11 October 2009

A Sunny Day In Glasgow - 'Ashes Grammar'

How to describe this music? Shards, yes, definitely: shards of glass, crystal fractures. And those fractal pictures that were popular in the nineties. Things that jangle, like bells on cats. Ghosts and shadows. And sun shining on sheeted rain on recently-washed pavements: oiled rainbows that you tread through. Stars collapsing, that sort of thing. And obviously, a sonic cathedral, but an unfinished one: the Sagrada Familia, perhaps? In fact, this is music I’d like to hear in a church. On the right day, with this playing and sun pouring through a stained glass window and maybe just a hint of incense in the air, there’s a danger that through finding magic I might also find god.

Wow, this lot. Last year 'Scribble Mural Comic Journal' swept me away. Live, in some dingy West End hole, they overcame their drab surroundings to endear. It was magical even in the tight corridor full of chatting wankers that is most small London music venues. And now this record transfixes and continues to do so long past the point of novelty.

Layers, clouds, smiles, tears, the soundtrack of dreams: this is a record I want to fall asleep to. I want it messing with my head as I drift off, colouring night visions. I want it still playing when I awake, informing my lucid morning insights.

There's no point dwelling on individual songs, many of them short. ‘Too short to scrobble’, last.fm will tell me when I play some of them, but what do they know? The technology’s wrong then. It's all of piece, and divisions are arbitrary. One fragment folds into another. Voices come and go, just like tides do.

Of course this is all very post-My Bloody Valentine, and there are any number of shoegaze revivalists out there, and bands like Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear at the tip of this particular iceberg are in danger of leaving us slightly bored now, but dammit: no one is doing it better than these people, right now.

04 October 2009

Girls - 'Hellhole Ratrace'

So by now, it having taken an age to write this, a fuller than average sequence of life events having passed since that initial 10” single – and what a beautiful format that remains – first snared my attention, we have all absorbed the coverage in the quality press; have noted the amusing photos, wherein the two gentlemen of the band are invariably surrounded by a bevy of diversely beautiful girls; have become intrigued by the back story of cults and abuse and loss and redemption; and have therefore been tempted to make the foray into internet or Rough Trade to buy the LP. We are, in short, already most of the way over Girls, our initial enthusiasm having been dampened by the fact that there’s really nothing that new on this LP, and god yes, now we’re being honest, it does sound a bit like Glasvegas, who themselves sounded a bit like...

We’re moving on. Girls was so last Friday. We’re even tired of this trend for reductive band names. Women, Girls.... now this really has to stop, before there’s just a band called Stuff. (I know, inevitably, you’re going to tell me, there is a band called Stuff, most likely attached to one of the lesser Suffolk higher education colleges.) And back in those innocent days of July when this first demanded our attention, this website could have looked cutting edge by banging on about how fabulous this single was, crucial days before printed media, whereas now we wheeze, limping last over the finish line in this particular music hype marathon.

We know, now, that this is the best thing on an LP where limp rock clichés too often abound. But dammit, this remains fabulous, and will still be so even in a couple of days when some other bunch of lo-fi Americans appear to offer the world’s new finest hopes.

This tune’s triumph is surely that it lasts for almost seven minutes yet consists mainly of the same thing repeated again and again. And as a long term passport holder of the Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall, you can hazard a guess at how much I love the three Rs of repetition. It is already a matter of record in these very unviewed pages how much I care for a tune that only changes gear in one direction and builds up an ever more relentless head of steam.
Which is what we have here. It starts. It develops a chorus. And then the chorus repeats. And repeats. Every time you think it’s going to end, it doesn’t. Bagpipey guitars crash in at one point. They keep going. Then the chorus again. And again. And what should lose in effectiveness – isn’t it a shame that on the latest Art Brut record all the best lines are repeated eight times instead of thrown away with casualness for you to pick up on and pick over? – in fact gains. It is a tragedy, is it not, that some of us ever lost that childlike glee in one more, one more?

So for this, they can get our hopes up, let us down, and after that do their best never to bother us again. For these near seven minutes, I’ll remain grateful.