Massive Crush

The Field Mice - music to walk alone by

2010-05-25T19:07:00.008Z

Wrote this in January. For various reasons, didn't have the courage to post it until now. Ho hum...

Things changed. Things got harder. Someone who had become important to me was leaving the city. Leaving the country, even. I got into the habit of walking around the city by myself, sifting my thoughts. Before, we had walked together. At the same time I was trying to write a story about a man and a woman who have a disagreement on a London street and she walks off and they never see each other again. The story would be named after the particular street on which it was set. I needed to walk down that street a lot to be able to write the story. And these days I have that modern disability where I can no longer walk down a street without personal, piped music. Only one act could soundtrack this particular mood and moment: the Field Mice. After a while, I became convinced they must have written a song about this same street at the some point, for they did things like this, but if they did, I never found it.

I hadn’t listened to the Field Mice for exactly one year, when I was trying and failing to write a story about a different couple who see each other for the last time in a London park. Clearly, it’s a January thing. Again, I would walk around the park trying to think of the words the people in the story would say, and when doing so listened only to the Field Mice. Which tells me that in my head the Field Mice must be all about wintry melancholy, about leavings and frustrations and things you wish had worked out differently and things you imagined saying better in your head and things you never quite managed to say. They’re a band about that ache in your throat when you’re trying to say ‘I love you’ but end up saying ‘see you later’.

There have, I suppose, been other bands quite like the Field Mice, but they have never been exactly the Field Mice. There have been any number of sensitive types not averse to wearing both hearts and learning on their corduroy sleeves, bemoaning their repeat failures to sustain a relationship against a backdrop of guitar either acoustic or jangling. I've liked most of those bands too. But like Field Mice successor bands, such as the Trembling Blue Stars, who despite the odd moment, have never reached those same heights, those bands just aren't quite up to the same mark.

My love for those mid to late 80s jangling and shambling guitar bands, and their formative influence on me, is a matter of record. I doubt that any music will ever mean as much to me as that made by Razorcuts, McCarthy, the Bachelor Pad and Biff, Bang, Pow! when I was a shaky sixteen year old suspecting there was more to life than what was then this in a distant corner of the north west of England. That fey, anorak or amateruish music clustered around Sarah Records, now bracketed dismissively under the banner of twee, will always unlock something adolescent in me. But even amongst labelmates of that era, there was something of the outlier about the Field Mice. They were different. They were somewhat outside their time, outside fashion, resistant of labels. And they were songwriters.

It doesn't always work for me. There were too many Field Mice songs. There were all those slow, acoustic ones, fine enough, but which blur together. And of course the songs that did it for me then aren’t necessarily the ones that do so now. An alternate, basic version of ‘Everything About You’, that most simple of songs which offered a plausible substitute for the romance I hadn't then experienced at first hand, appearing on that favourite of formats, the flexi disc stuck to the front of a fanzine, issued by Caff Records, now seems to me a bit too simple. I loved 'Missing The Moon', their genre-defying leap, built around keyboards and repetition years before pale white boys started doing that sort of thing, but now when I hear it, it’s like I’ve used it up and it can yield no more, possibly because so many things now sound like that these days. But others have stepped up to take its place.

'Missing the Moon’s' b side, 'A Wrong Turn and Raindrops', now seems to me to offer the perfect soundtrack to present big city loneliness, the Thames tide ebbing in time to that harmonica lament as you cross a bridge alone. 'Sensitive' comes across as perfect credit roll music for the end of a film as the camera crane-shots up and we see a single and increasingly distant figure condemned to trudge forever across the snow. 'Emma’s House' is a gem that lay neglected for years, patiently saving its gleam. 'Let's Kiss And Make Up' and 'End Of The Affair' are two, six month apart chapters from the same sad story. And of course we will always, always, have 'So Said Kay'.

Argh, 'So Said Kay', surely one of the great songs of loss, longing, lust and departure? Ever known that feeling of not being able to give someone up, even when you know they're bad for you? Of knowing something can only fail but wanting every additional second of it any? Of being scared about how much it turns out you can care about someone and what that does to your insides? Of course you do. You’re human. And that's 'So Said Kay'.

With some reluctance, because the imagined words in my head are always different and sometimes better than the writer's intended lyrics, I googled the words of So Said Kay, finding them on a curious site. Just read them. Oh my god.

'I cannot leave you alone. Honestly I cannot.'

'Never seeing you again. I am scared to death.'

'Ride with me to the next station. I want to spend another half hour with you.'

They're raw and bare. They're the essence. Missing someone, wishing someone was here, they are how I feel. They're particular, and they're universal. Oh christ, this is just so fucking sad. This is a song that, sometimes, would be impossible to listen to.

The opening line of 'So Said Kay' of course provides the name of the definitive, two CD Field Mice collection, 'Where'd You Learn To Kiss That Way?', which might be all the Field Mice you'll need for your portable music player as you walk alone and lonely down cold streets, but it will be the gift that keeps on giving, year upon year. Astonishing, indeed, to realise that even this compilation has been around for more than a decade now. Doubtless the miracle of the internet ensures it remains an essential part of the fabric of our shared humanity. That there are fresh people out there still to cherish this fills me with hope in dark days.

A Sunny Day In Glasgow - 'Ashes Grammar'

2009-10-11T17:24:00.006Z

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.

Girls - 'Hellhole Ratrace'

2009-10-04T22:37:00.003Z

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.

Fever Fever ' 'Keys In The Bowl'

2009-08-02T14:57:00.007Z

Perhaps in an ideal world we would only ever listen to any piece of music once. We would have to form a fleeting impression and then be forced to fall back on our own unreliable memories to reconstruct any given tune, which would warp and morph as we went along. Imagine, we could all hear the same thing at the same time and then reconvene a year later with our own startingly diverged, personalised versions.

Although I've never managed to get along to one of their rare performances, I'm sympathetic to the idea of The Bays, who are only about playing live and doing something different each time, and reject the idea of release and recording. I admire most ideas taken to extremes.

Naturally I only embrace the theory. As someone who can no longer recall the colour of his carpet, lost as it is under the laval advance of vinyl and CDs, I demand the physical object. I buy records as a compulsion; I have this particular specialised form of the male illness. And overwhelmed as I am by a continuing, unfavourable distortion of that equation between quantity of records purchased versus time in which to play them, I now approach, albeit accidentally, the puritan position I toy with. I buy many seven inches, much of them not already heard, because I was struck by something I read, or some connection with something else I sort of like, or some record label with an above average strike rate. Many of them get played just the once. They travel the short physical distance from the pile of unplayed to a pile of played. Others take their place in the stack and they quickly become buried. In busy times, only the ones that stick out on first listen demand exhumation. Many, nothing wrong with them, simply good or okay, will be forgotten and moved to another pile.

There's always another pile.

So here was one - Fever Fever - that stood out on first listen and demanded repeat play. There was enough to suggest a smart purchase: from Norwich, which has of late compensated for the decline of its football team by becoming a niche provider of quirky, noisy Peel pop, and on our friends Cherryade records, which have offered us many seven inch shaped packages of joy these past few years. Sufficient there to pluck it from the racks. And on that first listen, socks were duly blown off. I'm always pre-programmed to love something like this: short, shouty, female fronted rock, keeps changing direction, crams ideas in. I loved it. Ever since I took time our from stealing furtive glances at my sister's Jackie magazines to develop a 70s crush on Suzi Quattro, I've always been a sucker for anything that combines racuous guitar with don't-give-a-fuck female vocals, I suppose.

So it's great, and all should own this, and here's a band to take an interest in, but it's just... well now I've played it again and again, in vinyl and in download, and repeat listens don't offer the same magic as that first blast. Whereas the version I'd have in my head if I had only heard this once: that would surely be the greatest tune ever.

Toddla T - 'Rice and Peas'

2009-07-16T16:39:00.007Z

Hey it’s not all fey indie that harks back to that golden year 1986, time of anoraks and bowl haircuts, around here you know…

I am a great loser of objects. First I lost my leading brand of MP3 player. Then in short order I lost my mobile phone. Now, as a result of an expensive need to replace lost items, they are neatly combined into one, even easier and less convenient to lose package.

For the first time, I have taken out insurance.

Getting to grips with the new technology this presents, sort of akin to going straight from steam power to nuclear fusion, without any of the intervening stages, turns out to be fun. I’m no technophobe, me, I just don’t believe in upgrading for upgrade’s sake. But even in these ominous years where I totter towards the first digit of my age clicking over in a fairly significant way, I am finding new things I can do. For example, I’ve reactivated a dormant Twitter account, because now I can update it from the pub, which surely seems the point, and there in case you did not notice was the gentle invitation for you to sign up and ‘follow’, dreadful verb though that is. You may find the quality of your life improved by one or even two per cent by access to low-grade random observation if you do so.

One of things I’ve found fun is that on this new phone-cum-music-player thing I can play tunes direct, through tinny but quite loud speakers, unmediated by headphones. For someone who prefers his music from mostly ambient sources rather than pumped straight into his brain – I enjoy the interaction with found sound – this has been an intriguing development. Of course, it works with some music better than others. Fortunately I’ve never really been a symphonies kind of person. And there are limits. This stays in my kitchen. I’m not about to become a feral, blade-wielding 14 year-old deliberately annoying people with a shuffled playlist at a bus stop. I caught a train the other day and there was almost a whole blissful hour before someone saw fit to generously share with us all the dubious contents of his MP3 folder. Unprecedented.

Of course there are some things that work better out of tinny phone speakers than others. I was intrigued to hear that Wavves, who I adore, who is as important to me as anything else in music right now, deliberately encompasses and has fun with the distortion and degradation you get from MP3 compression. I’ve always loved lo-fi, never understood audio snobbery. (I download these massive flac files of Fall live bootlegs and instantly do the thing I’m not supposed to do and convert them into MP3s. It’s The Fall, for god’s sake.) Wavves sounds magnificent coming out of my phone speaker, by the way. And Toddla T sounds great, and this tune Rice and Peas has insistently burrowed its way into my brain.

I seem to recall this coming out last year in multiple versions on a couple of 7”s, which I bought and felt pretty cool about myself for, as the next person at the Sister Ray counter was asking after them but I had the last copies. They’ll be somewhere in the pile that has successfully mounted a campaign of occupation against my living room, and if I had a spare day and a student archeologist to hand I could probably unearth them. Now it resurfaces as obviously the best thing on a CD that’s been out for ages that I forgot I wanted and only found when I was looking through the racks for something else they didn’t have, and I decided just to buy everything I wanted beginning with T. Tinariwen it was I was looking for. Such is life.

Haven’t listened to the whole LP yet, to be honest, and find the linking bits of dialogue, presumably aimed at establishing Toddla’s street geezerness, annoying to say the least (I edit them out for the version of this that will underwhelm people on imminent CDs) but this paean to the urgent need to consume bad for you street food is just silly, uncomplicated fun of the sort that simply needs to be encouraged.

Even in the midst of a currently largely theoretical diet, I vibrate around the kitchen to this, phone in hand, immensely irritating my partner.

God Help The Girl - 'Funny Little Frog'

2009-07-08T19:52:00.004Z

In the main, I feel I speak for the great swathe of humanity when I say, saints preserve us from side projects. These are usually pronounced, in the Half Man Half Biscuit manner, with an emphasis on the ‘o’. I yield to no man, for example, in my disdain for David Albarn, and his many dilettante excursions, and one day, dammit, I will be proved right and the rest of you turn out to have been misguided all along. And you will say sorry, and I will be gracious about it.

So it was that I approached God Help The Girl with some trepidation. Over time, and conquering some early misgivings, I have come to love Belle and Sebastian, albeit I remain slightly less enamoured of their more recent diversion into 70s pastiche. They occupy a special place in many of our hearts. This could clearly only be a unsatisfying digression.

And yet, and yet... this LP, and this tune in particular, is what I find myself wanting to listen to on my latest portable music player that replaced the most recently lost portable music player, on my longer than customary walks to work as I make that late, vain gesture towards fitness, as apparently people do when they reach this age... where was I?

Right now London is mostly sun-kissed, and as I tread its eastern and northern reaches early mornings thinking sweet thoughts, this cute, breezy, mostly female sequence seems to offer the perfect soundtrack.

Soundtrack it is, of course, in its chin-stroking way, to a still unmade film. You can see that, or rather hear it. You invent the pictures, can imagine your own film, as you listen. And maybe that’s better. Perhaps that part of the fun. You can, possibly should, invent your own film to go with this. And in this relativist age, they will all be right.

We don’t actually have to see the eventual film, do we? We can spare ourselves that particular disappointment. Surely when it comes to making films about impossibly cute girls pairing with men who deserve rather less, in which people sit around smoking and talking too much, that is what the French are for anyway?

Slightly more than half of this LP really does it for me right now, and that, as you three regulars may recall, is somewhat more than contemporary average. True, it goes on too long, as most things do, and tails off near the end, ditto, where it veers dangerously close to easy listening. It’s perhaps a white wine spritzer sort of record, but then it’s been so hot lately I’ve been drinking mostly white wine (so much more interesting than the vastly overrated water the authorities continually advise us to carry a bottle of). There’ll be time yet for those other essential flavours: for the mead, blood and spunk of honest rock and roll, the cider of folk, the vodka of anything electronic and the sticky cocktail of ‘world music’.

Chief gem here, for me – the white Bordeaux in a sea of chardonnay, if we must keep flogging this metaphor – is 'Funny Little Frog'. It probably helps that this is a cover of one of the least lovely Belle and Sebastian tunes, and done exactly how I want it to be – lush, laden with synthetic soul, and heaped with artificial sweeteners, which will turn out to be bad for you. I want, and I'm not ashamed to say it, some strings in my life just now. Somehow too its tale of an imaginary love works better with the gender switched. Perhaps it makes it less creepy. Of course, I may just be saying that because I’m a man.

Proper LP soon though, hmm?

Why The Smiths changed my life

2009-06-24T22:51:00.005Z

So, as the occasional facetious correspondent has pointed out, it's been a while.

Well, what can I say? I do a beyond full-time job, and between you and me I mostly love the work, but at the same time my late 30s self still clings to those adolescent notions that I should do creative things alongside. The longer I've gone on, by the way, the more I've become convinced that the purpose of any creative act is not to win approval of or even find an audience; the primary point of creation is surely to give fulfillment to its creator. The act is all that matters, even if it is performed in a void. I believe it’s enough, although of course it may just be that I never really found an audience anyway.

Regardless, this is the time that gets squeezed when work takes over, as it has done lately, and only gets resumed when some chance conversation, usually with someone who is both younger and a woman, fires me into believing that I need to get going again. So I found myself disinterring something I started back in the cool, short days of February and never quite had the belief to complete.

The starting purpose of this website, albeit too often hamstrung by the sporadic nature of its contributions, is mostly to celebrate the new and exciting, to wax briefly and enthusiastically about something from the week that has made me smile, or excited me, or moved me in some way, before the next glinting, shiny thing comes along. But sometimes I must uphold the right to bang on about something of the past which somehow helped to make me whatever it is I am today.

My musical abiding love is, of course, and always will be, The Fall. They remain a guiding light, a magnetic north. They weren't my first love, though. The first shoots of a lifelong interest in music were provided by early 80s two-tone bands, and then lots of bands on a spectrum of electronic to new romantic, some of them good, like the pioneering Sheffield bands, and most of them so unspeakably bad I hesitate to recall their names. But then The Smiths came along, and after that everything was different.

They were the first band I got obsessed with. I mean, really obsessed. I would go to Manchester and in my head construct elaborate narratives where I would bump into Morrissey and floor him with carefully prepared, off the cuff bon mots. We’d bond; become friends. Maybe I’d guest on a b side.

Although when I say obsessive, I should make clear I stopped some way short of stalker status. I wasn't ever quite the gladioli wielding, hearing aid wearing acolyte. I don't do identity cults, have never believed in wearing the badges. Apart from a brief, ill-advised attempt to look like a young Bobby Gillespie, I cling to civilian clothes. I like to retain the option of passing unremarked in a crowd. And I was usually a chunky boy, whereas you needed to be slim-hipped and androgynous to get away with the Morrissey look. But there was a time, 15 or 16, lonely, vulnerable, and not yet having had my mind duly opened or softened by the discovery of girls and alcohol, when nothing mattered more to me than this band.

Of course it was singer Morrissey who I idolised. More than anything it was about the words, the ones he wrote and uttered. They were playful and pretentious, but self-undermining, smart but insecure, educated, obscure and iconic. They were words for any kid who though they were cleverer than the rest of the class but still desperately wanted to be part of the gang.

The Smiths looked, too, provocatively, deliberately, like outsiders. They stood apart. Even the record sleeves, with their cataloguing of obscure, often fallen, small celebrities were different, resembling nothing else, forcing you to do your own research. Then there was the name, with its deliberate anonymity: so right.

Imagine the impact on this white trash kid from a failed family in a small and isolated northern town where everything taught you to conform and accept your lot.

Occasionally, and usually when I've had a little too much to drink, I will insist to the unwilling listener that The Smiths changed my life. Said listener will assume I exaggerate.

It's impossible to convey, in an era of instant access to everything, and people thinking they're part of a community because they've joined an online group, quite how stranded you could be in the mid 80s. The occasional samizdat, roughly photocopied fanzine could give you a hint that people like you were out there somewhere, beyond the physical boundaries of your designated town. But you couldn’t find them, unless you had someone common to follow. And how to convey the drabness, the lack of glamour, the sheer defeatedness of post-miners' strike small town northern England, collapsed, redundant, bypassed by the pinstripe and braces yuppificiation of big cities and the south? We were Thatchered, and we had no response. Plus, as kids, we grew up members of a pre-millennial death cult, brought up on horror stories about nuclear winter and convinced, as Reagan made jokes about bombing Russia, that an armageddon was not only inevitable but imminent, so what was the point of an education, or even forming close relationships? Thatcher's adopted children, as compared to those born in her wake, were an unusually fucked-up generation. The consequences, as we became parents, we live with today.

So The Smiths came along and taught me there was more. They told me you could be smart, and clever, and you didn't have to hide it. You didn't have to fit in. It was okay to read books, to like art. Occasionally I think about the life I could have led: the WMC on a Friday night, bargain booze deals, knocked off fags, a tracksuit, an Ann Summers party-going wife, three mewling brats gradually being ground down, TV, a package holiday. That was what you prepared for. That was your lot.

The Smiths told me to aim higher. The irony is that the new right told us to be aspirational while marginalising our kind. It was the counter-force to this that made me aspire. I'm not always happy with my life - never feel I've done anything, know I'm never going to get more than a few thousands word into any novel I might write, and that first film will remain resolutely unmade - but I feel my horizons are broader than they might have been, that my life is more filled with art and ideas than would otherwise have been the case - and I think, in part, that was thanks to the education The Smiths provided at precisely the right moment. How can I ever not be grateful?

I leave The Smiths alone for long stretches these days. Other music crowds in. I can go years without listening to more than the odd thing. A quick blast of wilfully eccentric Shakespeare's Sister livens me, while the ultimate doomed romance of There Is A Light That Never Goes Out marks the end of an occasional compilation that the CD recipient never captures the full weight of. The songs can't always meet my expectations, when I hear them. I've made them mean too much to me. And of course I can't adequately explain this to other people.

When I do come back to them now, there are new things I hear and like. As if for the first time, I've come to acknowledge and admire Johnny Marr's exceptional guitar playing, appreciate how the tunes are neither subservient to nor undermine the words, and recognise how hard that must have been. I see now what an extraordinary, one off pairing that was. The tragedy of Morrissey and Marr is that they needed each other, and without each other, are a fraction, far less than half.

Because of The Smiths, I can forgive Morrissey everything, though I now find his persona tiresome, and care for only a handful of his solo offerings. But on each LP, the one or two semi-precious gems are enough, because of The Smiths. And while it's hard to resist the feeling that Marr has frittered away his talent in a slew of near session-musicanship, interspersed with spells of just wanting to be a regular dude in a rock and roll band, the serrated guitar of How Soon Is Now is always going to be enough

You know they're both never going to find it again, and that’s part of it. And this means they must buck the trend, must stay unique, and be the only band of any significance never to reform.

But then I never did seem them live, my gig-going days only starting when I escaped from my town to university, and carrying on pretty much ever since. So equally, as I always say, if they ever did get back together, I'd sell a kidney to be there.

What prompted this, sometime back in February, unfinished, was the issue of the two CD collection, The Sound of The Smiths, bought, in a wearying nod to my own personal zeitgeist, in some airport on the way to somewhere. It reminded me precisely how magical, how pivotal, how alchemical The Smiths were. If you don’t have this, if you don’t get it, how on earth are you going to navigate your way through the speed bumps and slaloms of the rest of your life?

Simply, find a guidebook in this.

The June Brides - 'There Are Eight Million Stories...'

2009-01-29T05:23:00.007Z

There was something so right about last Friday night. By the time it kicked off, we were just about sufficiently intoxicated, via dubious South African brandy, incongruous pints of mild and, at the venue itself, red wine of a somewhat challenging nature. From beloved Hackney we made our way to the venue, a new one to us, a room above a 1960s concrete snooker hall on one of Stoke Newington's less fashionable streets. We paid our five pounds to get in, bought drinks from an impromptu, jerry built bar. The stage area was defined by two semi-circles of battered leatheresque armchairs and sofas in a distressed condition. There were two vacant chairs that we made our own. As we sat back and sipped Chateau Usine, we reflected that the evening had been pretty good already.

We don't do reunions as a rule. I have no wish, for example, to be reacquainted with former schoolfriends - even those handful who have, as yet, evaded Strangeways - from whom I have probably drifted for very good reasons. And in music, it's better, in the main, not to look back. We caught the Pixies a couple of times in the past, largely to try to compensate for missing them the first time around, and I hope The Smiths never reform, but if they do, I'll fork out ready money to be first in the queue. So there I was a few days before on the point of buying tickets for something achingly cutting-edge when some random internet pootling revealed The June Brides would be getting together for one rare night, and I knew, reunion or not, that I had to be there.

You probably don't know this, but the June Brides were one of the most important groups in the history of British music. Ever. Knocking around at about the same time as The Smiths, they were also one of the groups who changed my life and made me realise there was something more out there, something a bit more interesting, something other than what I had been told was on offer. They set a template that was played with by all my favourite bands of my late 80s salad days. They were jangling, shambling, literate and nerdy, loser indie popsters and wringers of wry smiles, and on most tunes there were these ridiculous parping trumpets.

But they burned too briefly, 1984 to 1986, which crucially for me was before I left my smalltown behind and started being able to go to gigs. It has always rankled. About every two years I come back to the music. 'This Town', an achingly happy and sad almost celebration of life in an English Nowhereton, still seems to be about me. 'In The Rain' still has that meaning of life clarity you get from sitting in a pub wondering what you're doing there when everyone around seems to be having a great time. 'Sick, Tired and Drunk' probably wasn't supposed to be a manifesto for living, but that's how it seemed to turn out for me. It would be quite wrong for British music to have anything like a hall of fame, but if we did, the June Brides would need to be in it.

So a reunion should have seen them feted, makers of a black market of soaring ticket prices, diarised by thousands on last.fm. Instead we got a couple of hundred people somewhere handy for the railway station. But there was something bang on about it all. This was no Sex Pistols style latest sell-out because they need the money, man. There were reformed for all the right reasons, because it was the singer Phil Wilson's brother's 50th birthday (ironically nodded to by a Fall song the name of which you could probably guess beforehand) and he fancied seeing a gig. And for once, there was nothing wrong with seeing a bunch of blokes themselves circling a half century and of a certain thinness of hair and growing thickness of waist banging their way through a load of old numbers. Thankfully, there was little of the we have new material to try out nonsense here. In an endearingly under-rehearsed way they made their way through most of 1985's seminal LP, their only, There Are Eight Million Stories, and by the time they had shuffled off after about an hour, had performed every song you really wanted them to play.

It was a perfectly mellow evening, spent with a roomful of the mostly rotund and ageing, and therefore relatively free of the poseuring nonsense and look at me chat that bedevils many a London gig. Normally I go to gigs and look for someone old and fatter than me so I can stand beside them. Here, I found myself at least at the youthful end of the spectrum. Most of these people had been a bit older than me when they realised the genius of the June Brides. Ridiculously, our heroes where not even the night's main band, being merely the support act for some people called S/T, about whom I confess I know nothing. We hung around, hoping for something metronomically krautrocky, but after the faithful three songs rule was applied we found them wanting, not least for some Flight of the Conchordsish thing about being put on hold on the telephone, and ambled off into the night looking for a little more liquid.

You can, apparently, although I have yet to put this to the test, listen to the whole thing here.

Not really a gig review, but then we don't really do gig reviews here. Being pretty forward-looking people, we don't really do nostalgia either. Except when we really want to. I have now heard 'This Town' performed live, so there.

Wild Billy Childish and the Musicians of the British Empire - He's Making A Tape'

2009-01-11T15:44:00.005Z

And speaking, as we just were, of simple, direct music, and the joys of neglected seven inchers unearthed over the post-festive fag days, here's another. At some point, you just have to give in and learn to love Billy Childish, even if you can't hope to buy or even listen to the roughly one record a week he issues of stripped-down, just getting on with it, garagey early Who homage.

This one is a bit different because for a change he doesn't sing it, leaving vocal duties to the female member of his current band, who is presumably the one who dresses as a nurse live. Hey, if you're going to dress up as something, dress up as a nurse. That's what I say. There's something hard-wired into the heterosexual male psyche which means this is always going to work. Anyway...

Right now I much love this playful, deliberately anachronistic nod to the role that home-made music compilations can play in romantic entanglements. Confess I made a few myself over the years, shy love letters concealed in the form of other people's music, their subtle sub-texts too often falling on stony ground, missed by a listener who turned out to be more cloth-eared than I hoped. But enough about me, for which of us hasn't at some point, when briefly dazed by the could-be girl of our dreams, attempted to express emotions we otherwise couldn't by crafting careful sequences of songs? And yes, it is generally boy to girl. As emotional inarticulacy usually goes hand in hand with trainspotting musical enthusiasm in us hapless guys, that's how it tends to work.

Of course, and alas, we no longer make tapes any more (although I maintain that the format will make its comeback, and in time this tune may come to be seen as prescient). It just isn't the same somehow now, putting together CDs on our home computers, where you can continually re-order and fit things perfectly to time. There was something special about the homespun glue and scissors days of the C90 compilation tape, where you had to guess what sequencing would work as you went along, trusting your simple instincts for a killer segue and hoping you got to the end of that final clinching tune, so often something by The Smiths, before the tape hissed out. When you gave one of these to people, with a hand-filled inlay card and maybe some added personal decoration, you were giving them an object of love. The modern CD is a far more clinical, impersonal and ultimately disposable affair. It can't carry the same meaning.

So when the protagonist here comes home and finds her other half immersed in making a tape for someone else, she knows he's in trouble. The relationship sounds doomed to me. I'd get out while you can, love. And, err, bring the nurse's uniform with you.

Damaged Goods are offering us this, and for that we should thank them. I bet no one ever thanks record labels, but then I am quite drunk as I write this.

Thee Vicars - 'Don't Try To Tell Me'

2009-01-08T20:47:00.005Z

Okay, so for once let’s cut with the pretentious and elliptical opening paragraph and get down to it, shall we? What’s doing it for me today is this no-nonsense, straight-edged new garage classic. Thee Vicars – and I have never understood that ‘thee’ thing in band names, and expect I never will – offer us via Dirty Water Records two swift vinyl sides of fast, clean, beer-chucking thrills. You get drums, guitars turned up loud and trebly and urgent vocals, and there are times when that’s the whole package. Sure, you have to be young, dumb and full of spunk to get away with making records like this, but fortunately you have to be none of those to end up pogoing around your own living room to them. Evidently Thee Vicars come from the hole that is Bury St Edmunds, and this must be the sound of the frustration that too many Saturday nights spent there would drive you to. As it happens, they sound more like they come from our beloved North Kent Coast, as this fits firmly in with the back to basics Medway punk style pioneered by the prolific polymath Billy Childish himself.

Of course it’s been out for an age, and there’s a subsequent LP that now demands attention, but post-Christmas saw me do some valuable work cutting a swathe through the vast and tottering pile of unplayed seven inches, and unearthing an occasional gem such as this is what makes it all worthwhile.

Beyond the record, I bet this lot would kick any number of asses live, and it will become my business to catch them. I’d love to see them down the Dirty Water Club at the Boston Arms, surely London’s most democratic music venue, and one of the best, on a Friday night with far too much booze inside me. If there's anything right in this world, it will surely happen.

The Dierdres - 'Sir Michael of Aspel'

2009-01-04T17:15:00.005Z

I swear, I do listen to other things. At work, where I daily clock in to toil at the coalface of pointlessness, I listen to a fair bit of African music, which it pleases some to call 'world music', and get through a lot of reggae, although reggae is one of those things I seem to fall out of love with from time to time, this being one of them. But when time comes and guilt prompts me to fill some of this vacant space in my own corner of the vast irrelevance of the internet, the only thing I want to write about is shouty, annoying, slapdash, punky music like this.

What's on offer here from this apparently seven piece band is a foul-mouthed, unhinged tribute to the legendary TV survivor, who I've always regarded as a pretty decent guy. It features a cameo appearance by the man himself, and would seem to be based on a scarcely credible 'Antiques Roadshow' encounter between the band and presenter. Can this actually have happened? In this universe, or a parallel one? In a little under two minutes, the Dierdres, or at least a number of them simultaneously, confess their psychotically complicated love for the Aspel, and if I was him, I'd be flattered but also get a restraining order.

Early Au Pairs (and try googling that) are an obvious point of reference, and there's nothing wrong with that. Basically, to slip into a little Dierdre-ease, I fucking love this record, and anyone who doesn't agree is a prick. The world is now a bit more of a better place for this.

It's on Cherryade, who are on a real roll, what with this, the Lovely Eggs and the Kabeedies, or you can download from the world's major online music retailer. Of course in vinyl form it's a b-side, which has something so right about it. Sometimes, just sometimes, it so happens that a-sides are better, but not too often.

High Places - 'Vision's The First...'

2008-12-27T15:17:00.006Z

One of the invented traditions of the household is that over the course of the festive period - roughly defined as covering the spell between Christmas Eve and whenever we must depart to bring light to the lives of our adoring relatives in a series of small, drab and not even particularly snowy northern towns - only appropriately seasonal music may be played. Fortunately or otherwise I have over the considerable stretch of my existence acquired a vast quantity of poor grade yuletide indie tuneage by the yard. There’s about a solid day’s worth of such, which each December 24th gets duly transferred to the trusty MP3 player and before New Year’s Eve (and there are, of course, even one or two decent songs about that particular dark night of the soul too) is equally quickly removed to free up some space for further swathes of live Fall bootlegs. The thing is, Christmas tunes can’t be innately bad, because even The Fall have recorded several of them over the long, long years. It’s just, they’re never as good as a band’s proper, non-festive work, are they? Would you choose to listen to even The Fall’s Xmas offerings ahead of their regular stuff? Just like in the real world, in music, no one saves their best for Christmas.

So it will come as some relief on the train north when once again regular listening habits will be resumed. First up will be this tune, from High Places, with which I am thoroughly beguiled. As usual, I am late on this one, and, as is equally customary, I know next to nothing about the band. This surfaced as a single on Upset the Rhythm, who also put on catchable gigs in old London town, and subsequently led me to a CD available from the redoubtable Thrill Jockey label. It’s a mysterious, slight and charming thing, distorted, like an favourite old tune found mangled on a chewed up Memorex tape (and I swear, cassette tapes are about to make a comeback). It’s a jaunty pop number - I hear Rihanna’s immortal Umbrella in this - mingled with and undermined by the shimmering clutter you get in A Sunny Day In Glasgow and the by now customary global village rhythms. It's a fractured kaleidoscope of a song. A smidgen of steel drum I hear at one point, for example. You could dance to this, but you'd probably dislocate something.

This is not the sort of website that offers up top ten lists of the year, but if it was, there's a good chance this would be on it. Once again I note in closing they're from New York. They own us these days.

The Wave Pictures - 'Long Island'

2008-12-02T15:20:00.006Z

Our love for the Wave Pictures is already a matter of record, although when they first crossed the path of attention, we admitted some doubts. Not so now. We’ve since been utterly sucked into their world, and there seems to be little we can, or indeed want, to do about it. That single, I Love You Like A Madman and subsequent LP Instant Coffee Baby were our gateway drugs. Live they then clinched the deal. They’re pretty much the ultimate finely honed, value for money, good time guaranteed live band, inheriting the mantle - not that any criticism is thereby implied - from our old friends the Broken Family Band, as the act you could catch time and again at one of their frequent live shows and always know you were going to enjoy yourself. Now we see the Wave Pictures whenever we can, and we raid backwards through their back catalogue, past previous LP Sophie (while noting with bewilderment the inclusion of Instant Coffee Baby on the best debut LP of the year shortlist of those with it hep cats the Guardian) to the slew of early, rough and ready and utterly charming CD-Rs.

Long Island - wherein someone looks beautiful in lubricant - first surfaced, unless you know better, on Sophie, and was recently given a wash and brush up as part of a digital only EP, Pigeons, from the behemoth iTunes. Being venerators of the physical object, we’re not sure if we approve of the idea of the virtual only release (although we love seven inchers that come with free download codes, which help us sleep easier at nights) but this would appear to have been done for good, green reasons. Hey, we care about the planet here, even to the extent of reducing our meat rations and taking the occasional holiday in Wales, so this is to be applauded. This is the one where they walked to the studio, ran the equipment on wind power, mastered it using discarded brown, organic bread crusts, had only fresh rainwater for lunch etc. In its original form Long Island was a firm family favourite and in its new guise it only gains from a more muscular re-working. You could dance to this one, prior to hoping to win a grand in your hand on a Friday night. It’s all pianos and handclaps and sparkly, slinky clothes. You know when Orange Juice went disco? It’s nearly as good as that.

In short, we like. But then, you knew we were always going to do. And now we're off to see them live again.

The Dodos - 'Winter'

2008-11-28T08:00:00.005Z

There are, ultimately, only so many ways of saying fuck, this is great, but fuck, this is great.

Here's a precise, controlled offering from the Dodos, the latest in a wave of US bands who wash up on these shores and do what we used to do ourselves, only better. It comes in cycles. Just accept it. It's their turn, and hey, America's cool again now, right?

Their stuff is a heady mix of disparate influences, and there is pointy-headed musicological fun, if you are that way inclined, to be had in unravelling them. Right now West Coast psychedelia, modern folk, the Walker Brothers maybe and more recently Beirut are springing to mind, but whenever I say something like this someone will correct me and leave a spot-on comment underlining what a cloth-eared dolt I really am. A year later. Or how about they're sort of like Yeasayer, but without the Genesis thing going on? This one's simple and complex at the same time, always a winning combination in this parish. Deep, eighties indie drums are joined by what I'd very much like to be a mandolin, and then lucious, almost crooning vocal. Someone appears to have been having a bad time of it, but will be over the worst ere next spring. Then a mournful bit of brass completes the job.

And of course it is, err, winter right now, at least in this particular hemisphere, but this is, for once, no lame attempt on this website's part to be topical. Tales of regret and longing suit any season, and I stumbled upon it only recently via the magic of Hype Machine, where you can find this and more. It is now frequently played on that great radio station that goes in my head and finds its way onto many a CD pressed into the reluctant hands of bewildered and begrudging acquintances. It's from an LP called Visiter - ah, those cute mispellings - which has been out for an age and which for some reason I don't seem to have, and for this I can only beg forgiveness and promise to take according corrective measures.

The Lovely Eggs - 'Have You Ever Heard A Digital Accordion?'

2008-11-25T19:57:00.005Z

Oh, by the way, this is now officially the new best thing ever, and replaces all previous best things ever. We had a meeting about it and that was what was decided, okay? As is often the case, the Massive Crush taste committee were a little late getting around to this particular agenda item, as this tune has been huge in the world of proper music blogs that you can download stuff from for literally weeks, but you do realise how hard it is to get us all together for a meeting?

Anyway, we need new words in the English language to describe the casual and slightly crap genius of this latest offering. It's playground, nursery rhyme stuff, childishly sung, in a Talulah Gosh sort of way, that offers a new and escalatingly bizarre hipster checklist by which you will be judged and will fail. At which point they will sigh 'oh dear' and move on to the slimmer guy with a better cardigan than you and a full set of Pastels badges. It's the aural equivalent of one of those word ladder games that go from hate to love in five steps, taking us from digital accordions to time travelling in a De Lorean via a route that could best be described as entirely arbitrary. And then it rocks out. Of course you hear the Moldy Peaches in this and all your favourite mid to late eighties shambling anorak bands, and is there anything wrong with that exactly?

So, the Lovely Eggs. We love them. This forms part of a value for money five tune seven incher which gets quite Bearsuity and for which we're indebted to Cherryade records, whose releases are very rarely not worth a listen. Rudimentary googling, meanwhile, reveals a connection to the once-revered Angelica, who made us very happy once upon a time with 'Teenage Girl Crush'. Around these parts we prefer to listen to our music rather than watch it, but an amusing and indeed mildly disturbing video is also to be seen on the ubiquitous YouTube.

Go to it, kids. This is an order.

Vivian Girls - 'Where Do You Run To'

2008-11-17T21:43:00.003Z

My most recent alien abduction was at least rather shorter than that which once took this website out of circulation for about two and a half years. At least two of you have been in touch to express concern about my whereabouts. Well, what can I say? Sometimes life happens, and sometimes work happens, and sometimes both happen at the same time, and sometimes I even get the two mixed up. But back confined to this humble planet pop, what has been missed? Tottering piles of CDs and sevens, and bland folders full of sound files, demand attention. The products of three figure gleeful plunders of record shops, the only trolley dash I ever really do, lurk largely with their price stickers intact, a sure sign that they have yet to be adequately dealt with. It occasionally occurs to me that an obsession with sound has ruined my life, but I’m not sure I’d have had it any other way. And some palpably good things have floated up of late. Of the various crystal bands, Crystal Stilts may turn out to be the best. I’ve also found myself begrudgingly admiring this TV on the Radio LP, even though it sounds like music I don’t think I like, and getting to grips with Gang Gang Dance. I need to listen to Those Dancing Days more, but seem too busy working my way through the Wave Pictures’ back catalogue, having now, working backwards, reached the delights of their early, self-released CD-Rs. That Mirror Mirror LP with the preposterous name is continuing to puzzle me - I still can’t quite work out if it’s brilliant or terrible - and Chairlift, via an advert for a music player, appear to have become famous. If we were the sort of website which we are not, we would claim that we championed them first. Then I’ve spent the last week immersed in a slew of frankly varying bootlegs from the recent live adventures of The Fall (I spent two nights at the Hackney Empire with them, one great, one good) and, following a recent gig, realising once again the skewed genius of Connan Mockasin. There’s enough there for you to get stuck into, no?

This self-titled Vivian Girls LP, which has of course been out for an age, has got me under its thumb a bit too. It’s taking me back to where it all started, and to the music of my youth, mid 1980s shambly, jangly, guitar music: a seminal, and indeed political movement, although we didn’t realise it at the time. I thought music was always like that. Only later would it become clear to me that we were living at a special moment, where for once music would not be about bombast, swagger and sex, but about those other human things like embarrassment, frailty and making a bit of a mess. Bands were amateurish and tried their best. It was art, but it wasn’t art wank. I’ve been looking for that honesty and simplicity ever since, while that era, mislabelled at the time as C86, mislabelled since as twee, occasionally spirals back into vogue, as seems to be the case now.

So how could my teenaged, shy, anorak-wearing self know that my late 30s fat, creased and frankly ugly incarnation would really be getting into a record that sounds a lot like the Shop Assistants? The whole thing’s brief. There’s ten songs on this LP, but the Vivian Girls get in and get out in 20-odd minutes. I admire this. There are too many hour-long CDs in the world already. And the whole thing sounds like it was recorded in a biscuit tin. The guitars thrash and the drums flail and both are equal. The choruses are more important than the verses. The vocals are tinny. All of this is great. I think my favourite tune here is Where Do You Run To, with its Mary Chain bass but annoying lack of question mark, but really, all the songs sound pretty much the same. And that’s part of the point. I just wish it was on a series of flexi discs rather than a CD.

White Denim - 'Mess Your Hair Up'

2008-09-24T11:41:00.004Z

Or talking about hype, as we were, there's White Denim, who emerged top of the pile in the most recent South by South West hype contest, something nobody on this island truly understands. I resisted because, well, you do, don't you, if you have any sense of your value as an individual human unit. But come on - or is that c'mon? - this record's great, pure and simple, and only the churliest of churls could not admit this, and although the boat has long departed and you all know this by now for yourselves, I felt these words banging against the inside of my skull about it and I needed a vent. Indeed, I now feel bad it's taken me a while to get onto this one in front of all four of our readership. (Can you let me know when your birthdays are, by the way? I'd like to make sure I send you cards.)

What we have here is the sound of a small group of young men who don't know there are any rules about what you are supposed and not supposed to do in music and aren't particularly interested in finding out what those rules may be. It was recorded in whatever the Texan equivalent of a shed is and it sounds like it. It has that raw, rough and readiness to it you look for in a debut record. There's dirt under its fingernails. It smells of sweat and puke and back of the Chevrolet sex with your cousin. There's bad beer, late nights and all being men together. One of the base ingredients here is dumb, ballsy, what-the-hell music, of the kind you find in early Who. And there’s a fair amount of grubby southern blues too, and there is absolutely nothing wrong in this. An obvious comparison is the Black Keys, back when they were on the mighty Fat Possum label and before they got old, clichéd and boring. But there's more going on here than that. They would also seem to have a fine sense of the dynamics of a tune and when to interfere with them. They use repetition and fracture to keep your expectations on their toes. Less is sometimes more, and it’s sometimes as interesting to take something away as add things. They have an understanding of space that reminds me more of classic dub reggae than anything else, and the same kind of homemade feel you got when people were working with limited technology, although obviously the rhythms are different.

Take this song, Mess Your Hair Up. It's a balls-out rock tune, alright. But then it starts, stops again, gets locked in a mad wah-wah loop, things drop out. What is more satisfying than a tune where you know all possibilities have been explored, and all within five minutes? Isn’t it frustrating when you feel there was a bit more in there, if only the band had done a little more digging?

So revivalist, yes, and involved in the business of fusion, perhaps, but the inventiveness and sheer evident love of what they’re doing in this conquered the hype. Naturally they’ll have used all their ideas up in one go and the next one will be flat and turgid as they take the humdrum path towards straight rock and drab Americana, but for now, this is one to cherish.

Glasvegas - 'Daddy's Gone'

2008-09-19T07:26:00.004Z

We are, in this humble, dusty corner of the internet, resisters of hype. Press buzz deters us. The NME is a comic, and we mourn the days when you might be able to pick it up and take as much as half an hour to get from front to back. And most music blogs are - is there any other way of saying this? - shit. Vacuous look-at-mes who somehow think they're on the cusp of a career rush to break the latest, newest thing. Anything new is good. It's all fresh blood. Break it, be first, then move on for the next. It doesn't matter whether it's the 27th faint carbon copy of something which once might have had some life in it. Forgive me, I'm tired. But what very seldom comes across is a sense of the life-affirming joy music can bring, the adrenalin it can push through your sytem, the tears it can drag from your eyes.

So Glasvegas have been hyped to buggery. But you can only listen with your ears, and it turns out about half the LP is really good. You couldn't I suppose, hope for one that could be great all the way through. This, presently, is rare. It dips in the middle. But I don't mind. I've always been the lover of the single anyway. And one of those, 'Daddy's Gone', has made itself essential to my life at the moment. Of course it's histrionic and overstated, but I've always kind of liked a little bit of that. The lazy comparison of the music press is the Jesus and Mary Chain, which must be largely on the basis that they come from the same place. True, I can hear a shared love of Phil Spector, but for me the obvious comparison is the Mighty Wah!, for whom I've long nursed a soft spot. It has the same over-ambitious, slightly failed poetry in it, the same gutter-looking-in-the-stars thing, all working class regret and aspiration, choked throat early morning drunk dreams and bruised sentimentality.

Of course, they must never make another record.

The Kabeedies - 'Palindromes'

2008-09-17T08:21:00.002Z

"Most of my parents are palindromes: M U M and D A D."

Yes! It's obvious but how come no one's said it before? This is brilliant, stupid and just a bit shit, always obviously a winning combination. This lot, The Kabeedies, sound like they just can't sit still. They're evidently an itchy hyperactive bunch. And here's a short, jerky, dumb and smart offering. Boy/girl singer combination. Really good. No need for sentences.

I'm never going to stop liking stuff like this, am I? This is the third or fourth cycle of this kind of thing coming into vogue - hey, remember Bis, and weren't they great at first? - and it often seems to hail from Norwich. This one surfaced on NRONE records, with which we've already confessed we're in love, and I recall an earlier single I enjoyed, 'Lovers Ought To' on the fairly reliable Cherryade label. Of course they're sickeningly young and have a terrible name (but then as I type I'm listening to and enjoying a band with the worst name ever of Thomas Tantrum) but I reckon they should do this for two years and then get their hair cut, grow fat and boring and go and work in a bank somewhere, if there are any banks left to work in by then. I'm going to make sure I see them live, even though I know I'll be the oldest fucker there.

Chairlift - 'Bruises'

2008-09-08T20:00:00.004Z

I couldn’t wait for this one to make its appearance in the UK. I bought this direct from the venerable Kanine records in the US. I needed to have it. The internet makes this music thing easy. And the pound/dollar rate isn’t what it was, but still, what I paid in postage I saved on the CD. In truth, not all of this record, nonsensically entitled Does You Inspire You, does it for me. There are times when it all gets a bit too knowing, the musical equivalent of comparing ironic 80’s fringes. There’s sometimes an obviously too kitsch kind of oriental synth thing going on there. Chairlift, you feel, are not above the odd arched eyebrow.

But ah, this, Bruises, first heard as a demo a bit back, is beautiful and fragile and, apart from its ending where they couldn’t resist adding a layer of whipped cheese, understated. Love hurts, and there’s a truth that cuts through any amount of tongue in cheek. There’s a childlike simplicity and repetition in the lyrics of this, but sweetness comes mixed with darkness. What self-abasement wouldn’t you perform for the one you love? Then the man comes in singing about frozen strawberries at precisely the right moment. And you never thought frozen strawberries could sound sad and romantic, until now.

This apparently comes out properly in October, or you can get it on the internet now, or you can go direct to Kanine, like I did. Evident Utensil is here too, and we’ve already established how great that is, right? So for those two, I’m in, and I’m listening to the rest of it, hoping to love it all. Pass me the eyeliner and something tartan, then.

Mirror Mirror - 'New Horizons'

2008-08-17T12:35:00.005Z

I recently had something of a clear-out and unearthed and distributed to bemused friends a number of duplicate seven inch singles. It happens. I go to the shop and can’t remember whether I already have something. There’s a vague list somewhere, but never with me. And then I buy things on the internet and while they're on their way via creaky post I forget and grab them on some trawl through the physical racks.

This was one, but I didn't mind having it twice, and consider the recipient of my second copy a lucky man. Mirror Mirror are another band I know nothing about, burnishing further my deserved reputation for finger on the pulse musical punditry. A cursory search of the web reveals at least one other band who got the name first, specialising in bad metal, and if I can't find it on the internet straight away then I can't find it. All I know is that this is a great record which has begun to haunt me. It sounds like it was recorded in a tunnel, but a beautiful brick tunnel deep in the country with brilliant, blinding white light pervading one end, or perhaps in the vaults of a minor cathedral. Let's move towards the light. This is slow-paced, blissful but spooky; it's choral; it makes me want to join a cult. Providing it was a cult with good music. I'd like this playing at two am as I fall asleep. I'd have beautiful dreams. It would also be suitable for a funeral in a rural church on a sunny day. Any takers?

An obvious point of comparison would be Low before they got boring, and it's on Half Machine records, which is now officially a pretty good record label.

The Chap - 'Fun and Interesting'

2008-08-13T21:40:00.006Z

Of late much of this website's music-listening has been live, at gigs. This site does not, you will understand, do festivals. We don’t camp, and we don’t stand in a field bellowing and waving our arms to trite ‘indie’ anthems with lumpen thousands of people we would normally cross the street to avoid. But the festival season - which now encompasses, it seems, much of the year - has created a beneficial kind of waste product as bands on the al fresco circuit must warm up or warm down at proper venues with roofs, occasionally working toilets and a public transport route back to the comfort of one’s own bed, many of these in the city that we choose to make our home but which we're now too embarrassed to name after the last elections. Thus at this time of year we are able to construct a kind of parallel - or is that serial? - festival of our own by forcing ourselves out night after night to small, smelly, scruffy venues. Recently we’ve caught A Sunny Day In Glasgow (luscious, layered, cute and complex pop), They Came From The Stars I Saw Them (daffy space jazz), The Wave Pictures (literate, nerdy indie pop), Ballboy (vintage literate, nerdy indie pop, good to have 'em back) , The Flaming Stars (skinny 1950s noir rock and roll), Bearsuit (cherished art noise poppers, wasted on this occasion on an unappreciative crowd of wankers), a double bill of Health (structured, precise noise) and No Age (enjoyable West Coast surf punk dudes who the kids loved) and most recently Shit and Shine (epic, mechanised, motorised, turbo-charged noise). Phew. No wonder we're knackered. At times of heavy gigging the site finds we're either listening to the band we're going to see next or playing them again after last night reminded us how wonderful they were (and all the above were) and so the rest of it piles up neglected. Truly, we need more ears.

All of which is merely lengthy and over-written apology to all three of you for the lack of recent updating of these pages. Did we mention we’ve also been away a bit, in Scotland and Belfast again? And none of which has anything to do with this next tune from The Chap, which has been knocking around my head and demanding attention these past two weeks or so. It’s one of those that worms its way in, burrows down and stays there. Here’s a cool and somehow simultaneously camp electronic offering, with an operatic chorus nicely undermined by a spoken voice intoning “good, good, super, super” and so on. We find it curiously uplifting. Perhaps if Sparks were any good this is what they’d sound like. It may be about cloning, and let‘s be honest, we‘d all clone ourselves if we could.

But gosh, what a wholly inadequate description this all is. This one’s beyond us, it seems. So let’s just say it’s great, and I remember now these people doing another song we loved, ‘I Am Oozing Emotion’, and it makes me wonder why we haven’t yet investigated further. Gross negligence on our parts. This recent single comes from an LP, 'Mega Breakfast', which is now on our shopping list, and if we have to choose between this and essentials like bread and milk, we’ll buy the record.

Let's Wrestle - 'Let's Wrestle'

2008-07-19T09:13:00.005Z

Well, this is ramshackle and basic fare, and therefore something I instantly love. I swear I like complex, subtle music too. But when it comes down to it it’s the primitive, brain-dodging urgency of rock and roll and pop music that really makes me happy. We should celebrate stupid music more. At the moment the twin pillars for me seem to be the insistent, reinvented blues of White Denim, a band who might finally be worth the hype, and the rediscovered classic pop of Lykke Li, for whom I seem to have developed an embarrassing adolescent crush. I would fill virtual pages about both of these if I wasn’t so bloody busy working these days. But they both seem to me contemporary returns to time-honoured sources. Equally elemental is this eponymous gem from Let’s Wrestle, a beered-up, belligerent male-bonding anthem that should be bellowed by crowds of bad shirt wearers at Friday night chucking out time down the local Wetherspoon’s. “Let’s wrestle, let’s fucking wrestle,” goes the chorus, and that’s most of it. There’s virtually nothing to this. It’s troglodyte stuff, the only touch of attempted class added by the gold-coloured vinyl. I need to see these guys perform it live, and won’t even mind the inevitable lager shower. I like the Fallesque cut of Let’s Wrestle’s jib, allied with a Fall fan’s nerdishness about bands and record collections (see their earlier records; they’re all good). This is, in summary, nothing more than simplistic, dumb, primitive and clumsy. You will understand by now, of course, that these are words of praise.

Fuck Dress - 'Suburban Nietzsche Freak'

2008-06-22T17:26:00.006Z

"God is dead, so I listen to Radiohead."

Quite so. How refreshing once in a while to find an utter throwback of a tune like this. Here we are with a slice of indie back from when that degraded word ever meant anything. This has surely wormed its way through a rent in the fabric of time from 1985. (Perhaps Radiohead were actually named after this lyric then?) The label of the day is In Tape Records. The Fall are going through one of their periodic spells when they are fashionable and it's cool to acknowledge their manifest influence on all music (these moments are interspersed with long spells where everyone forgets about The Fall, but they keep working regardless). Yeah Yeah Noh are putting the fun back into being pretentious. The Membranes are the next big thing. The June Brides are surely going to change the world. And all records sound like this: thin guitar, robotically thudding drums, and two singers, a deep-voiced male and an accompanying female, apparently stood too far away from the microphone. Things are recorded in sheds, and sound like it. The lyrics are alienated, knowing and not afraid of wearing their smartness on their sleeves.

Yep, I like this, like it a lot, and I'm going to listen to it 27 times and then file it away for the next 10 years before rediscovering and being confused by it. It currently exists only in non-physical form but is due a real release from NROne records - no idea of the capitalisation there, it's a guess - sometime next month, and you can pre-order it (not an expression I have ever understood) there. Nrone has become one of those quietly good labels which most of the time gets it right. Inevitably there's a Myspace site, which rather shatters the illusion that it's 1985, when we were all using ZX Spectrums, and there are other tunes knocking around the internet, none of which, inevitably, are as great as this.

Yet another fuck band, by the way, in what's getting to be quite a collection, but it's becoming a bit boring to keep pointing this out, isn't it?

Mogwai - 'Young Team' reissue

2008-06-16T06:31:00.005Z

In the main, I manage to resist reissues. Of course, I’m a Fall fan, so the house is cluttered with their repeat offerings of the same LP. We’re talking three figures by now. My view is everyone’s allowed one act where they buy all the reissues, lives, bootlegs and pretty much any pointless everything, and mine is The Fall. It could be worse. Some people do it with Bob Dylan. But boy, the CDs just pile up. Recently, when returning from holiday, I opened the door to find it jamming against shiny discs strewn across the front room. At first the inevitable burglary was feared, but then the pleasantly mundane reality of it became clear: there’d been a CD collapse. Piles of them, and piles upon piles, were stacked precariously on speakers, and on top of bulgingly full racks. The faintest breath of wind would have been enough. Probably somebody slammed a door in a neighbouring house. Even now they sit higgledy-piggledy towered upon the floor awaiting the imposition of some kind of order.

Anyway, I don’t do reissues, but this one was always something special. There are times when Mogwai are the most important band in my life, and it’s still their t-shirt I wear probably more times than I should. I do have other clothes, I’m just proud of them. Ten years on, it would be hard to explain the impact of this record to some post-rock neophyte. There have been so many subsequent copyists that it’s difficult to get across how different, how shocking this music was. Of course they weren’t the first to do it, just the first to get it right. It redefined the rules. Most of the songs didn’t have lyrics. They were as long as they cared to be. They had very quiet and shockingly loud bits, or sometimes just quiet bits. It’s art stuff, but it’s rock.

But hearing it now I curse my cloth-eared 20-something self. I was then yet labouring with a mostly ideological misconception that all music should be three minute pop songs. Oh sure, I liked it enough, on then-novel double vinyl, but still it feels I missed a trick. Now, in an evidently louder and clearer edition, it seems it should have been life-changing. Meanwhile, all the other CDs pile up, inessential, and for this last week I barely listened to anything else. All other offerings sound flat. I only need this more.

This is an epic, infinite affair. I found it seizing on different emotional states and amplifying them. The twin peaks, Like Herod and Mogwai Fear Satan, had me strolling euphoric in sunshine one day, noticing leaves on trees like these were new things. The next day, they had me sobbing. And it’s really hard not to do this without talking about the sounds of stars dying or planets imploding. This is end of the world music. It turns everything into a scene from a film. It's your personal epic soundtrack.

About halfway through the week, I realised this is what I want to be listening to on my headphones as I leave this life. Of course, I hope that isn’t for a long time yet, but I can’t imagine a better soundtrack to go out to. If I time it right, the last notes of Fear Satan would be the final thing I hear on earth. I want this noted by the relevant authorities, and am prepared to carry a card to this effect.

Aidan John Moffat - 'I Can Hear Your Heart'

2008-06-03T20:30:00.004Z

I adored Arab Strap. Sure, there were flabby moments mid-period, and times when they got close to self-parody (hey, here’s another song about drinking, drug abuse and bad sex for you) but they’re one of the few defunct bands whose songs I find myself coming back to again and again. I have these spells where The First Big Weekend, or Hey Fever, or Packs Of Three, or The Shy Retirer, or (I could go on, Christ, when they were good, who was better?) demand frequent attention. I’m in one such now, partly because when bits of my shabby life start to fall off I find the Strap supply a fitting soundtrack, and partly because the recent solo work of the two former Strappers has sent me scurrying back to the source.

Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton now ply their separate trades, of course, and I have time for both. Malcolm’s given me moments of pleasure, not least last Christmas’s anti-heroic attempt at a festive chart-topper (check the sociopathic Santa video) We’re All Going To Die, or the recent hymn to the sad pleasures of at-home drinking, Blue Plastic Bags. But if you’re allowed to have favourites, Aidan, who recently has collected a John, was always mine. He always seemed to me to be the soul of Arab Strap, the man undergoing any amount of personal degradation so you didn’t have to. I admit, I worried about him with the demise of the Strap. Attending one of their last shows, at a mobbed and up for it King’s Cross Scala, he seemed to be the one who didn’t want to let go. I fast-forwarded and saw a grim future, embracing spiral of decline clichés. But here he is, with one of the few really essential records of the year.

Yet it took me a while to come to this. At first I thought it was too fragmented: brief, mostly spoken word pieces delivered over backing which turns out to be mainly recycled from old records. It just seemed too slight to me. But after a few plays I found it nagging, insistent. It’s life in the raw again, (hilariously the record's webpages ask you for your age to check you're over the threshold to access its 'adult content') but there are moments of pure poetry, lines that are going to haunt you and remind you of your own misdeeds and hurts. There’s apparently a narrative arc to this – in which case it’s the tale of a particularly mammoth and depraved weekend on a scale beyond even my own imaginings – but to me they work best as odd shards, gaps of beauty and gristle nestling between more conventional songs, without which no current playlist or mix CD can be complete. Live this really works too, having caught a recent gig at Kilburn’s Luminaire, now on its way to being my favourite place to see music, in which a slimmed-down, almost healthy-looking Moffat acted the raconteur and accompanied himself with an old record player and a stack of vinyl.

This is a beautiful thing, simple as that, funny and sad and full of life as it is lived. It’s issued by our old friends Chemikal Underground, which for many years was the greatest record label on earth (the Strap, Mogwai and the Delgados all in one place – did this really happen?). It comes appropriately packaged booklike, with a short story which you’re tongue-in-cheekly instructed to read before you listen to the CD. And you’re a bit foolish if you don’t already have and cherish this.

Look, all I’m saying is we’re going to be needing a new Poet Laureate soon, and we really could do a lot worse.

Be Your Own Pet - 'Becky'

2008-05-22T06:25:00.005Z

So I've just got back from one of my periodic bouts doing scary, grown-up, serious work in another part of the world. By the end of it I felt almost like an adult. But the song that soundtracked more than any other this particular trip? Why, this snotty, teen, girl punk, three minute anthem, of course. My 15 year old inner self remains, it seems. It's only the container that's getting old.

There are a lot of bands around doing short, shameless, guitared-up rock and roll, none of them really doing anything new, but Be Your Own Pet just do it better than anyone else. They offer a perfect combination of wit and stupidity. They do short, dumb songs about partying, fighting and throwing up - and surely we all have those kind of weekends? It's tearing-your-jeans, falling-out-with-your-best-friend-because-you're-drunk, losing-all-sense-of-proportion-because-you're-young-and-you-really-
think-this-is-heartbreak music. It's full of spunk and other cheap bodily fluids, but a girl singer stops it short of being mindlessly macho. And you just know one day this lot are going to grow old and boring and release a difficult LP which demands that we admire their broody musicianship, at which point we truly move from party to hangover, but mercifully, there doesn't seem any sign of that happening yet.

So yes, I love them, even if that makes me feel slightly queasy as my outer container hurtles towards 40 in a undignified way via any number of catastrophes. But if I ever get too old to like this stuff, administer the final, fatal dose.

This is a tune - a tale of vicious, disproportionate and very funny schoolyard revenge, and not a lot of regret either - that saw itself ludicrously excised from American versions of their new LP, Get Awkward. Truly, it's the world that's wrong, not the songs. Over here, in our new joke London city, even though booze is currently being made illegal, of course we lap up anything like this. More, exactly the same, please.

Half Man Half Biscuit - 'CSI: Ambleside'

2008-05-06T17:11:00.013Z

28 April 2008 saw something akin to an alignment of musical planets. Solar eclipses are surely less rare. As if a brand new - and, should you not yet have realised this, utterly magnificent - new Fall LP was not enough, right-thinking folk the world over were prompted to camp outside their nearest record shop awaiting the Monday morning opening by the issue of the latest from Half Man Half Biscuit, CSI: Ambleside. Truly, the rest of the week could only be blissful, and there was no point in anyone else putting any records out, although that new No Age LP surely merits some further listening once a sense of proportion has sadly reasserted itself.

If you ask people who claim to know a bit about music about Half Man Half Biscuit, chances are they'll tell you some of about four things: that they were around in the indie mid 80s, they made funny tunes like All I Want For Christmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit and Dickie Davies Eyes, they supported Tranmere Rovers and they split up. People occasionally tell me that they split up, and I splutter, not again. Fewer people seem to know that they ever reformed, or that they went on through the 90s and beyond to produce a string of life-affirming, necessary records. Sure, the early stuff's great, but in it's the later work where singer and writer Nigel Blackwell's sheer observational genius truly shines through. There's grumpiness and disdain for modern inanities aplenty in this stuff, but also a pleasure in the small and simple things. The songs I like best are those seemingly pure streams of consciousness where odd shards of observation and apparently random thoughts line up together, strings of uneven pearls.

It's all about the words of course. The music remains rudimentary, occasionally veering towards competence. It's meat and potato fare. It's all about listening again and again to dig out the nuggets. Thank god HMHB LPs don't come with lyric sheets. Of course there's a website dedicated to HMHB lyrics, and I admire their dedication, but I try not to look at it. A large part of the fun is puzzling out obscure and unexpected references. The band remain a surely uniquely British concern. If you haven't spent at least 30 years growing up here, it's questionable whether you'd understand much of this. The growth of minor celebrity culture and the proliferation of shit TV must have come as a godsend to Nigel Blackwell. He's the man who observes and dissects this stuff so you don't have to.

Like other recent genius LPs - and everything since 1998's Four Lads Who Shook The Wirral has been essential - I thought on first listens this represented a dip in form. I always think they've lost it. But it takes a few plays before it seeps in. Bits of lyrics catch you. You hear new phrases every time, piece it together. By now, a week in, having barely had a day when this didn't get heard at least once, I'm convinced it's as good as anything they've done, and like the new Fall LP, an unusually consistent work, if perhaps lacking the occasional standout songs of earlier records. And of course I'm going to resist the temptation almost every HMHB review falls prey to, of simply regurgitating the best bits of lines. That would be spoiling your fun. Suffice to say that at the moments my favourites are the chugging Totnes Bickering Fair, which has one of the great throwaway final lines of all time, the only-they-can-get-away-with-it Hokey Cokey parody of Petty Sessions, which they have the good sense to leave short, and the closing sour state-of-the-nation blast that is National Shite Day, which follows in their tradition of both epic closing songs and sustained, weary rants - see also from earlier times A Country Practice and Thy Damnation Slumbereth Not.

They're a band like no other. They're really the only band allowed to do this. They're a secret treasure not too many people should know about. They're doing their best work right now. They are worthy of your love. But the question is, are we worthy of them?

The Wave Pictures - 'Now You Are Pregnant'

2008-04-28T06:09:00.007Z

Sometimes tunes have to hang around a while and seep into your consciousness before they really hit you. Songs don't always make an early impression, and nor should they. They might seem okay, but nothing special. Then on one listen, for whatever reason, something clicks, and the run of the mill suddenly becomes something you can't imagine living without.

Here's one of those, currently part of a particularly dangerous playlist along with the sumptuous Daytrotter version of Casiotone for the Painfully Alone's Jeanne if You're Ever in Portland that left me blubbing twice on the same Victoria Line journey. Get a grip, boy. They're clearly a smart band, the Wave Pictures, shamelessly mining Postcard Records and vintage Hefner, the latest in that line of over-literate true indie bands who are doomed to make the girl smile but see her go off with someone who doesn't read books and has never even heard of Elefant records.

Not all their stuff does it for me but there are true gems amongst them, and this is the highest carat one, a bittersweet song to an ex-lover, the lyrics of which I'm not going to simply repeat here because half of the pleasure in these things is hearing them for yourself. This is one for anyone who's ever felt the pain of having an experience they couldn't share with a treasured ex, which should be most of us.

Ridiculously, this was a b side, recently re-emerging on a Moshi Moshi compilation of such given away with the increasingly ludicrous Artrocker magazine, though this is not their sort of thing at all. Their clothes are all wrong and they probably drink in unfashionable bars.

The Fall - 'Imperial Wax Solvent'

2008-04-23T06:00:00.007Z

So lately I've been doing other things, like working, or one of the things I do that isn't work, editing a magazine (sadly unmusical, although I like to sneak the odd reference in). But mostly I've been listening to the new Fall LP, repeatedly, obsessively. I've not listened to much else.

And it's great. It's a magnificent work. I say this with some relief. The Fall are at the beginning and end of any musical journey for me. Since I made it over the initial barrier of Mark E Smith's anti-singing vocal style about 20 years ago, they've been the band I revert to. New Fall offerings are feverishly anticipated in this house, but also fretted about. You see the last one, Reformation Post TLC, had its great moments, but overall turned out a disappointment to me, flabby, too obviously filled out with offcuts, overall one of my least favourites. True, even a bad Fall LP is interesting, and better than pretty much anything else out there, but I'd expected more. At that time, the Fall live were nothing other than stunning. It's a little over a year since I saw the greatest Fall gig of my life at the Zodiac in Oxford. But that band went and the new ones I've found pedestrian live. The last few Fall gigs I've seen, since Manchester last summer, haven't inspired. On the last tour I only caught the London show - I usually manage a few more - and found myself that rarest of feelings, bored.

So hopes weren't high but this all goes to show you can never write the man off. A year ago they were great live but flat on record. Now it's reversed. Imperial Wax Solvent tussles with The Unutterable for the crown of best Fall record of this decade. So far. It's packed with ideas, layers, odd concealed sounds, intriguing phrases, snipes at celebrity culture. Vocally Smith finds a bit more of a range here beyond the blood-curdling growl he seems to have adopted as default mode of late, although there's still plenty of that to amuse. He unearths pronunciations of words that just weren't there before.

Musically, to generalise sweepingly, the key ingredients of the Fall have for a long time been garage rock, krautrock, glam rock, rockabilly, heavy metal, techno, goth, country and reggae, and here it's mostly the krautrock side on offer. I'm all for that. (I'm one of the few long time Fall fans, it seems, who had a lot of time for Fall Heads Roll, which I thought took one dimension of the Fall, the garage rock part of their DNA, to an extreme.) Key song Fifty Year Old Man manages to encompass most of the above genres in its sprawling but essential 11 and a half minutes. But then there's a snotty punk number where Mrs Smith gets to sing, then an odd Kraftwerkian piece. You don't settle down here.

This is not to attempt a song by song analysis, which would not be in the half-hearted spirit of this blog, which prefers to talk about individual tunes, or just moments in them. If I had a favourite right now - and it's changed a few times already - it's Is This New, a vintage piece of fractured, almost nonsensical MES spoken narration over something chunky and cheesy that has had me googling 1970s TV show themes to find out which one it's been stolen from. At two and a bit minutes it's all over a little too quickly, something that can be said for a lot of these tunes, with the whole LP just flying past. How gratifying to be left wanting more. And for once, the production seems to get the fine line between clarity and murk just about right.

Brilliant. And, what next?

Imperial Wax Solvent finally comes out on Monday 28 April, although it's been over the internet and inside my head for weeks, and as can be seen, I failed to resist. Of course like pretty much every Fall fan who downloaded it early, I'll be going to buy my copy at the soonest. It's just, I needed to hear it. You do too.

Hercules and Love Affair - 'Blind'

2008-03-18T19:18:00.005Z

I don't care. I know I'm not supposed to like this. It's... dammit, it's disco, okay, a word I generally only use pejoratively. When I grew up an anorak-wearing indie kid, the battle lines were drawn, and disco (along with cock rock, admittedly an unlikely bedfellow) was the enemy. And although I'm ever so pro-gay in my white, middle class, liberal way, I happen to fancy, you know, girls. Further, you'd never get me inside a nightclub. Hate the places. Music's too loud, beer's shit and I've never been to one that isn't a meat market. Give me a dark, gloomy and preferably smelly pub with three misanthropic old blokes and a packet of pork scratchings any day. Hey, that's a dream night out. Life is miserable; work with the grain.

But fuck it, this is brill and you'd have to have rags stuck in your ears not to realise it. Back in the days when I cared about this website and used to try to talk about music and stuff on it, I declared my mixed feelings about this guy Antony from the Antony and the Johnsons, and how a particular song had utterly floored and convinced me. Went to see them at the Barbican shortly after that, some pretentious art thing where a series of women slowly revolved as the man sang, some of them, thrillingly, undressed. (I've seen so much nudity in the name of art. Occasionally you go to the theatre and someone doesn't take their clothes off, although you can usually get a refund.) Anyway, he sings on this one and he sounds great - he has a fabulous, almost terrible, voice - against a cheesy and smooth disco track which is utterly of both of its times - about 20 years ago and because of that, completely now.

Of course you buy this on 12" and it doesn't include the best version, which is on the LP, although alongside some useless remix by some bloke or other there's a classy Frankie Knuckles mix, which takes me back to that brief interregnum when I utterly rejected guitar-based music for the abstract thrills of late house and early techno. The LP's got to be great anyway, having heard a fair chunk of it via illegal downloads on the office computer, while vaguely wondering why no one's got round to sacking me yet. But I find downloading just fuels more buying, which makes it okay, and this lot are added to the massive list of LPs I now need to get, work demands having intervened two weeks running to prevent me from venturing to the record shop. What's with everybody - Teenagers, Fuck Buttons, Crystal Castles, Be Your Own Pet, Nick Cave, Youthmovies - putting LPs out at the same time anyway? Some planning, please? I'm under a lot of pressure here.

Deize Tigrona - 'Bandida' / 'Me Chinga'

2008-03-10T19:56:00.004Z

I never really got to grips with genres. I'm occasionally puzzled when I feed a CD into the computer or copy some MP3s into the relevant music-playing software and the machine tells me that this tune I really like is some sub-variant of a type of music that I hadn't known existed. Occasionally I flirt with reclassifying them all into one genre. I would call that genre 'music', although I might still have to reserve a special category for The Fall, who are above any such relativism.

So I thought this stuff was called Baile Funk, until I went to that ultimate authority on which I base all my life decisions, Wikipedia, which told me that basically that's a misnomer which only the crassest white guy imperialist tourist and cultural appropriator could make. Regardless, this is clearly modern Brazilian music and I seem to have pretty much fallen for this stuff in a generic way, in the same way I love, say Soukous music, without particularly being able to tell one thing from another. The daft and life-affirming Bonde do Role acted as a gateway drug here, although presumably they irk the purists by not being prepared to stay in the 'world music' ghetto, and from that starting point I now thrash about hopelessly in a great pool of similar-sounding records.

Take this one. It's so spartan. It's raw and angry-sounding. It's defiantly unmelodic, and as such seems quite typical. Of course, I don't understand the words, but as a hardcore Mark E Smith devotee, that's never really been an issue. She could be singing/rapping about love and kittens for all I know, but if so, she still sounds mightily pissed off about it all. This is rock music, and yes it's punk music, and a little bit of incomprehension probably helps.

A lot of this stuff seems to be on Man Recordings of, erm, Germany, and having unearthed this and paid more money than was sensible for it in the West London branch of Rough Trade the other week, I immediately had to fork out for more from Man, from Boomkat for a change, very good for these kind of things, through which resulting pile I continue to work, without finding anything quite in the same class. But now there's this new record by Tetine on Soul Jazz, I Go To The Doctor, which is so short and slight it virtually isn't there, and so crude in its innuendo, but which has managed to creep into valuable headspace nevertheless, and looks like making itself at home there, at least until the next impossible to predict thing comes along.

Casiotone for the Painfully Alone - 'Mother's Pearls'

2008-03-02T16:45:00.004Z

The older I get, the more music seems to have the power to move me. This was not what I expected to happen. I assumed music's power would be reduced as adulthood exerted its deadening grip and other things crowded the space. But even back in my Polaroid-coloured days I used to be puzzled by the frequently-repeated tale of John Peel being forced to pull over when hearing Teenage Kicks while driving, helplessly reduced to tears. Music became an obsession for me over two decades ago, yet it didn't have the power to make this teenager cry. Not so now. I'm clearly at a vulnerable age, where youth's optimism yields to disappointment and practical realisation of modern life's limitations, and there seems an ever growing roster of tunes that are capable of bringing tears to my eyes. I have to be careful what I listen to on the tube these days.

I realised things had reached a new level this morning when I managed to make myself blub just by wandering around the kitchen singing this song to myself while making a cup of coffee. Clearly this is a worrying development. But oh, there's something about this at the moment that just makes me ache. First appearing on 2006's classic Etiquette - and by the way, where's the follow-up, huh? - it recently resurfaced as part of a new Daytrotter session. I've written about Daytrotter and Casiotone before, which means I need not repeat myself for all five of you - but I'll simply restate my view that this man is a genius and the sooner the world gets round to recognising him as such the better off we'll all be. This is one of Owen's brilliantly realised female point of view tales, and the usual sketchy story of regret and disappointment, this time about losing a family heirloom while drunk down the club. This is for anyone who's ever done anything they've wanted to unwish the day after, which is all of us. I've begun to think that regret might be the most powerful of human emotions, stronger even than guilt. On Etiquette a woman singer guested in to perform it, but intriguingly here Owen sings it himself, and it still utterly works, poignant words matched with a cheesy hands in the air disco thumper. Today, nothing is as good a this.

Go there, download it, and be not quite the same person you were before. More exciting still, Casiotone are in the UK at the moment. Bush Hall awaits. I am excited, but I'll try to stay dry-eyed.

Chairlift - 'Evident Utensil'

2008-02-26T20:10:00.002Z

In truth I was a bit too young for The Slits the first time round. I've just googled 1979 and it looks like my favourite hits of the year were The Buggles' Video Killed The Radio Star and The Boomtown Rats' I Don't Like Mondays. Could be worse. But I've since come to love the warped, feminist reggae of Ari Up and co. I'm hearing a lot of that now in this tune by Chairlift, another in that seemingly endless wave of US bands - see also Vampire Weekend, MGMT and Yeasayer - who mix things up like kids who never heard of genres and wash up on these shores to great acclaim. There is no criticism here - all of those bands have much to commend them, and we have been so ill-served domestically these past few years by dull, pale British boys who all wanted to be The Libertines. Did I miss anybody out? Only the next five uber-cool bands I haven't heard of yet.

So yes, this Chairlift tune - and I can't confess I've investigated further beyond this immediate particular seven inch, although obviously it's on my gargantuan list of Things To Do once I've stopped wasting time putting in order sequences of words for an audience of five - puts me in mind of the Slits, and that, in my book, can be no bad thing. The less masculine we can make this thing we call music, the better - that's my view. True, with its daft lyrics about pencils it lacks the political edge of our correctly-chromosomed crusaders of yesteryear, but hey, don't we all? Anyway, one can stretch analogy too far. There are blokes involved in this too. There's one singing in the background, in a ludicrous, faux-sexy deep voice. For some reason the reference that popped into my head here was The Boys Town Gang, but then when I checked, their most famous tune doesn't have any male backing vocals in it, just some fabulous dancing - although you should not need any excuse to view this video. Instant Prozac, except this stuff works.

The b-side is the usual non-essential remix which isn't as good as the a side, this time by our new friends the aforementioned MGMT, although the backing vocals really come into their own here. The physical object, on Kanine Records, where you've previously found Holy Hail and Grizzly Bear, both revered in these quarters, is sold out at Norman Records, although Rough Trade or Pure Groove might have it, and remarkably for once, given it's something new, you can get it on crusty eMusic instead of giving Apple any more of your money. Remember, paying for music is the new getting music for free.

Munch Munch - 'Wedding'

2008-02-10T19:17:00.001Z

A couple of weeks ago I worried that I was going through one of those dips in the road where music mattered less. Well, I appear to be through that now. Partly it's this new Vampire Weekend record, which I suspect is the sort of thing I'm ideologically not supposed to like, but with which I appear to be helplessly obsessed regardless, and partly it's seeing Art Brut a few days back for the first time in ages and them restoring my faith in rock and roll. True, I was drunk, but I somehow had a very good night indeed, for perhaps the first time this year.

And then there's Tomlab, again, they being very much the label of choice for anyone seeking something they can't automatically predict these days. I'd offer to marry them and have their kids, except that I'm a man, I'm already married, and they're a record label. Apart from that, I foresee no difficulties, and may well propose sometime when suitably intoxicated. On offer this time is the fractured glam disco of Munch Munch. This is fine, ramshackle fare, boasting a chorus so rudimentary that it doesn't contain any words as such, until that is someone with a sore throat decides he might as well get involved too and joins in. This is so DIY it's held together with gaffer tape, but at the same time it has a mirrorball surface sheen. Then two thirds of the way through it turns into another song, with a cheap organ sound that recalls early - i.e. good - Inspiral Carpets. It's as chaotic as a northern wedding, and much more fun than the last few I've been to.

Rough Trade - I like their new shop, although it appears to be mostly a place for people to drink coffee - would appear to still have this.

Fuck Buttons - 'Bright Tomorrow'

2008-02-05T23:36:00.000Z

So, fucking Fuck Buttons, then. As I think we have by now established, there is currently an intriguing correlation between swearing and musical quality. As a rule it doesn't hold hard and fast, of course, but there would seem to be a fair degree of overlap between using what we might coyly call the f word and producing something worth listening to.

I'm increasingly told I swear too much, by the way, and occasionally make failed efforts to cut down. But swearing's as addictive as smack. At work, where I daily and increasingly interrogate the gap between effort and meaning, I have apparently infected my colleagues, and unwittingly introduced a culture of swearing which negatively impacts on the image of the organisation, or something. Like I fucking care. On one recent work trip I was advised the old swearing thing had slipped completely beyond the grasp of my control, at which point I instituted a day in which I would do my damnedest to watch my language, or each time I failed I would donate £1 to charity. This was a day in which I was excessively, maddeningly careful with my fucks. And it still cost me £25. Is there a support group I can join? Are there internet brethren I can socially network with to cure me of this ill?

Anyway, to this. It's all going along nicely enough as some kind of Spaceman Three - no, come back, but good - type of subdued drony thing, and then this ultra articificial, thin metallic guitar comes on over the top, and that's enough already to tickle the fancy of yer average Mogwai fan like me, until some bloke starts incomprehensively howling, indeed screaming, along as well. He's certainly venting, and possibly feels better for it afterwards. We may be listening to someone's catharsis here. The whole thing disappears as soon as it starts, via a quick bout of thudding drum, to leave you puzzled, wondering about meaning... but playing it again. This is all very avant-something. It's brill.

And wonderfully it's on a 7" picture disc, and as they seem to be a bit arsey about taking it off MP3 blogs which are seeking to share the good news, which I have mixed feelings about, it means you've got to go out and buy it and maybe support your struggling independent record shop in the process.

Now I may have to take time out from stalking Vampire Weekend, which is pretty much a full time job at the moment, to make good on this threat, but after this, I expect great things of this lot, and reserve the right to be disappointed and a bit disapproving if they don't go on to achieve them.

Bitchee Bitchee Ya Ya Ya - 'Fuck Friend'

2008-01-27T18:42:00.000Z

Typically, I'm months behind the curve on this one. But it's all relative, huh? I know I'll the only kid with my postcode to be into this, for example. I always have been, and always will be, interim hip. Cooler than most, but with a broader and shallower perspective than the true scenester. Take that Youthmovies gig I went to the other night. I love that band, but the venue, amidst the Turkish shops and restaurants of Stoke Newington Road, was full of Dalston trendy scene wankers who'd drifted northwards. Lower Dalston is North Hoxton these days. There was not a sensible haircut to be seen. And I bet they've been downloading this stuff for months. Fuckers.

Anyway, tedious work and life having intervened these past weeks - the two are distinct but subtly related - it's been a while since I last confessed my love of a particular record to no one in particular on here. I don't know if it's a coincidence but I seem to be going through one of those areas of poor reception where very little music is doing it for me at the moment. Most things sound standard; little really inspires. The only things that are exciting me just now are mixed up, mucky stuff like this, and like the Fuck Buttons record, and to some extent Munch Munch, and of course Crystal Castles. What this grab-bag might have in common I'm not sure, apart from a certain willfulness and willingness to defy formula, and the offering of a refreshing possibility that there might be people making music just for the playful hell of it all, rather than seeing it as a career.

So this is yet another Euro-trashy record put together by doubtless fearless 16 year-olds who I would despise if I ever met in real life, where they would be hanging around a bus shelter and filming my mugging on their 3G mobile phones. There's a lot of this stuff around at the moment to be sure, and it all comes from Kitsune in 12"s with those generic sleeves. Through all this CSS remixes run like a golden thread, pulling all these tunes together. You know, something interesting happened when the internet became the prime means of disseminating music and all the barriers came down and people started making records that just mixed stuff up without even realising that you weren't supposed to do that. Remember when you were only allowed to like certain things? We were wrong, weren't we? At the same time, of course, this internet generation grew up with instant, permanent access to eye-popping hardcore pornography, so there's a certain blank, whatever, grubbiness to proceedings, as captured brilliantly by our old friends The Teenagers. I'm convinced our civilisation is doomed and we're all going to hell, but at the same time I rather enjoy the soundtrack.

Naturally regardless of the internet I still demand the physical object by way of affirmation - people were blogging about this lot back in May, but it's only in December that the record came out and made it real for me. And what you get on this 12" is ludicrous and brilliant. A big crash bang wallop of a start yields to seriously distorted, squelchy keyboards. It sounds like something taped off the radio onto a gnarled old C90 tape (ask your parents). Amidst all the crunchy filthiness of this tune which is rock and dance simultaneously lurks a sweet, naive vocal and a memory-grabbing unashamed pop chorus. Is that I hint of Baccara I hear? Plus all the good records these days have gratuitous swearing in them, like this does. Fact.

Anyway, go and buy the record from someone, and then you get the mandatory not-as-good-as-the-original remixes too. Where would we be without them? No wonder Brazil's economy is booming. And then go and download The Anthem by the same. It's almost identical, and nearly as good.

Paul Rooney - 'Lucy Over Lancashire'

2008-01-03T13:45:00.000Z

Dandelion Radio's Festive Fifty has again justified its existence. Dandelion, an online radio station moved by the spirit of John Peel, which is streaming the Festive Fifty all the way through January, inherited this venerable yearly poll from Radio One, which has been predictably careless with Peel's legacy (compare and contrast, say, one of Peel's final tracklistings with those of minor celebrity Colin Murray, who now occupies that slot, and weep). Thus the annual ritual - a highlight, surely, of any yuletide - of picking through, disagreeing with and being occasionally enthralled by half a hundred of the year's choicest musical offerings, could be fulfilled once more. I listened to it in one great five-hour glob on the afternoon of New Year's Day, giving grateful due thanks to an understanding partner, and felt somewhat guilty and slightly queasy afterwards, much as one might when one has consumed an enormous amount of tasty but nutritionally dubious food in one sitting, a feeling which obviously I got more than once over the holiday period.

As is customary with Festive Fifties, my own choices fared fairly badly, with only one of my three votes making it in there and not a lot on my shortlist surviving the cut either. There was a particularly pleasing sequence where The Fall and Von Sudenfed rubbed close shoulders, and overall there was little I could object to. I like Battles, although obviously consider it a travesty that The Teenagers, with whom I am obsessed, were overlooked. But as I said, it utterly justified its existence by banging me over the head with a tune I really ought to have known but which has somehow passed me by until this point.

Cards on table time here. I guess I was always destined to like this one, having been born, grown up and spent some twenty years of my life in the shadow of Pendle Hill, referenced heavily herein. Pendle is famous for witches, you see, and the subject matter of this extraordinary record is the many satanic connections of Lancashire. Plus I'm a lover of dub reggae and this is what you get here: a sprawling 14 minute slab of best heavy Northern dub, on which sits atop a sprite of the air, an unreliable narrator, misinformed by the mysterious Alan (or Allan?), who delivers in a spot on parody of a now slightly antiquated East Lancashire accent - not a full definite article to be heard - a bizarre, twisting monologue. This touches with varying accuracy on, amongst other things, from memory and doubtless missing lots, Satan, the aforementioned Pendle witches, the A666 road, the colour red, cotton weaving, (dark satanic) mills, Marx and Engels, climate change, the slave trade, immigration from South Asia, the BNP, Mick Hucknall, dub reggae, Radio Lancashire's legendary On The Wire programme (one of the finest of all things about the County Palatine, and for which this apparently was first made, and thanks to which I've just discovered you can now listen to the show via the web, which I hadn't realised before), rival Red Rose Radio, Liverpool band The Beatles and of course Mark E Smith and The Fall.

You see, it all joins up. The title winks of course to The Fall's now 20 year-old b-side minor classic, Lucifer Over Lancashire. Don't underestimate the importance of Lancastrian folklore in the brew that makes up the greatest group of all time. See particularly 1979's sinister Dragnet. Bear in mind always that The Fall is a north Manchester (Lancashire) child rather than south Manchester (Cheshire). The difference is vital. Recall also The Fall's early 1990s invention of a unique hybrid of northern and reggae with their magnificent kitchen cover version of Lee Perry's Kimble and cut-and-shunt job of two tunes to make Why Are People Grudgeful? It's all about making connections. And all the connections are in this record.

I'm always thrilled, but at the same time embarrassed, when something I've missed resurfaces, but that's the joy of music and that's what keeps me listening. If I'd heard this before, I'd have voted for it too. Apparently it first came to light last May, which was a busy time, so there are my excuses made. Although, I recall this fellow (and a quick bit of googling confirms), then Rooney only, doing moody, spoken word and music pieces played much by Peel in the late 1990s. It's all joining up again. One about touts in the Barrowland, wasn't there? I could dig out the tapes if I get a spare day. And one turned up again on a Sonic Arts Network CD 'curated' by comedian and Fall fan Stewart Lee last year. I love connections.

Anyway, the shiny red 12" of this has now been ordered, and in the meantime I have the thing downloaded from that last link to listen to (in unwieldy 'ogg' format, whatever that may be, which eventually I turned into something I could hear... best have a twelve-year-old to hand to decode this). The MP3 player is currently being used for little else. This is a top three choice, in any year.

Casiotone for the Painfully Alone - 'New Year's Kiss'

2008-01-01T15:13:00.000Z

By now, the whole world of course knows about Daytrotter. The idea is brilliant and simple: when suitable bands tour themselves around the country we know as America, they are invited to stop off at a town called Rock Island (about which I'd like to retain my own mental picture, thanks, without adding any factual details to spoil it) and record a session. Brevity usually encourages a stripped-down, somewhat acoustic sound, which obviously suits some better than others, and there's a distinct lean towards Americana in what they offer. It's part of the jigsaw, but not the whole jigsaw. We are not Uncut magazine here, after all. This is, you feel, a world where Bonnie Prince Billy is revered as a god, and Iron and Wine as at least a minor deity (but hey, I really liked that last Iron and Wine LP, you know, played it a lot).

And what do you want, you miserable bastards, anyway? It's regularly updated, it's done with wit, it's free, it's legal, so none of that liberal guilt you get from downloading MP3s (you do get liberal guilt, I hope?) and it has a great cartoon strip too. Just now I grabbed a session by the Papercuts (it's okay... heard-it-before gentle indie) and a couple by the Dirty Projectors (despite myself I've recently found I've warmed to their pretentious art thing).

Anyway, Casiotone. They/he are/is utterly wonderful, and if you don't know this already, just what the hell do you think you've been doing with yourself for the last few years? Owen Ashworth is a short story writer and film-maker who just happens to work through the medium of short, bittersweet, observational pop songs. Cheap, generic keyboard sounds bang their noses against glimpses of stories, shards of life, snapshots of lives lived on the margins or in surprised disappointment, with these occasional moments of hope. Vocally, and in his ability to wring sad poetry from the mundane, he reminds me a bit of David Gedge of the wrongly-maligned Wedding Present. His 2006 LP, Etiquette, is a modern masterpiece. I hardly ever go back to old stuff - the new listening pile only seems to totter further upwards - but I still listen to this a lot. More instruments and voices are added to the brew in this one, and on the whole, and somewhat messily, love triumphs. Get it from Tomlab, which would be our record label of the year, or something, if we did such things here.

My favourite tune on there, over time, is probably New Year's Kiss, which resurfaces in a new form in this recent Daytrotter session. To be honest, I prefer the original, but I felt like making a lame stab at topicality, what with the recent arbitrary date change. Go here to download the songs. And don't miss the first session, too, which includes a heart-breakingly definitive reading of Tonight Was A Disaster.

There are mercifully few songs about New Year, compared to the endless glut of Christmas tunes. (Anyone, by the way, who has ever seen fit to give a spin to the appalling U2's ghastly bombastic offering on 1 January is surely going to hell.) New Year's Eve is, of course, the single worst night of any year, an annual wankers' charter where the basest excesses of group mentality are not only tolerated but positively encouraged. It is an evening to shun humanity. (This one just past I counter-intuitively went to the theatre, and then, after pushing my way through Sodom and Gomorrah crowds to get the tube, made my way safely indoors ere midnight. I always say that the perfect New Year's Eve involves a locked door and a bottle of scotch, which if I got the timings right would see me snugly passed out by eleven.)

Anyway, yer man Owen gets it spot on as usual, capturing the anticlimax which greets each January 1st, with this tale of a girl's less than perfect NYE encounter, from waking up in a strange boy's bed backwards. He's one of the few men around who can write as good a song from a woman's point of view as a man's. Every line's a delight from first to last, and I'll long treasure a phrase about 'champagne lips'. I'm currently learning to play guitar, largely so next December 31st I can head down Embankment tube station and busk this to an unappreciative crowd.

Next stop, Half Man Half Biscuit's Epiphany, January 6th.

Black Kids - 'I'm Not Going To Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You'

2007-12-28T17:08:00.000Z

Yes, we're even further behind the blogging curve than usual here. All the most fashionable places have been raving about these people for simply months now. Even newspapers now tip Black Kids, in those none-more-tiresome year end filler pieces, as one to watch in 2008, which of course makes them so 2007. But there's something been on my mind here, which I may as well offload. The purpose of these pages is pretty much only to praise - to assert the supremacy of an emotional, non-rational and enthusiastic response to music. It's all about things that I think are great and I want to tell other people are great. Sniping is usually confined to the margins, with only the occasional aside about how shit XFM is, or how lazy most record shops are. But here's my proposition about Black Kids: they only have one good song.

And it's a belter. I'm Not Going To Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You is perfect. Big chorus, sexually ambiguous lyrics, life-affirming sing-along stuff, in short. It sent me dancing, spiralling around my kitchen in absolute rapture the other Saturday morning, and not much can. It found its way onto most of the compilation CDs I press into the reluctant hands of acquaintances. But I'd suggest there's no point those people investigating further if they like what they hear sandwiched between The Teenagers and The Fall. The rest of what they offer is painfully derivative stuff - 80% The Cure, 20% Arcade Fire. (I blame Arcade Fire for a lot, by the way. 2007 was the year that the large number of bands who'd decided to sound like them were pushed towards us by idiot record companies.) It's weak, unfinished stuff, like first rehearsal tapes prematurely exposed to the public glare.

I uphold, of course, the right of bands to have only one good song, to flare and die, to ripple the surface only briefly. Some of my favourite tunes came from one trick ponies. Apart from the brilliant Surfing Mice, did The Hermit Crabs (the 1980s ones) ever bother to make another record? If so, I don't want to hear it. It's just that I sort of feel sorry for this lot. I realised this when I saw them supporting Of Montreal a few weeks ago. Having heard their one good song, I'd arrived at ULU early in the hope of hearing it. No cheap gesture this, given the inadequacy of that venue, the bar of which is worse than the most desperate indie toilet. ('Do you have red wine?' 'No.' 'Do you have white wine?' 'No.') And they duly played their one good song in front of a half-hearted crowd, and I loved it and the rest wasn't great, and that's when my pity was pricked. They look terrific, have an eye-catching, provocative name, a logo, and are the right age, and have therefore received a wave of web hype. So they're playing to venues that are too big for them before they're ready to crowds who are quickly going to respond adversely to the hype. The trajectory of this lot is there for all to see.

I realise how old fashioned this sounds, but they haven't even put a record out yet. You download this stuff from their website. This is partly why I hadn't wanted to write about my love of this song. I still revere the physical object, believe bands ought to put records out for people to take home and adore. In our speeded up world, where 'new music', whatever that is, is venerated and everyone seems to be looking for the next new thing to break, it's like they've lived their time before that first record has even appeared. Where will this lead to? Should someone just come up with the idea of a band, promote it smartly and then we can all fall over ourselves in excitement without the band actually having to exist? Perhaps this is the point at which the world ends.

Having only recently taken this site out of mothballs after an afternoon nap that ended up lasting two and a half years, this is a conclusion I'm reluctant to suggest, but here goes: in the fast approaching New Year, perhaps we should all stop writing about music? Or if we can't do that, perhaps we can agree to give up the race to be the first to break the newest new thing and just let things find their level? No chance, eh?

Wild Billy Childish and the Musicians of the British Empire - 'Christmas 1979'

2007-12-20T11:43:00.000Z

For someone who would never describe himself as a fan of the festive season, I seem to have acquired a lot of Christmas-related music over the years. In those glorious Decembers when we give the slip to the seasonal ritual of endless family visits - not, alas, this year - and instead huddle quietly in our East London hovel turning our unsociable backs on the outside world, I make up Christmas playlists to accompany proceedings. These lists get longer and longer each year. Of course this grotesque festival of greed and consumption could not be considered complete without the fragile masterpiece that is Low's Christmas LP getting its annual spin. But did I really need to chuck that five CD Sufjan Stevens box set into the mix last year?

There's been a real trend in recent years amongst those who make unpopular, left field music of the kind I have accumulated in vast quantities these past two decades to make Christmas records, presumably guided by the spirit of that cheapest of devices, irony. These are, in the main, not as good as records by the same people that aren't about Christmas. But still, I keep on buying them, so who's the tosser here? I recently, for example, bought three volumes of Christmas tunes from Cherryade Records, and will I even listen to them?

But Billy Childish, in his various incarnations, I'll always have a soft spot for. I'm glad there are people like him around the place. Sure, what you get here is what even fleeting familiarity with his back catalogue would have you expect: ridiculously reductive, back to basics rock and roll from that alternate universe where music is held to have reached its apotheosis with the early work of The Who. I don't want everything to be like this, but I don't mind a bit of it. So here the Medway's finest son gives us a tale of being on 'punk leave' from gigging in Hamburg at around the time we bade farewell to the seventies and witnessing a fairly typical festive breakdown, shackled to artlessly primitive backing.

My advice is to get this and play it loud and often this yuletide, particularly if there are any cloth-eared visiting family members you want to annoy. This is a great 7" from those purveyors of ramshackle thrills, Damaged Goods, even if the accompanying entire LP of Christmas songs is a bit much. Of course I bought that too.

Merry fucking Christmas, indeed.

The Teenagers - 'Starlett Johannson'

2007-12-17T16:04:00.000Z

At the time of writing I have just added up the number of plays for tunes by The Teenagers on both home and office computers (and one of the very best things about my job is that I get to listen to music all day long at work) and the count stands at 125, which suggests something like obsession. (The Last FM thing on the right there only counts some and doesn't function at all at work, for reasons that are doubtless too tedious to be worth understanding.) Actually, make that 127, as I had a couple further quick blasts on the portable MP3 player while slaloming around slow-moving crowds in London's busy West End this lunchtime. And of course that figure doesn't include countless turns of the hard copy vinyl artefacts on the trusty record player. (I haven't yet found a satisfactory way to capture analogue play counts and aggregate this with digital data. Perhaps I need to keep a notebook and pencil by the stereo? But we all know that if you try to record behaviour you end up influencing it.)

So yes, it would seem that I'm smitten by The Teenagers, and even though, as we've discussed before, that does make me feel rather the creepy Uncle Quentin meddling in the youngsters' fun (bands these days play 'all ages' gigs, but can I be alone in thinking an upper age limit might also be imposed?) there's not a lot I can do about it. It seems all my life I've been waiting for someone to come along and buy my soul in return for a fistful of cheeky, slightly cheesy, perhaps mildly misogynist and above all absolutely filthy Euro-pop-rock. Yes, perhaps I should have demanded a higher price, but on the other hand it's so damned catchy. And, as someone once said before he lost the plot, the music they play may say nothing to me about my life, but still I can't help it. Have I become a sort of voyeur here? Is that it? Is this why once again I spent a significant part of my weekend ferreting about amidst the innards of the miraculous Hype Machine seeking out and downloading fairly pointless Teenagers' remixes, none of which are, of course, as good as the original? (And naturally I have a theory about remixes too, the non-committal, anti-definitive and essentially open nature of which are perfect for these confused, relativist times. All versions are equal because the last thing we want is to have the courage of a clear conviction. See also directors' cuts and alternative endings.)

Of course nothing will ever quite replace The Homecoming in my affections, but this is still marvellous, being another slice of offbeat electro-rock about the almost eponymous heroine, who should either be amused or consider taking out some sort of restraining order. And naturally it connected neatly with my own Lost in Translation obsession, so maybe that's part of it. It's got a singalong chorus and they don't mind admitting they're scared of spiders. I am too. Perhaps there's a Facebook group all us arachnophobes could join?

Meanwhile the b side of the physical manifestation appears to be a hymn to the simple joys of self-abuse, in this case apparently aided by Christina Aguilera videos, which don't do it for me, but the diversity of human sexuality is a truly wonderful thing. There have been few songs about the pleasures of the humble wank - one thinks, of course, of the Buzzcocks' Orgasm Addict - and there really ought to be more. I've always considered it as evidence in support of Intelligent Design, or at least the existence of some sort of benign Creator, that human beings carry around with them all the essentials for solo sexual gratification - genitals, the means of manipulating them and an imagination. What better way to celebrate such a state of affairs than through the medium of song?

Where was I? But the magic doesn't stop there. Trawl the internet for the sleazier still Fuck Nicole - I've always had a fondness for the word 'quim', which is probably in Chaucer or something - or the straight-up, chorus-heavy rock of Tiger, two other personal favourites of the hour. Or find the strange but rather beautiful trombone-laden reimagining by Connan and the Mockasins, whose earlier tune Sneaky, Sneaky Dogfriend was one of the great lost classics of this website's two year nervous breakdown.

Got to go now. Play 128 is imminent.

Untitled Musical Project

2007-12-16T19:04:00.000Z

These lads have been on my mind today, because they stood out in an otherwise pretty dismal gig on Saturday night. The occasion was an allegedly Christmas evening's entertainment - although of course it isn't Christmas yet - loosely organised by the once excellent Tigertrap records at Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes.

I confess part of the appeal was to visit a venue which sounded intriguing but which I hadn't had a chance to see before. The reality was rather less so. I'd been wondering how they'd integrate an American-style bowling alley and a music venue, and the answer is, they don't. There's a bowling alley, and then there's a rather forlorn and neglected small stage in the corridor next to it. You're painfully aware throughout that you're really in the basement of a large, bland hotel. And we couldn't even bowl, the lanes all being booked by Christmas party groups who must have found the racket of the sound-checking bands a nuisance. For the rest of us there was an awful lot of standing around listening to those sound checks, an insight that wasn't without interest, although one couldn't help wondering why the doors hadn't been opened after all this. Still, they sold plenty of drink in our direction - so there's your answer - as we sought to alleviate the boredom in the only way we knew how.

But these made it worth it. I took an instant shine to their urgent and intense manner. They gave me just what I was looking for: a set of shouty, spiky and short songs that didn't outstay its welcome and kept me awake (I've developed a bad record of late for falling asleep in theatres and seated music venues). Their (disappointingly self-titled) mini-LP/EP whatever it is CD on the aforementioned label offers you eight tunes in under 17 minutes, which gives you an idea of where they're coming from. In truth this isn't really anything we haven't heard before, but what sets them apart is a spark of wit, summed up in song titles like I May Not Be Jimi Hendrix But At Least I'm Still Alive. That combination of the agressive and the playful will always snare me. For those of us who've rather missed Mclusky, we may have found their heirs. Great band name, too. Try to catch them live in the six months or so before they become old and boring and crack the three minute barrier.

The rest of the evening was alas downhill from this point, concluding in a lairy drunk man, who had started an argument with me, picking up a glass bottle by the neck and testing its weight in a significant way. I made my excuses and left. Christmas, eh?

Robert Wyatt - 'Just As You Are'

2007-12-14T20:48:00.001Z

Is it fair to say I've always liked the idea of Robert Wyatt more than I've felt a pressing need to listen to his records much? Sure, the odd tune of his has, at times, really settled under my skin: The Duchess from his record Shleep back in the John Peel days, Shipbuilding of course, and from before my time his insane, inspired cover of I'm a Believer. But in the main I take his work in small doses. It's perhaps the significant jazz influences you hear that deter me, jazz being one of those things I haven't made room for yet. I'm sort of saving jazz up for my fifties. (And classical for my sixties, if I make it that far. Then I'll like everything.)

Ah, but this, from his recent LP Comicopera, is purely gorgeous. I have no resistance. It melts me. I love the way he doesn't start singing on his own tune until about half way through. I love the confidence of that. Now, never one for letting knowledge get in the way of passion, I haven't remotely done my research here; I've no idea who the woman is who sings the first half of this, but lord, she has a lovely, Latin-accented voice. And then Robert himself comes in and he's never sounded better, reminding you that he's one of the greatest of all singers who can't sing, as well as one of our finest beard wearers. It's fragile, beautiful and perfectly weighted. It utterly works, with no hint of the self indulgence that you could sometimes accuse him of.

This is a song about acceptance and forgiveness, about love in the face of repeated failure and imperfection, and correspondingly about wanting to become a better person because you are loved and you know you keep letting someone down. There are, of course, days when I can barely stand to listen to this.

Bearsuit - 'Foxy Boxer'

2007-12-09T16:35:00.000Z

Now these buggers have been on my mind this weekend because I saw them on Friday night. The venue, by the way, upstairs at a pub called The Enterprise, was pretty much the shabbiest I've ever seen. And I've now put in some 20 years of watching unpopular bands in obscure holes. The Enterprise, hard by Chalk Falm tube, is a pub that I had twice before entered, both times having walked out without taking a drink aghast in horror at the clientele. Truly, I love Bearsuit to have braved this a third time, including on this occasion sampling red wine visibly concocted by mixing the dregs of several different bottles.

Each time I see Bearsuit - and I think to my shame this was only the fourth - it occurs to me that they must be one of my favourite bands. And then between times I rather forget about them, which means I must be a bad person. They're one of those bands - see also the very different Broken Family Band - who make more sense live than on record. I realised on Friday that they are at heart a shouty noise band who like nothing more than making a racket. But that's not all they are. They like edges, this lot, both sharp and serrated, but they like melody and choruses and boy-girl singalongs too. They prefer it best when all these things happen at once. And when songs stop and start and begin again suddenly and make unexpected gear changes. And when they can shoehorn in trumpets and flutes at any opportunity, as they did on Friday. Melt-Banana meets Talulah Gosh, perhaps? Live, they always appear to be having a great time themselves, even if sometimes they can't remember how to begin or indeed play a particular song, and I always love this. I reckon, particularly on a Friday night after a week's senseless toil, I've got more chance of having a good time if the band I'm seeing are too.

It's just that each time I see them there seem to be fewer people there than the time before. I reckon there were 50 of us, if that, paying homage in the Enterprise. And this, alongside climate change, is surely proof that all of us in the developed world are going to hell and probably deserve to do so.

Anyway, new single Foxy Boxer showcases the more melodic, less crunchy side of Bearsuit, despite which it's stranger than 99% of anything that you might hear on, say, idiot indie station XFM, and contains an inexplicable line about having 'hips like mahogany'. This tune is apparently inspired by the sport of 'topless titty boxing', which has so far escaped my consciousness, but surely merits a quick google as soon as I've finished this. Hey, if we need a demonstration sport for the 2012 East London Olympics, we've surely found it? Why don't you buy the record, which comes with a badge - I often consider buying only records that either come with a badge or are on coloured vinyl, as I reckon the strike rate would be high, and this offers both - or even, you know, pay for a download? They deserve your money.

Filthy Pedro - 'Rock 'N' Roll Points'

2007-12-07T17:01:00.000Z

Having spent two and a half years between blog posts wandering around looking for my lost memory - and honestly this is true, and of course I wish I'd thought of the canoe thing first, if only to bring fame of a kind - there are many, many gems that surely merited a mention in these never-read pages but which have since sunk to the bottom of the record stacks. This is one such that came out earlier this year, got played a lot as a 7" and duly downloaded too - not many justify this doubling - and then got lost beneath the next 500 or so singles that came along. Until for some reason recently, when I was putting together a slew of CDs for people who enjoy receiving them far less than I enjoy making them, and this simply insisted on being on every one. Perhaps this was inspired by some recent, uncharacteristic rock and roll behaviour of my own, involving extreme drunkenness, my head and a plate glass window, from which I emerged miraculously unscathed, barring a few minor cuts and bruises (but hey, you should have seen the window).

You can do a rock and roll points test on the Filthy Pedro website, by the way. I scored a creditable 20 rock and roll points.

Anyway, this is knockabout, smile-inducing, life-affirming stuff. If something in this doesn't bring a grin to your face then it's possible you're already dead. Every rock and roll cliche is distilled into something a little over three minutes long - feel free to tick them off your own personal bingo card as appropriate - and after this there's surely no need for a publication like the NME which celebrates these cliches every week afresh. This guy has nailed it, and all to an endearingly ramshackle, low-fi tune with a suitably rough-hewn delivery. A few years ago we all pretended to like 'anti-folk', but apart from the evergreen Jeffrey Lewis, it was never as much fun as this. Another comparison I've seen is with Camper Van Beethoven, but they surely only ever managed one good song, Take the Skinheads Bowling, whereas Filthy clearly has at least two, as the b side, which combines history and sex in a winning way, attests.

You can buy this stuff from his website, and clearly you should. Still here?

Of Montreal - 'The Past Is A Grotesque Animal'

2007-12-07T12:43:00.000Z

Every so often – oh okay, on average about three or four times a week – it happens that a song leaps out from among its siblings on some playlist or LP sequence and demands immediate, overwhelming and recurring special attention, to the neglect of others. Thursday's and Friday's greatest song ever - doubtless to be supplanted ere Monday - comes from American art-poppers Of Montreal, about whom I have recently shifted ground, moving from a position of vague suspicion to one of simple love.

A special place in my heart is reserved for songs like these that quickly gather a head of steam and then just keep on going. This one crushes anything in its path and refuses to pause for breath. It's merciless. It just keeps on rolling, and it builds and builds. Somewhere else I saw it described as an ideal treadmill song, a description I envy, although at an epic near twelve minutes, I think the inevitable heart attack would have claimed me by the end, which would be at once a shame but at the same time not a bad way to take my leave.

Alongside its mighty momentum, in its words this song is also clearly about me and my life, as songs occasionally are. We all think that, don't we? We have all secretly entertained fantasies that the world is constructed around us and we are the reason for its existence and there will be no world after we die, right? Right. I wouldn't be so crass as to blurt the lyrical pearls of others all over these pages (although currently 'at least I offer my own disaster' seems to me a suitable epitaph for either my gravestone or Facebook page), because you need to do the work and have the pleasure of finding these things out for yourselves, but there seems to be enough in here to base a whole philosophy, or at least a religion on. I am left utterly skewered and trying to reconstruct what was my life.

And then ridiculously last night I went to see Of Montreal at ULU and they opened with this, and although it wasn't a great gig because it was at ULU with its uniquely muddy sound, there was something about it that was right and proper and felt like fate.

This is on this year's LP, Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? which looks lovely on vinyl and where all the good songs come towards the end.

Vampire Weekend - 'Mansard Roof'

2007-12-06T07:38:00.000Z

I'm a resister of hype. Buzz around a band deters me. Lord knows, there are so many awful, third rate retread of retread bands who are being hyped to buggery on any given week. XFM, a kind of 1990s Radio One for stupid people, is particularly culpable here. Every run of the mill guitar band is a second coming for them.

But you have to go where your ears lead you. Apropos of some buzz band of a few years ago, a mate of mine whose tastes run the full gamut from the underground to the wilfully obscure once asked me, "But how can you like them?" "Because I hear the music and I can't help liking it," was all I could reply. I'm no analyst of sound. If these pages are about anything they're about asserting the supremacy of an emotional response to music.

So much has been written about this bunch already on this thing that we call the internet, and that made me disinclined to like them, but then I heard this record and it's great and so they win. It comes in at just over two minutes, has not an ounce of flab on it and is perfectly arranged. It's one of those tunes where everything happens at precisely the right time. Love the singing, love the little bit of strings towards the end, and especially love the percussion.

There would seem something interesting happening at the moment with western bands picking up on non-western rhythms. I've heard African rhythms a few times in unexpected places recently, enough to make me feel it's a trend. It's diverting if probably pointless to speculate on what might be behind this. Has 'world music' - and be honest, all the really good world music is African - become the mainstream? (Hey, Tinariwen are playing Shepherd's Bush Empire next week; it will be interesting to see how they fare outside the Barbican / Jazz Cafe 'world music' ghetto.) Has the crossover between the mighty Konono No. 1 and the American indie avant garde influenced things? (I saw them in London earlier this year and it was a joyful evening; head music and body music at the same time.) Are the current generation who learned the internet as a first language just so normal about being able to access anything instantly that they're open to anything too? Or is it just (and we can only hope not) that they've all got hold of dad's copy of Paul Simon's Graceland?

And of course it opens up a can of worms labelled appropriation if (presumably) privileged white kids take this stuff and prosper on the back of it, but that, my friends, is the entire history of rock and roll music, and are we saying it's better for cultures not to mingle and each to stick to their own? And isn't it great, and a testament of the endless journey music takes you on, that I'll now know what a Mansard roof is the next time I see one?

When it all comes down to it, what the hell, as soon as the drums start beating on this one they have me.

The Blow - 'Parentheses'

2007-12-03T23:50:00.000Z

It's possible, isn't it, that Tomlab has quietly become the best record label around? Think about it. There's that insane, identically packaged alphabet series of 7"s - one for every letter - where the last I'd heard we'd got up to about U and I've ended up buying half of them at least twice because I can never keep track of what I have and what I don't have. Then there's the fact that they're home to the wonderful Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, one of the great underrated acts of this or any other time, and that by itself would be enough. And I've developed a soft spot of late for the looped bedroom strings of Final Fantasy. They seem to be the place where lone oddball types find a comfortable home. We'll overlook for the moment the fact that they gave a leg-up to arch, tiresome Patrick Wolf.

And then there's this tune by The Blow. This has, of course, been out for ages, sealing this site's reputation for being hopelessly behind whatever this week's trend is, having first crossed my path as a 7" earlier this year. I buy too many 7"s - I pile them on the floor and they creep ever forward and claim more carpet week by week (I can't remember what the pattern was now) so sometimes things get lost in the pile. Perhaps I was deterred by the usual swathe of less-good-than-the-original remixes that cluttered the single, when what I really wanted was a classic a side/b side combination. It came to light again for me as the opening song and the one I couldn't ignore on a cheapo sampler to celebrate Tomlab's tenth birthday, Puppy Love.

I'm an incurable softy and so a tune like this is going to get me every time. This is a song about being in love, about completing someone by being with them, and about accepting faults. Eccentrics should stick together, at least to take two people out of the equation for everyone else, or so I keep telling my wife. Ah, and I'm a sucker for a great chorus, and lyrics that assume a life before and don't need to spell everything out, and upbeat, chirruping, vaguely Latin synth tunes, which makes this pretty much the complete package. "Something in the deli aisle makes you cry," indeed - I love inventing the story for that one. There's a whole Raymond Carver tale lurking in that one line. And there's a great lyric too about the wisdom of babies which I won't spoil here, but it was almost enough by itself to make me reverse my personal ban on reproduction.

You could, of course, find somewhere to download this for nothing on the internet, or even pay for it if you're experiencing a dose of scruples - for once, emusic has it, for example, along with the rest of the LP, which of course isn't as good. Or you could take note that the great Norman Records has the physical object with music on it of Puppy Love for £2.99 plus postage, and in doing so support two fine institutions.

Burial - 'Untrue'

2007-11-26T14:25:00.000Z

Much has been written about this bloke. In some ways - although don't I always say this? - he's the perfect artist for our time: blank, anonymous, open-ended for your own interpretation. As an image, it's a shrewd one. A Banksy-like air of deliberate mystery never did anyone any harm, but then aren't most of us hiding behind constructed, distilled personas online?

The music all sounds the same, and the new record sounds pretty much like the old one. This is what he does. You listen to the whole thing; it doesn't really make sense to pick out isolated tunes. If I was feeling pretentious I would call it a soundscape. It's murmurous, concealed music, muffled voices hinting at hidden depths. It holds back. Occasionally you could dance to it, but then it frustrates itself. It's cool, detached. It is, of course, for once a realisation of that often misused, politically confused term, urban music. This music is uber-urban, and utterly London. It's arguable whether anywhere else other than the endless hinterlands of the world's greatest city could have produced something like this right now.

It's a cliche - and sometimes you can only embrace them - to call this 4am music, driving round the south circular music, sitting in a laundrette watching the drum revolve music, eating takeaway chicken music. It's all that but this morning I realised something else, which is why, tired and jet-lagged, I write. My job - which obviously secretly I love - occasionally scoops me up and dumps me in hot, distant places for a week or two to do some work. Flying back this morning from a spell in East Africa I realised where this music really works: it's music to listen to on a plane, that disembodied, unreal experience, at a time when you don't even know what time it is any more and when you're awake but can't do anything. This morning this record made perfect sense. It helped me. It was better than sleep.

Why not buy this from Sounds of the Universe records? I always enjoy getting their emails and they seem genuinely enthusiastic about all this kind of stuff.

I Like Trains - 'Spencer Perceval'

2007-11-06T07:29:00.000Z

This tune is as goth as I allow myself to get. Hey, there has to be that little bit of goth that lurks within even the poppiest of pop kids of all of us. I concede, albeit grudgingly, that there is that side of me which yearns to don a Joy Division trench coat and walk moodily around a concrete East European city in black and white. In the main I keep it successfully repressed. So I resisted this lot, deterred perhaps by their erratic capitalisation, which I still refuse to concede, and somehow lumping them in mentally with all those interchangeable Leeds-ish bands who scarcely merit attention on Dance to the Radio Records.

I was wrong. This lot are different and pay persistence. Imagine an intelligent Bauhaus with a penchant for Victorian melodrama, bookish, nerdy and, yes, with something of the trainspotter about them. (An earlier favourite of mine was The Beeching Report, a phrase which can still be guaranteed to send into a rage locomotive enthusiasts of my father's generation.) So here's a tune about the only British Prime Minister - to date - to be have been assassinated. And it's a true epic, passing the nine minute mark. Which breaks all my rules. Which is of course great. It appears to be written from the point of view of the assassin, with all the self-justifying, unpunctuated, almost logical madness of the latest YouTube posting of this week's high school killer. You see, only the technology changes. It dives and soars, and I particularly like the moment where everything seems to slip out of time and the whole thing teeters on the edge of falling apart.

This first surfaced as a luscious, jet black 10" - which, we have already established, is the best of all formats - and I frankly didn't give it the attention it deserved then. It resurfaces now as the outstanding moment - rather, series of moments - on the recent LP, Elegies for Lessons Learnt. Pretentious? Of course. There must be a silent film these guys could write a soundtrack for out there somewhere.

The excellent online radio station Dandelion Radio, which of course everyone in the whole world already knows about, a station in the spirit of Peel, is the rightful inheritor of the venerable Festive Fifty tradition. I've cast my three votes and this came third. Only The Teenagers' The Homecoming and Von Sudenfed's The Rhinohead beat it. This means it's been a great year for music.

But then it always is.

Fabienne Delsol - '(I'm Gonna) Catch Me A Rat'

2007-11-05T13:25:00.000Z

It's basically all about sex, this music thing, isn't it? I know this is a far from original insight, but occasionally it needs restating.

So yes, I'm a boy (at heart, I'm not convinced I ever got past being a confused 15 year old adolescent) and here's a breathy, effortlessly cool and frankly sexy French girl singer. And that is already enough. London is the greatest city in the world, of course, but the idea of Paris is cooler, and that's where her songs take me, having been led on from this 7" to listen to more. It's late, I'm in love, I'm smoking an unfiltered cigarette and my chic Parisian girlfriend simply adores it when I talk pseudo-intellectual bollocks about Sartre. At the same time, this particular tune is utterly Nancy Sinatra. And there is, of course, nothing wrong with that. There's virtually nothing there: a drumbeat, a slither of guitar, some gloriously dumb lyrics and it's all done and dusted in somewhat less than two and a half minutes. It demanded an instant second play, and too few things do. This is a Toe Rag Studios at its best, and makes up for all that boring White Stripes stuff.

You can buy the physical object from Damaged Goods - and this is surely something you need to walk around carrying under your arm to strike the proper pretentious pose - or as downloads from, for once, emusic.

I'm off to have sex now. Immediately.

The Teenagers - 'The Homecoming'

2007-11-04T17:10:00.000Z

I have a habit of wondering the parched, soulless offices in which I daily toil mumbling snatches of songs which have made themselves stick in my head. So I'm in trouble here, biting tongue as I slope from one pointless meeting to another to stop myself bursting into a quick rendition of a central line from this song.

"I fucked my American cunt."

I know, by the way, that as a person who has recently moved down a row on any survey in which you are required to belong to an age range, I'm years behind the curve on this one. A perfunctory google suggests oceans of hype have washed around this bunch, none of which has crossed my cloistered consciousness. And yes, since you do ask, I do at times, as an ageing music obsessive, feel somewhat like a creepy uncle eavesdropping on the beautiful young things. But damn it, I refuse to concede the space and go gentle into that good night. That I'm not a spotty teen but a cynic who feels he's heard everything before but still loves this says something interesting, surely?

But then I've always been a sucker for boy/girl, call and response tunes. I love the cynicism and amorality of this, and the way it twists to suggest something sweeter towards the end. I love the difference between the boy and girl viewpoints. I love it when the girl speaks and it's exactly like something out of Clueless, that smartest of Jane Austen adaptations. I love the accents, I love the distant, barely there music, and I don't know or care what genre we're supposed to call this. Knowing, smart, cool, it's the perfect tune for our fractured, knowing but neurotic, post-my space, over-social networked but simultaneously atomised times.

There's more than this to The Teenagers - and of course, the name is perfect too - and new single Starlett Johanssonn is increasingly claiming headspace as well. They do a good line in filth, this much is clear. You can buy this stuff from, say, Pure Groove, and when that isn't enough you can do what I just seem to have spent a large part of the afternoon doing, and trawling via Hype Machine blogs which are better than this one because you can download illegal music from them to get more. We may just have found the definitive band of this era.

Von Sudenfed - 'The Rhinohead'

2007-11-03T06:56:00.000Z

Okay, so I've been away for a while, having, like they do in films, lost my memory and ended up wandering around this shabby land, attempting for reasons I can't recall to visit every branch of Tescos, coming to my senses only in a public cemetery during a cloudburst in, somewhat to my irritation, Accrington. On the journey I shed many things, but I seem to have retained my love of music, and there is now so much catching up to do.

Back in the days when I invented the internet, I wrote about the Mark E Smith / Mouse On Mars collaboration. And things just got better and better. So here all you need to know is that Von Sudenfed have made the greatest record of this year and perhaps the century so far in The Tromatic Reflexxions, and yes of course it goes without saying that it's miles better than the last Fall LP, to the extent that it's really a cliche to have said so, and The Rhinohead is its most glorious, immense, life-affirming slab of a tune. I can't imagine living without it. This is Northern Soul as you always wanted it to sound, a classic from a speed-fuelled late night down the Wigan Casino upgraded, rebuilt for a new era.

What seems clear to me now is that our world is fucked, because in a sane world Rhinohead would storm the hit parade and sit in splendour at the top of the charts until about March. Everybody else would stop putting out records because there'd be no point, really. Its release would be celebrated by Von Sudenfed themed parties where children would dress up as their favourite member. Who'd you like to be today kids: Andi, Jan or Mark? In a world where things are right and all was well they'd have brought back Top of the Pops for a one off five minute special, repeated every hour on the hour, with Mark reading the words off a bit of paper. Was a national holiday in honour of its release even considered, I ask? What then do we have politicians for?

You also need to have seen them live, and so I'd suggest spending your weekends on perfecting that time machine you're working on so you can get to the gig at Heaven a few weeks ago. There was a night. Miserablist fat, bald Fall fans hogged the back while lovers of life at the front lapped it all up. Anyone who thinks people who play laptops aren't, like, proper musicians should have seen this. But in the regrettable absence of a Tardis in most households, can I suggest that you visit Dime a Dozen, the default website for live Fall-related content, every single day until you can slip in under their 100,000 members bar and sign up for piles of low-quality, lovingly assembled recordings? It worked for me.

Rhinohead comes in a big fat 12" with a beautiful purple cover and you can buy it from shops or from the internet. Everyone knows that the best online record shop is still Norman's, right? Or you can download it from, say, 7digital, which I only mention here because it isn't, you know, itunes. It contains the usual utterly pointless remix - and there remains work to be done in analysing the amount generated for the national economy by paying for the vast swathe of otherwise utterly pointless remixes around - and this year's second greatest song, Slow Down Ronnie, in which Mark E finally gets round to tackling a subject he was always going to have to do, and dispenses advice to snooker legend Ronnie O'Sullivan. If Mark E Smith is telling you to slow down, you've got problems, I'd have thought.

Here's My Card Records - 'Board Meeting'

2005-06-20T16:48:00.000Z

These last few records have all been a bit nice. It’s time for some noise.

I am, of course, drawn, moth to flame, by the very idea of Here’s My Card records. They combine admirable kitchen table enterprise with a neat format. What they do is produce credit card sized CDs, home-burnt, in home-made covers, which they then sell on their website for not very much money. It’s an irresistible idea, which they justify with some knowingly pretentious twaddle about the pressures of modern living, the shortness of time and the over-availability of everything requiring a new formula of “quick and cheap”. A couple of quid via Pay Pal buys you 300 seconds of noisy fun. Because, you see, you can only fit about five minutes of music on a credit card sized CD. That makes them, as they’re proud to call themselves, the world’s smallest record label.

Of course it’s the sort of music you couldn’t listen to all day, but what isn’t? I’m always bewildered by sub-genres, so I don’t know what you’d call this. I’d take a stab at electronic noise.

Now, I don’t want to be forever banging on about how much I still miss John Peel, because in music I’ve always looked to the future instead of the past, but time was when I’d get to hear this sort of thing while listening to his show. I always felt I didn’t need too much e-noise in my life, and I got sufficient of this stupidly fast, ultra-repetitive and deliberately irritating music while Peeling, waiting to hear something else. Now it’s in danger of slipping from my musical palette. I can’t be sure of chancing on it. I have to seek it out.

To be fair, it was chance radio airplay that led me here. Huw Stephens on R1 the other week played a quite glorious manic cut and paste job by the Nailbomb Cults. It’s a name you tend to remember, and a bell rang, they having previously appeared on an interesting sample of music from Oxford, A Catholic Education. Their website was a gateway to the strange world of Here’s My Card records. By the way, go to the Nailbomb Cults’ website and download some of their supreme noise. It now seems my life was incomplete without Disneycore.

In a spirit of utter recklessness I lashed out £4.50 for two records. One, inevitably, was from Shitmat, long (to embrace cliché) Peel favourites. The other is an eight track compilation – eight different outfits, including Shitmat and the Nailbomb Cults, eight different tunes, all 45 seconds under, blended seamlessly. In the spirit of the thing my review of the eight tracks is as follows: 1 – squelchy; 2 – bang-bang; 3 – cheeky cut-up; 4 – shrieky; 5 – slidey; 6 – horsy; 7 – ferocious noise; 8 – post-noise.

It took me longer to write this paragraph than listen to it. Clearly, you need this in your life. Best buy two, for when you inevitably lose one.

Antony and the Johnsons - 'Hope There's Someone'

2005-06-15T13:00:00.000Z

Good grief, but this is something special. I confess I had given this lot little heed. They garnered rapid praise in glossy music mags for the middle-aged, of which I am naturally distrustful. (Look, I only buy those mags for plane and train journeys, and because there’s always something good on the CDs, okay?) Plus there was the involvement of usually reliable negative indicators, like Lou (didn’t you used to be good sometime in the last Century?) Reed and Boy George. (Actually, what I do like about Boy George is that whatever he does, he still looks like a fat brickie who should be idling away his afternoon in William Hill’s, only in a stupid big hat. His life has been a triumph of fantasy over corporeal reality.)

Anyway, here’s this 10” on Rough Trade (and by the way, I’m beginning to think that the 10” single is the best of all formats, and wish there was a lot more of them), arty cover with no writing on, picked up with no real enthusiasm while I was buying a pile of other things and it didn’t feel like I was spending enough money. I played it, and then I did that rarest of things: I immediately played it again. It’s a strange and rather unsettling record. There’s a piano and an odd, high, wobbly voice, one of those voices you have to buy into you, where you have to get over the hurdle of thinking it’s a bit ridiculous before you realise it’s something special. There are parallels to be made with the Tindersticks during one of their more soulful moments, before some symphony orchestra or other kicks in. Subject matter is stunning, too, pulling me up short: “hope there’s someone who'll care for me when I die.” Bloody hell. Don’t we all? Then, just when you’re trying to keep yourself together, the piano soars to the fore and swamps the song, loud, echoing, a tunnel of sound. If there was an afterlife, this might be what the journey there would sound like. I was left floored.

I suspect I wouldn’t much like Antony, or his Johnsons, if I met them, and wouldn’t want to hang out with the trendy New York art crowd that provides the milieu from which this apparently springs. I wanted not to like this. Now, damn them, I’m going to have to buy the LP.

James Yorkston and the Athletes - 'Song to the Siren'

2005-06-12T14:43:00.000Z

I reckon Song to the Siren is that rarest of things - a 'classic' that actually is a classic. This song is timeless and indestructible. Now along comes James Yorkston, a man for whom I have a certain amount of time, without quite being able to put my finger on why, and he only goes and makes this song his own. He turns it into a Scottish folk song, complete with fiddles and nameless folky instruments (but thankfully no bagpipes). Somehow, this works. It makes me feel I'm back sitting in that pub in Tobermory, whisky in hand as the rain lashes the windows - but with someone good singing instead of Runrig xeroxes.

Anyway, it's a b-side of a 7" only - shove that up your ipod - and it's out on - oh here we go again - Domino records. Why don't we just rename this site the Domino fan club and be done with it, eh?

Juana Molina - 'Salvese Quien Pueda'

2005-05-24T17:47:00.000Z

Two things brought me to this record. First, there was the involvement of Four Tet. I am, on the sly, a bit of a Four Tet fan. He always strikes me as someone who understands how music is put together, and in his records the right things generally happen at the right time. Second, it’s on the Domino label, the most reliable musical indicator of our era. You rarely go wrong with a Domino record. If I ran a label – and I can’t say I haven’t thought about it – I like to think it would be a bit like Domino.

So to this 12” from someone called Juana Molina, with a couple of Four Tet versions on one side. And do you know, it’s bloody lovely! I play this on return from a stressful day spent selling off small, irreplaceable, parts of my soul in exchange for not very much money at the coalface of pointless administration, and my troubles quietly subside. A Radox bath and a mugful of something soothing – like malt whisky – couldn’t work this magic. For your money, you get three versions of Salvese Quien Pueda (this is Spanish, apparently, and her rather cute website is also in this language, with Molina evidently hailing from Argentina… hmm, does this make this ‘world music'?). There’s two from Four Tet on the A side, an ‘ugly’ version, which is crunchy and liquiduous, and about which there is nothing wrong, and a ‘pretty’ version, which is the real gem here. It isn’t pretty; it’s beautiful. Imagine walking through a gorgeous, sunlit meadow with the girl of your dreams on your arm. She sings to you softly, while make-believe animals low in the distance. You’re there. Towards the end the drums come in, at which point the whole thing leans back, lifts off and gently hovers.

On the other side Ms Molina adds her own version, wherein the song stretches out and gives itself a little room to let things develop. Murmurous noises and sleepy sounds are joined by some pleasant acoustic guitar, and we end with my favourite ‘la la las’ so far this year. I’m never terribly au fait with genre boundaries, but it’s possible that this is ‘folk music’. But if this is folk music, how come everyone isn’t doing it?

Scout Niblett – 'Kidnapped By Neptune'

2005-05-20T12:37:00.000Z

This is glorious and quite unnecessary record. I’m scared of analysing it, because really there’s not much there. It’s simple and ultra-repetitive, in some ways a brainless footstomper, a mantra woven from the milk, bread and potatoes of drum, guitar and voice. (You can still work magic with those basic ingredients.) An army could march to this. Every so often a sleazy-sounding woman interrupts the proceedings, the whole thing grinds to a halt and then starts up again. By the end she sounds somewhat exercised. This fits in somewhere between Stereolab if they were any good and Solex if she could occasionally resist the call of wackiness.

Once again I will betray the fact that I live in some kind of musical vacuum built out of endlessly reissued Fall CDs by shamelessly confessing that this woman had never previously crossed my path before I heard this on some radio show or other. Oh hang on, I just checked the website, and this is the person who did that loathsome cover version of Althea and Donna’s rare gem, Uptown Top Ranking? Glad I hadn’t realised that before, or this one would probably have lingered in the shop unpurchased. Anyway, it’s quite rightly a 7” only, and it’s on Too Pure, which is even kind of a proper record label, so there can be no excuse.

Sunnyvale Noise Sub-Element - 'Techno Self-Harm'

2005-05-11T20:38:00.000Z

Since the death of John Peel and the disappearance of all manner of outré music from the radio, I find I've been buying more and more records on spec, unheard. Fortunately I earn more money than I used to - just as well because records are expensive and it costs me an absolute bloody fortune to keep up. How much easier and cheaper it was in the days when you could hear stuff, find out you liked them and go out and buy them. These days I follow hunches, read reviews, hack my way through record shop e-mails, then listen and sift. The crap quickly sinks to the bottom of the pile, never to be heard again. The good stuff stays on the top. The weekly e-mail from the great Norman Records of Leeds (the best record shop on the web, bar none) is a more reliable guide than most. Refreshingly honest, if they really think a record stinks and you’d be a fool to part with your cash for it, they'll tell you, which makes a change from most record shop e-mails that clog the in-box, which like to pretend that every single thing they sell is fantastic.

And so to this one, which I bought from Norman Records purely on the basis of their description. Never heard of these buggers, although according to their website they've been around for years, making ‘improvised electronic music’. No, don’t go, this is actually good. Norman Records said it would appeal to fans of 65daysofstatic, and it’s an observation that’s hard to fault. This is more in that 'glitch rock' / post-post-rock vein, but going much further than the abstracted and pretentious meanderings such a description usually bring to mind. Basically, as the title track demonstrates, Sunnyvale know there are few records that can’t be improved by collision with a filthy great guitar riff, as happens about one and a half minutes in. Once that happens, there can be no looking back. Truly this is the new wave of moody fucked-up techno rock you can shake a leg to. The only complaint can be that, at just over five minutes, I wouldn’t have minded a bit more of this.

Techno Self-Harm is the best song on this five track CD, which also boasts a longer live version. Despite their stupid name, not all elements of which I can hold in my head at once, Sunnyvale also prove they know how to make a good title with There Are Already Enough Photographs of People and Doors. And how right they are. It’s on Field Records – no, me neither – and you can buy it on their website. This one’s staying on the top of my pile.

The Concretes (and the Fall)

2005-01-05T05:04:00.000Z

It seems very escapist to talk about music at the moment, following the latest, large scale reminder of the general fragility of life. Things I've listened to in the last week have tended to sound a bit hollow. I know things have gone wonky when I go back to listen to old stuff by the Fall. This is my default, my musical magnetic north. I retreat here when all is confused. Lately, I've been listening to a lot of Fall stuff, particularly early 1980s live recordings.

But this Concretes record, it's been about a bit, and I've played it a fair bit, but only recently did I come to really appreciate it. It was sometime over Christmas, somewhere between night and morning. I lay in bed rigidly awake with night fear, head filled with a forest of worries, unable to sleep but too tired to do a thing. So I slipped the headphones on and listened this through. Perfect. These are cute songs, sugar coated but with a sad centre. They're tuneful, but the singer can't sing a note. I think this girl is the latest in a line of great singers who can't sing, something I've always fallen for (see also: Mark E Smith, Julian Cope, Edwyn Collins). The Concretes sound like you always hoped Saint Etienne would.

It did the job, this record. I listened to it, then slipped back to sleep. Perhaps music still retains its power after all.

Mouse On Mars - 'Wipe That Sound'

2004-12-13T21:13:00.000Z

It’s hard to think of a song that wouldn’t be enlivened by the presence of Mark E Smith. Perhaps he should have been asked to appear on Band Aid 20. He’d have pepped up that moribund tune, and certainly the video would have been more entertaining. (Not that I can see what all the fuss is about, mind. A bad version of a bad song is released, and no one has to buy it.)

So here comes MES collaborating with German electronicists Mouse on Mars, whose offerings I have always found rather cold. The results are, of course, a triumph, recalling Smith’s earlier and seminal collaboration with Coldcut back when Fall fans didn’t like dance music. Mark E witters on about lord know what to great effect while the keyboards do their thing. There are two versions here, one a thumping, squelching behemoth and the other, which I prefer, a lighter, dancier take. Both are tons better than anything on the latest, crushingly disappointing collection of unfinished odds and ends from the Fall, Interim. The MES numbers come on a four track 12” from Sonig records of Germany, and as was always going to be the case, the other two, one an instrumental, the other with some unnecessary rapper, sound lame by comparison. He hasn’t lost that mordant magic. Now let’s have another proper Fall LP, soon.

Piney Gir - 'Peakahokahoo'

2004-12-10T02:28:00.000Z

This is already in danger of getting overplayed in our house. I have to resist the temptation to stick it on again and again. It sits enthroned atop the listening pile.

I knew little about this women until she supported the inevitable Broken Family Band at a ‘secret’ gig in a very strange location (the Department for Education and Skills Social Club!) a couple of weeks ago. BFB were as great as they always are of course, but I liked her too. She played, with a backing band, an all too short set of daft, cute, sleazy, keyboard-driven country-ish tunes, and I knew then I need to hear more.

She’s not scared to try to turn her hand to anything, this Piney. All kinds of things go on in here. One minute she’s Peaches, the next Suzi Quattro. A gorgeous country number, and my favourite, Greetings, Salutations, Goodbye, gives way to the dreamy nursery rhyme of K-I-S-S-I-N-G, which is followed in turn by Nightsong, a romantic, easy listening duet with the always puzzling Simple Kid. I’ll always fall for a song with whistling in it. Elsewhere, My Generation and Que Cera Cere lie trembling, assaulted. All kinds of different styles rub against each other and the result is good, dishevelled fun.

Her website’s here - www.pineygir.com - the LP’s on Truck Records - www.truckrecords.com - and clicking the link to buy online will take you to the Oxford Music shop - www.oxfordmusic.net.

65daysofstatic - 'The Fall of Math'

2004-12-07T22:09:00.000Z

Do you know, this is brilliant. Perhaps you already do. Again, I suspect I was slow to pick up on this. I thought for once I might have been ahead of the pack, but when I mentioned to my friend Phil that I’d bought this record, his response was to yawn that he’d had it ages, and if I thought that was good, I really ought to hear some terribly obscure band whose name I forgot instantly. Hmph. As it happens, I saw this lot ages back, supporting someone else, and liked them, but the early records were on some label that produces 15 copies of a release no one ever can find, and until now they’d eluded me.

Anyway, as I said, this is great. Perhaps in the future all music will be like this. Or perhaps the end of the world will sound like this. 65daysofstatic (the only annoying thing is their spaceless name) are where you end up when you get past post rock. Impossible here not to mention the kings of this territory, the esteemed Mogwai, but 65dos seize the baton and run with it a bit further. Or rather, they sit down for a pint with dance and electronica and then decide it would be more fun to pour the pint over the equipment and see what it all sounds like. The tunes come encrusted with technology. These are the sounds machines make as they wheeze their last and expire. I like music that grabs my head and I like music that grabs my body. This does both.

This is one of the best records of the year, and if you don’t have it that makes you worryingly less cool than me. The LP is out on Monotreme Records - www.monotremerecords.com - and this one can’t be that hard to find because HMV in London sells it, or you can get it on their website. The new single, Retreat! Retreat!, is out too, taken from the LP, with two other great tracks. (I particularly love the major cities of the world are being destroyed one by one by the monsters, and not just for the title). The band’s website is www.65daysofstatic.com, and they’ll let you download some more tunes there as well. Off you go.

Bearsuit - 'Chargr'

2004-12-01T02:13:00.000Z

I couldn’t understand the suggestion that came from some quarters after the awful loss of John Peel for the Undertones’ Teenage Kicks to be released, in the hope that it would make Christmas number one. To me, this missed the point of John Peel. It was about new sounds more than old, and chart placings were never a barometer of success. Far more appropriate would be if everyone went out and bought a copy of the new Bearsuit single. (Okay, apparently they only pressed 500, so we’d have to demand some more.) This is a fine example of a band I owe to Peel. Without him, it’s unlikely I’d ever heard of them, never mind having probably more of their records than is good for me in my music accumulation.

It would be fair to describe Bearsuit as an erratic band. They’re daft, whimsical souls. Live, they veer between brilliant and dreadful, and are not averse to finding percussive possibilities in pots and pans. On record, they think it’s boring if a song doesn’t change tune, speed and direction at least two or three times in a couple of minutes. It’s like they’ve got a million ideas in their heads and only a few songs to cram them into. Hey, it’s better than vice versa, and one thing you can never accuse them of is being bland. It just so happens that I think their first single, the irresistible Hey Charlie, Hey Chuck, was their best, and it’s also the simplest, most singalong thing they’ve done. Recent LP Cat Spectacular! was patchy, but I have some fondness for single Itsuko Got Married with its insane binary chanting, so maybe they’re a singles band.

And Chargr is great, perhaps their best since the immortal Hey Charlie. Inside it, chaos reigns. Two people appear to be having an argument in a factory, a man shouts at us, there’s a saccharine interlude – now I will always think of summer as ‘midriff season’- and then the whole things over before you know it with an urgent, abrupt ending. Best play it again, and again. The b-side’s a sort of Christmassy number, not their first. I’d quite like to spend Christmas round at Bearsuit’s house. I think it might be interesting.

The single is on 7” vinyl only – quite right too – from Fortuna Pop - www.fortunapop.com - or you can download an even scratchier sounding MP3 of it – no substitute for the real thing – from the Bearsuit website at www.bearsuit.co.uk. While there, download some other stuff, particularly the divine Hey Charlie, Hey Chuck.

The Flaming Stars - 'Named and Shamed'

2004-11-25T18:11:00.000Z

What’s not to like about the Flaming Stars? They’re a proper garage band that play late night rock and roll music. This is music about having to much to drink, getting into a fight, crashing out and coming round somewhere unknown, about feeling you’re heroic or poetic when you’re just boozed up. This is a band that seems to be believe it’s better to have loved and lost than… pretty much anything really. It’s dark street corner music, unexpectedly hitting the pavement music, genuine down-in-the-tube-station-at-midnight music. It’s about dusting yourself down, lighting your last fag and going back out into the night. Truly, this is the music you’re supposed to use the description ‘urban’ for. That there’s a song on here called Spilled Your Pint says it all.

I saw them once, lured partly by a flyer that read: ‘Arrive drunk. Get drunker.’ This seemed sound advice, so I did, and they were wonderful. Over the years they’ve put out a fair few records, all with pulp fiction style covers and usually showing signs of weak resistance to a punning title (I always liked Bring Me The Rest Of Alfredo Garcia). The new one’s a classic example of what they do: instantly recognisable, filled with their usual dark poetry and low, rumbling music that’s somehow taut and loose at the same time. I suspect that if they were American and hung around with the White Stripes, or if they were a bit younger and were mates of the Libertines, you’d have this record by now.

The record is out on Vinyl Japan UK, a label I always liked the name of, and the band's website is here - www.oslater.demon.co.uk.

Sons and Daughters - 'Love the Cup'

2004-11-22T13:59:00.000Z

Not for the first time, I was a bit slow in finding out about this. I should have just trusted the label. Domino is the nearest thing we have right now to a record label that can automatically be trusted. Like Chemikal Underground in its glory days, if you see the Domino logo while browsing the racks, you can assume your pennies are going to be spent wisely.

Sons and Daughters once again prove this rule of thumb to be a wise one with their mini LP/CD Love the Cup. This band is an intriguing mix of choice ingredients. They’re big city hicks, country cow-punks. In here is folk and jangle, rhythm, the occasional need to howl, and a bit of Americana. All the songs come tinged with melancholy. Oh, and they understand a chorus alright. It’s a compelling blend – and all this in seven songs! Like so many of the great groups, they have two singers, one female, one male, who share duties and sometimes coincide, and as it happens I’m going to eschew the predictable Delgados comparison. But bands like this only ever come from Scotland, don’t they? The single Johnny Cash was my way in to the band, and it’s still my favourite of theirs. It lives up to its title, and that’s praise. Broken Bones is my next most-loved tune. Ah, now I want to listen to it again. I think they might just be my newest favourite band.

As this is on Domino, you can find it in shops. The band’s website is www.sonsanddaughtersloveyou.co.uk, and the feeling’s mutual.

Half Man Half Biscuit - Peel Session

2004-11-20T17:53:00.000Z

Here's a new favourite thing from an old and much loved favourite thing. I'm always a bit suspicious of people who say they like music but don't love Half Man Half Biscuit. I realise that in these fickle times the only bands less fashionable than HMHB are Baccara and Sailor, and to buy one of their records in a central London shop is a sure way of inviting the smirks of those who work behind the counter and somehow think they're cool, but really, so what? HMHB occupy a unique position in British music as observers of the minutiae of life and deflators of celebrity egos. They're probably still best known for their early records, those raucous assaults on the not so great and good, but over the years they've become subtle and wry. They are the greatest English folk band.

Ah, I could write reams about HMHB, and perhaps one day I will, but to the matter in hand. Their latest Peel session - recorded before the great man's death, but alas something he never had the pleasure of hearing - is well up to the mark. I'm not quite sure what my favourite song is, but I think I've got it down to a shortlist of three of the four. I know it isn't the standard chug-a-long of Joy Division Oven Gloves, although even that's filled with lines to make you smile. At first I thought my favourite was Asparagus Next Left, a dark fantasy about what those roadside signs to pick your own vegetables lead to. Then I more or less decided on For What Is Chatteris?, possibly the closest HMHB have got to a love song ('for what is Chatteris without you there?'). But at the moment, I think it's Epiphany, a creepy tale that leads to a lunatic's song delivered with gusto.

Truly, they are a band without compare. They have a trainspotterish website - www.hmhb.co.uk - which unpicks the many references in their songs, and handily archives recent sessions for the Peel and Kershaw programmes. The recent Kershaw one's pretty good, too. In fact they're all great. Go there, download them, and if you don't have an MP3 player, you should buy one just so you can listen to these.

The Barbs - 'Massive Crush'

2004-11-19T11:19:00.000Z

"She killed her parents. I left mine a note."

Looking at the website of their record label, Mother Tongue records of Tuvalu – http://www.mothertongue.tv/ – this has been out before. Seems it was first released in August 2003. Well, I missed it then (it must have been one of those spells last year when work forced me to labour hellishly hard in hot, exciting places). I’d remember this, because it's is the sort of tune I’ll always fall for: loud, quick and built around an irresistible shout-a-long chorus. A boy and girl swap lines about the usual teen rebellion fantasy of getting into a car, leaving all behind and setting off who knows there, and a dirty guitar does the rest. I bracket this with other dark gems like the Hells' He's The Devil But I Love Him So and Ciccone's Leggit, It's The Rozzers, which is intended as high praise. Only young people can make this music. I don't even know if, as a fat mid 30s bloke, I'm allowed to like it, but I know that while there's breath in my body, records like this are going to get me every time.

You can download more from their website at www.thebarbs.co.uk, but I confess I've not listened to the other stuff yet. I kind of don't want to spoil this one right now. The only things to object to are the horrific cover art and the fact that this is apparently only available as a CD. It would be a perfect 7" single. But in whatever format, you can't live without this. I fully intend to love it for a fortnight and then grow tired of it, leave it on the shelves for a few years and then dig it up at some point in the future and love it all over again.

Sarandon - 'The Miniest Album'

2004-11-17T18:05:00.000Z

In the mid 80s there flourished briefly a self-styled ‘cubist pop’ movement. It was headed by Big Flame, and there were also the Mackenzies and forgotten others recalled only on inlay cards of dusty, buried Peel tapes. I was a fan of this unmusical kind of music, all sharp and pointy with notes in unexpected places. I recall this now on listening to a new record by a band called Sarandon, about whom I know nothing. It seems to follow in this tradition. Are we ready for a cubist pop revival? Well, why not? We’ve had far less deserving ones. We live, after all, in a world where kids consider Franz Ferdinand truly astonishing because they’ve never heard Josef K.

There’s something about this 7” single which appeals. Brief, angular songs jerk into life and then quickly expire. I have a special fondness for short songs. The singer reminds me of the bloke out of another treasured mid 80s band, the Wolfhounds, with that slightly sour edge to his voice. I probably make this sound more retro than it is, for good songs are good songs in any day, and I’m glad someone is out there doing this. It’s aptly named as the Miniest Album. You get seven songs, one per inch, which appeals to my northern parsimony. Value for money, and a pile of songs that are no longer than they need to be. Who could resist?

You can do what I did and buy the record directly from their website - www.kabukikore.net/sarandon - via PayPal for three quid – just think, in Big Flame’s day you used to have to send off cheques and SAEs to get things. While there, you can also download a couple of MP3s, if that’s what grabs you, although that isn’t nearly as exciting as getting a good 7” single through the post.

The Schneider TM Experience - 'Psychedelic Queen'

2004-11-16T13:47:00.000Z

I picked this up in Jumbo Records, Leeds, strolling about killing time before the train home after Leeds 1 Burnley 2. It turned out to be fortuitous diversion, and a fitting coda to a fine evening. As well as this, I dug up a great raw garage 7” where the Little Killers get heartily stuck into some Rolling Stones tune – I may come back to this – and the essential latest (and, sadly, final?) instalment in Dave Godin’s Deep Soul Treasures series, Volume Four.

But just how good is this record? I played the b side, Uh Yeah, Baby, by mistake first. It’s basically noise. Okay, I think I’ve come to like it, but first instinct was something had gone wrong with the pressing. Turn it over and a gem of gems is revealed in the form of Psychedelic Queen, a ludicrous and exuberant cover version of, erm, Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen. Actually, it’s probably one of Queen’s best songs (hey, when the competition is Radio Ga-Ga and Fat Bottomed Girls, there’s praise). Schneider TM’s version is noisy, scuzzy and, I suspect, utterly sincere. This right now is the record that can’t fail to pick me up. One blast of its mad energy, and the broadest smile breaks the sourest day. And christ knows there are enough of those at the moment.

Apparently there are 300 of these on Earsugar Jukebox - www.earsugar.com. Schneider TM's website is here - www.schneidertm.com. Download their great version of There Is A Light That Never Goes Out while you're around.

John Peel

2004-11-13T13:13:00.000Z

I feel like a musical orphan. My musical godfather has died. John Peel was my teacher and my guide. He made me understand music. He gave this callow indie kid an understanding and love, for example, of reggae and soul. More than this, he taught me that it isn’t genres that matter; it’s whatever makes a good noise, whatever gets you going, and it doesn’t matter what it is or where it comes from. He took me on an adventure, opening my ears to things that were amazing. He made me feel that an obsession with music wasn’t a waste of time, but rather a positive, affirming and even central and indispensable part of life. He showed us by example that a love of music isn’t something that has to stop once you leave your teens. I owe a huge chunk of my record collection to John Peel. All my favourite bands come from John Peel.

I feel now, with his shocking, sudden death, abandoned on this journey without my guide. I feel for his family and those who knew him, of course. His death has come far, far too early. This crazy ride was not supposed to end so soon. He should have still been playing records for years to come. I took for granted that there would be many more times when I’d be able to turn on the radio and be confronted by something surprising, something brilliant, sometimes something unbelievably irritating. Then part of me thinks that at least he went out while his talents and influence were undiminished. He was loved by many, achieved an impression that will not fade, and went quickly. It’s not a bad life, all told. Ideally, he should have died one night after playing one final record, naturally a track from the latest Fall LP, at one in the morning. But at least we won’t have the years of struggle to avoid marginalisation by a radio station that increasingly seems to have lost its enthusiasm for music before the inevitable semi-retirement to Radio 2 or some digital ghetto.

I’m surprised at how I reacted to this news. Stranded on a work trip to Singapore, from out of the blue came a text message from a music-loving friend. I’ve spent days since crying, struggling on and them washed by waves of sadness, listening to records I owe to Peel, reading the coverage, restless, unable to concentrate, lacking in appetite for anything much. I have all the symptoms of bereavement, as though John Peel was a member of my family. No death of any public figure has ever affected me this way. I’ve always been suspicious of shows of public mourning for famous figures. But dammit, I do feel like I knew Peel. For 20 years he’s been coming into my room, wherever those rooms have been – my bedroom in my parent’s house, various student rooms and latterly the living room of my 30-something mortgaged, married existence. John Peel’s been an enduring presence. I’ve followed him around the schedules, as different regimes have seen his presence ebb and flow, occasionally drifting off during one of those weird times when I fall out of love with music, always coming back when the latest thing ensnares me. So this sense of loss is a powerful one. I simply can’t believe that I’m going to turn the radio on at 11 o’clock on a Tuesday night and John Peel isn’t going to be there to send me in another unexpected direction. I have tapes – and can you imagine there will ever be another music show that you feel you will have to tape and listen to again? – but it’s hard to think there’s going to be no more.

My reaction is, partly, selfish. What on earth are we going to do without him? Who, now, will dedicate themselves to the task of unearthing those things we really ought to hear but which no one else is playing? How are we going to discover the new and unexpected now? There are other radio shows, but who else has the utter disregard for fashion and the breadth and range of John Peel? And who else can make the trick of talking between the records all part of the pleasure and not a maddening interruption?

Many of the tributes were nostalgic. Many were the mentions of listening to transistor radios under the bed clothes and discovering punk rock. I found myself feeling sceptical about whether many of the celebrities who chipped in have listened to the show since making it big. For me, John Peel wasn’t some teen memory. He was the person I was expecting to listen to next week. And many of the tributes focussed on the bands, often giving examples of really quite uninteresting ones, who made it big after being picked up by Peel. This missed the point. It was never about trying to discover bands who would become superstars and elevate them to fame. It was just about trying to find and play good records that deserved to be heard. The measure of Peel’s success isn’t in the fact that the Smiths or the Strokes ending up selling loads of records, but in all the obscure tunes by bands you never heard of again that found a place in someone’s heart.

I am very nervous about the future of music now. I can’t help but think that all my favourite bands of the moment I heard of through Peel. I wonder now how bands like the Broken Family Band and Herman Dune, Ballboy and Bearsuit, are going to get their records heard. Are bands like these, are even bands like the Fall, going to disappear from our radios? At least for these bands, I know of them, so if I see their records in a shop I’ll buy them, and if I see they’re playing live, I can go. But what about the next generation of bands? How are we going to find out about them? Who’s going to play that demo tape, or pick up that first single? If you’re starting a band now, things have just got that much harder. This is much, much worse than the death of a musician. If the singer in your favourite band dies, there are lots of other bands to follow, and doubtless a steady, posthumous flow from the archives to keep you going. John Peel cannot be replaced, and I doubt anyone will even attempt to fill the hole he has left.

I do think it’s daft to talk about statues, or releasing old records in tribute. Sure, Radio 1 should commit to playing a wide range of new music in that gap left in the schedules. And of course Peel’s extraordinary record collection should be kept intact and in this country – surely that’s why you have a National Lottery. But John Peel’s legacy should be that we continue to take a passionate interest in music, that we commit to seek out new sounds, and that we promise to keep listening to music in a spirit of eclecticism and curiosity. That would be a true tribute to a great man.

Ikara Colt

2004-06-15T18:08:00.000Z

Ikara Colt at the Garage, 11 June 2004

Has anyone really ever thoroughly enjoyed themselves in the Garage at Highbury Corner, surely one of London’s worse music venues? It’s a gloomy, dark, low ceilinged place, hard to get in and out of, and with a bar that’s bad even by music venue standards. It takes a special band to transcend these surroundings. Either that or incredible drunkenness, which must have been the reason I found the Detroit Cobras so enjoyable after the anti-war march last year. Some excellent performers – and those as diverse as Mclusky, Dick Dale and the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs – didn’t impress here as much as they did elsewhere.

So could Ikara Colt beat the bad vibes of this dump? Err, no, to be honest. It was… alright, but that sounds a little like faint praise. There are worse things than okay, but it isn’t the pursuit of the adequate that drives us out of homes in the evening, is it? The band weren’t bad and I think I had a good time, but I was messily, teenagedly excited about this lot at one time, and it doesn’t seem quite to have worked out.

I’m beginning to conclude they’re a singles band. Those urgent, fast, early singles like Sink Venice and One Note spoke of great promise and they still stand up, but I’m not sure now if they’re not getting a bit slick these days. The Fall influences are there to hear, but part of the magic and success of the Fall is that if anyone ever got too musicianly they were out on their arse. Perhaps Ikara Colt shouldn’t have learned to play their instruments. Or perhaps they should only put out singles. The problem with listening to them play a lot of songs is that you realise a lot of the songs sound the same. And amongst them, the best ones are the old ones, and the ones that don’t sound the same are new, slower and far less interesting ones.

I’m suspicious of this surface sheen these days as well – the new album is beautifully packaged, but sits as yet unplayed on the listening pile, regarded with suspicion. All their things look good. Or perhaps I’m tired of the almost daily e-mails I get from their news service encouraging me to buy the multi-formatted, limited edition releases early and often. Does everything have to be bloody marketed?

Oh, and the audience were a bunch of wankers – but is this even worth recording in the context of a London gig? You know when you take half a step back to let someone get past you and they suddenly decide that the space made available immediately in front of you is an attractive place to hang out so they need walk no further? When someone does this and then undertakes a bizarre backwards chicken dance that repeatedly propels their elbows into your over-sized stomach, it’s a little harder to enjoy the music. One day, when I stop going to gigs, it won’t be because of the music – it will be because of the people.

Support band was Your Codename Is Milo but I’ve seen them before and they were dismal, so I was able to put in some valuable pub time.

The Libertines

2004-03-12T17:54:00.000Z

The Libertines
Brixton Academy, Friday 5 March

This was an enjoyable shambles.

When it comes to the Libertines, ‘shambles’ is not a criticism. It’s what they do. Chaos is what they’re best at. That meant they’re a band always worth seeing. You never know quite what you’re going to get, and surely unpredictability is part of what drives people to see live music? For example, I hated the Kills when I saw them last year, because they played along to a backing tape. We knew exactly what we were going to get. Even in an encore, there could be no spontaneity. Whereas with the Libertines, they teeter always on the brink of collapse.

I know I’m not supposed to like them. I look down on bands hyped in the pages of NME and similar comics. I am suspicious of them. I tried not to like this lot, but in the end what can you do? If you like the noise a band makes, what else matters? Up the Bracket is a great LP, filled with excitement and enthusiasm, a true debut album where there’s a clatter of a thousand ideas, a rush to say everything you want to say at once and an absence of insulating gloss. It’s a record to grasp immediately and then cherish for a long time. So what can I say? I gave in.

And I’d always go and see them live because they play on the edge. Anything might happen. This is a band that fundamentally doesn’t make sense. Two front men almost compete for your attention. They often share the same microphone, and seem on the point of kissing, or fighting, or both. Yet the drummer holds it all together. So frequently they look back and take their cue from him. You only feel sorry for the bassist. He’s the only one who still has his shirt on at the end.

When I saw them at the Kentish Town Forum at the end of last year they struck me as surprisingly tight. Not so this night. They are all over the shop. They play the songs too fast. Often, they get so excited, get caught in the wrong space, that they forget to sing. Microphone stands never stand for long. This means you don’t hear the songs at their best. Cherished lines are thrown away, favourites are clattered through at top speed, but by god it’s fun. I’m an old grump who always gets seats when available, but as soon as the band come on every single person stands up and stays standing.

They play everything on the LP and new songs that sound like the old songs. They play all their best songs too early and by the end it feels a bit stretched because they’ve forgotten to finish with some crowd pleasers. The lights go on without an encore but really there’s nothing left to play. They got to the end of the night without self-destruction, and people seem mildly disappointed.

They will not be around forever this band. See them while you can.

The Broken Family Band

2004-02-27T15:53:00.000Z

The Broken Family Band and Garlic, the 100 Club, Thursday 12 February

I begin to approach the point of obsession with this band.

Still, that's the great thing about music, isn't it? You ride the wave of your enthusiasm. You go and see a band again and again. You hunt down their records. Then someone else comes along. This time next year, you've got yourself a different favourite band.

At the moment, it's this daft, English, indie country outfit for me. I love the Broken Family Band. Even better, this was the first time I have seen them as a headlining band. Previously they've been in support slots, and suffered that middle of the bill fate of being squeezed between a slack early outfit and the need to give the main band a decent run before the curfew. This gave them room to breath and the confidence that comes from knowing people have paid just to see you. They stretched out and enjoyed that space, playing a wider range of songs than I'd seen them play before: by now firm favourites from Cold Water Songs, older songs from the King Will Build a Disco and new ones from the forthcoming and excellent Jesus Songs.

Before that we had support band Garlic. Rubbish name, decent band. I'd got one or two of their records but hadn't seen them live before. Americana, underpinned by tremendous pedal steel guitar playing from a man who didn't look like he was with the rest of the band. I shall seek out their records.

Of course we were all waiting for the hip, chart-topping sounds of the Broken Family Band. The singer appeared to have brought his dad with him, which was nice. Sitting at the side of the stage, I could see things I hadn't noticed before. Previously I'd seen them head on the Water Rats, and you notice the charismatic singer and his burly henchman on acoustic guitar. There's more to them than that. The drummer and bassist are great too. They keep it all going.

You can't help but smile at the words, you can't help but tap you feet to the tunes and you can't help but watch the singer, who has buckets full of stage presence. You emerge from a Broken Family Band gig happy, and ready to see them again. Particularly good on this night were two of my favourites, the lovely Queen of the Sea and the scary Twelve Eyes of Evil. Because they were headlining they could save their two best known songs for last, so we finished with a rip-roaring Don't Leave That Woman Unattended and I Don't Have The Time To Mess Around. As an ending, it could not be bettered.

I love the 100 Club as well. It's the perfect venue, and shows most indie shitholes up for the toilets they are. It's slap bang in central London, the staff are civilised, you can sit down, you can get a drink without being ignored for ten minutes first and when you get that drink you can get a proper pint of beer in a glass instead of a can of something dubious and expensive with something plastic to drink it in. I recall the days when I pretty much lived in the Duchess of York in Leeds and if the bands were rubbish at least you could drink the beer. The 100 Club's true act of genius is to have the stage down the long side of the room rather than at the end. In so many indie venues the stage is at the end of the room and you all stand together in a sort of corridor trying to get a glimpse of the band. Here, the people who want to get down the front can while miserable gets like me can sit round the side, listen to the music and watch the band. Can't understand why everywhere isn't like this, and it shows what low standards we usually accept. Shame they normally get ropy bands on, mind.

For once, though, it had all come together. It was the perfect band for the perfect venue. We left exhilarated. And to nurture that obsession, I've already bought tickets to see the Broken Family Band again in March.

The White Stripes

2004-02-12T18:35:00.000Z

Review - The White Stripes, Alexandra Palace, Wednesday 21 January

Welcome to the world of showbiz.

To be fair, this could have been terrible. In some ways, we expected it to be. It's possible The White Stripes have got big past the point where they still make sense. Really a band like this should be playing every pub venue up and down the land. They should be a revered cult, the kind of band you follow passionately, a badge band the love of which proves you're in the company of someone as nuts about music as you. They shouldn't be on the front page of newspapers, number one in the album charts for weeks on end or instantly selling out multi-thousand venues. That stretches an admittedly thin proposition past a dangerous point. It's tempting to think they've passed their best. Elephant was not the masterpiece the hype promised. Inside that beast there was a really good 10 track LP straining to get out, but if you ask me – not that you did – they’ve never bettered De Stijl.

Yet, despite that, this was an enjoyable night. However big they get, I guess they’ll always be worth seeing. Despite the size of the gig, and the way you felt you were being processed as you waited in one of those queues that wraps around itself while being shouted at about all the things you’re not allowed to do, and despite the office party atmosphere that for once saw that I wasn’t the sole person in a shirt and tie, this was as intimate as any experience you share with several thousand people can be. Huge though the venue was, the White Stripes made an admirable lack of concessions in their act. There was no big backdrop, no big video screens. It was still just the two of them, in their funny clothes, on stage, Meg bashing the drums, Jack treading on a thousand pedals to extract an extraordinary range of sounds from his guitar, at times forgetting there's anyone else there.

There were many highlights. Hotel Yorba still does it for me every time. I’m a grinning, swaying sentimentalist all over again. To follow that with Seven Nation Army, a single so simple it’s genius, almost feels like they’re spoiling us. The other great songs from Elephant, Black Math and The Hardest Button To Button, were out there too, rubbing shoulders with cast iron, ipodded classics like I Think I Smell A Rat and the singalong reclamation of Boll Weevil. Alright, with The White Stripes you’ll always get your duff moments. In The Cold, Cold Night is sweet and gets a cheer, but of course Meg can’t sing, and does anyone need to hear I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself ever again? (But then as a country neophyte I love Jolene, so there they made me happy.) And there is the showbizzy stuff, the ‘we love you, you’re a great audience’ cobblers, and Jack’s ill-advised digressions into Dick Van Dyke territory (Shine on Harvest Moon, for pity’s sake).

But forgive them these excesses. They’re part of what they are. What we have is a good band, perhaps a great band, who have recorded lots of wonderful songs and a few duds. They’re selling records, they’re on your radio, but still they’re just doing what they’ve always done. I’m glad they’re out there and going strong, turning up in unlikely places like Alexandra Palace.

Nice venue, too. Although there were thousands it never felt crowded, and there was ample space at the back to get a drink or something to eat or just avoid the dire support band. I felt embarrassed that I’d never been up to Alexandra Palace. It felt like we were above all of London, and I’d love to have seen it when it was light. I left resolving to go back for a walk and a couple of pints one Sunday. I’d still go and see The White Stripes again too, given the chance. They haven’t blown it yet.

The Projects

2004-02-11T14:37:00.000Z

Track and Field Winter Sprinter Night Three – Kicker, James William Hindle, The Loves and The Projects, King’s Cross Water Rats, Friday 9 January

We’d miss it when it was gone. Here was the last night, day three and final of the Track and Field Winter Sprinter series. I'm aware that for students and young people, going out three nights running is hardly remarkable, but for people who have to get up the next morning, I find it pretty impressive. I've never been one for festivals - I will not camp, I don't like mud and I do not share my toilet with thousands of others - so you could say this was an ideal festival - four bands a night and your own bed and bog to go back to. I arrived drunker than the last two nights, having picked up my brother, down from Brum for the football - another very full day ahead on the Saturday - and made my way to the venue by the simple method of not walking past any pub en route.

The idea - the way I'd sold it to my brother - was to see Tompaulin, a band he likes but one of those I can't make my mind up about. Alas, they'd had to cancel due to a bereavement - one of those things that can't be helped, and hats off to Track and Field for e-mailing everyone and giving us all a couple of quid back on the door.

Ah, there were the familiar faces we had come to know over the last few nights. There was intense looking man with beard. There was the person of indeterminate sex reading a book about real murders. And there were the cliquey groups who'd come along purely so they could gather together and maintain a constant conversation.

As my brother grabbed armfuls of 7” singles I tried to work out who the band was. Wasn’t impressed at their tuneless thrashings around, so I was surprised when it turned out to be Kicker. I’d seen them before and thought them good, in a sub-Stereolab / Broadcast / Saloon kind of way. Sure they’d had a women singer. Turned out they did and she wasn’t there, so they were gamely pressing ahead with one of the blokes from the band filling in. Marks for carrying on regardless, but it wasn’t quite the same.

Returning from Wednesday night to fill the gap was the man with too many names, James William Hindle, or is it William James, whose quiet, dare-we-call-this-folk songs struggled against the nosier Friday night crowd. Again, opinion was divided, but I came down on his side of the fence.

I knew I’d enjoy The Loves. They live in the 1960s and make ramshackle two minute tunes with bubblegum choruses. Most of them contain the word ‘love’. I’d seen them before and in my memory (I might have remembered this wrong) they were all wearing uniforms, whereas this night they were disappointingly drably dressed. Apart from that, my heart was genuinely warmed. I don’t want to live in a world where these kind of pointless, never-going-to-make-it bands don’t exist.

With The Projects stepping up to fill the Tompaulin-sized hole it meant that for the third night running I hadn’t heard of the headliners. I was now quite drunk and very hungry, so ready for any excuse to leave and sink into the usual seat at the legendary King’s Cross Tandoori, but I had to stick around and delay my date with a dansak because, hey, the Projects were any good. They came, I suppose, out of that same Stereolab / etc. (see above) school but they did it with style, with rhythm and even with tunes. The woman singer was excellent, the drums and keyboards insistent, and you have to find a word to describe the guitars that isn’t angular. They managed to do what the last bands hadn’t done on the nights before and made me stay to the end. Memo to self: track down any Projects records.

Right, curry time.

The Broken Family Band

2004-02-10T14:08:00.000Z

Track and Field Winter Sprinter Night Two – The Broken Family Band, Finishing School, Homescience and the Ladybug Transistor, King’s Cross Water Rats, Thursday 8 January

So here we were again. Night two. More or less the same pubs in the same scuzzy part of London. Again, that need to get to the venue earlier than you’d like because the band you really want to see isn’t the main one. This makes me think I like unpopular music, but that isn’t by choice. I never set out to like music that is wilfully obscure, in the same way that I never decided to support a football team which will never win things – but that’s the way it’s apparently come to be. Anyway, bands and venues don’t keep time like people who have to work for a living do, so we got there before anything much was happening. Having spent over 80 quid on music of varying quality the day before, I resolved at all times to keep my gaze averted from the table with the records on it.

First two bands were Finishing School, who I liked, and Homescience, who I didn’t. Homescience were a wimpy bloke band while Finishing School where one of those nice, melodic girl bands who are pleasant enough to listen to without necessarily being the sort of thing you’ll get excited about. One of the women out of this was also in the Essex Green the night before. How many bands does any one person need to be in?

Both went on a bit long, as I was there, waiting with less than perfect patience, to see the Broken Family Band, with whom I am in danger of developing an obsession. I always say that The Fall are my favourite all time band, and then I allow myself at least one current new favourite band. At the moment, it’s the Broken Family Band. Yet nothing about them makes sense. They’re a country band. From Cambridge. Cambridge, England. It took me a bit of persistence to like them. First response was that I don’t like country music. But the songs got to me. I bought their LP Cold Water Songs last year. First time I played it I thought I might have got this wrong. The first track made no concessions to those wary of country. They even had American accents. But somehow I grew to love it. It stayed in my head, and I played that record again and again and again. Now I’m forced to admit something I resisted: I really do like country music. Perhaps this is a sign of getting older. Certainly no one under thirty should admit to liking country. Now, not only have I hoovered up every Broken Family Band record I can find, but I’ve also got a fistful of Johnny Cash CDs and the recent and wonderful Rough Trade Shops Country compilation. This looks like the start of an enthralling journey. And isn’t that one of the wonderful things about music? Who’d have thought a teenage Smiths obsessive would end up here?

I saw the BFB alongside Herman Dune last year and they were wonderful. The records don’t quite capture how good they are live. The singer’s a little chap but he brims with charisma and menace and commands the stage. It helps that he has an extraordinary voice that covers high and low, quiet and loud, sad and funny and all points in between – sometimes in the same song. Aiding and abetting is a moustachioed hulk on bass and other things. They might have started as a joke, but they’re far too good to be treated as one now. Of course the set was frustratingly short – squeezed as they were in that insidious spot between the main band and the earlier bands who’d overstayed – but very sweet. I Don’t Have the Time to Mess Around and Don’t Leave That Women Unattended were particular thrills, but then they always will be. Encouragingly, the audience loved it, and before you knew it, they were gone. I needed at least an hour more.

For the second night running the best band had been on in the wrong place. Again, we might as well stick around and hear the supposed headliners, who couldn’t hope to match this. Don’t know anything about the Ladybug Transistor, apart from that this is no name for a band. What allusion am I missing? They were adequate. But surely that was the same guitarist from the Essex Green leaving his Byrdsian fingerprints all over the place? How incestuous is this? Anyway, I thought the singers were interesting and it was perfectly alright, but it couldn’t help but feel anticlimactic.

Bed was calling, and I answered.

Herman Dune

2004-02-09T15:10:00.000Z

Track and Field Winter Sprinter Night One – Herman Dune, James William Hindle, St Thomas and the Essex Green, King’s Cross Water Rats, Wednesday 7 January

Three gigs in three nights in the grim first week back at work after the holidays. It seemed like a good idea at the time, the time being before Christmas when I booked the tickets, thinking it would be good to have something to look forward to in the New Year. Of course, what I forget is how desperate those early weeks of the year are. I feel like I’m operating at the bottom of the sea. Thick soup fills my head. Just getting to the end of the month alive feels like an achievement. And all I want to do at the end of the working day is trudge home and vegetate.

I’m a lazy bastard and I have a blackbelt in procrastination. That’s why we always have to buy tickets in advance. Good intentions to pay on the door dissolve in the acid of another bad working day. Possession of a paid for ticket appeals to the skinflint in me. I’ve spent the money, so I’d better go. So we went, via a couple of disappointing pubs, arriving early because you have to when the band you really want to see is only one of the support bands. It was irritatingly busy, but at least beer was available.

First on was some bloke called James William Hindle, which is one more name than strictly necessary. It was just him and his guitar singing quiet, gentle tunes. I thought he was alright, but Nic said the words were naff. Then it was St Thomas, apparently a Norwegian group, which explained the presence of a number of enthusiastic Scandinavians behind us. They tried hard and they meant well, but they took themselves rather seriously, and I have little tolerance for bands who explain their songs in the gaps between then. Stop talking and play another song. (The Flaming Lips last year were great for the 50% of the time they didn’t spend talking.) I liked them a little at first but grew tired. Apparently I missed the singer talking in all seriousness of his battle to lose weight. I’d been busy spending too much money on records at the time. I like gigs where you can buy records, and somehow it doesn’t count as much as buying records in shops. Standards are lowered. I have a pile of gig purchases where beer and a live environment have made me think a band’s better than it is. So I filled my boots with Track and Field CDs, something by the first singer and a St Thomas 7” which of course turned out to be dreadful. Forty odd quid spent – not bad for a time of year when the aim is not to spend money.

Next up were the band I’d came to see. Dismissed in half a sentence in the Guardian’s predictable review they might have been, but I’ve decided to love Herman Dune. It took seeing them live last year to convert me – a great Track and Field night with Kicker, the Broken Family Band and Camera Obscura. Before then, they’d always been a sort of second division band to me, but that night the warmth, affection and obvious love for what they do had won me over. You could call what they play folk music. It’s simple, emotional and beautiful. True, they’re pretty horrible looking people – the first time I saw them I wondered who on earth were those two bearded, greasy blokes in baseball caps cheering the other bands, and then they wandered on stage and started playing – but in their heads they’re gorgeous, travelling troubadours.

It was a short and lovely set. They obviously have many songs, as there were few I recognised from last time or the excellent Mas Cambios LP, and they’d acquired a largely superfluous woman singer somewhere on their travels. Best bit was a couple of songs in the middle accompanied solely by a ukulele and for the most part without even a microphone, which even achieved the near miracle of making a London crowd almost silent. They’d gone before you knew it – why weren’t they top of the bill?

Might as well hang around to see the headliners, the Essex Green, about whom I knew nothing. The crowd, at its peak for Herman Dune, thinned rapidly, making it clear what the main attraction was. The headliners were… okay. Thought they were pretty good at the start, but evidently those were their best songs, and I grew tired of the inevitable sub-Byrdsian guitar that just had to crash into the middle of every single song. At some point the thought of getting home before midnight became appealing, so we left before they’d finished. On the way out of course I had to stop and buy one of every available home-recorded CD of a Herman Dune side project, and, as you do when you’re half pissed, tell one of the band that I think they’re great and I love them.

So that was eighty odd quid spent on records, more than a few pints and renewed acquaintance with one of my favourite bands. Not bad, and there were still two nights to go