is about the anticipation, the distance covered. Set to a few simple chords and keyboards, Dank U is a documentation of André’s latest life-change, his transformation into Stanley Brinks. The first song is a straightforward tale of Stanley’s arrival set to pleasingly self-deprecating, mournful horns…“In the summer of 1973/A boy was born, and that boy was me”…“I played in a band/We toured the old world/The shows were exciting, fun and unheard“… “In the fall of 2006/I changed my name to Stanley Brinks”. As is the second. As is the third.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with that. I can’t stand groups that chop and change in their quest for ‘newness’. Newness does not exist. It’s a conceit, a fucking annoying one, truth to tell. Accept the limitations of your form and then you can move forward. If most of Dank U sounds like the midpoint between The Wave Pictures’ debut album and Herman Düne’s Not On Top, that’s because it is. It doesn’t mean it’s any less fresh or engaging.

André changes lyrical tack round about song four (‘New Hampshire’) when he starts singing about his escapades with ladies, and especially on song five (‘My Experience With Truth’) where he recounts an encounter with a groupie. Shockingly, because the entire Herman Düne pantheon is so anti-macho it seems wrong to hear them discuss sexual encounters in such blunt terms: but not for André the coyness of Disney heroes. (The lyric makes André sound superior, rather than equal partners – that’s why it’s objectionable.)

And then we’re back to self-examination (song seven, ‘Song Of Hassan’) until the very end, when our troubadour throws the template away entirely for a pure devotion song (‘I’ll Be With You’).

And if the whole affair feels a little like a subdued solo project (much in the same way when David-Ivar and Nèman played my living room immediately following André’s departure, it felt magical but somehow lacking)…well, that’s to the good. Sometimes it’s good to strip away the layers and discover what lies underneath.

Originally published in Plan B #35: back issues available here.

Death Cab For Cutie: Narrow Stairs (Atlantic)

Miss AMP — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 15:57:27 +0000

Uh, oh, it’s that ‘difficult-second-album-on-a-major-label’! What to do? How about: spend lots of time trashtalking about “bloody and loose” production values, spreading rumours of forthcoming eight-and-a-half-minute long singles, and letting it be known that the whole deal is to be recorded on tape, promising a sound several continents away from the gleam and sheen of 2005’s million-selling, post OC ‘breakthrough’ album, Plans? Yeah, that oughtta do it.

But, you know. It’s May 2008 and I hold the long-awaited disc in my hand and… come on, boys. It’s like an office girl who only wears black explaining that this black top is different to a different black top, more exciting, because there is a strip of black sequins across the chest and along each shoulder. It’s still a black top, love. Likewise: this is still a Death Cab album. What are the black sequins, then?

They’re there, alright: in the eight-and-a-half-minute ‘I Will Possess Your Heart’; in the tabla-drenched ‘Pity and Fear’; and in the fuzzy, dusty sound that envelops the whole album. Lyrically, too, things have shifted. Ben Gibbard’s always been a chronicler of tiny, meaningful relationship moments – kisses in photobooths and all that – but on Narrow Stairs the focus shifts and pulls away, and we’re given distance rather than intimacy. Instead of scenes from (presumably) Gibbard’s life you get a bundle of vignettes and a handful of characters: ‘I Will Possess Your Heart’s creepy stalker; a bride at a wedding (’Cath’), in a borrowed dress and a forced smile; a former optimist realising all his hopes have died (‘No Sunlight’).

But. But. The much-touted eight-minute epic may be more like a Eighties 12-inch remix than a glorious, sprawling epic anthem like ‘Transatlanticism’; there may be no big obvious pop banger like Plans’ ‘Soul Meets Body’, and the whole tabla thing was definitely a mistake – but it’s still Death Cab, and if you snip away the sequins you’ll find real pop gems underneath.

Take, for example, ‘You Can Do Better Than Me’, which marries jaunty Pet Sounds-ish organs, timpani and sleigh bells with a long-term relationship lament. ”Sometimes I think of leaving, but it’s something I’ll never do,” (and here the happy-clappy organ drops away and it’s just Ben’s thin, gentle voice) – “Because you can do better than me, but I can’t do better than you.” Ouch.

And just as you’re taking that in, up starts ‘Grapevine Fires’, in which gentle, minor-key piano chords frame a narrative in which a couple hear news reports of brush fires, so they go to a cemetery with wine and paper cups and pick the woman’s daughter up from school and sit in the cemetery watching it all burn away. The daughter dances against the flames, the firemen work double shifts and pray for rain, and the man knows there’s nowhere he’d rather be than watching this destruction.

It’s beautiful and, in its mixture of nostalgia for the passing present and acknowledgement of death in life all sung out against shiveringly sweet arrangements, it’s classic, classic Death Cab. Pointless sequins be damned, there’s still nobody else out there who can do this mixture of indie-rock blues and lyrical, trembling beauty with this much grace.

Originally published in Plan B #34: back issues available here.

Silver Jews: Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea (Drag City)

Noel Gardner — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 16:49:39 +0000

The advance scoop on this sixth Silver Jews album from David Berman’s brain to your eyeballs is that it’s “really different” from their other albums. This gives away little. All musicians think this
about their latest work – it’s only human. Obsessive creation of art fuels narcissism of small differences.

Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea – a bravely brief 10 tracks, like most of their albums – is a wonderful record, one worthy of the fine toothcomb treatment. The Jews’ most recent opus, 2005’s Tanglewood Numbers, was sometimes superlative, highly endearing and perhaps rendered more moving by the knowledge that the primary brains behind it had spiraled to the brink of suicide not long beforehand. What it didn’t have, in the main, was instantaneous or earworm-worthy tunes: a spate of dense, FX-peppered country appropriations rendering it the proverbial fan favourite, something it’s perfectly possible the Silver Jews have deliberately reacted against here.

‘What Is Not But Could Be If’ is, in its musical mood, probably Lookout Mountain’s most lugubrious turn. Its lyrical pitch warrants a closer reading, however: while Berman is too classy a wordsmith to brashly advertise his Judaism in song, there’s a spiritual angle evident in these suggestions of all-purpose hope. “What was not but could have been/Was my obsession way back when…when failure’s got you in its grasp/And you’re reaching for your very last, it’s just beginning.”

Pulling a poetic U-turn for a moment, Dr Seuss is, basically, a root influence on every American in the last few decades who possessed enough self-confidence to construct their own rhyming couplets. Rarely does it manifest itself as literally as ‘San Francisco BC’, a surreal tale of a pitfall-strewn job hunt delivered by its author in a metre that’ll be instantly familiar to anyone who grew up with Theodor Geisel as a guide: “We were waiting for his dad to meet us there/When Gene took off his hat and I noticed his hair/It was neatly trimmed but a patch was bare!/I knew it wasn’t new wave – it was human error!”

David Berman has, in the past, squirmed away from suggestions that he’s a country singer. Hard to give subtly devastating closer ‘We Could Be Looking For The Same Thing’ any other genre tag; this is pointedly classic dual-purpose Nashville songcraft, where the husband and wife – Cassie Berman, David’s saviour of the non-religious kind – goof about like the green young lovers they ain’t and the listener gets a lyric he can slur to his object of secret affection later, when he gets leathered enough to think it a good idea. “We could belong to each other, if you’re not seeing anyone…”

Lookout Mountain… isn’t, definitively, a country album; there’s scraps of jangle-pop, psychedelia (a surprising and crystal-pretty, if ultimately dispensable, cover of ‘Open Field’ by Japanese cultists Maher Shalal Hash Baz), rockabilly and whatever the heck you’d call ‘Aloysius, Bluegrass Drummer’, which sounds sort of like The Tubes doing ‘Ballroom Blitz’. Great fleeting touches, like the seagulls and foghorns on ‘Party Barge’ and the way ‘San Francisco BC’ makes like the tape recorder’s batteries are flagging, crop up, less indicative of a desire to ‘experiment’ than a genuine love of playing this weird little game.

The quality it has, more so than past Silver Jews ventures, is its conveyance of very real emotions from a very talented gentleman, while sounding like it’s being written with a tangible audience in mind. “I’ve been around and I’ve seen enough to know/We could both spend happy lives…”, that final track continues, “know” sounding like an operative word.

Noel Gardner talks to David Berman

In the CD booklet, most of the lyrics are written on paper liberated from various hotels. Does this hint at the influence of a touring lifestyle?
“Touring gave me a good look at who I’d be speaking to when I wrote again. In the past I only had a blurry face to go on. What I saw was a lot of tender-hearted young people with little in the way of wisdom gained from harsh experience, leaving them vulnerable to the saturation and aftermath.”

‘Suffering Jukebox’ implies a certain romantic attachment to jukeboxes. Have you encountered these ‘internet jukeboxes’ in bars, where you can download any song you might want to hear?
“Wow. That’s the first time I’ve heard of that. I think the ‘any song at your fingertips’ technology will be the end of rock songwriting. It will be like jazz and classical, a closed off art. Aficionados will be trapped in a maze without exits.”

Originally published in Plan B #34: back issues available here.

The Last Shadow Puppets: The Age Of The Understatement (Domino)

Lauren — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 17:28:06 +0000

So here’s Alex Turner, Arctic Monkeys frontman, singing things like “She was walking on the tables in the glasshouse” instead of stuff about the liver damage statistics of Hunter’s Bar. And here’s his mate, Miles Kane (the Rascals), plus two more well-placed dudes, producer/drummer James Ford (Simian Mobile Disco) and virtuoso arranger Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy). And here’s a swarm of strings, like mad ants or stung wasps, etch-a-sketching themselves onto the beginning of this record and setting the tone – of tension, melodrama and guitar histrionics more suited to that three-piece who hang solar systems from the ceiling of Wembley Stadium than two boys from Sheffield and the Wirral. Two boys, that is, famed for their no-frills, know-everything urban documentation.

In comes a gallop of drums, and BANG – the opener is like like West Side Story for 2010 – and this is in no way a bad thing; nuh-uh. “I can still remember when your city smelt exciting”, Turner leers, hinting that the concrete jungle is a less fertile land for situational inspiration than it used to be. It’s never merely his acerbic South Yorkshire accent that grants him this disapproving commentator’s edge – it’s in the way he enunciates: consonants switch from glottal to serrated, his delivery from obnoxious to fogged and vulnerable. If I was his mum, I’d be entering him into all sorts of Public Speaking contests. You can barely hear Kane, but this is partly the point: you’re not supposed to identify the seams as they swap lead vocals, but to think of them as one two-headed young squirt in a trench coat, if you will.

Obsessing over themes of enclosure and suspicion, Turner and Kane thrash about above lush instrumentals. Pallett’s gymnastic strings trapeze from augmented lows to diminished highs – there are preludes, postscripts, stories in them. Infrequently, there are monks. Yeah. Monks. Baritone,cloistered in dripping crypts, wordlessly reciting underneath ‘Only The Truth’. This could so easily not work – and, separately, these songs wouldn’t: out of context, they’d be laughably theatrical. I mean, The Age Of The Understatement? Is it supposed to be ironic that this single’s video features the two men wandering a desolate Russia populated by tanks and chanting infantry? Slow-roving across tundra, cannons a-ready, with Turner and Kane looking uncomfortable in their designer bootees sat astride chugging engines? Or is it illustrating exactly what the title implies: that we pretend everything’s OK, when really there are people out in the sticks destroying more or less everything; that we talk about the most surreal, violent things like they’re humdrum necessities? I dunno. But I’d like to think it’s the latter, rather than just an example of two guys thinking it’d be cool to ride a killing machine for a music video.

It’s testament to the talent and dedication of these two sprogs that they’ve put the time, work and ideas into something relatively divergent from their comfortable cash cows (well, in Turner’s case), when a huge percentage of the egocentric milieu that wetly slopped into the spotlight in the wake of the Monkeys would be happy to sit on their arses swigging lager and going to the occasional awards show. It’s props to Turner and Kane for having the energy and – ahh! – friendship to push themselves, and not go slobbering off over the horizon wearing cravats and sucking on fags. Bravo.

Originally published in Plan B #33: back issues available here.

Thalia Zedek Band: Liars And Prayers (Thrill Jockey)

Everett True — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 16:58:43 +0000

The weight of history is against us.

If you haven’t encountered Thalia Zedek before, not immersed yourself in her emotionally draining music over the past three decades, is there a chance I can convince you to listen in now? Since forming her first band, White Women, at Boston University in 1979, Thalia has been consistently compelling; from the Gothic no-wave Dangerous Birds in ’81 (the deranged vocals totally belied the music), through the violently focused Uzi, to her stint with Live Skull, Eighties peers of early Sonic Youth and Ut; finding heady release in post-heroin withdrawal band, Sub Pop’s terrifying Come (formed with Codeine drummer Chris Brokaw in ‘91), and continuing through 2001’s immense (in every sense) solo album Been Here And Gone. You rightly decry this form of music – enervating, tremendously serious, emotionally torn blues – as being too male and staid. So what happens when a woman intrudes – like Thalia’s primary inspiration, Patti Smith, did so long before? Is there a place for such weight, such emotion as these women have always practised – a harsh form of beauty indeed, drawn from life’s despair and the imminence of death? Is gender even an issue here?

Oh, Thalia. I thought I’d left this music behind with the birth of my son: there’s no room for such introspection when the day-to-day takes precedence, no room for self-regard when tiredness rules everything. I thought this music belonged to another era, another life – a life where you’re trapped halfway between release and the desire to never be released; an era populated by musicians who grew up believing in the sanctity of Patti and Neil Young’s darker moments, an era that found
its undoubted nadir when Kurt Cobain killed himself in the name of music. I thought I’d left all this behind with the toenail clippings on Mark Lanegan’s bathroom floor, my refusal to listen to music that doesn’t hit within seconds, and bounce. When you have a serious death fixation, and all around seems worthless, valueless – everything – do you really need music, a musician, that clearly shares similar thoughts?

The answer is yes.

The answer is so obviously yes I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to rediscover it. From the lightly strummed opening chords and wailing violin on the twisted, tormented epic ‘Next Exit’ (think dusty roadways, the beauty of stillness, light flickering across a stagnant pond remembered only in dreams; it launches soon after into a tumultuous, unbowed country riff so dense you wonder if there’s an amp in the world that could do justice to the volume necessary for this track)…yeah, from that, right up to the exultant final bars of ‘Begin To Exhume’, this is an album to lose yourself in, that can heal through its sheer volume and pain, that can pacify and soothe. Shared experience counts, of course – we have met in the past – but it doesn’t hurt that Zedek has long possessed one of the most startling, nicotine-ravaged, bluesy voices of either sex in music and that the sound of her voice is like…

When I was in my twenties, I would listen to ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ by Otis Redding over and over on my Dansette, lights out, volume absolutely maxed up, over and over until the whole fucking world would stop revolving (and in my thirties, Manic Street Preachers’ ‘Everything Must Go’, but at 5am and painfully drunk…and in my forties, watching Warren Ellis shoot great wads of phlegm skywards while wrenching out another unattainable melody on his violin)…

Sometimes – maybe often, and I’d merely forgotten – you need that release.

Sometimes, you need to stop.

So when those guitars bubble and murmur fitfully to themselves before building once more, ever more intense, in the middle of ‘Body Memory’, or when Thalia starts pleading, “Do you remember/What you heard/Everyone’s asking/No, I can’t Say/If I remember/The blues skies/Of September” during the inclement ‘Do You Remember’, I’m reminded that sometimes it feels good, really good, to listen, to lose oneself in volume, in music, in The Voice. Music is always a two-way experience, much as those asinine Lloyd-Webber acolytes and Q editors would like to convince us otherwise. What you give is, indeed, what you get.

So, you know. Maybe the weight of history isn’t with us, but I don’t need to share my personal experiences with you anyway. More than Lanegan, more than Daniel Johnston (who performs an entirely different service altogether), more than an entertainer like Cave or Waits or whomever, Zedek should long have been hailed as one of the Voices of our time. And I know: I know time isn’t kind, and time moves on, and time forgets. And this moment is brief.

But just this once, I’m glad I’m living in it.

Originally published in Plan B #33: back issues available here.

The Heartfelt Revenge of Lou Barlow

kicking_k — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 15:40:51 +0000

OK, so clearly you have memorised (at least) one piece of ridiculous hyperbole regarding
yrself. Please quote your favourite here.
“‘Sebadoh fail to excite’ – a headline over a live photo of me, giving the audience the finger. Translated from Dutch. I know that’s not hyberbole, but it’s the only specific quote I can remember.”

What is the biggest misconception about you?
“Some people have the impression that I am a sarcastic asshole. It dogs me.”

The most over-used adjective(s) about your sound?
“Lo-fi…”

What word never gets used that should?
“Gumption.”

What was the most heinous lie you ever told in an interview?
“I don’t know, could be blocking it out…”

Were you caught?
“Probably.”

Were there any repercussions?
“Life is a series of repercussions, right?”

What was your worst interview and/or photoshoot experience?
“I went on a press tour to do interviews in Europe, for my new Folk Implosion album. The record had clearly flopped and was getting tepid reviews. One interviewer greeted me with ‘I don’t like your new album’. I tried to convince him otherwise, on tape, and felt pathetic afterwards.”

What was the weirdest?
“A guy in Vancouver, Nardwuar, interviewed the Folk Implosion for his TV show while eating a speciality sandwich that had three pounds of meat on it – sausage, hamburger, ham and cheese. He was sweating and visibly uncomfortable doing so.”

Correct your worst misquote.
“Don’t remember quotes, but once a guy thought I drew a penis and testicles on a CD I signed for him. He was angry about it, too. At that time, I had a loopy, John Lennon wannabe trademark that
I signed everything with. It did look like a cock and balls. I haven’t used it since.”

Has music criticism ever actually helped improve yr work, even only in spotting a mistake or providing a second opinion?
“Criticism is good. It hurts. I avoid reviews now, but I used to seek them out.”

If you were a music magazine editor, who would you feature and why?
“Forgotten bands. Hardcore bands, proto-indie bands, Sixties garage bands.”

Who would you put on the cover?
“The Neats, from early Eighties Boston.”

What do you do when a band you don’t like cite you as an influence?
“Keep still. Say nothing.”

Do you ever google yourself?
“Sure, especially when I first got a computer and was drinking heavily.”

What’s the best/worst/weirdest experience resulting from this?
“I was happy my website popped up on the first page.”

What’s the favourite of your record covers and why?
“Bakesale by Sebadoh: me reaching into a toilet as a toddler. I like ugly covers in general but that one is alright. It has the date on it too, which is nice.”

What does it, y’know, say about you?
“Eternally reaching into the toilet I s’pose…the truth is in what you leave behind?”

What brilliant (at the time) ideas regarding ‘direction’ or presentation or whatever are you now glad you never followed?
“I followed every idea it seems. I only wish sometimes that I was more single-minded.”

Have you ever made a music video that actually expressed something about the band, or has it all been empty multi-media gimmickry and super-superficial posturing?
“Every video I’ve done, apart from a high budget affair – ‘Willing To Wait’ by Sebadoh. And a Folk Implosion video that a contest-winning fan did. All others were directed or co-directed by myself and my partners. In the Sebadoh ‘Skull’ vid I carry an amp through a river – that expressed a whole lot about the band…”

Are there any territories where you’ve never had any success?
“Africa, Asia.”

Why d’you think this is the case?
“The music I’ve made, being lyrically centered and undanceable, doesn’t leap the language barriers.”

Where are you biggest, geographically?
“I think we are are, in a way, equally semi-popular in most of the English-speaking world.”

What product/service/organisation would you allow your music to advertise and why?
“I take all advertising money. I consider it reparations for the damage TV and media has inflicted on me. I’m trying to raise a family, I don’t give a fuck who wants to use my music. Being pious works for other people – it’s sexy and admirable. Not for me. It’s anarchy out there.”

Have you ever covered a song ‘cause you think you can do it better than the original?
“No. I covered a Ratt song that should, theoretically, be better than the original – but it’s not. I cover songs to warm up my voice. Never to outdo.”

Have you ever covered a song by a band you didn’t like?
“Yeah, but for weddings…”

Who’s the worst (or weirdest) band you ever supported?
“Gun Club weren’t so good when Dinosaur Jr supported them back in the mid Eighties.”

Who was the worst (or weirdest) that ever supported you?
“Harry Pussy open for us back in the mid-Nineties. They were weird and awful. We loved them, but they put the audience in a terrible mood.”

What’s the most actually fairly insane thing a fan has done to impress you?
“Tattoos. Anything other than family names, military affiliations or prison-related events seem insane to me.”

What’s the worst question you’ve ever been asked? What was your answer?
“‘Where are you biggest, geographically?’ You got my answer…”

Originally published in Plan B #33: back issues available here.

Robert Wyatt: back catalogue reissues (Domino)

Jon Dale — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 15:12:02 +0000

Robert Wyatt: Rock Bottom; Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard; Nothing Can Stop Us; Old Rottenhat; Dondestan Revisited; Shleep; EPs; Cuckooland; Live At Drury Lane (Domino)

OK. Robert Wyatt. The first thing you should know is, every note on these records is a note you should hear. The second thing is, Wyatt’s masterpiece, Rock Bottom, heads up this canon: a gorgeously unsettling underwater song suite, it’s limber, loving, sweet, turbulent, adrift on seesawing drones and exceptionally lithe ensemble playing, and deeply affecting. Got that? Good.

The legend of Wyatt rests on his first group, Soft Machine, and on Rock Bottom; but ultimately, this new reissue series highlights Wyatt’s few truly solo records, Old Rottenhat and Dondestan. Recorded entirely alone, they document his struggle with the global politics of the time, and his discomfort with the grim reality of ‘being English’ under Thatcher’s rule. They’re knitted together with knotty piano, cheap keyboards and Wyatt’s pattering percussion, which lends them the air of homespun arts and crafts, framing Wyatt’s sharpest invective against the global reach and repercussions of capital and Empire. ‘The Age Of Self’, for example, is eerily prescient of neo-liberalism’s rule (“There’s people doing ‘frightfully well’, there’s others on the shelf/But never mind the second kind, this is The Age Of Self”).

But Wyatt’s not partisan – he’s aware of the hard left’s internal struggles. ‘The Age of Self’ mentions media magnate Robert Maxwell and Marxism Today editor Martin Jacques in the same breath; Dondestan’s ‘CP Jeebies’ comments on factional behaviour in the Communist Party.

Borrowing from Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’, Old Rottenhat’s ‘Gharbzadegi’ tackles cultural imperialism: listening to Wyatt’s Eighties records, it struck me that here Wyatt performs ‘solo’ but assembles a cast of absent collaborators whose songs he interprets in response to cultural imperialism. I can think of few other performers with Wyatt’s reach: who else has taken in songs from Peter Gabriel (on activist Steve Biko), or Elvis Costello and Clive Langer (on the everyday impact of the Falklands War), alongside songs written by La Nueva Canción singers Violeta Parra and Victor Jara, and Cuban folk singer Pablo Milanes? Who else would write a beautifully mournful song named ‘Amber and the Amberines’, after the US’s dress rehearsal for full-scale invasion of Grenada and the Grenadines, in part hymning Grenadian Marxist political party, the New Jewel Movement?

If this is heady stuff, it’s because these were heady times. But what times aren’t? Listening back to this music can feel eerie, not just because Wyatt’s voice is so close in your ear, but because the songs are reminders, rejoinders, diary entries – journalism, but not pejoratively so. If you need a crash course (or a hard lesson) in how to do politics in pop properly, here you have it – and if anyone tells you the writing is simplistic, the messages dated, then remind them that clarity communicates, and that in the Eighties, Wyatt was rare in his address of the ‘wounds of Empire’ via a clutch of songs and a wheezy old keyboard.

After these moments of loneliness, Shleep and Cuckooland return Wyatt to communal creation: with figures like Brian Eno, Annie Whitehead, Paul Weller and Phil Manzanera on board, it’s a good crew. The politics are still there, but there’s more address of the personal, the domestic. They’re essential, of course. But for now, I keep returning to Wyatt’s Eighties period, for its sharpness, its sadness, and its political fury. Because these records contain songs that, in their baldness and honesty about the conditions of humanity, about the things people do to one another, about the abuse metered out in the name of Empire, tell you more about the world – your world – than most any other music I’ve heard. And Wyatt’s found a way to navigate this world with a grace and an intelligence that’s directly reflected in his songs: in their generosity and character and wit, but also in their unflinching, unsparing commentary.

So hear them all, and live a better life.

Originally published in Plan B #39: back issues available here.

Peter Rehberg: Work For GV 2004-2008 (Editions Mego)

Louis Pattison — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 18:07:51 +0000

Laptop noise auteur and Editions Mego owner Peter ‘Pita’ Rehberg’s working relationship with the French performance artist and puppeteer Gisele Vienne began back in 2001, when the pair collaborated on Vienne’s Showroom Dummies piece, a performance that saw humans lock limbs with mannequins and waltz across the floor – but who was tugging the strings?

Since, Rehberg and Vienne have maintained a creative relationship, most recently with Kindertotenlieder, a morbid theatre piece translatable as ‘Songs For Dead Children’, peopled with life-sized puppets and winter beasts plucked from the annals of Austrian mythology, and scored by Rehberg and Stephen O’Malley’s electronic doom project KTL. At first sight, Vienne’s use of puppets reminded me of the Chapman Brothers’ plastic mannequins, dolls mutated with nose-dicks and orifice-mouths. Here, though, the horror is latent rather than actual, the child-sized dummies stood like hollow shells to a lost innocence, reminiscent (if you don’t mind jumping mediums) of Philip Best’s disquieting photomontages, with their glassy-eyed orphans and yellowing shots of children trussed up in awkward Victorian finery.

Work For GV 2004-2008 concentrates on three earlier collaborations between Vienne, Rehberg, and American transgressive author Dennis Cooper: 2004’s I Apologise, 2005’s Une Belle Enfant Blonde, and 2008’s Jerk. Rehberg’s scores walk the familiar territory of glitch and gloom, although, at times, these pieces have a musical quality that much of Mego’s hyper-processed computer music lacks. ‘Slow Investigation’ initially recalls Throbbing Gristle, with its horn-like tones moving in a blanched waltz; although closer to its centre it takes on an almost orchestral complexity, forming movements from bubbling synths, processor chatter and severed wires spitting sparks. Unexpectedly beautiful, meanwhile, is ‘Boxes And Angles’, eleven minutes of stuttering, euphoric synthesiser oddly reminiscent of Fuck Buttons: stick a beat on it and it’d keep the ravers happy.

Three tracks, meanwhile, feature spoken word appearances by Cooper that investigate those old transgressive humbugs of decadent sex and violence. ‘ML6’ is woozy and dream-like, hallucinogenically grotesque in its lurid details, its echoing synths gradually building to a barrage of drone decorated by pluming, oscillating high tones. It’s a dousing, or a waterboarding. ‘ML3’, meanwhile, overlays a throbbing generator drone with a rambling, gut-spilling pen letter from a long lost lover, breathless with apologies and self-loathing, excuses and desperate justifications (yet somehow, ominously, a future reconciliation seems likely). Out of the context of Vienne’s pieces, these drift free of a place in any specific narrative; but after repeated listens you begin to anticipate – slightly fear – his sinister arrival, stalking in on soft words and neatly measured syllables, with evil in mind.

Work For GV 2004-2008 might not be the definitive Rehberg work: part of possessing the skill and flexibility to shape yourself round new mediums and unusual collaborators inevitably involves a willingness to give up something of yourself in the process. These pieces, though, confirm Rehberg’s skill in the creation of mood and the fusing of distant disciplines, yanking computer music out of the realms of arid abstraction and infusing it with a very human, emotional energy, adrift in a liminal limbo between horror and euphoria.

Originally published in Plan B #39. Back issues available here.