Sunday, February 22, 2009

From Australia with love for the Go-Betweens



I am now in Australia, for a week’s work, and think this is the perfect occasion to blog about Australian music and the bands from the vast country which have made most impact on me. Perhaps I am faintly intoxicated by the move from dreary recessed cold Ireland to a warm, bright, friendly, vibrant country (big impression made!), and the giddy horizontal vertigo of being so so far from home, but I have been listening to a strict diet of Australian music (carefully constructed Antipodean playlist) and it just fits, and much of it is great.



While I may come back later in the week to some broader thoughts on other bands, I must obviously start here with the Go-Betweens (see also Allmusic Guide page here), surely the most magnificently beautiful band to come from that, or perhaps any, continent. Appearing in the early 1980s as a collaboration of two physically and stylistically contrasting singer-songwriters, Grant McLennan (ostensibly the sunnier one, unassuming and not very rock-star-like) and Robert Forster (contrastingly tall, dark and serious, looks like the rockstar above). They released a series of albums as a band in the 1980s, then split and went on to two parallel solo careers (of which McLennan’s did more for me, although Forster’s solo debut, ‘Danger in the past’, backed by various Bad Seeds and recorded in Germany, is a moody classic), before reuniting in the last ten years for two new albums together; fresh critical acclaim and a new audience were found, but the new beginning was cut tragically short when McLennan suddenly died in May 2006.

The Go-Betweens speciality was bittersweet songs of love but with an edge or twist, set against achingly beautiful, usually acoustic, backing; they were once described as having a 'striped sunlight' sound (which became the name of their love CD and DVD) and somehow this just fits perfectly - bright, but not all the way, shadows on a beautiful picture. Somehow I think this may be a metaphor for Australia itself, hot and bright and sun-drenched, but with a troubled undercurrent of violent history and danger, from blazing bushfires to a million lethal life-forms.

Of all their striped sunlight, none shone brighter for me than ‘Bye bye pride’, from 1987’s ‘Tallulah’ . While I have made it tediously clear in previous entries that ‘Inbetween days’ is my favourite song of all time, this is the only one that even comes close, and couldn’t sound more different. IT HAS A BLOODY OBOE SOLO ON IT! To me, ‘Bye bye pride’ is just the sound of widescreen joy, large with life and love, bursting at its seams with pleasure, as it builds up and up to a full-on onslaught of energy and warmth at its climax. Lyrically simultaneously evocative yet mysterious, conjuring images of warm nights in far-off place with sad lovers splitting painfully (‘took the shirt of his back, the eyes from his head, and left him for dead...didn’t know someone could be so lonesome, didn’t know a heart could be tied up and held for ransom’). It is very scarily close to perfect, and I absolutely love that song.

Tthe official video, which I cannot believe I have only just discovered thanks to the miracle of Youtube, is here:



Their back catalogue is adorned with other gems, like ‘Right here’, ‘Spring rain’, ‘Finding you’, 'Batchelor Kisses' and ‘When people are dead’. Their best album is probably ’16 Lover’s Lane’, which contains their most commercially successful song (‘Streets of your town’) but also two further stone-cold acoustic masterpieces, ‘I’m alright’ and ‘Quiet heart’, the latter like a slower but incredibly stately and elegant cousin of 'Bye bye pride', replacing the oboe solo with a harmonica one of almost equal grace (see [unofficial?] video here).

I first encountered them in 1989, although I had heard of them before, when I saw them support REM in Dublin during the ‘Green’ world tour; knowing they would be playing that night, I bought ’16 Lover’s Lane’, and was getting to know the songs which helped, and they were incredible. I still remember, although not which of them, Grant or Robert introducing ‘Clouds’ with ‘this is my favourite song’, and the live version with extra verses and pared back instrumentation is well worth tracking down (see it here).

In addition, the ‘Striped Sunlight Sound’ live DVD includes a beautiful session of these two guys, old friends, sitting together with acoustic guitars in someone’s house, just playing and chatting about their history, and is a lovely way to remember Grant (see them do 'Bye bye pride' in that session here).

It is debatable whether their latterday reunion ever reached the musical heights of their earlier perfection, and I don’t for one think it did, but they were gathering critical acclaim and a new audience, particularly for their last album together ‘Oceans apart’; where they would have gone after will never be known. They were certainly not suddenly going to become the biggest group in the world or anything, but perhaps even more people would have been welcomed into their shade-dappled world and have let the beauty of their songs into their hearts; as this cannot now happen, it is up to us who remember and love them to keep the flame going and the word spreading.



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Friday, February 13, 2009

This one's for me

In an unusual move, record company releases compilation seemingly personalised for pleasantly surprised Irish blogger

A strange thing happened in a music copmany a little while back. Someone proposed the idea of launching CDs specifically and uniquely tailored to individual consumers who had shown good support by buying loads of CDs and downloads over the years, and was reckoned to be owed something back in return. The CD would be designed with them in mind, and if others liked it and bought it too, even better!


The record company decided to pilot this unprecedented and pioneering scheme by picking an unspspecting blogger in Cork in Ireland who seemed to deserve, for some reason, this great honour, and decided that the obvious collaborators in this secret scheme would be his current favourite band, The National.



They and The National collected a bunch of other folks he likes (including Antony, and Sufjan Stevens and many more) to record new songs and picked some stuff he didn't know, but they really thought he would like. And then, when this was done, they picked a name which was almost comically evocative of the atmosphere of his favourite type of music, and was almost actually the same as that of a compilation tape he had made (filled with Nick Cave, Tindersticks, Joy Division and other happy ditties) almost 15 years ago. To cap it off, they decided to make the world a better place in the process by giving all the proceeds to HIV charities, to complete their selfless act. And then they launched it, and the blogger bought it, and he was a very very happy person.

This really, really happened. Some day, it might happen to you.
On getting 'Dark was the night', the first five songs I listened to, in order, were ‘So far around the band’ by The National, five times, in a row. Of course, it would be boringly predictable for me to say it is the best song on the album, but I am going to have to own up to boring predictability. It displays a new direction of sorts, still driven by Bryan’s propulsive drumming, but with a new lightness with woodwind whistling and all sorts of instruments I can’t name swirling around the song like rich perfume, while Matt’s vocals are clear and often beautifully complimented by subtle backing vocals. I really think this may yet become one of my favourite of their songs.

Of the many others, I am working my way through them and several have jumped out already, particularly by folks I didn’t know, like Buck 65 and My Morning Jacket. By the way, I think that given the general feel of the album, the term 'folk' seems broadly appropriate, although here folk has been taken in directions which many hardcore cardigan-wearing sandal-shod proponents of that genre might neither recognise nor approve of, drawing in both baroque and bar-rock, as well as electronic and even touches of rap.

Sufjan Stevens’ epic odyssey around the world of musical achievement (from his album-per-US-state master plan to his occasionally wonderful huge Christmas song boxset of a few years ago) appears to have brought him into strange territory (as evidenced on the 10-minute ‘You are the blood’) far from ‘Chicago’, while Arcade Fire’s ‘Lenin’ has a nice throwaway 80s poppiness to it. Antony and The National’s Bryce Dressner deliver a typically spine-tingling contribution, while Stuart Murdoch of Belle and Sebastian offers a lovely ‘Another Saturday’, which seems to be borrowed from a traditional air. Andrew Bird's take on the Handsome Family's gothic masterpiece 'The Giant of Illinois' is a fairly radical reworking, and a bit of a shock at first, like a head-on collision between classical music and dark dark country, but it is growing on me.

In fact, I have no doubt the coming days and weeks will draw me closer into some of the less well explored corners of this huge and dense collection but, for now, I just want to say thank you very much for this post-Christmas present, and keep up the good work!



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Tuesday, February 10, 2009

The CD that launched a thousand record collections



In May 1996, I saw in a newsagents the first issue of a new magazine about movies and music called Uncut, which I bought and liked. I have bought every issue since, and have come to trust its musical recommendations more than any other source. I cannot start to list all the bands it has introduced me to, particularly through its much-missed free CDs with collections of songs from new artists or albums (titled at various times 'Unconditionally Guaranteed' or 'The playlist'), now replaced most months by far less interesting themed compilations, some of which never even get their plastic wrapper removed.



However, of all its CDs, one stands out for eternity in my, and I bet many others', mind, and that is one which appeared in 1998 called 'Sounds of the New West', which sought to showcase the best of what has been called Alternative Country or Alt-Country. This was as far as it was possible to get from Dolly Parton and Garth Brooks and still share a planet, but still had at its sad bleeding heart some indefinable quality of Americana which meant that the only category it could somehow be shoehorned into had to have the word 'country' attached.

It wasn't my first introduction to this music; a few months previously, a rave Uncut Album of the Month review had sent me off to find and buy 'Strangers Almanac' by Whiskeytown, still probably getting my vote for one of the best albums of that whole movement (perhaps it was, for me, first love, the thrill of the new, guitars and harmonies and sadness and songs about wars and women in bars and houses on hills, but somehow filtered through an angry indie sadness not unknown to my favourite UK bands of the 1980s). I then sought out a few more which I liked from this strange new category, like Willard Grant Conspiracy's 'Flying Low', with Uncut beside me all the way, leading me gently by the hand through this unexplored musical hinterland.

So, I was sort of primed to welcome this CD when it came but, nonetheless, it blew my bloody socks off. I listened and re-listened and thought and read, and listened some more, and then I want shopping and didn't stop for most of the next decade, exploring every scrap of the territory it had provided a treasure map of, excavating under every 'x' and exploring every nook, creek and cranny.

I was not alone; several contemporaries of mine, wistfully tending our 80s record collections and looking around in suspicion at mid-90s crap like britpop and most of what passed for pop music at the time, abruptly took to this stuff like flies to dung. It was the promised land and goldrush rolled into one when we could find no new musical sustinence elsewhere; we were thirsty for new music that sated our souls and it poured and poured.

The track-listing was as follows:

01 - Hazeldine - Tarmac
02 - The Flying Burrito Brothers - Sin City
03 - Josh Rouse - Suburban Sweetheart
04 - Emmylou Harris - Wrecking Ball
05 - Pernice Brothers - Crestfallen
06 - Neal Casal - Today I'm Gonna Bleed
07 - Kate Campbell - Crazy In Alabama
08 - Willard Grant Conspiracy - Evening Mass
09 - Wagon - Two Hours Alone
10 - Freakwater - Lorraine
11 - Vic Chesnutt - Until The Led
12 - Calexico - Trigger
13 - The Handsome Family - Weightless Again
14 - Lambchop - Saturday Option
15 - Silver Jews - How To Rent A Room
16 - Will Oldham - Apocalypse, No!
17 - 16 Horsepower - Coal Black Horses
18 - The Walkabouts - On The Beach
19 - Nadine - Dark Light
20 - Emmylou Harris - Boulder To Birmingham [live]

However, something changed, just like Pulp (the only bright spot in that 1990s UK wilderness) said it would. In 2008, my favourite music was by TV on the Radio, Vampire Weekend, Glasvegas and others who could not possibly be even vaguely associated with country, no matter how alternative. Most worryingly of all, in that year many of the artists on SONW (for short) released albums.

It appears we have grown apart, and are no longer as close as we once were. Its not them, its me. But I am nearly 40 now, and instinctively I feel the reverse should be happening, that I should be heading for what seems like more mature music, not going bloody backwards. Put bluntly, this is a musical existential crisis for me; I just don't understand where it all went wrong, how we drifted apart, how first love has turned to increasingly distant respect. This is not what I ever thought would happen, and I need to understand it. As conventional therapy is not cheap these days in recession-shrouded Ireland, I am afraid I am going to have to use this blog to work it out of my system.

Over the next weeks or months, and not in every post, I am going to do a track-by-track analysis of the SONW CD, in terms of what each song meant to me, which ones I followed up, and where they led me. I want to try and draw some closure on the whole damn thing, or at least use the experience as a way to maybe explore the growth, peak and possible decline of a movement which, for a while at least, meant a hell of a lot to many folks who never went next or near to the heartlands of America which begat the music and musicians alike. Its an experiment, and it may not work, but I want to try, and if anyone ever reads this I can only hope they find it useful, if only as a case study of an odd and outgrown obsession and its strange chronicler.

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Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Grand Anthems: The National and 'Boxer'


While I have previously opined on this blog that 2008 was a great year for music, there was absolutely nothing that even came close to matching 2007’s ‘Boxer’, by The National (band homepage here), for its impact on me. This is simply one of the greatest albums I have ever heard, for completeness, mood, pace and basic unabashed magnificence.

When 2007 ground to a halt, I urgently scanned every best-of list published to confirm the obvious, that it was unanimously album of the year. Uncut magazine, with which I have a decade-long relationship of utter trust in terms of musical recommendations, and which I can think for introducing me to most of the artists I now hold dear (including The National) was the first to disappoint, indeed shock me. In The Cure’s song ‘How beautiful you are’, the narrator realises, based on their very different reactions to a chance encounter with a poor family in Paris, that he and his lover are actually far less alike than he had previously believed, and concluded that ‘no-one ever knows or loves another’; my reaction to Uncut was similarly hurt when they placed ‘Boxer’ somewhere in the mid-30s of their chart.



When Irish DJ Tom Dunne asked for listeners top three albums of the year, I asked if I could give three votes to ‘Boxer’, and said that if my entire iPod was fed into some gigantic musical blender, mixed up, and distilled down to its pure essence as one song which encompassed all I loved in music, that may well be ‘Guest Room’ (which can be heard over an unofficial fan video here); Tom read out my letter and played my song, and of course I missed it! Overall, though, the critics loved it, as can be assessed by the Metacritic analysis here.

Twelve songs, building up gradually in 'Fake Empire' (which they can be seen performing live on Letterman here) to the crescendo of 'Mistaken for Strangers' (watch the video here and live version here, from a session which yielded several good videos linked below) and maintaining the pace, before slowing it down and easing us home on the last three quieter ones. Fanfeckingtastic.

As I have raved previously, the greatest weapon in the National’s armoury is their drummer, Bryan Devendorf (fast developing a John Lennon-gone-to-seed cool), who lends their songs a unique rhythm and flavour; 'Guest Room' and 'Apartment Story' (watch some really cool acousticish performances here and here) wander all over your head led by the mysterious rumbles and crashes in tempos and changes in directions I can't begin to describe. Strangely, though, their songs where he is right to the fore from the beginning, like ‘Squalor Victoria’, are less spectacular than the ones where he kind of sneaks up with you, like ‘Fake Empire’.

The lyrics are not very decipherable or inspiring, it must be said, but I genuinely don’t care for once; enigmatic snatches like a poorly tuned radio catching snippets of someone else’s arguments is fine for me (perfect example: 'You were always wierd but I never had to hold you by the edges like I do now'). It is all about the moments, like just after the 2-minute mark in Apartment Story when the whole pace slows suddenly into a new pace to gather steam for the anthematic ending, or (again just after 2 minutes mark) in 'Guest Room' when another change in tone just takes my breath away, just before they kick into New Order mode for the final romp home. Of course, the grandest moment of all is the stretch between 1:15 and 1:45 in 'Apartment Story' where the drums build up, probably my second favourite 30 seconds of music in the world, after the first 30 seconds of the Cure's 'Inbetween Days', of course.

I have delved into the workings of this album, getting some insights through the frankly-pretty -arty-and-a-bit-wierd-for-me DVD that accompanied the Virginia EP (a little more narrative and structure would have helped this one for me, and yes I know I am a philistine), but even more through deciphering the convoluted history of some of the songs through snippets and clues scattered tentalisingly around. For example, I now have three versions, all quite different and interesting, or 'Slow Show', from the album, the Virginia EP and a Daytrotter session I found on-line (check it here). The album version is certainly the most polished (although it always make me think of U2's 'New Year's Day' played backwards) but the others have different mixes, lyrics and places of emphasis, andeffectively stand alone as great songs (there are also different live acoustic versions here and here). What other treasures and experiments lie out there (like a pretty cool video for 'Start a war' being plated in a darkened room around a table here)?

Of course, the album passed the multi-format test. While the record for this is held by Prefab Sprout's 'Steve McQueen', which meant so much to me in my late teens that I at different stages owned it on LP, tape and CD, and bought on special edition CD (with extra acoustic versions) a few years ago, I downloaded 'Boxer' from iTunes impatiently on day of release, but eventually accepted that an album that perfect needed a physical reality more solid than an electronic-only virtual life, so I bought the CD.



It strkes me that the video for 'Apartment Story' above, where the band gradually win over an initially unhearing wedding crowd until everyone is on the dancefloor (it really is a beautiful piece of cinematic video, full of naturalistic character and observation, and moments like the girl in the red shoes and the first feet tapping in perfect rhythm as the song gathers pace) is a nice metaphor for the band themselves, releasing albums noted only be a few discerning ears, championed by magazines like Uncut, until more and more people turned to listen with 'Boxer', and finally joined the crowd.

They have played Ireland several times in the last 18 months or so, but I finally got to see them in the Olympia theatre last May, so high up in ‘the gods’ that I was really only looking at the top of their heads, which wasn’t quite the intimate experience I needed from my first concert of theirs, but it was still bloody great.
A poor phone video clip of part of 'Fake Empire' I took during that concert is here (with apologies for the change in angle in the first few seconds):


I guess it is some kind of irony, really, that I saw them first from hundreds of feet above, when in reality this album, to me, is so far above everything else it just looks down and laughs.....

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