A ghost is exorcised

For a long time, I have managed to suppress memoried of a band called Living in a Box who promoted their album 'Living in a box' with the single 'Living in a box' (in 1987), but, strangely to report, Wilco, almost the antithesis of those 1980s' one-hit-wonders-thank-God' have made me think of them, with the first song of their new album 'Wilco', off their new album 'Wilco'; I have managed to forget completely and quite contentedly what the eponymous song by the earlier exponents of the triple-decker-name sounded like, but I am pretty sure it did not start off sounding like the Velvet Undergound's 'Waiting for the man', like the new example does.

Wilco came from the ashes of the very alt-country Uncle Tupelo, and didn't move too far for their debut, 'A.M.' (1995), although 'Being there' (1996) and, in particular, 'Summerteeth' (1999, to my mind, their masterpiece) were near-perfect collections of pop gems and lovely ballads (of which much more to follow), but then they went a bit experimental (2002's 'Yankee Hotel Foxtrot') and then very bloody experimental (2005's decidedly odd and a bit scary 'A ghost is born') and then retreated from the future to the 1970s (in 2007, if you can follow) with 'Sky blue sky'. In between they did two mixed but generally lovely albums of versions of unreleased Woodie Guthrie songs with Billy Bragg ('Mermaid Avenue volumes 1 and 2') and a good live album ('Kicking television').

They have really covered a lot of ground in their music, from country to Radiohead and, while they have gone through quite a few line-up changes, their mainstay, Jeff Tweedy, always struck me as a basically decent and very talented guy (as evidenced by the pretty brutally honest documentary 'I am trying to break your heart' and some recordings of live solo shows I have seen and heard).

My main concern today, or rather source or some excitement, is that Tweedy seems to have found what I regard as his true voice again. Missing from the last several albums has been that vulnerable hoarse quiet voice that was just made for quiet love-struck songs, not mad computer-driven hard drives of noise with lashings of angry guitar bolted on top. I mean the voice that starts 'Via chicago' with the wonderful line 'I dreamed about killing you last night and it felt alright to me', as seen below:

I mean the voice that sings the wonderful tribute to Paul Westerberg of the Replacements that is
'The lonely one' :

And I definetely mean the one that sings 'We're just friends'

I downloaded the new album Friday and listened to it in the car yesterday, and might as well have just spotted a space-ship in terms of my reaction when I heard 'You and I' and knew that wonderful voice was back again, long-lost but never forgotten. And then there was 'You never know' ('pure 'Summerteeth' pop excellence, existential clouds banished by piercing sunshine), and more downbeat familiarity in 'Country disappeared' and 'Everlasting Everything'.

Put in such familiar territory, the experimental flashes of songs like 'Bull black nova' are far less intimidating and much more likely to gain my sympathy. I had started to worry a little that no album of 2009 so far had really excited me, but this may just be the one.

Welcome back Jeff. You have been missed.

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The arcade fires back

In this blog, I have meandered previously about the Genius function of iTunes and its apparent obsession with Arcade Fire. After months of watching it dutifully and predictably insert their songs into the playlist for just about any song I could think of, I decided today to do an experiment; this is sort of part of one of my day jobs (how obscure can I get?) and so it seemed a natural idea which, as with many ideas, mainly made me wonder why I hadn't thought of it earlier.

I would do what product development people refer to as reverse engineering; I would feed it an Arcade Fire song and see what happened. Perhaps I would confuse it; perhaps my PC would catch fire; perhaps Steve Jobs would knock on my door and ask me to stop. The excitement was almost unbearable as I started by selecting the sacrificial track to be fed to the gaping maw of the great dispersed cloud of electronic musical matchmaking that is Genius. As I have said before, what really gets to me about its incessant shoving of their songs under my nose and into my ears (I have really odd-shaped headphones) is that I am just not that big a fan; I can see the point, and sort of see what the fuss is about, but they just don't really touch or excite me on anything beyond a technical level. They are like modern art or classical music; I know I should appreciate them, and can see why others get excited, but the passion is just not there.

Anyway, I picked 'Ocean of noise', which I am slightly less unenthusiastic about than many of the others (talk about damning with faint praise...). The next earth-shatteringly important decision was whether to run Genius on my select iPod library (if 4760 songs can count as select) or on my PC library (closer to 10,000); the greater range and randomness of the latter, plus the fact that I could get 75 songs in the list (as opposed to 25 on the iPod - sample size really counts in proper research!) led me to run it on the PC, and I clicked on the icon with trembling fingers as sweat gently beaded my brow. Okay, not really. But I did regard the results with some mild interest, and looked again, and then arranged by artist for a clearer look, and got a surprise.

Genius did not sift through my collection in a very widespread way, but picked several tracks each off a very very small sample of the 1003 albums in my library, and showed a clear preference for those with DNL marked on their charts, as it were.

Let me explain the DNL concept. I have had a subscription for the eMusic site for around 2 years, which gives me 65 downloads a month, and some months I have got plenty of good stuff (new or old). In other months, though, I have (usually just before the roll-over date when I would lose my allowance) found nothing new or old which grabs me and, in mild panic, experimented with something I have heard of, but not heard. Inevitably, many of these, due to the overall pressure of new material being thrown at me, have ended up temporarily or permanently in the DNL (Downloaded, Never Listened) file. Of course, some DNL albums were loans from others or occasionally more mainstream purchases, but I reckon most came from eMusic.

Anyway, this is where Genius seemed to do much of its rummaging. DNL albums it proferred for my contemplation, like an eager dog holding up a dead fish, included:


Writer's Block - Peter, Bjorn and John (5 tracks)
Armchair apocrypha - Andrew Bird (4 tracks)
Ga Ga Ga Ga - Spoon (4 tracks)
Favourite Worst Nightmare - Arctic Monkeys (4 tracks, maybe picking up a clue here - two words, first begins with 'Arc'?)
Jukebox - Cat Power (3 tracks)
Robbers and Cowards - Cold War Kids (2 tracks)
The Gulag Aorcestar - Beiruit (2 tracks)
Evil Urges - My Morning Jacket (2 tracks)
Icky Thump - the White Stripes (2 tracks)

On a more positive note which suggests either that it is getting to know me, or that Arcade Fire fans who run Genius have good taste, it included six tracks from the National's 'Boxer' (plus 'Secret meeting', 'All the wine' and 'Mr November' from 'Alligator'), as well as picking out Editor's 'An end has a start' (4 tracks), Wilco's 'Blue Sky Blue' (my least favourite of their albums, but represented by 4 tracks), TV on the Radio's 'Dear Science' (3 tracks), Kings of Leon's 'Because of the Times' (2 tracks), Mildlake's 'Trials of Van Occupanther' (3 tracks) and Fleet Foxes (2 tracks).

Random individual songs to fill out the list (surprisingly few) came from British Sea Power ('Do you like rock music?' - are they the British Arcade Fire or is it vice versa?), Calexico ('Cruel'), The Dodos ('Fools'), Franz Ferdinand ('Eleanor put your boots on'), Overkill River ('Lost coastlines'), the Shins ('Black wave' - maybe for the ocean link?), and Vampire Weekend ('I stand corrected' - perhaps a knowing wink from Genius or am I getting paranoid?).

And, of course, with a certain crushing inevitability, like death or taxes, the list included 7 songs by a certain Canadian band whose initials might just be A.F. (Arty F**kers?), and three tracks of an E.P. of theirs with a certain gentleman whose initials are D.B.

Before I finish this post, I have realised it could end up being completely vanilla, with nothing but text and, as I am trying to avoid this, I better include one video, and of course there is only one option here:

So, to conclude, what have I learned about Genius from my experiment? It is infinintely more loyal to albums more than to either tracks or artists, it is relatively conservative in that it does not cast its net too wide, and it is obsessed with getting me to listen to more than the 20% of my collection I almost exclusively take out for a spin; it is in turns a nerd trying to change my tastes by whining at me, a stalker rummaging through my wheelie bin, and a friend trying to drop hints and gently steer me to safer waters of musical taste. I'm just not sure its all that clever, that's all. Then again, it probably thinks I am pretty dumb too for paying for all those unheard albums!

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My first non-music post!

When I started this blog, around 6 months ago, I fully intended it to be a mix of posts about all the aspects of popular culture I enjoy, including games, books, movies, and music, although I sort of knew it would tend to be biased towards music. However, 20 or so posts later I have not got off the subject of music yet, although I have read quite a few books I enjoyed (particularly Ben Goldacre's 'Bad Science'), and have really enjoyed FEAR2 on my PC over the last while, and even seen a few movies, mostly on DVD, and caught up on some TV box sets (special honourable mention for 'The thick of it'); according to the plan, all of the above should warrant their own posts at some stage, when I have got my outpouring of musical musings into some kind of temporary equilibrium (maybe next year....).

Anyway, time to break into the obsessive stuff about alternative country, the Cure, the National, alt-country and the 1980s with my official first movie-related post; it is about Star Trek, which I have recently seen and really enjoyed.



Now, let's be clear, while I fit many of the formal medical criteria for full-blown nerdiness, I was never a Trekkie, and never even that pushed about the series or movies, even to such an extent that I, for example, actually watched any of them. I was clearly a (star) 'War'rior rather than a Trekker (think I just added another tick to the nerd chart there), which leads me neatly to a short diversion in the direction of a pretty cool parody I found (of course) on Youtube (and I really honestly have only the vaguest idea who the Trek characters are, and couldn't name any bar Picard).

So, when I heard they were making a new movie, I was not particularly excited (to say the least) although the involvement of J.J. Abrams did draw more notice than I would otherwise have given the enterprise (deliberately no capital used), as he does bring something quite cool to that which he touches (the Nerdas Touch?); I thought Cloverfield, for example, was overall a very interesting phenomenon from hype through campaign to the final really really cool inclusion in the background of the final shot of something hitting the ocean almost off-shot (putting in something like that which very few eagle-eyed viewers would notice without forewarning or a DVD pause button appeals to my inner fruitcake quite a bit).

Then, the reviews were positive (including my great advisor, Mark Kermode on the BBC) and I decided to give it a shot, bringing my 9-year-old son along for his first big loud movie that featured real people. And we both really really enjoyed it!

This post is beginning to go on too long so I will just fire out some of the things I liked most:

• The casting, which seemed overall very apt, and everyone seemed to sort of fit with my vague notions of what the Star Trek cast made young and cool should look like; Eric Bana kept reminding me of someone, which I eventually surprised myself by concluding was Tom Cruise!


• The fact that everyone basically seemed to be having fun on screen, and in a highly infection way which seeped off the screen


• The scene where Kirk is sort of smuggled on board the Enterprise and MyCoy keeps trying to alternately cause and cure various ailments (numbtongue!) to build a cover story


• The fact that the Enterprise got a real 'Millenium Falcon at the Death Star' moment at the final battle, swooping in to save the day


• The way the movie was stuffed with nods and references for the true fans but not in such an overt way as to (green) alienate the causual viewer (like me)


• The many great lines (I particularly liked Spock's comment on Kirk's surprising comment to offer aid to the villain before his grusome end), 'Who was that pointy-eared bastard?' (Kirk)/ 'I don't know, but I liked him' (McCoy) and the undeniably heroic challenge 'Your father was captain of a starship for twelve minutes. He saved 800 lives, including your mothers and yours. I dare you to do better'.
  

I guess one fitting way to end posts about movies is the trailer (still working out how not to write a post about music), so let's give that a shot:

And there endeth my first movie-related post, although more will follow (eventually).

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Rare endangered sparkling mouse-horse hybrid with flaming lips snapped by David Lynch, but may be extinct

Uber-wierd film director David Lynch has released a film in which an uber-wierd film director manages to get two very different musicians together to record an album with lots of other cool collaborators, but then a row with their record company meant it was buried, and eventually likely to be released with a blank CD in a case containing a booklet with lots of the director's photos; so the album didn't exist, but then you could listen to it on the web. Throw in a few dwarfs, dream sequences and surreal visual interludes, and actresses playing multiple roles interchangably and you would have a typical Lynch film, except that this isn't a film, it's for real.

The artists are Sparklehorse and Danger Mouse (of Gnarls Barkley and the 'Grey Album' which blended the Beatles with hip-hop) and the album was called 'Dark night of the soul' (another name almost ridiculoulsy primted to make me interested), and featured tracks with the Flaming Lips, Frank Black, Vic Chesnutt, Suzanne Vega and many more. It can be heard in its entirety, or track by track, here, although I am not sure if this will remain active indefinetely.

The album is very good, although it is somewhat disconcerting for me to have to listen to it only on my PC, unable to wrench it free and embrace it fully in my iPod and earphones. The opener 'Revenge' with the Flaming Lips is my favourite so far, sounding very like what I imagine Pink Floyd might sound like if I ever actually listened to any of their stuff (I have a feeling this circular logic suggests I should do that soon....), and 'Daddy's gone' with Sparklehorse and Nina Persson (the Cardigans) is very nice too.

I must admit not to being a big fan of the type of music Dangermouse would have been involved in, but I have always had a soft spot for Mark Linkous and Sparklehorse. Linkous is the main force of the band, and releases albums which blend electronica, strange sound effects and distorted vocals with a country edge and a string of guests, from Tom Waits and PJ Harvey to many of those mentioned on 'Dark night of the soul'. He released his debut, snappily titled 'Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot' in 1995 but, a year later, nearly cut his career short with a massive drugs overdose in a London hotel which nearly killed him and left him in a wheelchair for six months.

His music is often compared to that of the Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev, but he does not go for either the science-fiction humour of the former or the spaced psychadelia of the latter, but steers his own course with a blend of wierdness and a particularly sweet vulnerability and strain of heartache which often bubbles up through the odd textures of his songs like a soft side he tries to suppress but which keeps breaking through.

His finest moment for me is 'Maria's little elbows' from 'Good morning spider', in which he sings lines like 'Sometimes I feel I've got the emptiest arms in the whole world' in a way which would touch even the stoniest hearts and where the chorus is basically the word 'Loneliness' repeated several times hauntingly.

I can't find a clip of this song on-line, but my next favourite of his is 'Comfort me' from his next album 'It's a wonderful life' (and all the more valued for nearly having been extinguished by drugs, I guess), which can be seen below:

I love the drum patterns of that song, and the song, actually, has a very comforting feel, at least for me. A short piece with Linkous talking about his music can be seen below:

A typical Sparklehorse song may incorporate static and snatches of other songs, as if a radio is being tuned in or out, foul language, and vocals from different planes and planets. Sometimes this can be somewhat disconcerting (like a gentler version of Tom Waits when he is in particularly noisy mad form) but sometimes it can be sweet and wonderful. It is another example of an artist with a fundamental duality in their output, like Nick Cave (tender lover/scary shouter) and the Cure (lovable pop/existential doom) which I find really interesting.

Anyway, the album is called 'Dark night of the soul', and it is there now, and may not be there forever (perhaps this is just a dream sequence in a David Lynch film, and my hair is acutally standing several inches off my head while a dog runs away with my severed hand), so check it out, or Frank might get you.

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REMembering: the Green world tour 20 years on

I discovered REM in 1988 or so, with the release of 'Green' (what a bloody album, practically every song a classic piece of REM, and ushering in a new era of acoustic beauty on 'You are the everything' which they would later mine to extremes) and buying around the same time the catch-up compilation of old stuff called 'Eponymous'. I rapidly bought up most of their own catalogue (on cassette!) and, in June 1989, was delighted to get the chance to see them live in Dublin on the Green world tour. This was a fantastic concert (the Go-Betweens supported just to up the wonderfulness quotient to quite extreme and frankly dangerous levels for me), and a film of the tour was released on video (and later DVD) as 'Tourfilm', seen below:

The Dublin concert didn't have the video backdrops, but the basic principle was pretty close, and it remains probably the one of the best gigs I have ever been to. I still recall them coming out and launching fairly heavily into 'Finest worksong', and feeling briefly disappointed, just for a flash, that this was going to be a loud distant impersonal performance, but this gradually evaporated as the concert became more and more intimate (even in the warehouse-like surroundings of Dublin's RDS), until Michael Stipe stood before a chair, stripped to the waist, and started hitting it with a stick for the start of 'World leader pretend', still probably one of my favourite REM songs ever (I love the descending drums and the bit towards the end where the drums start and the singing and piano rise to the fore in a beautiful oasis of calm, much longer and better on album that live), and captured below after a pretty hard-hitting (but wonderful) version of 'Turn you inside out' (dedicated to the Exxon corporation!); 'World leader pretend' starts around the 4:45 mark.

One of my other favourite REM songs (in fact, possibly at the top of the list) is 'Fall on me', and the 'Tourfilm' version is below:

I will include just one more 'Tourfilm' clip here, of 'I believe', which features another really cool intro, which was something of a speciality for these concerts.

The general visuals for 'Tourfilm', as may be judged from these clips, are really cool, with very arty (but not too much) camerawork and images, and mostly black and white footage, and the band in great form with Stipe majestic in his splendid wierdness, with hair and eyes to scare the world. The intro to 'Tourfilm' in particular deserves to be seen for the captions and spoof warnings shown on the big screens apparently as people entered the concert,as does the very end. as they finish up to the Velvet Underground's 'After hours'. Unfortunately, it is not possible to travel back in time 20 years to this wonderful concert on an uncharacteristically hot Dublin summer night, but it is easy to buy the DVD, including here! Some final thoughts on REM and this tour and DVD:

• The day after the gig, I met Mike Mills on the street in Dublin, while proudly wearing my new 'Green world tour' t-shirt (me, not him) and with my ticket stub in my pocket, but was having a row with my girlfried of the time and failed, to my eternal regret, to ask him to sign either (I do, however, have a Go-betweens t-shirt signed by both Grant McLennan and Robert Forster);
  
• The day I bought the DVD, by then a postgraduate student, I took the day off and watched the film around 5 times in a row;


• 'I believe' REM were never quite the same again, and were at their peak during this tour. Certainly, a concert 5 years or so later during the 'Monster' tour in Slane (a large Irish outdoor venue) was immensely disappointing, and I think they never quite recovered from the twin losses of Michael Stipe's hair and Bill Berry (with the notable exception of the staggering 'Leaving new york');
  
• The best other REM live artefact I have come across is a very old bootleg cassette of them playing live in McCabe’s Guitar Shop in the mid-1980s with a bunch of guests, most notably Natalie Marchant, then of 10,000 Maniacs, with whom Michael did a wonderfully funny duet of ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ and the Velvet Underground’s ‘Sunday morning’ (it should be noted that they were each singing one of these songs, at the same time), blending into a child’s counting song. The cassette has long since given up the ghost, but I am sure there must be an electronic version available somewhere, and some day I will find it. While I hunted for it on Youtube recently, I did find the following gems, firstly with Michael, Natalie and Peter Gabriel doing the latter's 'Red rain' together, and secondly with Billy Bragg standing in for Peter in a version of John Prine's 'Hello in there' which I will finish up with:
  
  
  
  
  

As a final final thought, I remember a line from an interview with Stipe around the late 1980s in which he was asked if he and Natalie were the Kylie (Minogue) and Jason (Donovan) of intelligent adult rock, to which he replied 'who the fuck are Kylie and Jason?'.

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Sweetheart of everyone's rodeo

Return to the new west (part 4)

I had heard of Emmylou Harris before 'Sounds of the New West', of course (Irish folk singer Christy Moore had a song a long long time ago about the Lisoonvarna matchmaking/music festival which name-checked her), and I had bought her 'Wrecking Ball' CD some years ago, having known the Neil Young song and also because hearing some of the songs on radio perked my interest.

I have since bought several of her solo CDs, which all feature some lovely songs (particularly, I think, 'Red Dirt Girl'), but I still believe her greatest talent, as Gram Parsons perhaps was the first to recognise, many years ago, is in lending her unique vocal talents to other artists, particularly male ones, in duets. After Gram's death, her work has been a fairly prolific mix of such duets and solo work, and some of her solo work is a bit, for me, too traditional slow country (see a good overview of her career on Wikipedia here). A very old clip of her in action with Johnny Cash is below:

In the last ten years or so, she has become a sort of fairy godmother to the whole alt-country scene, appearing on albums all over the place to bestow her blessing (and implicitly that of the great god Gram) on these newcomers who unapologietically worship at her (and his) feet. My favourite Emmylou duets are 'We are nowhere and it's now' with Bright Eyes and 'Oh my sweet Carolina' with Ryan Adams. She has also guested with a few more mature souls, including 'Coming around' with Steve Earle and 'Beachcombing' with Mark Knopfler (okay, so he doesn't quite fit the list, but she did record an entire album with him).

She also does a wonderful duet with Elvis Costello on 'Heart-shaped bruise' on his album 'The delivery man', as well as this lovely version of 'Love Hurts' (originally by Gram himself, of course):

I will come back to Emmylou later in this series of posts, as Uncut awarded her the singular honour of two songs in the 'Sounds of the new west' CD (fitting really, given her overwhelming mentoring role in the whole movement), but for now, I will leave with two versions of her doing 'Wrecking Ball', the first a fairly straightforward live version, and the second the album version set very poignantly to footage of the devastation of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

As well as her role in guiding and inspiring the alt-country movement, comment must of course be made of the pure beauty both of her music and herself; she is really a queen with a level of sheer class that cannot be ignored, the sweetheart of everyone's rodeo.

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A love song like the way its meant to be

My 9-year-old son has just got his first iPod, and while I am really really resisting the urge to load it with Joy Division and some of my darker favourites, I have put him onto the Killers. Now he loves them and, as a result, they are playing all the time, and, as a further and related result, I have somewhat belatedly accepted that they are (in moderation) quite a wonderful pop band, sort of a Duran Duran for now, with real songs and real instruments and real talent, working on their own terms in a pop melieu (did I really just type those words!) and doing it rather well indeed. Every album has a few duds, but those that hit the mark do so quite impressively (for example, 'This river is wild', 'All these things that I've done', 'My list', 'I can't stay', 'Tranquilize', 'Spaceman', 'Mr brightside', 'Bones', 'Read my mind').



Today, I just want to focus on one song of theirs I was listening to (from the compilation 'Sawdust'), and it is actually a cover version, of Dire Straits' 'Romeo and Juliet', which can be seen here:

While this cover version is very respectable, this is quite simply a wonderful song in its original form. For me, Dire Straits represent something quite old and usually dull. with prolonged guitar solos and bandana-wearing band members, but this song stands out as something quite uniquely romantic and yearning, and the chorus is for me one of the most romantic ever written. The version on the live album 'Alchemy' is my favourite (hear it here), and the version below is not quite as good, but captures the song well.

As a final note on the song (no pun intended), the Indigo Girls did a nice version of it on 'Rites of passage' (resisting, presumably, the temptation to rename it 'Juliet and Juliet'), and I found the following solo version (by Amy Ray) of it on Youtube below.

This, in all its incarnations, genuinely is a love song, like the way it's meant to be.

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