Mahgeetah (Part I)

Backtracking: When you sit around pretending to study all day, there’s no time to appreciate the raw power of the guitar. Consequently, rhythm-based music has soundtracked much of the last five years of my life, with “rock” music relegated to weekend blowouts, when I just want to sit in front of the hi-fi, mouth agape at the rich overtones and natural harmonies of the humble axe.

There have been guitars, of course, but they were either in the post-rock vein, or they were being re-appropriated into dance music. Like I wrote previously, the post-punk revival happened.

In my downtime, the twin mainstays whose CDs always found their way into the stereo were Spoon and My Morning Jacket: two bands who keep the rock rolling. The former make taut, concise music that, at its most prosaic, resembles Pavement and Led Zeppelin, but, at its smartest, fashioned instantly familiar melodies out of white space and scrappy guitar. The latter write caterwauling, brawling songs, recorded in grain silos and made to be played in country discos, like the ones Dub Blood frequents in Annie Proulx‘s Postcards.

I have written in the past about the minimalism of Spoon; how they rarely eke out a song beyond its natural limit. But they also do maximalism, of a kind, as on their 2007 album, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. Unexpectedly embracing a poppier tone (in particular, that of rhythm and blues), the band sound less jittery and paranoid than on their other albums, and the songs take in rousing brass and leather-jacket swagger. Experimental moments persist, notably with “The Ghost Of You Lingers” and its urgent keys and desolate vocals, but the prevailing mood is one of accessible optimism, even when the songs’ protagonists are deadbeats or world-weary. “The Underdog”, which was produced by Jon Brion (of Late Registration fame), hurtles out of the starting block before settling into a jaunty shuffle. Over scraggly acoustic guitars we hear frontman Britt Daniel revelling in the band’s titular status; a faintly mariachi brass arrangement likes to cut in periodically. At the song’s close, brass and percussion whip up a ragged storm, before the whole thing implodes in on itself, which could be seen as a metaphor for the impermanence of the band’s popularity.

There are several references to Elvis Costello, circa-Get Happy!!, on the album. Most audibly, many of the songs bear a similar debt to the R&B and soul Costello was inspired by on his 1980 album. Additionally, a bonus disc supplied with some editions of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga was entitled Get Nice!—if this is a coincidence, I’ll be damned. On this supplement, the band spell out the inner workings of the songs, and the processes by which they arrive at the final versions of songs. So we get a space-rock demo of “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb”, only a fragment of which made it to the final cut, tacked on right at the end of the album version. Another song on the main disc which retains the stamp of a cut ‘n’ paste approach is the brash “Finer Feelings” (see above), which progresses in a familiar, canonical style (brittle guitars, intricate drums and percussion, the odd flourish of synth) until we get to where the bridge should be. Suddenly, the main arrangement peters out, to be replaced by an interpolation of Mikey Dread’s “Industrial Spy“. Distant samples of a cheering audience clash with it, creating a disorienting, dubby feel. And then, a few seconds later, the brittle guitar cuts back in and we are returned, safe and dry, to Spoonland. It’s this kind of abrupt yet comfortable experimentation that Spoon excel at weaving into what might otherwise be dubbed “dad rock”.

My Morning Jacket reached the apex of their rural rock on 2003′s It Still Moves. A few of the songs, like “Dancefloors” and “Easy Morning Rebel”, encourage innocent jiving, and conjure up the aforementioned country discos, in which minor fights break out, and belles are courted. But there are also more spacious and elegant songs, like the centrepiece “I Will Sing You Songs” and the yearning “Rollin’ Back” (see above), which allow frontman Jim James room to breathe. He still uses his distinctive howl on these songs, but more sparingly, as an embellishment, in collaboration with an elegant croon and gentle cooing, the likes of which would later be resurrected by Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes. James’s voice is cloaked in reverb—not the pretentious kind used by the lo-fi crowd, but a more hushed variety which lingers in the air. Behind him, the instrumentation is less raucous, with muted chords and fragile arpeggios. It’s the kind of music that could soundtrack first dances in the backwoods of Kentucky, or Tennessee, in village halls and country clubs untouched by Jack Johnson and Snow Patrol.

But now my formal education is at an end, the open road beckons, and the time has come to merge on the freeway of rock. In the concluding part of “Mahgeetah”, I shall discuss the new inheritors of the rawk throne: Kurt Vile, The War On Drugs, Yuck. Until next time…

Modest Mouse — Electric Ballroom (16/12/09)

The last time I saw Modest Mouse performing live, it was May 2007 – they were raising the roof of the Royal Albert Hall while Liverpool were busy losing in the Champions League final. Since then, a lot has changed. Johnny Marr has taken time out of the band to work with The Cribs; Liverpool are no longer even competing in the Champions League. And this time round, Modest Mouse have swapped the hallowed hall imbued with the spirit of Hendrix for the sardine-packed club atmosphere of Camden’s Electric Ballroom. Their numerous instruments and bandmembers shoehorned onto a stage barely bigger than my bedroom, the band look and sound like a troupe of consummate professionals, ostensibly touring in support of an EP, but in reality taking to the stage out of love for their devoted followers, and love of taking their rural groove out on the road.

Guilty Pleasure #1 – Muse

Much as I hate to admit it, I’m suspiciously drawn to some songs on the recent Muse album, The Resistance. I get that it’s totally counter-intuitive to philosophise about pretentious music all day and then go home to a loud, outré, sloganeering chunk of symphonic rock, complete with time-signature changes, wholly self-indulgent guitar solos, and violently operatic vocals. But I really am beginning to love bits of it, at least.

Slap bang in the middle of the album lies the seven-minute long, multi-part leviathan that is “Unnatural Selection”. It opens with Bellamy phoning in a drawl over the kind of church organ that hasn’t been acceptable since Origin of Symmetry. From this innocuous opening emerges a slithering beast of a riff that recalls “New Born”. This somewhat pummelling passage eventually morphs into a rather baroque chorus that invokes memories of Bach, albeit interwoven with some background chanting resembling a football-terrace chant. Eventually, the song collapses into a gloriously decadent waltz, replete with woozy guitar licks and a Hammond organ that has somehow escaped out of a 50s horror film. When that passage is fully spent (and my, Bellamy has a lot of nonspecific wailing to get through), the baroque riff breaks through once more for a final showdown, this time with ten times more multi-tracked vocal harmonies and half a dozen more guitar overdubs.

And you know what? It’s marvellous.

Sometimes, Muse play up their theatricality until it just sounds ridiculous, but when they get it right, every disparate element of their schtick can fall into place perfectly, with a careless swagger than ploughs through any idea you may have had of decency. The lyrics may be meaningless nonsense, but when Bellamy is busy waking up the residents of Lake Como with his pair of bellows, it’s hard not to admit that he sounds like he’s having a good time. And, more to the p0int, that you’d be a bit of a killjoy not to have a good time yourself.

I got trimm trabb, like all the flash boys have.

Continuing with the theme of unlikely favourite albums by bands, today I bring you the surprising admission that my favourite Blur album is… not Parklife, Modern Life Is Rubbish, or even the underrated eponymous Blur, but 1999′s moody and introspective 13. Recorded in a pre-millennial, post-Britpop world, 13 is an emotionally raw and musically exhilarating account of broken relationships and a dissatisfaction with the prevalent chart trends.

It is worth noting that, in his excellent account of the Britpop era, The Last Party, journalist John Harris locates the creative high watermark of the time as being “This Is A Low” – the totally un-music-hall-stomp closer to Parklife, which channelled a very English sense of nostalgia (a relationship, described through the metaphor of the shipping forecast, of all things) through a musical style that hovers halfway between The Kinks, Neil Young, and early Pink Floyd. With this in mind, it is perhaps not surprising that Blur would go on to make, in my opinion, their finest work when they intentionally severed all ties with the parodic soap opera that was Britpop, and ventured further into the songwriting toolbox that they undoubtedly possessed.

13 is undoubtedly a difficult listen, and yet it begins on a false promise, with the strangely uplifting gospel-backed “Tender”, which grows slowly and serenely from a wistful and lonely music box, through a processional guitar figure, into an achingly weepy epic. It is little wonder that, years later, Damon Albarn would get all emotional when performing the song in the absence of Graham Coxon. The various twists and turns the song takes in its backing instrumentation seem to depict an external fragility and precariousness of the band, which peels away to reveal a rock-solid core of a song underneath – the perfect image for the band on this album, as they weave in and out of ambient soundscapes, scratchy noise rock, meandering krautrock, under the who-knows-how-watchful eye of producer William Orbit.

Where Blur suggested a band in flux, throwing themselves into a genre (lo-fi American alternative) for the sake of being different, without fully believing in the cause, 13 shows the quartet completing their mastery of a range of different styles, each suffused with a typically dark, wry humour that would come to characterise the band far more than any one sonic palette.

The remainder of 13 is unwelcomingly beautiful, in an alien and inhospitable way – again, a true reflection of Albarn’s mental state, pitched as he was into a painful break-up and a getaway to Iceland. Songs like “Bugman”, “Swamp Song” and “B.L.U.R.E.M.I” are rightfully angry and confused and goofy; others, like “Coffee & TV” and “Mellow Song”, betray a love of affectionate melodies and storytelling.

Then, halfway through the album, things shift up a gear in the melancholy stakes, with the sonically dazzling “Battle” heralding a total immersion in sadness through samples and beats. “Trailer Park”, with its jarring, perplexing refrain of “I lost my baby to the Rolling Stones” (because to me, Blur were always much more similar in scope and ambition to the Beatles), takes unexpected diversions through sonar pings and industrial grind. “Caramel” emerges from a fog of organ and intricate guitar, and takes on a new life as a Can-style krautrock journey – feedback and an otherworldly palette of noises ricochet between the channels, held down by the insistent drumming of Dave Rowntree. In the last of these weird-out experiments, “Trimm Trabb” morphs from a mellow, house-piano meandering into a knuckle-grating freak-out, with Albarn’s affected vocals resembling a man gargling with treacle and acid.

The whole beast dissolves into an uneasy, fragmented chorus of seemingly unconnected vocals, which leads beautifully into the traditional Blur-faux-album-closer of “No Distance Left To Run”, which sounds like “This Is A Low”, driven to suicide, not on the “white cliffs of Dover”, but on some distant, alien shore, where the sky is crimson and the water is salty with tears. Whereas Parklife‘s closer was regimented into a 4/4 beat, here, the band favour a looser-limbed waltz, allowing greater space between the sounds. Albarn’s lyrical chops were never in any doubt: here, on 13, the band’s music is allowed to take on freer expressions and more wide-reaching influences, to dazzling effect. As “Optigan 1″‘s lonely carousel-ride music box shuffle winds away into oblivion, we are left with the faint echo of an album that perfectly captures the band’s sentiments: sorrow, emotional turmoil, and the desire to push the boundaries of pop music just as much as The Beatles did several decades previously.

When I first heard 13, I thought I was hearing Blur’s very own Kid A, but released to an uninterested world a year earlier. To this day, I still think that’s an image worth thinking about. Sprung upon the public at a time when we were more interested in the private lives of the Spice Girls than the immersive musical statement that is the album, 13 was destined to fade quickly from the charts and enter only in the conversations of critics. But to continue to ignore it would be to do it a great disservice, for in amidst the unfamiliar experimentation and bizarre sonic assaults, there is an absolute pot of gold full of richly rewarding, emotionally complex songs that anyone can enjoy.

In what way is it a better album than Parklife? Purely for the reason that here, Blur stopped writing about the world outside, and started telling us about themselves. Incredibly, far beyond the witty social commentary of their earlier works, hearing a man confess his bleak state of mind is wonderfully enriching, more so than hearing about a civil servant-cum-golfing fanatic.

White goddess, red goddess, black temptress of the sea

In Dan Weiss’s review of Interpol frontman Paul Bank’s forthcoming solo single, “The Fun That We Have”, the writer suggests that while “All the guys fall for the languid Turn On The Bright Lights … the girls I know tend to prefer the blockier Antics.” I may be the exception to the rule, in that I feel there’s a compelling case for suggesting that Antics is the superior album; indeed, that it may be one of those albums that I irrationally associate with ‘perfection’. Other such albums have included, over the years, Tortoise’s TNT, Amon Tobin’s Supermodified, and Massive Attack’s Mezzanine. To this list, I believe we can add Antics, because it succeeds in continuing the importance of mood and atmosphere that Interpol established on their debut, while attaching greater importance on the quality of the songwriting.

Turn On The Bright Lights is an alarmingly accomplished debut: from the very off, its echoey, jangling guitar signal a kind of reflective anxiety and unease that never lets up. Through the elegiac swooning of NYC and the slightly malevolent swagger of PDA, the intricate interplay of guitars provides the ideal counterpoint to the locked-in tautness of the rhythm section. The emotional centre of the album, Hands Away, with its beautiful swells of orchestral slush, is book-ended by two tightly-wound pop songs in Say Hello To Angels and Obstacle 2. The second half of the album finds the band a little in the wilderness, meandering through Stella… and Roland seemingly on autopilot, relying on atmospherics to succeed any boredom. Finally, in the closing brace of The New and Leif Erikson, the band secure their foothold once more with a pair of gorgeous, engaging epics that take unexpected turns and dives. The album is a delicious journey, and I’ve probably done little so far to dispel this suggestion. But, crucially, for me, it provides too few highlights. Taken as a whole, it’s an extremely successful portrait of a city, a culture, a social class. Taken apart, it only really contains one standout track – The New – and the overriding impression of a band reaching out far beyond their limits (which is undoubtedly a good thing) is more than anything else a product of the album’s interstitial outros. Collectively, it’s epic. Singularly, it’s just really good.

Antics, by contrast, announces itself in a considerably more upbeat fashion, with the organ-led swell of Next Exit, and proceeds, over the course of 42 minutes, to never put a foot wrong on the individual level of the song, and indeed the overall texture of the album. It’s both an album of singles, and a single body of an album. The structure and pacing of Turn On The Bright Lights was a loose-limbed thing; Antics follows a much more interesting pattern: the first side consists mainly of snappy, bright pop songs, broken only by the wandering beauty of Take You On A Cruise; the second side, beginning with Not Even Jail, is far more adventurous, with a series of far-reaching performances brought momentarily back to earth by the brief C’mere. As on its predecessor, Antics closes with a stunning couple, with the maximal arrangement of Length Of Love leading beautifully into A Time To Be So Small, which appears to depict a father-and-son argument taking place in a boat, from the point of view of a sea urchin, watching the dispute from the ocean beneath said boat. This is fascinating, far-out stuff, and it’s extraordinary how we never feel a sense of ridicule at being stretched so much by what superficially appears to be a four-piece straight-up post-punk revival.

The reason I think Antics is the better album, then, is because when it sticks to the pop formula, it gets better returns than before, and, when the band take off their dancing shoes and put on their thinking caps, the album’s exploratory epics put just as much experimentation and texture into each song as Turn On The Bright Lights achieved on the whole album. That’s not a criticism of Turn On The Bright Lights, more a satisfying reflection on just how accomplished Antics is. Of particular importance are Take You On A Cruise and Public Pervert. On the former, mournful, bleating pails of guitar and feedback lead masterfully into a an almost mantra-like passage of whispered chanting; on the latter, a simple arpeggiated bassline combines with lilting, tremolo guitar work to set up a raging beast of a song that captures perfectly the feeling of the lyrical refrain “So swoon baby, starry night…” It’s a rare moment of emotional unity on an album otherwise populated by unsettling and macabre imagery, as in the closer’s chorus of “cadaverous mobs”.

Antics is very much the kind of album that, when it recedes into silence at the end, one wants nothing more than to conjure it into being again. It manages to assert a continuous instrumental virtuosity that never ceases to surprise, which, combined with the best collection of lyrics Paul Banks has committed to tape, breaks surprising ground given the band’s sparse set-up. More so than its predecessor, it succeeds not only in the big picture, but also in the minutiæ, and for this, it remains one of the most pristinely unhindered albums I own. I wouldn’t change a single thing.

The money shot

Some songs are impressive throughout, while others ramp up the tension and build-up before unleashing a climactic killer moment. Sometimes, I yearn for a particular song just to hear that singular moment, when all the individual units of the track coalesce and lock in to reach an apex. Occasionally, I’ll even get this craving while listening to another song – in these instances, I am liable to forget what the desired song was by the time the previous one has finished, and I then spend several minutes scrolling through my library, in search of the elusive high.

About 3:20 into !!!’s Heart Of Hearts, the synced-up groove of whirring guitars, groaning keys and raw, ecstatic vocals lock into a repeated cry of “For a heart of, heart of, heart of, heart of hearts”, set to a snappy motorik beat and astonishingly pulsating bass. Suddenly, the whole contraption comes to a dramatic, pounding halt. A second later, all hell breaks loose, sonically, as the instruments bounce back in, but with ten times the soul and vigour. It’s a pretty spectacular event.

Elbow’s stunning Crawling With Idiot begins in a very low-key manner, with Guy Garvey’s breathy, sensual vocals set to a trickling piano chord sequence and a delicate guitar figure, alongside a subtle waltz time signature. Gradually, electronic burbles and coo-ing backing harmonies enter the fray, creating an oppressive, claustrophobic tone. Finally, at 2:45, a jarringly harsh guitar line drones in, gradually, bringing the song to a wonderfully chilling climax, as the sweetness of the vocals contrasts with triumphant organ and that unsettling guitar. And then the song ebbs away, gently, into bleak nothingness.

Far from being one of the characteristically long epics on the TNT album, Tortoise’s The Equator is an under-four-minute long diversion, travelling along languid guitar work and a fidgety, twitching beat. Halfway through, at about 2:00, a yearning, soaring guitar figure is cut across by a supernova of a whooshing sound, which leads into a gorgeous segment of the song, where the soothing synth wash in the background is complemented by finger-lickingly funky guitar strumming.

The Coral have a cunning habit of letting 60s-sounding psychedelic pop songs wander into spazzed-out freakouts, and Come Home is a prime example. A jazzy groove is strumming along fairly ordinarily; the vocalist is singing sweetly about magic and myths and sitting by the fire, when suddenly, a reverb-heavy guitar breakdown segues into a organ-led vamp. Gothic sounding vocals loom forebodingly; the jerky guitar piledrives in angrily; the drums get more chaotic; a searing lead synth whistles dissonantly. How very romantic.

4:00 into Blur’s epic album closer, Essex Dogs, after a passage of portentous reminiscence and messing around with a whammy pedal, emerges a torrent of freeform noise rock experimentation and some of Coxon’s finest guitar work. It’s a visceral, guttural thrill that can’t easily be topped.

Brash, overblown and amazing

I realise there’s a lot of Damon Albarn-loving on this blog, but I really do have to say this. Despite the fact that The Great Escape is a predominantly messy, archly pretentious, deeply worrying album, I have a strange addiction right now to its opening track, “Stereotypes”. Everything about it is surprisingly enjoyable – it’s a huge guilty pleasure, but strangely loveable too. From the first hit of chords, played simultaneously on naff organ/synth and ridiculous guitar, to the comedy false end halfway through, it’s utter genius, and it sets up the ridiculous nature of the album perfectly.

In spite of all that, I realise that on another level, it’s a really horrible song. Go figure.

Good weather for airstrikes!

I can think of pretty much my ideal album for the snowy weather that’s hitting Britain today. It comes from the land of glaciers and geysers, and it’s also the album I associate the most with the natural environment. Sigur Rós’ Ágætis byrjun, released in 1999, was the record that launched their international career, and quite rightly too, because it’s utterly stunning. Yesterday I wrote about music that’s good because it’s frightening – the first time I put this record on, I thought aliens were arriving on Earth. I was petrified of the other-ness of the band’s sound, based around the guttural, explosive power of Jón Þór Birgisson’s cello-bowed guitar, and all manner of strings, percussion and sonic trickery. Their later work resembles more the sound of glaciers, moving slowly through the Icelandic landscape, but in Ágætis byrjun, the extraterrestrial force is strong.

How does this relate to snow? I can’t really explain it using words. Just listen to the thing and, in particular, the album’s 10-minute long opener, “Svefn-g-englar”, which emerges from “Echoes”-style keyboard pings before opening out into a soaring, emotionally draining epic with guitars from the end of the universe. On record, it’s pretty satiating; when performed live, it’s like a new galaxy is being born.