Guilty women

Music deals to varying degrees with the issues of commitment and unrequited love. As I’ve written before, R&B gives us some of the most wonderful affirmations of serial monogamy (see Justin Timberlake, “My Love”; Beyoncé Knowles, “Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)”; Hot Chip, “One Life Stand”). Rock music, less so. Songwriters with guitars do a better job of either posturing as the dominant sex, conquering any and all, or of playing out the part of the spurned, luckless lover.

Into that latter bracket, place The Shins, thanks to their recent “40 Mark Strasse“. Principal songwriter James Mercer narrates an invented tale of a child falling in love with (unbeknown to him) a prostitute; the story recalls the part of his childhood spent near the Ramstein Air Base in Kaiserslautern, Germany. The titular street is a nom de plume, bestowed upon a stretch of highway frequented by GIs in search of vice. The song is melancholy and resigned, with the initial youthful optimism (“Too young to know just what it was / Something more than a friend”) quickly giving way to the ethereally-backed chorus, in which Mercer asks,

“My girl, you’re giving up the fight / Are you gonna let these Americans / Put another dent in your life?”

The song shares a common strand of regret with Bowie—hinted at by the Germanic title—which finally plays out in the middle eight, with a gorgeous swell that looks back to the masterful outro of “Ashes To Ashes“. In the verses, eery sonar pings peek through a rich-timbred chord progression doubled up on acoustic guitar and prepared piano. As Mercer qua innocent child figures out the girl is beyond his grasp, he heaps the blame on her, telling her, “You’ll have to lose all them childish notions”. Is there a wider message to the song, to girls who have “the heart of a dove” but who can’t resist “play[ing] in the street at night”? The anguish in Mercer’s voice as he responds to his own exhortations suggests the dichotomy is not restricted to childhood infatuations with women of work.

Into this bracket we can also place Isaac Hayes’ interpretation of “By The Time I Get To Phoenix“, which provides ten minutes of backstory which contextualises what has become a succinct country standard. Hayes tells the story, in his sonorous voice-of-a-preacher, of a man who falls in love with a girl determined to take advantage of his naïveté and largesse. In his words,

“She said, ‘I got a fool and I know I got a fool, but I got a good thing’.”

She is ungrateful of his generosity—he takes no notice, knowing he is punching above his weight. Then, she cheats on him—and he finds out:

“But one day, one day, the old boy got sick and he had to come home.
I don’t have to tell you what he found.
Oh! Yeah, it hurt him so bad.
He said, ‘Baby…Mama, why?’ That’s all he could say.
That’s all he could say. He was hurt.”

The backing, a barely-there organ drone and a one-note bass line, underscores Hayes’ soliloquy with a universality: the same hurt is felt all the time; the philandering man is not the only challenge to the defining “power of love”. In the song itself, the lover-in-exile is brutal, standoffish—”Though time and time I try to tell her so / She just didn’t know I would really go”—but the introduction makes his crime of silence pale in comparison to her own, that of blatant deception.

When the main part of the song kicks in, a pair of forlorn trumpets peer through a winding clarinet part, while a lounge piano trickles in the occasional colour. The despair of the narrator is all too evident: he really doesn’t want to go, but he’s powerless to prevent the wandering ways of his girl. Even when the arrangement reaches its most triumphant moment, it’s only to bid farewell to her.

“I’m leaving my heart here / But I gotta go”

By taking the point of view of the spurned man, watching women who are tantalisingly close but whose commitment proves unattainable, Mercer and Hayes wrote songs that take a sophisticate’s eye to relationships. Some couples bicker and fight; other couples were never meant to be—in both these categories, it is possible to see men being the innocent victims of guilty women.

Talking heads surround us

I’m not usually one for gimmicks.

In the 1960s, a predilection for quadraphonic sound emerged in the progressive rock scene. Pink Floyd’s use of the Azimuth Co-ordinator was flashy, but a lack of readily-available consumer equipment prevented the technology from making a leap into the living room. There was a brief glimmer of hope in 1997, when The Flaming Lips released Zaireeka, an album designed for home-brew quadrophenia, but the music was too challenging to have mainstream appeal. A decade-and-a-bit later, “surround sound” is a fixture of the home cinema setup: we’ve finally found a way of making music in four discrete channels work. The question is this: do we actually want to hear that music?

Funk, soul, brother Isaac

You can sometimes trace a direct lineage from seminal albums through to their modern descendants. Sometimes, though, it’s just a genetic fragment, a heartbeat or a swagger that travels through the generations. When we talk about Can’s lasting influence, we can feel the ur-krautrock’s presence everywhere. When we talk about Isaac Hayes’s Hot Buttered Soul, we have to feel the fabric of modern music between our fingers, and bring it up to our noses to inhale the waft of Hayesian heritage.

The four songs that make up the album are diverting and ingenious. They walk around you, several times, making a mockery of conventional song structure. They are arranged like masterpieces—think of the cinematic interplay between strangled electric guitar and soaring strings on “Walk On By”. They know when to ride sparse, motorik beats, and when to let the piano parts expand to fill the universe of emotions—as on “Hyperbolicsyllablecsesquedalymistic” (see above). Everything is produced in a way that suggests the studio is a living thing—especially on the wandering “By The Time I Get To Phoenix”, with its ambient, barely-there organ drone and Hayes’s “velvet sledgehammer” monologue, which eventually lead into something grander and more significant.

On the face of it, Hot Buttered Soul shouldn’t be so un-derivative. Two of the songs are “covers” (albeit in the loosest possible sense), and the album was pieced together from several recording sessions—a far cry from the deranged-genius-cabin-fever-vibe we associate with most truly original works. But, somehow, it feels vital and inspirational in the correct sense of these words: it gave life to soul as a progressive, expansive genre (consider Curtis Mayfield’s Super Fly, released three years later in 1972); and it provided a rich seam of sounds and textures that artists would tap into in the decades to follow.

Capped with Hayes’s inimitable, husky set of pipes, the album manages to strut and preen, but also to serenade and emote. It’s no wonder the music it sired was, taken as a whole, so schizophrenic.

Strict machine, strict morals

To mark the end of their time as residents on the EMI/Parlophone roster, Goldfrapp have elided their finest singles into a neat collection with typically gorgeous artwork (Mat Maitland at Big Active gave me an early love of graphic design) and two new compositions.

It’s a fine body of work which encourages listeners to not only reappraise the combo’s most radio-friendly material, but also seek out deeper cuts which might have been released as singles in a parallel, more sophisticated universe. It’s inevitable, with a collection like this, to notice the absences, but concision makes the collection all the more elegantly sequenced.

“Elegant is an appropriate word to describe Goldfrapp”

Elegant is an appropriate word to describe Goldfrapp. Even at their most sexually charged (see “Strict Machine“, from 2003′s Black Cherry), there is a quaint naïveté to the music and the lyrics which is at odds with their image. The prevailing mood of 2005′s Supernature, from the artwork downwards, was intended to be sleazy, but its standout songs (the ubiquitous “Ooh La La” which opens this compilation, and the dominating “Ride A White Horse“) quickly trade smut for euphoria. That album also featured two quasi-ballads, “Let It Take You”(see below) and “Time Out From The World“, both beatless and stratospheric, and rich in emotional baggage. At their zenith, Goldfrapp appeared to have beamed in from a very different place.

“Seventh Tree repositioned them in the mode of Beck circa Sea Change: acoustic and woody in timbre, and tepid in dynamics”

The duo then took quite an about turn in their career, eschewing the disco ball of Supernature and Black Cherry, and the alpine, noirish cabaret of their debut, Felt Mountain. 2008′s Seventh Tree repositioned them in the mode of Beck circa Sea Change. Acoustic and woody in timbre, and tepid in dynamics, the singles from this era don’t stick in the mind so much, but their mid-table position in this new compilation allows you to enjoy the very particular sonic details that made it, in aggregate, a rather bleak and tired affair. It’s a pity they never released the best song on the album, “Cologne Cerrone Houdini” (see below), which harks back to the age of soul with its orchestral flourishes and squelchy keys. The song is airy and helium-powered, in stark contrast to the songs which surrounded it.

“Head First was an exercise in cheap 1980s neon retreads”

The final act in the Goldfrapp/EMI partnership was the most sorrowful. Where Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory once created the Ur-sounds that would be replicated by others (Madonna’s Confessions On A Dance Floor was reputedly inspired by Supernature), 2010′s Head First was an exercise in cheap 1980s neon retreads. Alas, below the head-rush, it was limb-less.

Goldfrapp’s falling star tendencies might lead the listener to imagine this compilation as a parting shot. It doesn’t help that the new songs sound elegiac and stately, and that they close out the track-listing. (They are both, however, lovely: “Yellow Halo” softly pulsates through French touch and blog house, sounding a bit like Friendly Fires and Cut Copy; “Melancholy Sky” (see top of article) is lounge-y and evokes comparisons with the duo’s Felt Mountain sound.) But Goldfrapp are nothing if not determined. Currently at work on their sixth album, Will and Alison remain a creative partnership to be written off at one’s peril. So let’s hope The Singles proves not to be a swansong, but the closing of a chapter in the career of a duo who are often overlooked but never underrepresented in their impact on popular music.

Basement Jaxx — Jump n’ Shout

If you read Simon Reynolds’s excellent essay “Maximal Nation” you’ll know that, in the main, electronic music in the 1990s was “deep/dark/stark”, with some notable exceptions. One such exception was Basement Jaxx, the creative pairing of Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe, forged in cult Brixton club nights. Somehow, they became a pop phenomenon, to the extent that their debut album Remedy, released in 1999, was one of my early musical purchases (My actual first? I subconsciously pestered my parents into buying Michael Jackson’s Dangerous on cassette in 1994).

Remedy had a sweaty album cover that demanded being placed face-down to avoid parental detection, and it also had a singularly obnoxious song on it that might well be seen as the forefather to Reynolds’s “digital maximalism”. “Jump n’ Shout” (see above) has a clattering house beat, incongruous wobbling and kettle-whistling sound effects, and a totally reckless parping lead synth. Did I mention MC Slarta John’s incomprehensible rapping, which vomits all over syntactical conventions?

Somehow, in spite of the panoply of competing elements (there’s even a beautiful, eastern-sounding melody buried somewhere deep in the mix), Buxton and Ratcliffe pull it off. The song is so ridiculous, you can’t help but fall for its charms. Call it the ADHD puppy that’s simultaneously yelping, biting, scratching and urinating on your leg, which you nonetheless take into your home.

Becker’s band of Brewis brothers

It’s a known fact that I got into Steely Dan through listening to and loving Field Music’s second album, Tones of Town. Criminally underrated at the peak of their powers, Field Music will this month release their fourth album, Plumb—their second since a change of line-up that saw the Brewis brothers augmented by Ian Black and Kevin Dosdale. (You can read my review of this incarnation of Field Music in concert here.)

Nowadays, Field Music sound like a cross between Fleetwood Mac and XTC, but circa Tones of Town there was a delicious interplay between jazz and the baroque in their music, which I recently traced back to a little gem of a song by Steely Dan.

“Through With Buzz”, from 1974′s Pretzel Logic (for a fuller description of that album’s virtues, see here), is a quasi-interlude which sets up the album’s final third. With its crisp piano chords in the first part, yearning strings in the second, and a little foray into Motown in the third, it exemplifies the sophistication in Steely Dan’s arrangements. To see that complexity writ large, listen to its preceding song, “Parker’s Band” (see below).

More to the point, it is flattered by near-emulation in Field Music’s own expository interlude, “A Gap Has Appeared” (see below). The familiar elements are in place: piano-work a lesser listener might compare to Billy Joel; emotive cello; and then a surprisingly vivacious, jazzy drum track.

And that’s how you draw a line from Los Angeles to Tyne & Wear.

Spoon — My Mathematical Mind

Reading Mark Richardson‘s latest Resonant Frequency column, which is all about BASS, and our perceptions of and reactions to it, I was charmed to learn that his favourite song of all time is Aphex Twin’s “Flim“. It’s a gorgeous composition from a musician who often prefers to alarm the listener, and it also represents electronic music at its most elegantly sequenced—calculated, even.

Thinking about “Flim” in such a way made me jump to maths, and from there to Spoon’s “My Mathematical Mind“, which is the rigid arithmetic to Aphex Twin’s differential equation. Or, if you consider the way it builds and grows and complexifies, it’s more like an exponential function.

No verse or chorus in sight, Britt Daniel plies layer upon layer as the song wears on, rocketing it skyward at an ever-increasing pace. Atop an octave-jumping piano drone, we get skronky guitar-work, frazzled brass and crashing percussion. And then, right at the end, the elements coalesce and the track coalesces into serenity, like the eventual solving of an equation. How very mathematical indeed.

The Holy Ghost of Michael McDonald

You might know of my straight-faced love of Steely Dan, a jazzy duo who at their peak relied on the very best session singers and musicians. One such singer was Michael McDonald, whose husky and resonant tones are not that dissimilar from the digitally smeared vocals Karin Dreijer Andersson trickles over her songs as Fever Ray.

McDonald went on to found the Doobie Brothers, but not before he did backup vocals on classics like “Peg” and “I Got The News“. And McDonald’s trademark pipes get around even today, cropping up now and again on other people’s songs. In 2009 he appeared on a B-side version of Grizzly Bear‘s “While You Wait For The Others“, which showcases his distinctive voice in a lead setting. The original version was led by Daniel Rossen, who has a pretty honeyed voice, but McDonald has a beefier go at it, and then tackles the complex vocal arrangement in the song’s final minute, augmenting it with soaring accents.

More recently still, DFA quasi-heirs Holy Ghost! brought in McDonald for the closing song on their eponymous debut, “Some Children“. Like many of the songs on Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest album, “Some Children” has a natty choral arrangement, but Holy Ghost! are totally different in every other way. No intricate baroque pop in sight, they make sleek electro-by-numbers which can come across rather characterless. They know their way round a disco bassline, and the DFA production team gives it the requisite layers of vintage Clavinet and close-miked live drums, but it can veer off into anonymity.

Not so “Some Children”, which is reined in by McDonald’s lead vocals. On this occasion, he makes a sweet song more sultry—his curious phrasing has the effect of virtually slowing the verses down, before unleashing a richly textured extended outro, with his harmonies piercing through the stacked choir. It’s a really lovely, fitting finale which restores my confidence in the band—and pays Michael McDonald’s heating bills.

Why do McDonald’s vocal talents still appeal? He doesn’t have an equivalent in contemporary popular music, which has increasingly become the territory of more polarised singers (dramatic falsetto on the one hand, pained baritone on the other). Moreover, the kind of complex arrangements he specialised in has become the preserve of composers, and not multi-taskers (think of Nico Muhly, for example). So, perhaps when a band goes hunting for a man who can do it all, and add an inimitable personality to a song, it’s unsurprising they alight upon him. If that’s the case, go forth and multiply.

Tago Mago at 40

I won’t forget the first time I heard Can’s seminal krautrock record, Tago Mago. Although history isn’t on my side—I wasn’t in a dingy basement in Berlin, or a warehouse party in New York, or a grotty den in Camden—the setting was so fitting it bears recollection. In the winter of 2008 I travelled across Rajasthan; my soundtrack was a combination of familiar favourites and things I was too young (or not-alive) to have appreciated when they first came out. Jouncing around in the back of an SUV as we journeyed through the desert-and-fortress vista, the album that did the most justice to the surroundings was Tago Mago, whose 40th anniversary is now being celebrated with a commemorative re-release.

Tago Mago is an album of split personalities. The first such division that strikes you is the alternately blissed-out and then frenetic freeform scat of the band’s vocalist Damo Suzuki. He sings and screams in the loosest approximation of English, and sounds perpetually terrified of mankind’s impending doom. The next thing you notice is how keenly the album is halved. The first half is lithely propelled along by Jaki Liebezeit’s instantly recognisable drumming, with subtly tricky polyrhythms coalescing into fragments of funk. Alongside Liebezeit’s continual presence is a palette of strangled electric guitar and limber bass-lines, which continue to crop up through decades of punk, post-punk and disco.

The second half is a freer affair which owes more to improvised jazz and the contemporary experiments in musique concrète. After the relentless eighteen-minutes-plus of “Halleluhwah”, this spacious second half takes you to the other side of the universe, or to another part of your consciousness. Menacing drones and industrial noise collide with Suzuki’s deranged wailing; now and again in drift primitive electronic rhythms. It’s the birth of ambient music, and it makes you realise how derivative all that followed inevitably was.

Of course, I came to love the album having already been a recipient of krautrock’s largesse, in that it had influenced plenty of albums I already knew. Far from diluting the experience, the benefit of hindsight made me appreciate more profoundly the sheer volume of different movements, aesthetics and genres that splintered out from this very special album. And I’m sure that when we consider the music that may emerge in the next forty years, a fair share of it will still be traceable to these seven sprawling, entangled pieces of music.

From Eden to wilderness

There are two distinct musical strands to Wild Beasts’ more exploratory recent work, which are combined to dizzying effect: the first is characterised by jaw-dropping, bottomless bass tones (see the backbone of “Lion’s Share”, the serrated “Plaything”, and the foreboding back-end of “Burning”); the second is an emphasis on the ambient and the pastoral (the delicate plucking of “Loop The Loop” and “Deeper”, the bewildering middle section of “End Come Too Soon”). In the past, I’ve mentioned the relationship between this aesthetic and certain trends in electronic music; now, I want to project backwards twenty years or so, to examine the influence had upon the latter aesthetic by Talk Talk.

Like Wild Beasts, Talk Talk picked up more critical acclaim the further they retreated from more boisterous and unsubtle compositions. “It’s My Life” (1984) may have been a hit and spawned a standout final single for No Doubt, but it was once they started burning incense and candles while improvising with orchestras that they produced their best work. 1988′s Spirit of Eden is a fascinating and obtuse entry point to their métier, so let’s start there. Six leisurely paced, disarmingly complex songs which stretch to forty minutes, the album can seem frustrating at first. There might be a few bars you can whistle to, but these moments are fragmentary, and blow away in the slightest breeze before they can be repeated.

The arresting opener, “The Rainbow”, has about three false starts before it gets going for certain. First, we hear a lazily atmospheric passage—a few jazzy notes on a clarinet, some overtone-rich chords struck from an abrasive-sounding electric guitar, both set to an indistinct wash of strings. Then, nothingness. Some moments later, as if telegraphed in from the beginning of the universe, a few groanings and murmurings of primordial soup. And finally, over two minutes in, a wonderfully resonant guitar enters with what you might call the opening credits. The four minutes which follow are similarly abnormal: strange chords begin on piano and are then resolved on organ; Mark Hollis indulges in his trademark disturbed-narcoleptic vocals; occasionally, the clouds break to reveal fragments of the titular rainbow.

As strange an opener as “The Rainbow” is , if anything the songs which follow are even stranger. Few will forget the haunting chorus of “Eden”, in which Hollis unleashes a nauseous wail, which clashes gloriously with the maxed-out Hammond organ. Nor can one fail to notice the tropical percussion breakdown near the end of “Desire”, with its knowing incongruity. At every turn, Spirit of Eden surrounds you with warmth and weirdness: some songs peter out into drifting silence and then cut back in with a radically avantgarde coda or middle-eight; others dare you to question unusual textures and chord progressions. Halfway through “I Believe In You” there is a gloomy passage of filtered organ and jazzy drumming which, thinking laterally, has found its way into everything from Sigur Rós and Tortoise to Doves and Four Tet. It’s like the feeling you get when you listen to those early Can records: here is fundamentally original music which has gone on to inform and predict countless and disparate genres and trends.

At its most nuanced, Spirit of Eden also sets an extremely high bar for orchestral arrangements in post rock. Unique atonal collisions of horns are nowadays the speciality of Radiohead (see “Codex“, “How To Disappear Completely“), but they bear the indelible stamp of authority from a composition like “I Believe In You”. Looking to younger forces, These New Puritans’ grimly beautiful Hidden also bears a great debt to Spirit of Eden—consider the fragile, gently resolving woodwind at the end of “Fire-Power“, and the insistent funeral march of “5“.

And, finally, Talk Talk’s rich pageant is also present on Wild Beasts’ Smother: you can feel it most perceptibly in the leisurely paced “Loop The Loop”, but it also creeps in elsewhere too.It’s a great challenge to weave in microfragments of other people’s defining characteristics, but Wild Beasts pull it off time and time again. Like the luxuriantly stretched-out gurgling sample that runs beneath “Reach A Bit Further”, they take a little morsel of Talk Talk’s heritage and tuck it into the quantum folds of their finest work. There is no other way even a band as daring and non-canon as Wild Beasts would have the balls to do what they do in the centre of “End Come Too Soon”. When all semblance of songiness cuts out, to be replaced by an abstract sonic edifice of yearning and regret which builds to a pulverising akmē, the spirit of Eden is well and truly alive.