Music from the Crusades, Various
If a real medieval audience could hear this magical and sometimes spine-tinglingly beautiful collection of medieval ballads, I suspect they’d burst into roars of disbelieving laughter. It might sound like the real thing to us, but nobody really knows what the real thing sounded like and this album must be getting something badly wrong. But it can’t be getting everything wrong and I think the spirit of the Middle Ages is here, or several spirits: some songs are wistful and yearning, some boisterous and playful, some pious and icily perfect. As was the medieval way, the artists and musicians did their work gratiâ Dei, for God’s sake, not their own, and most of the songs are attributed to a simple “Anonymous”, though one, “Ja nus hons pris” (“No Man Who’s Gaoled”), is attributed to a certain imprisoned “Richard Coeur-de-lion”. The best performances are by a tenor called James Bowman, who has a voice that would have made him famous across Europe back then; nowadays, when “early music” has to compete with thousands of other forms of music, it’s a treasure known only to a discerning few, rather like the languages – Latin and medieval French – in which the songs are performed.
You have to know both the Vulgate and medieval history to appreciate titles like “Sede, Syon, in Pulvere”, but “Palästinalied”, or “Palestine-Song”, the only title in German, shows that the Middle Ages have never really gone away. Wars in the Middle East and the threat of militant Islam have been with us before, and though part of the joy of this album is the way it allows you to escape the modern world, there are some things you can’t escape and a dose of real medieval life would cure many modern discontents and dissatisfactions. Still, as the human race enters its final days, some of us continue to look back and regret what we’re going to lose and what we’ve already lost, and it’s a pleasing irony that a compact disc, product of the scientific hangman, can contain so much of both.
How ’Bout That, Louis Jordan
Louis Jordan reminds me of a cross between Little Richard and Chuck Berry: he’s got Little Richard’s high camp extraversion and Chuck Berry’s excellent tunes. Only those tunes – which are indeed said to have influenced Berry – aren’t quite rock’n’roll: Jordan was a star in the 1930s and ’40s, playing swing and jazz, and though he paved the way for rock, his day was over by the time it arrived and he’s little remembered today. That’s both a low-down dirty shame and an injustice, because his music isn’t just high octane fun but high quality too, and sounds very complex and skilful set against the sometimes crude rock that would follow it.
Not that it’s high art: Jordan was an entertainer for a mass market, and often did what his white audience expected of him: played the extravert Negro fool on songs like “G.I. Jive”, “The Green Grass Grows All Around”, and “Barnacle Bill the Sailor”. There are glimpses of darker emotions on this compilation, though: “You Run Your Mouth and I’ll Run My Business”, as you can guess from the title, isn’t good-natured like most of Jordan’s more famous songs, and there’s some bluesy lamenting over female perfidy on songs like “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town” and “It’s a Low Down Dirty Shame”.
But I would guess from his voice and style that not all of Jordan’s romantic troubles, and not all of his romantic interests, came from and were centered on women: as I said above, he is often not merely extravert but very camp too, and like Little Richard’s his voice can be high-pitched to the point of effeminacy. “Honeysuckle Rose”, his dithyramb of praise to an attractive woman, isn’t sexualized simply by the lyrics but by Jordan’s vocals too: it’s almost as though he’s singing to a woman and acting the part of that woman himself. He’s much more masculine on some other songs, but his hermaphroditism makes him even more Dionysian than the spontaneity and abandon of his music. If you haven’t heard him before, you ought to try to; if you have, I doubt you’ll need advising to hear him again.
Bombshell: The Hits and More, The Primitives
In all walks of life, from pop music to drug-dealing, some people achieve far more success than their talents deserve and some far less. Paul Court, the song-writer for the late-’eighties-and-a-bit-of-the-’nineties indie group The Primitives, is one of the second group and I’m not sure his largely unrewarded talents don’t apply to drug-dealing too. Like a drug, music is designed to alter your consciousness and some of the songs on this compilation album are perfect little pills of pop, filling your brain with a two- or three-minute rush of jingly-jangly melodic pleasure. And maybe jungly pleasure too: The Primitives were a primitive band in the garage-and-bumblegum-pop tradition, particularly when they played live. Female vox, occasional male backing vocals, guitar, bass and drums, and that was it. There was no pretension about them, but they achieved the kind of a-lot-in-a-little simplicity that only a highly intelligent and highly skilful songwriter can give a band.
“Crash”, their most famous song, both opens and closes the album, first as album version, then as demo, and some of the other songs come into two versions too, whether demo or acoustic. I enjoy the chance to hear the different interpretations, but this does reflect the brevity of their career, which stretched from about 1987 to about 1992. Unfortunately, a misspelt “Way Behing Me (Acoustic)” and the appearance of “Secrets (Demo)” as the already-heard album track rather than the demo also reflect the sloppiness of the German company that put the compilation out. Court deserved much better, and further proof of that is in the cover version that’s thrown in too, the Rolling Stones’ “As Tears Go By”. It’s given the light treatment of the early Primitives and isn’t anywhere near as good as Court’s own compositions, I’d say. Perhaps that’s why he chose it, and perhaps the darker sound of the songs off their final album, “Glamour”, reflects his frustration at not achieving the success that seemed to await him in the beginning. But though bands with attractive female singers can get attention more easily, they find it harder to get taken seriously. The Primitives never did drop any bombshells in the end, and I’d suspect that the title of this compilation is a self-ironizing acknowledgment of that, as well as a reference to Tracey’s gleaming blonde locks.
Aavaante Gaarde, The Next Best of Post-Elektronika Vol 23
A dazzling, if ultimately doomed, experiment in post-stochastic pre-audition from these short-lived Italo-Teutonic pioneers in 1973. Throwing down a sonic gauntlet of mind-blistering complexity, ambition and density, Aavaante Gaarde attempted to capture their own sound as it would be twenty-three years down the line. On side one of this über-rare LP they wrap their trademark densely-nodulated washes and undercoats of electronically-treated post-static in a hammering carapace of raw organic reverb, tossing in occasional rough-hewn fragments of “found” silence and sonique capricieux. Side two, however, was a single shimmering test-tone designed for infinite play when the needle hit one of its circular grooves — they asked fans, who received an honorary certificate of membership in Aavaante Gaarde with the record, to purchase a dedicated record-player and literally keep it plugged’n’playing on side two for the next twenty-three years, ensuring that even the core band’s demise, already anticipated by many, would not prevent the record literally fulfilling its manifesto of capturing in 1996 the best of what Aavante Gaarde was to would have been playing (sic) over the previous two-and-a-bit decades. Unfortunately, sales of this post-visionary platter were low and powercuts across much of the band’s core constituency in Lower Saxony meant not a single dedicated ’player could boast optimally uninterrupted continuity in terms of operation by the end of the mid-to late ’70s.
People have a love-hate relationship with Morrissey. That is, some people love him and some people hate him. Passionately. Which is rather odd for such a passionless artist. He rarely deals in strong emotions; most of the time it’s inchoate ones: ennui, yearning, regret.
And when his emotions are strong, they’re never active. Heaven forfend. “Margaret on the Guillotine”, a hymn of hate to the late great British prime minister, only asks when she will die: it doesn’t demand that she must. No, Morrissey’s philosophy is summed up in these lines from “Nowhere Fast”:
And when I’m lying in my bed,And they’re probably the acid test of your fitness to worship at the shrine of Mozza. If you laugh when you hear them, you’ll probably be able to appreciate the rest of his oeuvre. The truth is that Morrissey doesn’t always take himself or the world very seriously, and you shouldn’t either:
I think about life
And I think about death,
And neither one particularly appeals to me.
We hate it when our friends become successful,And though many would say that as a solo artist he has never re-scaled the melodic and lyrical heights he reached in The Smiths, I disagree. The Smiths are probably the best British band of the last twenty years, but I think their music has rather more to do with Morrissey’s gloomy reputation than has generally been recognized. On his own, Morrissey has usually managed to stick to the straight’n’narrow of rockabilly, which provides a much livelier backing to his acidic lyrics (and reminds you that his background – Irish Catholic – is the same as those earlier greats Lennon and McCartney).
And when they’re northern that makes it even worse,
Just look at that face,
It’s so old,
And such a video!
“We hate it when our friends become successful”
And I think he has even managed to write melodies to match anything he produced during his days in The Smiths. He also produced some unpleasant musical messes, sugared with violins and the like, some of which have unfortunately found their way on to “Best of” compilations. Ignore them, listen to gems like “Pregnant for the Last Time” or “The More You Ignore Me (The Closer I Get)”, and you may just begin to see the point of an artist who is certainly unique and who may be half-way to genius. I just find it odd that someone so determinedly and defiantly English should live in Los Angeles. He says he enjoys the light. Not what you’d expect, but what you’d expect isn’t necessarily what you get from Morrissey.
Feline, Feline
Grog, the bassist, vocalist and chief song-writer on this album, may sound like a corpse-painted, bullet-belted, beer-bellied, throat-noduled Norwegian black-metaller, but in fact she’s rock chick in excelsis. Or she was till she cut the straight black hair she wears on the cover of the album, where her Gallic-y elegance made me read the name of the band first as Fé-leen. The cover comes from the video for “Just As You Are”, but shots of her on the back of the album and the CD itself, and in the CD booklet, show her with a page-boy cut. She’s still got the red lipstick and the pale, long-hours-in-rock-clubs-after-midnight skin, though. The musical — and lyrical — talent isn’t essential for a rock chick but she’s got that too.
On this album she serves up twelve Goth-metal-with-keyboards cocktails, working from the Cure’s recipe-book and adding absinthe and pepper for extra darkness and bite. But cocktail four, “Shocks and Surprises”, only half-describes the music: although it’s usually very competent, there are no shocks. However, one of the surprises comes when, during “Mother”, Grog announces in her slightly flat, estuarized voice (which doesn’t sound as good as she looks, alas) that “I am my own mother”, and that whiff of psychosis is never very far away on the rest of the album: you feel as though you wouldn’t want to upset Grog while she’s chopping onions. I also like, for different reasons, the song “Bad Habit”, in which she briefly eschews singing for a bit of what is technically known as creaky voice. Feline broke up two years after this album came out in 1997, but Grog’s still going strong, complete with re-grown hair and Feline’s guitarist Drew Richards, in the anagrammatic-looking Die So Fluid.
Tristesse demo, Funeral
I got this at the beginning of the 1990s by sending away a blank tape to an address in Norway, and the young band who were just starting out then never did climb to much greater things. But “obscure doom band” isn’t a contradiction in terms, and “unjustly obscure doom band” is even less of one. This early demo – I think it’s for their later album Tristesse – is very dark, very slow, very heavy, and very good. The acoustic guitar that begins each of the three long songs doesn’t sound clichéd or contrived as it sometimes can: it contrasts the dirge-like, tolling guitar and drums that follow like delicate silver script on the door of an obsidian tomb. Funeral are said to have given their name to funeral doom, the slowest and saddest form of doom metal, and Tristesse is a perfect example of funereal music. I re-read H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark” while listening to it again tonight, and though At the Mountains of Madness, set amid the icy wastes of Antarctica, might have been better, it evokes suitably dark and Lovecraftian emotions and images, and it is literally music to die for: one of the band would later kill himself.
Pop Said, The Darling Buds
The first time I heard the Darling Buds — it was “Shame on You” on an old indie compilation — I assumed they were an all-female English band with two lead singers. Wrong on all three counts: they were a Welsh four-piece and only their singer was female. They just used a lot of double-tracking, that’s all. Or rather, that’s not all, because they used a lot of good music too, with Andrea Lewis sprinkling the sugar of her melodies and the ginger of her sometimes misandric lyrics over the crisp-baked pastry of Chris Farr’s backing tracks. Both of them seem to have been at the cooking sherry on side two, which is mostly unmemorable apart from the aforementioned “Shame on You”, but beachcombers on the shores of the Sea of Pop should be very happy to pick this piece of ’80s indie whenever it drifts ashore from the wreck that followed their later Erotica album. It came about the same time as Madonna’s album of the same name, and I know who I would rather have seen go down shortly thereafter. Figuratively — and nautically — speaking.
Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, The Sundays
The more I listen to classical music, the cruder most rock and pop music seems and the more of my collection I’ve given away. But a few bands and artists keep their old charm: The Housemartins, that man Morrissey, and The Primitives, for example. The mutually shared common features are melody, intelligence, and effeteness, and The Sundays have all three in spades. When I first heard their beautiful single “Here’s Where the Story Ends” I thought the female vocalist was French, and though she isn’t – she’s an English EngLit graduate called Harriet Walker – the oddness of her phrasing adds to the charm and etherealness of The Sundays’ songs. I can’t help thinking that there’s some genetic influence on this kind of music: it doesn’t have much testosterone in it, and I can’t imagine it appealing much to people with dark skin. In fact, it’s interesting to compare the female singers of The Sundays and the similar but poppier Primitives with the Asian female singer of the slightly later and much rockier Echobelly. Harriet of The Sundays and Tracey of The Primitives have voices, Sonya of Echobelly also has a mouth: on songs like “I Can’t Imagine the World Without Me” she makes sure you’re aware of her tongue, teeth, and lips. In other words, Harriet and Tracy are singing their lyrics; Sonya’s doing something rather earthier with hers. Echobelly are one of the bands I’ve given away, but I’m still listening to The Sundays and The Primitives. I prefer their vocals nowadays, and I’ve always preferred David Gavurin’s and Paul Court’s music, which is on the foothills, at least, of the peaks occupied by white European males like Mozart and Beethoven.
Hungry for Stink, L7
A mixed album in a number of ways: good songs like “Stuck Here Again”, bad songs like “Talk Box”; punk songs like “The Bomb” (“Tick! tick! tick!”), heavy metal songs like “Freak Magnet”; confessionals, rants, sneers, and one damn-fine instrumental, “Riding with a Movie Star”, that is my highlight of the album. But the music is mixed in itself: the guitars are sometimes down-tuned so far that they sound as though they’re playing in Australia, and the heaviness is deepened by the lightness of the female vocals laid over them. The vocals are mixed too: at least three members of the band seem to take a turn, helping keep each other’s voices fresh by contrast. They’ve got a sense of humor too and a gift for arresting imagery (sample: “I’m saving my piss in a jar”), so it’s worth deciphering the scrawly hand-written lyric-sheet. Good cover too: someone wearing a papier-mâché animal-head is aiming a blow in a car with what looks like an oddly shaped knife against a backdrop of blurred blue ocean. L7 didn’t break any new musical ground, but they sure could rock, produced two or three excellent songs per album, and remain the heaviest all-female band I’ve ever heard.
Static and Silence, The Sundays
Wetter than the Pacific ocean, sicklier than an avalanche of icing-sugar, this album makes Radiohead sound like Cannibal Corpse working off severe crack psychosis. David Gavurin has allowed the easy-listening tendencies already audible on the otherwise excellent Reading, Writing and Arithmetic to run amok and thrown his own talent and Harriet Wheeler’s voice after them. Orchestral instruments should not be allowed near pop music except under very strict supervision and if you want to know why, take a listen to some of the songs here. The opening “Summertime” isn't one of them, but that makes matters worse, because the song raises high hopes that another RWA — or something even better — is on its way. Instead, the album then crash-dives into a bottomless ocean of syrup and doesn’t get near periscope-depth again. My disappointment was compounded by the excellence of the title and cover photo and the intelligence and wistfulness of some of the lyrics. But you can’t do wist with French horns and tinkly piano.
Never Another Sunset, Rose of Avalanche
Serendipity is the art of making happy discoveries by accident, but I can’t really say that everything about my purchase of this second-hand tape at a street-market was accidental. I liked the all-silver-on-black cover, the title, and the name of the band, and when I got the tape home I liked the music too. It’s a kind of medium-paced rockified Goth with nasal mid-Atlantic vocals, and though that may not sound much, or even sound very bad, there’s something special about Rose of Avalanche. There’s a grandeur to their music and they manage to convey a sense of melancholy, loss, and even silence through loud, swirling, even energetic melodies. I like that paradox, and though not all the songs on this album are memorable, the ones that are, like “Never Another Sunset” and “The Devil’s Embrace”, will stay with the right kind of person. I hate to use the term “cult band”, but that’s apparently what Rose of Avalanche were and are. It’s funny to think another Yorkshire band called Pitch Shifter were recording their first album at the same time in almost the same place, but although Pitch Shifter were more original, more austere and much, much heavier, I think I’ll be listening to Rose of Avalanche much longer.
Industrial, Pitchshifter
Like ancient Gaul, a beetle’s life is divided into three parts. First the egg, tiny, inoffensive, and easy to overlook; second the grub, pallid, soft, and ugly; third the adult beetle, maybe black, gleaming, coldly and cruelly beautiful.
Pitchshifter’s career has been like that too. Only they seem to be running it backwards. Their original incarnation was the adult beetle: black, gleaming, coldly and cruelly beautiful. Now they’re the grub: pallid, soft, and ugly. Maybe in the future they’ll turn into the egg: tiny, inoffensive, and easy to overlook.
But at the time of this album, they were the adult beetle. Very definitely the adult beetle. Their music was intense, powerful, and full of rage and aggression. They used a drum-machine in those days, and over its steam-hammer rhythms they laid down brutally simple riffs and gruff, bass vocals that had been tortured through an electronic device called a pitch-shifter (hence the name of the band). Inspired less by human music and more by mechanical noise, they produced this, one of the most aggressive and intense albums of the 1990s. One more album along the same lines followed, Submit, then they metamorphosed into a grub. Shame.
Depeche Mode, Playing the Angel
If every song here were as good as the first three — “A Pain that I’m Used to”, “John the Revelator” and “Suffer Well” — this might have been the best Depeche Mode album ever. But every song isn’t as good as the first three, so it isn’t. The quality drops precipitously with the fourth song, rises even more precipitously with the fifth, the musically and lyrically beautiful “Precious”, then drops again and stays pretty much in the depths for the rest of the album. The good songs will turn up on a future “Best of” compilation and because DM have used analog synthesizers they’ll fit right in with songs from what probably is their best album, Violator from 1990. David Gahan is still occasionally a ponderous singer, but his flattish voice has long defined DM and he’s not only on some of his best form here, he also contributes one of those four very good songs, “Suffer Well”, adding some melodic and lyrical variety to the album with the three written by Martin Gore.
Grand Magus, Monument
These Swedish doom-stoners have got the heaviness and the groove, they just don’t quite have the songs yet. Or the album covers. Odin knows what the mirror-imaged furry thing on the cover of Monument represents and perhaps Odin wouldn’t be pleased by the mountainously heavy riffing in the track named after him, “Chooser of the Slain (Valfader)”. They didn’t have electric guitars in his day, after all. But I’m pleased by it, and I’m also pleased by the possibly even heavier riffing in the final track, “He Who Seeks... Shall Find”. These two are the stand-outs but there are occasional treats elsewhere too. Like their fellow-countrymen (and -woman) Runemagick, Grand Magus are a three-piece and their music generally shows it: it’s uncomplicatedly heavy. Unlike Runemagick, however, they sometimes go and spoil things with twiddly guitar solos, possibly a pernicious influence from the same band, Iron Maiden, who seem to have influenced the lead-singer and guitarist JB’s vocals. But he’s a much better singer and lyricist than Bruce Dickinson and if Grand Magus ever manage to conjure music to match their heaviness, they are going to leave the execrable Maiden even further in their dust. (Brucie might have known that the Old German-y font they used for the song-titles and lyrics has two lower-case s’s, though: one’s used at the beginning and in the middle of words, the other at the end. The album-designer used only the former.)
Avril Lavigne, Let Go
The French-Canadian Avril Lavigne was, appropriately enough, a gamine on steroids when this album was released in 2002. Or rather, not on them (what’s the opposite of a steroid?). Her “sk8er-grrrl” act was manufactured, of course, but that shouldn’t have detracted from her undeniable talent or the musical and lyrical quality of some of the songs on this album. Unfortunately, it did. I still think that this is about as good as pop music can get and though I have my doubts that she wrote as much of it as her label may try to pretend, she had to sing it herself and did so very well, with an intelligence and fluency you wouldn’t expect from someone still in her teens. But girls mature much faster than boys and Lavigne is, in the words of track 11, “Nobody’s Fool”. That song was never going to enjoy a long life after the charts like “Sk8er Boi” and “Complicated”, but less well-known songs like “Mobile” and “Anything but Ordinary” deserved to. Much better-looking than Madonna, with much better songs, and probably not much less intelligent, I hope Lavigne can go somewhere near as far. She’s certainly already captured a time and teen-fashion the way Madge did.
Deaf to Suggestion, Skink
Not everything comes to him who waits, but patience is often rewarded. For years now I’ve been listening off and on to a tape of odds’n’ends recorded off the John Peel show. One of the odds’n’ends is an urgently driving slab of riff-propelled mutant minimalist aural-assault rock (or something like that) by a band called Skink. At the end the Blessèd Peel muses on its high quality and concludes: “I’d like to hear more of Skink.” So did I at the time and so have I ever since, but it wasn’t that good and I never did anything about it or caught anything else Peel managed to play by them. Years then rolled by and lo, a mere couple of days after I listened to my odds’n’ends tape once again, a full CD by Skink fell into my nicotine-stained and eczema-infested hands.
As I might have expected, it’s not that good, and they’re too Americanized in everything from vocals to samples, but it’s not that bad either and it’s good to have that Peel-praised single — “Violence” — in more context, though it is a bonus track and not part of the album proper. Skink were a guitar-bass-vocals three-piece with a drum-machine from (or based in) Nottingham and the CD was released on a record label run by Alex Newport out of Fudge Tunnel, who also produced the album. FT were a much better band and didn’t take themselves anywhere near as seriously as Skink seem to have done, and though Skink bear a passing resemblance to Pitch Shifter at times (particularly when you know they’ve got a drum-machine), PS were a much better band too. But then minimalist bands leave themselves little room for manoeuvre and if they don’t get their formula right, they won’t get their albums right either. FT and PS did get their formulas right, Skink didn’t quite, but “Violence” remains a cracking little single.
I was once quite comfortable with my attitude to Slayer. I hated them and I hated their music. Number two, hating their music, came first, after I listened to “Reign in Blood”, their infamously heavy early album, and discovered that it had all the heaviness of a buzz-saw. That is, none. It was loud, high-pitched, and fast, but it didn’t seem at all heavy.
Number one, hating them as well as their music, came along after I tuned in to the radio to hear them live at a festival. The sun was shining outside, but as they were announced it was covered by cloud as quickly as I’ve ever seen it covered, which seemed a portent of something, though I wasn’t sure what. Then Tom Araya, their lead singer, gloated about what was going on in Yugoslavia before they launched into “War Ensemble”. So I switched off the radio and decided Slayer weren’t for me. They really weren’t pleasant people and fortunately their music wasn’t worth listening to.
Alas, those comfortable days are over. I heard them live on the radio playing “Angel of Death”, their infamous song about Josef Mengele off “Reign in Blood” and damn, this time round I liked it. It wasn’t just heavy, it conveyed genuine menace in a way that’s rare in a theatrical and overblown genre. Then I heard “South of Heaven”, the title track off this album, and I was half-converted. I still think Slayer the band are obnoxious people but I like some of their songs.
And three of them are on this album: “South of Heaven”, “Mandatory Suicide”, and “Read between the Lies”. The other seven are loud, fast, and unmemorable, but these three add heaviness to the mix and stop being unmemorable. The lyrics are surprisingly literate too and as an added bonus the picture of the band on the back of the CD enables me to indulge in a little biological determinism. Three of the band, Tom Araya, Kerry King, and Jeff Hanneman, look like thugs, with bullet heads and broad faces. One, Dave Lombardo, doesn’t: his features look positively delicate next to the other three’s.
And which members of Slayer 1988 are still in Slayer 2001? The three thugs, Araya, King, and Hanneman. It seems that genuinely heavy, aggressive, nasty music requires a certain dedication. Lombardo, who doesn’t seem to have received an overdose of male hormones, didn’t have it; Araya, King, and Hanneman, who do seem to have received that, do.
And while a reasonable dose of male hormones is believed to be good for spatial and combinatorial abilities, overdoses of them aren’t. Compare masculine soccer, which is a complex and skilful game, with hyper-masculine rugby, which isn’t. And compare masculine Lombardo, whose drumming is very skilful and complex, with hypermasculine Araya, King, and Hanneman, whose guitars and bass aren’t. Slayer’s music is crude, but it’s heavy and when it’s good, it’s very, very evil.
Accidentally Making Enemies / Emotionally Driven Disturbulence, Obiat
If Obiat albums were football matches, 2004’s Emotionally Driven Disturbulence would be an emphatic away win: Originality 2 Heaviness 6. 2002’s Accidentally Making Enemies would be the less emphatic home win earlier in the season: Heaviness 3 Originality 1, with a home goal disallowed for use of wah-wah guitar. In short, Obiat play doomy stoner rock like they mean it, but not like they intend to re-invent it. Striker Laz, one of two (or is it three?) Hungarians in a band based in Reading, has a voice that other reviews I’ve seen on the web call soulful, so it’s not original of me to call it that either, but then this is Obiat and that’s what his voice is. Midfield Atilla/Marlene’s and Raf’s bass’n’guitar groove heavily enough on EDD to get pictures swinging, and heavily enough on AME to at least get windows rattling. Defender Adam’s drums are, well, drums. Drummers are like full-backs and goalkeepers: most memorable for the things they get wrong, not for the things they get right. Adam gets it right, so isn’t memorable. Live, I’d imagine Obiat are occupying a promotion spot for the premiership; on CD, they’re in with a very good chance of the playoffs. Visit their website for further details.
Electric Wizard, Dopethrone
The Cult seem to have one good song, “She Sells Sanctuary”, with the rest running the gamut from dire to dross by way of dreck. From what I’ve heard so far, Electric Wizard are The Cult of stoner rock/doom metal. I like their name, I like their image, I like their album covers, but what I don’t like is their music — except for one song, “Electric Wizard”, off one of their early albums. The riff rocks like the balls on a bull-mammoth (the CD actually starts jumping on one of my CD-players because the bass is so intense, even at low volume), the lyrics are suitably spacy and drugged-out for a band devoted to both stripped-down prog-ish/psychedelic rock and marijuana — “One day we were a-sitting and a-wondering where’s it at/When down came a dragon with a wizard on its back” — and it stays interesting for 9’49”, at least on the first few listens. The trouble is that, to my ears, it’s far better than any of the songs on this later album, though it isn’t as heavy as some of them or as slow or as musically interesting. Maybe they sound good too in a bonged-up haze, but I’m not going to risk psychosis to find out and the band must have been particularly proud of this song and thought it sounded good under the same circumstances or they wouldn’t have given it the title they did. Their lead singer, Jus Oborn, is said to have undergone surgery for a “severe form of tinnitus”, presumably related to the fact that they play live so loud. If so, I just wish I was already one of the many who think the sacrifice was worth it.
Envenom, Runemagick
A good test of authentic doom metal is that it sounds wrong played during daylight. Runemagick sound wrong played with any light at all and why they aren’t much better known merits an appendix to Ludwig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis. They’re catchier than the Black Death, heavier than the collapse of the World Trade Center, and not much faster than a rolling glacier, and if you want a dose of death-flavored doom, Nikolas Rudolfsson (guitar), Emma Karlsson (bass), and Daniel Moilanen (drums) are the dealers to see. But if you want pointless and obtrusive guitar solos, you’ll have to go elsewhere, because Runemagick don’t deal in them. An eerie and distinctive wailing is as close as they get, and they don’t get there very often. Maybe it’s something about being a three-piece. They don’t have the personnel to be self-indulgent and just get on with the job in hand: tolling like the bells of doom.
Vocals are kept to a minimum too: for the second track, “Envenom (Laterna Magica)”, Rudolfsson wrote fourteen minutes and fifty seconds of music and thirty-nine words of lyrics. The music is excellent, the lyrics are bad — “Breath of fire/Eyes so dire/Doom admire” — but then heavy metal has never been known for good lyrics and you can’t understand them without the lyric sheet anyway. That’s part of why I wish they — all three members contribute vocals — sang in Swedish and just used English song-titles, if that. English is the language of Coca-cola commercials and speeches by Tony Blair: it has no mystery or darkness in it. Yes, native speakers of Swedish will think the same of Swedish, because familiarity breeds contempt, but most of their potential audience aren’t native speakers of Swedish or any language closely related to it. “Jag tycker om läskedryck” (or something like that) is how you say “I like lemonade” in Swedish, for example, but it still looks and sounds suitably dark and mysterious to outsiders. Doom metal should ideally be sung in Latin, but undiluted Germanic languages come a close second and English isn’t an undiluted Germanic language any more. Swedish still is and it’s a shame that a Swedish band use lyrics that might have come from anywhere.
Julian and Sandy: Fab Sketches from Round the Horne / The Bona World of Julian and Sandy: More Sketches from Round the Horne
“Hello, I’m Julian and this is my friend Sandy.”It makes me laugh just to write it down, and anyone familiar with Julian and Sandy should laugh just to read it. If you’re not familiar with them and don’t understand what Sandy says, you’ve missed out on a lot: Julian and Sandy, played by Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick, are one of the great double acts of British comedy, appearing in every episode of the ’sixties radio comedy Round the Horne. Kenneth Horne, the bald, genial host of the show, would hear of some new enterprise run by the ineffectual duo – almost always called “Bona” something – and pop round to enquire about employing their services. Lots of camp dialog and double entendre would follow, often using the gay slang known as polari or palare: for example, How bona to vada your dolly old eek! means “How good to see your attractive old face!”“Oh, ’ello, Mr ’Orne! How bona to vada your dolly old eek!”
Polari was a mixture of Italian, Romany, Yiddish, and rhyming or back-slang, and though it wasn’t a truly independent language, because it used English grammar and syntax, it had an extensive vocabulary and could work very well as a code between gay men or the showfolk who originally developed it – many of whom were gay, of course. In Round the Horne fewer than a dozen words of polari are used over and over again, which means that lallies, or “legs”, and riah, or “hair”, are always entering the conversation, but the sketches were written for a general audience and catch-phrases are often a very important part of comedy.
Not that the catch-phrases were there from the beginning. One of the attractions of these two collections is that you can hear how the characters and the scripts evolved. On their early appearances, which began properly with “Rentachap” on the 28th March 1965, Julian and Sandy were much more Cockney and broadly acted than they became later, as they went up in the world and Williams and Paddick refined their characterizations until the unexpected death of Kenneth Horne in 1968. Barry Took and Marty Feldman, the writers of the series, were refining their scripts too and learning to exploit the full comic possibilities of polari. Not that everything they wrote would be broadcast either. The second of these double-CD collections, The Bona World of Julian and Sandy, includes the sketch called “Bona Palare” in which Julian and Sandy are running a language school. But you’ll only find this dialog in the script published in The Bona Book of Julian and Sandy (1976):
JULIAN: Well, we concentrate on the modern languages – French, Italian, Spanish – for the holiday-maker.You have to understand Cockney rhyming slang to understand that, and it’s appropriate that the same joke turns up in the film Carry On Up the Khyber (1968), because Kenneth Williams was a mainstay of that series too. I recognize Williams’ enormous comic talent but he was an extreme show-off and I prefer Hugh Paddick’s more understated acting and dialog in these sketches. In the “Bona Bookshops” sketch, Sandy lists some of what he and Julian have published, including “Poe’s Raven”. “Is he?” Julian replies, then pauses fractionally. “I never listen to gossip, ducky.”
SANDY: Though we do the more exotic tongues if you wish them.
HORNE: Such as?
JULIAN: Cambodian, Tibetan, Australian...
SANDY: And we can give you a smattering of Afghan. Not much – but enough to get you through the Khyber.
It’s easier to miss some of Julian’s filthier lines, and some of them, like some of Sandy’s, are very filthy indeed, because a lot did get past the BBC censor. Julian and Sandy are practising homosexuals, and the sketches were first broadcast before homosexuality was legalized in the UK. It’s said that they helped change first public opinion and then the law, because they helped show that homosexuals weren’t threatening perverts. By laughing at them the public learned not to fear them and even came to love them. I’d agree, but though I love Julian and Sandy too, I don’t think homosexuality is a laughing matter. It isn’t natural and it exposes men to disease and early death, as well as promoting promiscuity and hedonism in wider society. That was well true before AIDS too: AIDS only made things worse (and gay propaganda and dishonesty killed more people than the Catholic church’s teaching ever did). It’s possible both to acknowledge that and to hail Williams and Paddick as very talented comedians performing excellent scripts.
The Holy Bible, Manic Street Preachers
I understood why Richey wanted to kill himself much better after listening to this: if your mind were as full of the emotions and information oozing and bleeding out of the lyrics on this album, I think you would too. As black and heavy as a landslide of coal, this is music to self-mutilate by, and when the coal-dust has settled you’ll see an abyss of hatred for self and humanity that peers back into you as you peer into it. Richey chose, soon afterwards, to jump into the abyss, and though a balanced person wouldn’t follow him just by listening to this I would start to worry about someone who listened to it a lot. Anyone who thought popular music – and the Manics are very popular – couldn’t deal seriously with themes like anorexia nervosa, child prostitution, and the holocaust should just listen. You’ll find it hard not to, because The Holy Bible has all the gruesome fascination, and some of the rhythms and metallic squalling, of a car-crash in slow-mo.
Into Darkness / Eternal Frost, Winter
Heavy metal is a crude and sometimes cretinous art-form, but because of that you can sometimes see things there that are harder to see in subtler art-forms. A biologist called D’Arcy Thompson once wrote a book called On Growth and Form about the mathematics that governs the growth and form of plants and animals. Mammalian skulls, for example, although they may sometimes look very different, are related to each other by very simple rules of transformation: you can turn a saber-tooth tiger’s skull into a mammoth’s, and vice versa, by altering a few fundamental variables. And that is, in effect, what evolution did as these two beasts evolved from the common mammalian ancestor. There are common ancestors in culture too: rock’n’roll underlies the many sub-genres of heavy metal, and the two extremes – the saber-tooth tiger and the mammoth – of heavy metal are probably black metal and doom metal. Both, in their different ways, are about speed: rock’n’roll is still there, but in black metal it’s been speeded up a lot and in doom metal it’s been slowed down a lot. The effects of these transformations in different directions are startling: despite their common origins in rock’n’roll, black metal and doom metal, like saber-tooth tigers and mammoths, are utterly different beasts.
I can’t recommend any black metal bands in particular to illustrate the point, because black metal doesn’t appeal to me and I know very little about it. I can definitely recommend a doom metal band, however: this one, the American band Winter, who took the death metal of Celtic Frost circa To Mega Therion and altered the variable of speed to profound effect. Appropriately enough, Winter are now extinct, but no-one interested in extreme metal should neglect this split CD. Black metal, as say Marduk’s Panzerdivision Marduk might suggest, is like being crushed by a tank at top speed; doom metal as purveyed by Winter is like being crushed by a glacier at top speed. In other words, it’s very heavy, it’s very cold, and it’s very, very slow – music to watch the earth freeze to the core by. Unlike black metal or death metal the lyrics are ecological and political rather than Satanic or medical, but the vocals still owe a lot to death metal and are probably weaker for it: they’re the quickest way Winter’s music could have been improved. Bass, drums, and guitar don’t need much improvement, but the experimental noise of the hidden final track doesn’t fit with them or the vocals. You shouldn’t listen to this album in summer or by day or with the heating on and you probably won’t be able to listen to it repeatedly, but if you like, or want to see if you like, doom metal you should definitely listen to it.
I once knew this guy who didn’t approve of smut or porn. He wasn’t too bright either, if you can believe that. The funny thing was that he did approve of Led Zeppelin. You know, the same Led Zeppelin as used lyrics like “I wanna be your back-door man” and “Squeeze me babe, till the juice runs down my leg”.
As I said, he wasn’t too bright. Kind of like Led Zeppelin’s music, really. I don’t find it surprising that they did so well over in America, because they seem to me more like an American band than a British one. There’s not much subtlety or wit in their music, and that’s why I do find it surprising that Robert Plant and John-Paul Jones are pretty intelligent and well-sussed people. But Jimmy Page was probably a couple of notes short of an arpeggio even before all the drugs, and it’s high time Bonzo was exhumed for scientific tests – I’m sure his bones have got a hell of a lot to teach palaeontologists about the origins of the human race.
So does that mean I don’t like Led Zep? I suppose it does, really. There may be something special about them, but I’m not sure whether I’ve ever felt it that strongly myself. Except once, maybe. In “Heartbreaker”. I think I tuned into the radio during the guitar solo in the middle, so I don’t think I even knew what band I was listening to. But the solo sounded good – very cold and clear – so I listened on. Then everything went quiet for a moment... and then the music started up again and the guitar came back in. It may not sound like much, but that guitar was the heaviest thing I’d heard in my life – it sounded like a tank starting up. A tank starting up across a country field on an icy, slightly misty winter’s day. A complete image came with that snatch of music, and I can still forgive Led Zeppelin just about anything for the sake of it. Yes, even the cover on Presence.
But what I can’t do is listen to many of their songs and retain much interest for much more than a minute or two. “Whole Lotta Love” may have some of the power of a charging rhinoceros, but it has all the grace and beauty of one too, unfortunately. “Stairway to Heaven” sinks under the weight of so many clichés that it almost rises from the ashes of its dead self a wiser but sadder song. Almost. But not quite. Because Jimmy Page may be a guitar-god, but he’s never struck me as even vaguely praeternatural, let alone supernatural. And Robert Plant just isn’t a good singer, unlike, oddly enough, the singer in the Led Zeppelin-copyists Kingdom Come.
Which is one of the other puzzles that puzzle me about a puzzling band. Queen were said to be heavily influenced by them, and I like Queen much better than I like Led Zeppelin. And Led Zeppelin are supposed to be one of the big two heavy-metal bands to come out of Birmingham, but they don’t seem that big or clever compared to Black Sabbath, who cram more ideas and inventiveness into single songs than Led Zeppelin manage on entire sides. The much less well-known Birmingham band Diamond Head seem to me much worthier to sit beside Black Sabbath, as do Judas Priest (another Birmingham band), and Napalm Death (yet another Birmingham band) seem much more interesting and at least risible, when they are risible, in worthy causes. When Led Zeppelin are risible, which is often, they’re risible in the cause of their own egos.
As I said, they seem much more like an American band to me than a British one, but for that long-ago moment in “Heartbreaker” and for the inspiration they gave Douglas Adams for Disaster Area, the plutonium rock band from the Gagrakacka Mind Zones in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy*, I suppose I can’t begrudge them a secure niche in the history of popular music. But a pedestal? No.
Blood on the Tracks: A Suicide Squad of Underground Scribes Assail the Ramparts of Rock, ed. Nicholas Hilbert; Now He’s Sixty-Four: Headpress Salutes a Seminal Hero of Rock/Pop, ed. Derek Colgate; Backstage Boogie: A History of Groupie Culture from Hep-Cats to Zep-Rats and Beyond, ed. Harry Gilligan; Deaf Certificate: Forty Years of Worship at the Shrine of Led Zeppelin, ed. Hansi Draper and Udo Queenan; Puke, Pills and P*ssy: On the Road with America’s Wildest Punk-Rock Performers, ed. Olga Trebor
There are disappointingly — or fortunately? — few publishers of whom it is possible to say of them that their productions release a genuine frisson of authentically visceral/pheromonic menace... and for whose volumes/tomes I’ve literally gone without food to purchase them. Feral House of San Francisco are one of this select groupage. Creation Books of London (and also San Francisco) are another. And Critical Vision of Greater Manchester are a third. With these literary W.M.D.s, Critical Vision stake their claim to be considered arguably the key player in this synapse-fusing triumvirate. If you think you’ve seen a bear-slide state-side, think again: you’ll pick up these books with veridical — or vi-ridical — apprehension, interrogating yourself uneasily: “With this much subterranean talent packed between two covers, is it safe to open the f*ckers?”
Well, it is... and it extravaviously isn’t. “Clichéry” and “soporificism” just aren’t in the vocabulary/lexicon of the suicide squad of underground scribes assemblaged here. Each is a scarred veteran of trangressive mind-combat, using words as weapons to leave your consciousness lying bruised, dazed, and bleeding in the gutter of post-imagination. Having counted them up, literally dozens of well-thumbed texts/manifestos by the first two aforementioned publishers (Feral House and Creation Books) jostle for pecking-order on my shelves. Each has been a necessary document of personal mind-expansion and transgressive engagement. But with more material like this, my as-equally-as-well thumbed Critical Vision collection will be starting to nudge/edge clearly into premier place in my hierarchy of heresy. As Nietzsche says: In der Schwärzung des Himmels wurde nur ein Wort gesprochen, und das ist... Methuselem. “In heaven’s darkness only one word is spoken, and that is... Methuselah.” No other books in my experience have taken these words more conscientiously to heart, and likely no other books ever will...
McCartney: The Biography, Chet Flippo
I’ve not actually read this, never having been much interested in its subject, but I’ll have a look sometime at what it says about his upbringing. In the meantime, the back cover was diverting. Paul McCartney, according to Q magazine, is a “fiercely competitive control addict whose mateyness masks a shrewd business sense.” Laugh? I nearly swallowed my false teeth.
Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, AC/DC
There are two periods in the history of AC/DC: BB and AB. Rather like BC and AD, I much prefer the earlier period, which is Before Brian.
Before Brian Johnson, that is. He’s the Geordie singer who replaced Bon Scott and turned AC/DC from a raucous, good-humored rock band into crude and often witless heavy metal. Fortunately DDDDC is BB, so it’s worth listening to both when you’re an adolescent and when you’re not.
In fact, it has a strong claim to being the best of the BB albums, with Bon Scott’s charisma, wit, and lyrical skill combining best with Angus Young’s ear for a good, loud, unsophisticated tune. AC/DC are rhythm rather than melody, and nobody should go to them looking for subtlety, though they might find more of it than they were expecting at times. Bon Scott’s lyrics are often intelligent as well as funny, and he has the same kind of skill at capturing everyday life as Chuck Berry, whose musical inspiration, in suitably mutated and misbegotten form, is definitely present on the BB albums.
Though you didn’t find Chuck Berry singing about the things Bon Scott sings about. Or indulging in the kind of asides that Scott indulges in. Whatever the truth, these sound so spontaneous and unrehearsed that they don’t go stale. Listen out for the jokes at the end – and the beginning – of “Ain’t No Fun Waitin’ Round to be a Millionaire”, for example, and revel in Young’s riffing and Scott’s word-play in between:
I got patches,In cold print the full charm doesn’t quite come across, but listen to Scott delivering it in his inimitable lived-in voice and see if I’m not right. I suspect that Scott was a far more complex man than his lyrics and choice of topics were immediately meant to suggest, but his intelligence is still obvious and intelligence is what’s needed to succeed in most walks of life. AC/CD, in the BB period, were the best at what they did, and although what they did wasn’t all-important, I’m certainly glad that they did it – and continue to do it every time someone puts one of their old records on.
On the patches,
On my old blue jeans –
Well, they used to be blue,
But then they used to be new,
And they used to be clean.
© 2005-6 Simon Whitechapel