Burial - 'Archangel'

I've returned from some five years in the wilderness (Australia since you ask), fetching up in the sunlit uplands of the UK. After travelling for a couple of months in China and Japan, we arrived in London in the middle of the one the coldest snaps I can remember (or maybe it's always been that cold in Winter, and I had somehow forgotten).

Since then, I've been working in Paddington, walking the streets, a grimy mixture of dirty main roads and gleaming canal-side developments. And this Burial track, which I'm sure has been written about to death elsewhere, has been the perfect accompaniment. It's an urban masterpiece, the sound of disembodiment, of ghosts howling in the machine.

Home....

So, after wondering the globe for the last five years, I've returned to the sunlit uplands of the UK, where all is bright and marvellous, oh yes!

Publish Post

The trouble with science 1

Actually that should be the trouble with scientists. The more one is able to see the patterns and themes that make the universe work, the more one hates to rely on interpretations, anything that might smack of the artistic.

So while I love the work of the Evolutionary Psychologists, their tendency to rubbish Freud at every turn seems a little like tunnel vision.

Fortunately we have Adam Phillips to mount a typically paradoxical defence: Freud?

Underworld: Oblivion Ball

I owe Underworld a great deal. If it hadn't've been for Dubnobasswithmyheadman taking residence on my stereo and in my head during my first year of Uni, I'd probably still be listening to... well, I shudder to think. Maybe I'd be of the opinion that Kaiser Chiefs represented British rock at its mercurial best? Or that James Blunt was a sensitive and engaging artiste with a voice like old honey, rather than an unutterable ballsak with a voice like gagging on sick. Who's to say? I do know that, before Underworld, and with only a few honorary precursors (The Shamen, The Orb), the music I liked had to have choruses, guitars, drums; the indie litany, all present and correct.

But Dubnosbass was a passport to a quite different sonic dimension (having already turned down The Prodigy's earlier and (then) less appealing promise to take my brain to said other dimension): not only was it a thunderous and beguiling album in its own right, it was as if someone had just turned the colour on. Suddenly, I got the point of beats, could see the possibilities of 4/4; realised that I'd be listening to music like this from then on.

So when we learned we could combine our trip to Japan with a chance to see Underworld, Andrew Weatherall, Simian Mobile Disco and a couple of locals acts, we were cock-a-hoop (which turned to ecstasy-on-toast when we managed to get tickets to see Daft Punk in Kobe). On the other hand, their most recent album, Oblivion With Bells, sounded a bit vanilla on the few, admittedly not close, listens I8d given it. Were the band finally reaching the end of their productive span after the better part of 20 years?

Tish and nonsense. On the evidence of last night's gig in the cavernous Makuhari Messe in Tokyo (easily sold-out), Underworld are, if anything, at the peak of their powers. They played a truly mammoth set of crowd-pleasers, roof-raisers and floor-shakers and had the crowd of 20,000 staggeringly stylish Japanese and two not-quite-so stylish-thank-you-very-much westerners reaching a state the Buddhists call satori but I call ohmygodthatwasAMAZING. Samurai dancing, beat bushido: whatever it was, we were going off. A song like Rowla, for instance, became a frightening acid squall; a frankly barbaric King Of Snake was divine, unending; even the new songs seemed little short of perfect. From

They hit us with the ever-circling beat-storm of Pearl's Girl, and followed it with a euphoric Two Months Off. Ahh those synths. I wanted it all to stop. I never wanted it to stop. They finished with Moaner, a song I'd never really come to terms with in the past; and yet, in the context, it was spell-binding, Karl Hyde throwing Elvis poses in his glittering silver jacket, ranting in the purple spotlight like the scary but lovable cockney loon we know him to be. Toss in a towering Cowgirl and a delirious Born Slippy, and you've got the mother and father of all live shows. Shock and awe doesn't cover it.

They play an encore of Jumbo, the blissful synths and gaseous pads a relief from the frenzy of the last two+ hours, and we walked (!) back to our hotel to some dubstep from Weatherall, before losing consciousness at around 4am.

There's no WAY that Daft Punk can top that. Right?

::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Apologies for having been away so very long. Since we've A) packed up our entire lives and left Australia, B) spent a rather crazed month traveling in China and C) found ourselves in the middle of Japan, updating this blog has been both tricky AND hard. As the ad very nearly says, Impossible Is Something.

Oh yes, and D). I lost my iPod. 80gbs worth of music down the wazoo, just like that. So, apart from Radiohead's album, I've had very little new music to listen to. And yet, apart from the embarrassment and anger of losing such a valuable piece of hardware (and a birthday present to boot), I don't feel too bad. It means I can start all over again. I will only upload albums that I WILL listen to.

This is my pledge, and I will keep it. Definitely.

:::::::::::::::::::

The man Barrie on McCarthy's frighteningly good The Road. Nothing to add really, except to say that Blood Meridian is in my top five books EVAH ("What are the others?" I'm not telling**), not least because I could reliably freak Shana out by reading aloud from its blood-soaked pages (not literally blood-soaked, I hope you understand. That would be weird), especially the first Indian attack, the poor horse bitten on the face by a snake, and the final hallucinatory scenes with the Judge and the Kid.

*Though, to be fair, I only got hold of it in my last couple of weeks in Australia, when finding time to give albums the Deep Listen was far from easy.

** " Cos you don't know", etc.

Encyclopedia of Life

It's possible to having fleeting moments of scepticism when it comes to user-generated content. Sometimes, the last thing I want to see is other people's videos on YouTube; and the great mass of commentors on The Guardian's Comment Is Free make me want to instigate revolution; oh yes, and I've been burnt by Wikipedia, and the episode with the Dolphins*.

But this: this is genuinely fantastic. The only trouble being, it doesn't actually exist yet. Nevertheless, if they can get even a small fraction of this project off the ground, it will become a breathtaking resource. I'd be keen to know a bit more of the detail of who gets to edit (Professional biologists, right?), but otherwise, where do I sign up?

*When, in the course of writing a feature on songs about various mammals (why? Search me), I had cause to use Wikipedia for some facts, and found myself reading some mentalist screed about our dolphin overlords, come to rule the world, etc.

Bat For Lashes

I absolutely hate it when this happens. I got the Bat For Lashes album Fur and Gold a good six months ago. Yet for some reason, I only listened to it last week. Actually, I know why. Too much music. Too many new albums, too many old albums, too many mixes, too many MP3s, too many damn podcasts. Make it stop. Except you don't want it to stop, because you might miss an album like this.

I think the problem must have been the initial reviews damned it with faint praise: "Bjork-lite", "Batty by name, batty by nature", "weird". I should have known then that this was laziness of the first order (I've never been lazy when it comes to describing music, no sir, no way). It's true up to a point that singer Natasha Khan has a singing timbre not a million miles from Bjork's - but to compare to Bjork suggests a similarity of styles that really isn't there most of the time (especially not in later Bjork).

What is similar is a sense of listening to something both precious and mysterious, full of meaning that can't quite be grasped. "Creatures of mercy/Shoot them down, set me free," sings Khan with the kind of conviction that Bjork brought to songs like "Isabelle" and, especially, "Pagan Poetry". And "Tahiti" has the same crystalline beauty of Vespertine's best songs. But mostly I'm hearing the magic and sensuality of Kate Bush. In other places, there's a similarity to Goldfrapp's first album; plush and romantic, full of harpsichords and plucked strings, sinuous Theremins and harmonies, kettle drums, spoken word interludes.

Either way, the album is like stepping into the kind of dream I would have when I was young, full of forests and wolves and hunters and danger.

Just finished reading Sarah Waters' "The Nightwatch". Terrific book with a novel structure: The story starts in 1947, before moving to 1944 and the so-called "mini-blitz" before ending with 1941, the Blitz proper, and the first meeting of most of the characters. So, by the very way it's put together, the story continually reveals information about what's gone before. Featuring: Christian Scientists, conscientious objectors, dentists moonlighting as abortionists and a whole gaggle of friends of Dorothea.

Âme : “Enoi"

Now this is fucking blistering, and I don't use the bad word lightly. What a simple idea. Take a techno track with scattered vocal fragments rippling through the hi-gloss fabric: "Wish", "eeeh" etc; take various frenzied clankings and spastik sound events and gothik synths and peculiar chants, then build up the beats and the bass-spring and the intensity, and then, just when it's really ticking, introduce us to the cry of the alien tripods from War of the Worlds, like a psychotic fog-horn. Scared the willies out of me the first time. And then every other time too. The A-Side, Balandine, is equally unhinged, a vicious bass-riff being submerged beneath hard Detroit beats.

Frenzied, epic, orchestral, this is techno at its best.

Chemical Brothers - We Are The Night

In which the Chemical Brothers continue their ineluctable slide toward the awful. I've given it a few tries now, and the question keeps coming up: when and why would I listen to this? When it's sonically affecting (which is not often), I still can't help wonder what I could be listening to that would deliver the same payoff at least twice as hard. The beats used to fun or hard or dirty or some thrilling combination of the three; now they mostly just sit there. The psychedelia, already largely in retreat with Push The Button, has all but disappeared, and the songs just aren't memorable enough.

The title track never gets going, the Midlake track is banal, and I never want to hear the nonsense with Willy Mason or god help us the Klaxons again. Easily the most enjoyable track is The Salmon Song with Fatlip, and that's the one that sounds least like the Chems. Maybe I need to listen a few more times. It's just that right now, doing that sounds like a chore; something I never thought I'd be saying about a Chems album.

The horror, the horror

There comes a time when the running must stop, when one must confront the very thing from which one flees. To drain the poison, to exorcise the demon. Otherwise, that which you've tried to erase will always be there at the threshold of consciousness, leering and gibbering like a maniac.

All of which is by way of saying that The Travelling Wilburys albums have been re-released. Well, I'm not afraid any more. I'm going to look my demon square in the face and say "You can't beat me, Lord Baal!" And at that point, my psychic wounds will heal and I will be accepted with love into a balmy sunlit world of joy and grace.

Forgive the saturnalia of sarcasm, but the Wilburys first album also happens to be the first album I really loved, with the possible exception of Cloud Nine by George Harrison. In a time before U2, or The Cure, or any number of later obsessions, I listened to Volume 1 hundreds of times. It struck me as the very acme of what music could do.

"Handle Me With Care". Yes! Handle me with care - such prescience! Handle me with care, lest I crumple beneath the combined weight of your breezy youthless genius. "Tweeter and the Monkey-Man". It turns out that Bob Dylan had recorded plenty of albums and songs before this, and that some of these were, and still are, thought to be good. Am I ashamed to admit that "Tweeter" was the first Bob Dylan song I ever loved? Yes; but there it is.

On the other hand, I've no intention of re-listening to either record. What if the healing rays of musical hope turn out to be mere overpolished session rock, with all the fragrant charm of an o'er-brimming chamberpot? No, I'll just have to stay repressed, to keep that little scaley demon fellow fed and watered and hopefully becalmed. Otherwise, I’m likely to find myself posting on the genius of George Michael's "Jesus to a Child".

That way damnation lies.