Here's My Card Records - 'Board Meeting'

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'

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'

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?