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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Suburban Sweetheart (not of the rodeo)

Return to the new west (part 3)

Working my way slowly through the Sounds of the New West, Josh Rouse from Track 3 was more of a hit with me than some others to feature, and Uncut regularly featured very nice songs of his (like 'Miracle' and 'Laughing') on their CDs over the next few years, and he also did some nice work with Kurt Wagner of Lambchop (of whom much much more later). His habit of mentioning his influences as The Cure and The Smiths of course was always going to endear him to me as well, although this is tempered by his avowed love of 70s singer/songwriters. I think there is definetely a nice image which captures the spirit of his best music in that strange mix (did Robert Smith ever listen to east-coast 70s guitar stuff, I wonder?), a strange experimental genetic hybrid of laid-back guitar, but with edgy indie sensibilities growling 'louder, harder, wierder' through the twangy haze.



His homepage can be found here and his Myspace page here and a nice clip of him playing 'Miracle' live is below:



However, my favourite song of his by a long shot was 'Sad eyes' from 'Nashville', which apparently was recorded after he broke up with his wife, and a lovely live version can be seen at:



Rouse has certainly produced some very nice songs over the years, although most of his albums I have listened to lean more towards slightly average songs than exceptional ones. His music has definetely picked up a Spanish edge (fair enough as he moved to Spain some years ago) also over the years, which is not my preference at all. One question I will end with though is why, when fate or the fickle marketplace decides which sensitive singer-songwriters will make it big, do people like James Blunt and James Morrison make it big while people like Rouse, who should be able to appeal to much of the same market, fail to?

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The Arcade Fire conspiracy grows

A while back, I posted about the strange fact that just about every Genius playlist I did in iTunes included at least one Arcade Fire song. Now, I still use and really like the Genius feature, and have discovered I can do it in two ways.

One is to run Genius on my iPod, and let it pick from the 4504 songs on board. The other is to run Genius on my PC collection, with 10,053 songs, including all those on my iPod, but also stuff from my family, stuff I have had once on my iPod and then left off (and often forgot about), and stuff which is so odd that I frankly have no idea how it got there.



The element of unpredictability and fun in Genius is thus clearly much greater for me to use the PC version and see what the hell it comes up with. And, of course, it still comes up with a lot of Arcade Fire. Naturally.

However, last week when I ran genius for Tindersticks' wonderful 'The not knowing', it found and reminded me about a live version of 'Five years' by David Bowie and Arcade Fire from something (rather off-puttingly) called 'Fashion Rocks'. I think I bought an EP of this from iTunes ages ago and actually never listened to it then but the song is brilliant! See it below:



As it happens, looking for that video clip on Youtube led me directly to the following version of Joy Division's 'Love will tear us apart' (which, for some mad reason, Genius proved unable to build a playlist for recently) by U2 and, yes, Arcade Fire. It is misjudged and overcrowded and very Bono but there is an endearing ramshackleness about it and I must admit a real soft spot for people carrying single drums and hitting them very hard, as happens a lot here.



So, in a conspiracy worthy of Dan Brown but actually interesting and without illuminati, the vatican, mad monks, or Tom Hanks involved (thank God), Arcade Fire are stalking my music collection, and I feel I may yet fall unavoidably under their spell. In the meantime, I will keep up the fight, and post occasional dispatches from the front line here.

As something of a soothing dessrt after the heavyness of those last two tracks, I found a clip of the aforementioned 'The not knowing' by Tindersticks here:



The live version does not quite do justice to the soft baroque beauty of the album version, of their 1992 debut, but it is still a simple piece of earthfallen heaven.

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Orchestral manoeuvers in my head

I know nothing about classical music.
I know nothing about orchestras.
I do not know woodwind from brass.
I do not know what a conductor is doing with his hands.
I do not know how to even begin to understand sheet music.
I do not know my e-bow from my oboe.
I do not know my arse from my oboe.

However...

I do know that, when certain good artists I like get a very large and very serious orchestra behind them to lay layers of massive sound over their wonderful music, it is as cool as fuck.

I am, once again, a philistine, and somewhat proud, or at least unashamed, of it.

This bout of unexpected railing against proper highbrow music unless applied in very particular circumstances where it is used as epic backdrop for some music I actually do like was inspired by the new Elbow CD/DVD box set of 'Seldom seen kid'. This version of the album was recorded live at Abbey Road studios with the BBC Concert Orchestra and an award-winning choir called Chantage. The box with this new version, by the way, includes both CD and a DVD of the performance plus a booklet and pictures; this clearly shows that the record companies were reading my recent post about how the Radiohead boxed sets were enough to get me buying CDs again by offering something fundamentally non-downloadable.

Anyway, Elbow (and oboes) in full flight in this session performing 'One day like this' can be seen here:



Just look at that! What an enormous group of musicians playing mysterious (to me) and somewhat outsized and outlandish instruments, building together a veritable cathedral of sound, flooding further beauty into the already vastly swollen grandeur of the original song. The unbelievably rich sound perfectly encapsulates and compliments the wide-eyed romanticism of the lyrics, with its beautifully captured images of someone realising one morning that life, and love, just doesn't come much better than this ('what made me behave that way, using words I'd never say, I can only think it must be love....'cause, holy cow, I love your eyes') and concluding that 'one day like this a year would see me right'. It really does feel like an ode to joy, especially when the choir just let rip towards the end and it goes on and on and round and round. I also love the look on the singer's face towards the end of the song, as if he is simply overwhelmed by the tidal wave of noise that he has been responsible for unleashing.

Of course, the orhestral bits still are a mystery to me; what is the enormous drumkit you get to see around 5 min 30 sec? Why do they need so many of the same-looking instrument? Why don't they just have one and make it louder (a variation on the Spinal Tap principle)? And what the hell is the conductor doing???

Anyway, moving along, the version of 'Weather to fly' from the same session is below; while not as naturally orchestral as the previous song, this is just such a wonderful song I had to include it.



Elbow's accompaniment included 52 orchestra members and 20 choir members; that is a lot (and I wonder if they all liked the album!).

However, it is admittedly not as many (when the final of the 'who can assemble the most ginormous orchestra for their song' competition comes down to the wire) as Sigur Ros assembled for 'Ara Batur' from their last album 'Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust' (and no, I have no bloody idea how to pronounce it, but it translates into English somewhat pleasingly as 'With a buzz in our ears we play endlessly'). The film below for this incredible piece of music, reaching a crescendo in its final minutes unlike just about anything my limited appreciation of such matters can begin to describe, depicts over 90 musicians giving it something of a lash, to put it mildly.



One of my other favourite bits of music which has clearly benefited from some serious accompaniment by proper musicians far more used to black tie dress and civilised galas than rock concerts is Suede's 'Still Life', the (presumably unofficial) video for which below allows us to gape in wonder at the moment at around 2 min 30 sec when the orchestra bursts into full flight, in a way that always makes me think of an image of running through sunlit meadows, but in a good way.



I will finish this post with two of my own poor quality clips of moments from recent gigs where strings and more have added something special. The first is from a Tindersticks concert in Cork in November 2008, where a string quartet (to left of stage) added a wonderful dimension to great songs like 'Buried bones' (from which this snippet comes).

Tindersticks' music has always sounded like they could hear an orchestra playing along, even if we couldn't, and their early live CD from the Bloomsbury Theatre where they actually did get such accompaniment for real is well worth a listen.

An artist less intuitively linked with such pomp is Josh Ritter, but he played a wonderful gig in Vicar Street in Dublin just before Christmas 2008 with a 24-piece orchestra behind him and his band, and it was quite magical, as the clip below of the start of an extra-special seasonal version of 'Kathleen' shows. Josh's sheer joie de vivre and adoring fans always make one of his shows a grin-inducing spectacle, and I look forward to seeing him (plus orchestra) again in Cork this July.

And finally, sticking with Mr Ritter, he can do pretty special things with just a String Quartet, as can be heard from the MP3s of 'Girl in the war' and 'Empty hearts' which can (hopefully still) be found here.

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Gram Parsons and year zero for alt-country

Return to the New West (Part 2)

It has been a while since I have turned to my planned series of posts on Uncut's Sounds of the New West CD, but here I am again finally, on to track 2, The Flying Burrito Brothers and 'Sin city'.

Of course there had to be a Gram Parsons song on here somewhere, as he is widely accepted as patient zero, the founding father of the whole alt-country movement. Parsons, who was born into a very wealthy family and hance could afford never to have to worry about real work, became the original cliche; he lived fast, died young, and left a good looking corpse, albeit briefly, before it was turned into a pile of ash under a soon-to-be-famous desert tree.

Parsons expired on 17 September 1973 in a seedy motel after a cocktail of drugs (morphine) and alcohol (tequila), with ice cubes shoved where one doesn't normally shove ice cubes, as his friend tried desperately to revive him. In a great twist to the tale which you could hardly make up, his corpse was later stolen by his manager (as agreed with Parsons - what were they on when they came up with that plan?) and burned shortly after under a soon to be famous Joshua tree in the desert(Wikipedia article on Parsons is here while a homepage about him is here). Yes, that is a Joshua tree behind U2 there on the left; perhaps the reason they look so serious is that they can't find the actual spot where Parsons was burned but are sure they can smell something.

Having heard a lot about Parsons and his influence (mainly from Uncut, of course) I was somewhat bemused to hear, on finally buying a budget-priced set of his two albums, what sounded a lot more traditional old-style country than I had anticipated; I was not sure what to expect, but somehow John Lydon in a cowboy hat was in my mind. Several of the songs, like 'The new soft shoe' and 'Kiss the children' were almost, to my ears, stereotypical soft weepy country stuff. His first solo album 'GP' remains definetely a bit too soft for me, but his second, 'Grevous angel', has grown on me a lot more, including as it does far more contemporary-sounding songs like the title track, 'Love hurts', and 'In my hour of darkness'. Before these solo albums, Parsons recorded with the aforementioned Flying Burrito Brothers, the Byrds and others, which I have yet to explore in any real way.

Of course, perhaps one of his greatest gifts was the discovery of a young singer called Emmylou Harris, and the discovery that she was a hell of a lady to share a duet with (for example on 'Love hurts' and 'Hearts on fire'), but we will get to her very shortly (at least that's the idea) in this series. Some incredibly old footage, possibly taken by John Logie Baird himself, of Parsons and Harris together can be seen below:

Overall, I have concluded that his music just takes some time to work its way into your head but, when it does, his influence and originality become all to apparent. In fact, perhaps what really made him click for me was hearing others (including people like Wilco and Whiskeytown, who were always going to be able to draw me in and make the appropriate polite introuctions, like old friends urging me to give the kid another chance) cover his work in more contemporary style (as on the covers compilation, Return of the Grevious Angel, seen below), helping to bring his songs to life in a more familiar way, but respectfully showcasing the excellence of his lyrics and songwriting. A great duet of Emylou Harris and Ryan Adams on 'Return of the grevious angel' can be found here.

Songs like '$1000 wedding' now seem like the story of a great movie waiting to be made

There was a $1000 wedding,
Supposed to be held the other day
But with all the invitations sent
The young bride went away
The groom saw people passing notes
Not unusual, you might say
But where are the flowers for my baby
I'd even like to see her mean old mama
And why ain't there a funeral, if you're gonna act that way
I hate to tell you how he acted
When the news arrived
He took some friends out drinking
And it's lucky they survived.....

This is high-grade gritty drama, far from old style country music. As a final clip, the footage below shows Evan Dando (who always strikes me as a fitting seeming heir to Parsons) playing this song:



I have not given up on Gram yet, even if he may have given up on me, and I have no doubt that his swaggering ghost haunts much music that I love, for which his debt to my musical wellbeing cannot be overstated, and might never be adequately repaid.

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See these CDs? Reason to return to the record store

In the last three years, like many others, I estimate that my CD buying activity has reduced by 90%, in terms of number of albums purchased, or even more in terms of money spent. I download the vast majority of my music from iTunes, or as part of a subscription for eMusic, which happens to have much of my type of music. So far this year, I have purchased U2's 'No line on the Horizon' (because of a sort of tradition, because it looked nice, and because they threw in a poster I am around 25 years too old to put on my wall, plus access to a film I am unlikely to ever watch - yes, marketing guys, I am that stupid), Leonard Cohen's 'Live in London' (also looked kind of cool and was an impulse purchase in hard copy, as it were) and Grant Lee Buffalo's compilation 'Storm Hymnal' (simply because I couldn't find it to download anywhere, and because one evening I took a sudden hankering after a few songs - especially 'Mockingbird' and 'Happiness' - from 'Mighty Joe Moon' which I hadn't even thought of, let alone listened to, for 15 years.



Anyway, my point in this post is that record companies have an easy way to make me buy more CDs, and that is to combine good recession-proof value with extra qualities that simply can't be downloaded. The best case of this I have probably ever seen is the new edition of Radiohead's 'The bends'. This comes in a small CD-sized card box, which contains

- the Bends CD (original, not remastered I think)
- the original CD booklet
- a CD with 21 B-sides and acoustic and BBC session versions of some of the songs on the CD
- a 90-minute DVD with several live performances (including Top of the Pops - bet they didn't get invited back after 'Kid A'!) plus original videos for the singles
- 5 postcards with the single covers, which look really nice, although I have no idea what to do with them (maybe keep them for my wall along with my U2 poster if I suddenly start living backwards, like Brad Pitt in 'Benjamin Button')

And it was €16.99! That is savage value, and enough for me to buy the whole package despite not being that big a Radiohead fan, although I always had a soft spot for 'The Bends' (especialy the title track, 'Black star' and 'Sulk'). There is a great video for 'Sulk' here:



and a nice live version of 'Black star' at:



They lost me a bit with with 'OK Computer' (except the wonderful 'No surprises') and then evaded me forever more when they disappeared up their own backsides with subsequent albums, which I really don't think anyone could possibly describe themselves as having a soft spot for (except perhaps Cylons? - just catching up with the fuss about Battlestar Galactica!).

Bacically, I was impressed by this package and this value, and if there were more like it out there, I would certainly buy them.

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Music and melancholy

A while ago, I started to draft a post on the importance of melancholy music in my life. I have always been a fan of music that others would describe as unacceptably sad or morose, and make no apologies for the fact. Music has helped me through some hard times of real (or often imagined) existential melodramatic self-pity and angst.

Since then, I have had cause to return to music for comfort due to personal loss, and have gone through something which I am not going to write about here, but which made me think even more about how important music with a certain mood was in the darker moments of my life. While the music I turned to first in recent days revolved around a core of 'The songs of Leonard Cohen', 'The Boatman's Call', and (predictably) 'Boxer', for now I am going to stick to my original idea, which was to talk about the music which I listened to in times of adolescent micro-dispair over long-forgotten girls or crises, so trivial in grown-up retrospect, and come back later to talk about more recent emotional comfort blankets like the above, as well as American Music Club, Tindersticks and others.



So, back in time for now. Coming of age socially and musically in the early 1980s and being of a certain taste and midset predictably turned my head towards Joy Division, of course, and songs like the magnificent 'Shadowplay', probably my favourite of their songs:


It is simply impossible to know whether we would still hear the same agony and dispair in Ian Curtis' voice and see it etched on his face if he had lived to grow old like his bandmates. As it is, to me it sounds like a moan from a pit of hell, like a man clinging on to everything with his fingernails, like it seems he really was. There is no doubt in my mind that every second of every Joy Division song is the real thing, not just put-on angst by intense young men of more recent years who can make the sound but never match the mood, who will never convince you that their demons are crawling behind their skin, looking through their eyeballs, and playing their larynx like their own guitar. However, despite the dispair, Joy Division for me would not necessarily conjure the word 'sad', more 'angry' or 'dispairing', and would not quite hit the tone I needed in the dark blue moments of which I speak.

For that, I really think you need The Cure. Not the happy, bouncy, poppy Cure of late 80s/early 90s, and definitely not the loud grungy Cure of the last decade, or even the scarily psychotic Cure of 'Pornography', but the young early 1980s Cure, when they had just discovered drugs and alcohol and synthesisers. This is when they made the sepulchral mausoleum of sound that is 'Faith', which contains songs like 'The Funeral party', to me one of the saddest pieces of music I have ever heard, with the drums and huge synths building a rhythm that can only honestly be described as 'funereal'; this is exactly what Emily Dickinson would have sounded like if she had grown big hair, worn over-sized black clothes and white runners, and picked up a guitar:


Of course, growing up musically with a melancholy bent in the 198os made the Smiths an inevitable accessory. While probably too simple and obvious, I am sure I was not the only person/loser who though that the following lines in 'How soon is now?' had been robbed from the diary they never wrote.

'There's a club if you'd like to go
You could meet somebody who really loved you
So you go and you stand on your own
And you leave on your own
And you go home, and you cry, and you want to die'


I could go on about this kind of music forever, and am sure I will come back again to this topic, but will end this post with just one more song of the era. By comparison with those which are listed above, Japan's 'Ghosts' is light and ehereal, like a whisper or David Sylvain's fringe, or perhaps a ghost, but the short lyrics always struck a simple chord with me, so I will end this post with a live performance (not as good as the one on the live album 'Oil on Canvas', but good nonetheless).


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Two more reasons for the Irish to be happy

Earlier this week, I took the opportunity presented by St Patrick's Day to offer some well-earned praise for Irish music of a certain era (mid 1980s to early 1990s). It was a good day and the sun shone, which is pretty rare here, and a welcome break from economic gloom and doom. There are many reasons to be fed up in Ireland right now, from bankers, businessmen and politicians who may be venal, reckless, incompetent, or any combination of all the above, to rapidly increasing unemployment and equally rapidly decreasing salaries, leading to a general feeling of dispair and malaise.

However, even in the few days since March 17th, we have two more reasons to be happy in Ireland, and we are prepared to take any crumbs of comfort we can.



Firstly, despite the fact that I know as much about sport as a fish knows about philosophy, even I know that we just beat Wales in Rugby to win something called the Grand Slam. I even watched the match (despite genuinely not understanding any of the rules), and got carried away with emotion and excitement, just like several million other Irish people at home and abroad. We haven't managed this particular feat since 1948 (this I know because my now very proud father was there in person to see that match), and this is an enormous achievement which just might pierce our current gloom and raise spirits across the country, if only until the hangovers kick in, so let's enjoy it while we can.

Secondly, despite my very recent proclamations on Irish music of a decade ago, we still have some very very talented musicians, and my favourite of them right now, Cork's own Mick Flannery, just won the Meteor award (Irish music awards) for best male artist, and he deserves it, as he is really good, and he proves that the golden age may have scaled down a bit (what hasn't in Ireland these days) but there is still a lot of quality out there.

Well done Mick!

I will end this post with a clip of him playing 'Safety rope' in Cork's Pavillion Theatre last October. I admit that, yes, he appears to be invisible, but he was there, honestly (he is just blocked from view behind his piano by his backing vocalist with the spine-tingling vocals).

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In praise of Irish music - for the day that's in it

Today is Saint Patrick's Day, and it seemed only fitting to fit in a post on the contribution of Irish music to my musical miseducation. Let's be clear here, I am far too uncultured to appreciate the undoubted wonders of the vast heritage of Irish traditional and folk music, and so I am not going to go there. The nearest I ever got to that type of Irish music was the Waterboy's Room to Roam (happy soundtrack to many an Irish holiday), which I guess is like comparing reading Shakespeare to watching Baz Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet.

No, I am talking about Irish popular music (and, to clear up any possible confusion in the opposite direction, I am certainly not talking about Westlife or Boyzone either - I shudder even to type the accursed names). Of course, to consider Irish music over the last 30 years without mentioning U2 is close to impossible, but I am really going to try. Undoubtedly, there will be future posts on my struggle to decide what I actually think about them, but that is not for now (it's late and a feeling of need to recognise even briefly the day in question is driving my blogging tonight). All I will say on this day of celebration of all that is mystical and mysterious about Ireland (i.e., b****cks) is this: what fairy magic or portrait in a north Dublin attic has kept Larry Mullen looking EXACTLY the same for 30 years????

No, tonight's message is a simple and argumentative proposal. Despite my obvious love for lots of music from America, the UK and Australia, and the fact that I have barely mentioned Irish bands in my posts to date, I would argue that for a period from around 1986 to the early 1990s, Irish bands (and not necessarily U2) were among the finest anywhere, and we went through a true if brief golden age.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that this period coincided with my coming of age as a music fan, and growing up in Dublin meant that it was all around me, all the time, and I went to the gigs, and the free larks in the parks, and the college concerts, and soaked it all up like an impressionable sponge. Still, in my defense, at the same time I was also devouring the Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen and the Smiths and plenty of that stuff, so it wasn't as if my taste buds had yet to grow. There were genuinely great bands in Ireland at the time, all of which I will come back to discuss at later stages, but for now I will just name the names and list the roll of honour:

A House

An Emotional Fish
Hothouse Flowers

Something Happens!

The Fat Lady Sings

The Golden Horde

The Stunning

Whipping Boy

This is the kind of Irish culture that should be recognised on Saint Patrick's Day, without green hats shaped like pints of Guinness, pints of Guinness shaped like pints of Guinness, or in fact anything (e.g., hair, food, beer, dogs, the Hudson river, the White House fountains, grass) coloured green (well, the grass is probably okay). This is what Ireland can do and can offer, and I wanted to make that point today, just because it seemed like the right thing to do.

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Hazeldine and female alt-country

Return to the New West (Part 1)

I am finally getting back to my planned series of posts on songs on the Sounds of the New West (SONW) Uncut CD from 1998!

The first song on SONW is 'Tarmac' by Hazeldine, and it certainly kicks off the CD in defiantly non-country mode, with heavy drums and snarling guitars. I must admit, in fear of accusations of sexism, that my dalliance with country music, of various degrees of alt-ness, has focussed mainly on male singers, as I have found too often that female voices somehow make the sound far less alt and far more traditional (to be explored more in later posts in this series). Nonetheless, a sound like Hazeldene’s, dominated by the aforementioned grungy guitars, is not something one would associate with Nashville, and one could certainly never imagine Nancy Griffith seductively offering the intriguing invitation to ‘f**k me like Batman’.



I quite like ‘Tarmac’, and went as far as to buy the CD ‘How bees fly’, at a CD fair if I remember right. The album is fine overall, but I can’t say it would be a favourite, and many of the songs do ditch the heavy guitars for something more conventional; on occasion, such as ‘Allergic to love’, the result is actually quite lovely. In addition, there are some good songs, such as ‘Apothecary’ (such a beautiful word, archaic and arcane, faintly smelling of odd alchemicals) which hit something stronger and stranger.

In terms of other female country singers/groups, I have had a long-standing relationship with the Indigo Girls, discovered during college years and always retaining a soft spot in my heart, although their output over the last decade has done little for me. Their ‘Southland in the Springtime’ (from 1990’s career peak Nomads, Indians and Saints) is simply one of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard, warm like an aural cuddle, incredibly and tangibly evocative of a place I have never been, and with a gorgeous combination of harmony voices and acoustic guitars and a richness of texture that is quite breathtaking.

I have also bought or downloaded quite a few Lucinda Williams albums; she is in some ways analogous to a female Nick Cave, veering from the scary to the sweet on different albums, from the utter beauty and tenderness of ‘Essence’ (from which ‘Blue’ and ‘I envy the wind’ defy my limited ability to find new words for beautiful without a thesaurus to hand) to the scary rap-country she practiced on her next album ‘World without tears’.

I guess my conclusion, circuitously reached and outrageously generalising, is that, while they have not dominated my collection, female alt-countresses (?) can undoubtedly hit peaks of heavenly beauty firmly denied to their male counterparts.

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