mp3: Eating Noddemix
website: Young Marble Giants

Love, that’s what I feel for this band. Not “they were cool”. Not “you should listen to them”. Not even “I hope you like them”.

Within the space of a single album, they managed to carve out a sound that was completely original, completely them; I love their ingenuity, their unerring beauty, the simplicity and unassuming depth, their unworldliness. They sounded and still sound like no-one else. The sparseness of their arrangements, Alison Statton’s gorgeous, lonely, reverbing voice; someone once told me they loved the “symmetry” of Philip Moxham’s basslines, and normally I’d set fire to someone for saying that sort of thing, but in this case, he’s absolutely right. The balance and simplicity of their music is utterly bewitching. It feels somehow natural and calm, but running right through it is a kind of under-the-skin sadness that just won’t leave you alone. One thing that’s made me happy is that with all the re-releases this album has had, they’ve never changed the original cover, which, along with the title, Colossal Youth, has a kind of grandiosity and classical feel, like it’s always been there, waiting for you to discover it, and you just found it growing in the ground.

But don’t get me wrong, this is no Starbucks organic sigh-into-your-coffee feelingsy music to put next to the horrors of Jack Johnson or Nick Drake, who, like old wood, has been reclaimed and turned into something polished and shiny to balance your cup on; in this music’s quiet sadness, there’s an inner core of steel - a revelling defiance in their unpolished but perfectly formed songs. There’s not a second of indulgence here, no solos, no wasted drumbeats, no trilling for decoration. It’s, as I say, just perfect in its simplicity. I can’t put it better than that, sorry. No point screeching on when they didn’t. Go and buy it, or steal it, if you do that instead.

If you decide to go legal, you’ll have to buy it on 2 July, obviously, as it’s not out yet.

Buy.

mp3: Wickerman

I’m a big fan of Pulp; always have been. There’s something about Jarvis Cocker’s intelligence and need to tell a story that I’ve always admired, his easy wit and the fact he can descend into self parody sometimes absolutely shamelessly just makes me like him even more. Anyone who can sing in a magician’s whisper, “Nouga-a-a-at! And…caramel!” and still move me more than almost anyone else I know is worth knowing.

I’ve written before, ages ago, about why David’s Last Summer from His N Hers is one of my favourite songs, it reduces me to bits if I think about it too much, how they capture so beautifully a change in your outlook, your life, your existence, when you first take steps away from what you’ve always known and have to face up to responsibility, becoming an adult, even though you haven’t really got a clue what any of that means - the utter joy at the fact of existence, with that itch of sadness, a tinge of guilt, even, at how it’s just really a series of endings, one after the other. And Jarvis does it all the time. That line in Dishes from This Is Hardcore, banal in itself as read but so warmly delivered, you feel he’s singing only to you: “And I know I’ll never touch the stars, cos stars belong up in heaven, and the earth is where we are…” and finding total peace in that admission, rather than more boringly seeing it as being a moment of defeat, is perfect. It’s one of those lines that somehow manages to mine down under my skin right into me, I find myself mouthing it when I hear the song, it pricks through the, as Liz Phair called it when she was still good, on Nashville, “slick divide”. But Nashville’s a whole other story.

So I stumbled across Wickerman from We Love Life. I like that album, in the main - there’s some dull stuff on it, but it’s got Weeds, Sunrise and Trees on it, all lovely, and it’s more muted and contented, a perfectly good ending to a great group. I would hear the first line of Wickerman when it came on at random on my mp3 player - “Just behind the station…before you reach the traffic island…” and it never really engaged me before. But on the bus in from the airport a month ago, I bothered to leave it and let it carry on - “..a river runs, through a concrete channel. I took you there once, I think it was after the Leadmill. The water was dirty and smelled of industrialisation… Little mesters coughing their lungs up, and globules the colour of tomato ketchup. But it flows. Yeah, it flows.” And the images keep pouring in, as he takes you underneath the city, following the dirty river; it reminds me of how I feel about my home town.

Walking around my old home town, the quiet of it, the fact you could be in all sorts of places there all alone; you forget that sometimes, when you live in a big city. You can be somewhere and be alone. Just you, a stinking and barely moving brook, a motorway and railings. Or going back to childhood haunts and seeing how they compare when in miniature, almost, because you changed, you grew up, you saw things you could compare it to, while it did nothing but just stay there. Whether it’s the sugar-soil-sulphur hills we used to go and play on, with our own versions of dramas involving bigger boys, adults behaving strangely in places they thought we couldn’t see them, falling down hills, climbing, bikes, fishing; the parks and overgrown places you weren’t sure you were allowed on, but went anyway, or the safer confines of front gardens and front rooms. I went back to the park area where we used to play about a year ago and as expected, it was smaller, but lay pretty much as it had when I was a kid. The hills were still there but even calling them hills was pushing it; the brook next to the canal was a lot nearer than I remembered, the route out of the park that [info]mrstevie and I would take when going on insane mile-after-mile walks was a lot longer than I remembered. There were dedicated benches each with a bunch of plastic-wrapped flowers sitting as though thrown on, in the middle of a clearing. And…single men everywhere. The place I used to play’s become a cruising ground, it seems. A quite paltry one, but one nonetheless. I walked up to the Nine Arches, texting [info]megazoid, and watched people walking along the railway tracks from the ground, one waved at me, I waved back. I stood under the arches and read the graffiti about all the people whose names ended in Z and were 110% Fit.

In the other end of the town, you walk out of a small wood adjoining the lake straight into a cornfield, then within seconds you’re under the motorway, someone seemingly, from the subject matter, in the correctional facility down the road, has written a pornographic story in large marker pen on the railing top next to another stinking and stagnant stretch of water which somehow has graffiti on the other side, despite there being no means of getting over there. And then you’re out the other side and up a hill, watching golfers move between the trees in the distance, hearing the motorway, completely impassable, and ending your journey before it’s started, right above you, and I distinctly remember hoping no-one else was coming under that low, dark, smelly bridge; the country’s most boring lake and busiest motorway separated by a dirty story that must have taken hours to produce in the dark. Seediness, greenery and solitude always seem to go together in small towns.

I don’t have memories of romance in my home town like Jarvis does, of the “child’s toy horse ride that played such a ridiculously tragic tune”; opportunities were always more imminent and even brutal than romantic. There wasn’t really room for it in Newton-le-Willows, and I didn’t have the courage to embrace romance there, and courage would certainly have been what you needed. But there’s something about this song, the yet-again joyous sadness and the wonder at things you have literally lived with for so long, your whole life, that they seem just like a low hum in the background. I love how certain songs suddenly turn up that volume on that hum and reveal it to be so much more rich and tuneful and varied and surprising; it just pulls me back to it all the time.

Buy

mp3: Nothing To Be Done
no longer updated website: The Pastels

This always reminds me of someone at university, who will remain nameless, but was terribly self-conscious and cool-conscious the whole time I knew him, always making sure everyone knew what he was listening to, why he was listening to it and why it was important we knew why he was listening to it. So imagine my shock when finally getting round to listening to something he recommended that wasn’t Pearl Jam (The Daily Mail had caught on by this point - Grunge kids don’t have meals! They eat pizza!) or the Loveless-era drear of My Bloody Valentine, and it actually being good; I wasn’t sure what to do.

I only know a little about The Pastels, which is actually illegal in Glasgow and can result in being barred from Sleazy’s, but I think I can get away with it to an international audience.

What a sweet song. In a way, it’s almost too sweet, sickly mellow, as someone else I didn’t like from university, used to say. No, I didn’t like anyone much at university. 1993 was a funny year; we stayed in a flat with no radiators (which meant I walked about with a hot water bottle round my neck, like some elderly Flavor Flav), watched the crowds come and go to the Rangers games down the road, and had a direct view of the linedancers leaving the Grand Ol’ Opry across the road every Friday. My flatmate’s bedroom skylight looked directly onto a huge stone angel on the roof of the restaurant building opposite, which would cause all sorts of perturbation for the first few months when it was in the corner of your eye. This song whisks me back there immediately: so what you say, we go and get a beer?

Buy.

mp3: Half Day Closing

(slightly pointless) website: http://www.portishead.co.uk

As she grimly walked away
“I’m leaving you,” she said.
And I had nothing new to say
Like the 2nd album by Portishead - Armando Iannucci

A tad harsh, but a fair opinion when you listen to some of it. The first album, of course, was derided for being on every vaguely cool TV show and the background to every dinner party of the mid-90s, which is a bit unfair, considering the level of ingenuity of the music. It was the soundtrack to my -30C sojourns into blizzards in St Petersburg, Russia, where it hurt to go shopping. In fact, Sour Times reminds me of that very painful experience every time I hear it. I have a lot of time and affection for the first album. It was marvellous.

The second one? Hmm. Time has been kinder than I thought, though. Seems they had quite a hard time with it, as you would after selling 14 billion copies of your first one, not really expecting it to sell more than maybe a few hundred, and seemed to think total suicide was the best method, rather than more mellow tram noises and Billie Holliday impressions, so started their album with Cowboys which is all half-tone key changes and dissonance. Try shagging to that, Anna off This Life, they seemed to sneer. This particular one, though, Half Day Closing, which my Zen landed on today, however, is pretty horrible, to be honest. I always press skip, because it makes me feel a bit sick. In fact, if I was given to writing about music in terms of what this song sounds like, it sounds almost exactly like a Led Zeppelin frenzy at half or maybe even quarter speed. You don’t believe me? Speed it up. It really does. Who knew? No-one said that when they were looking for Satanic messages, did they? All that backwards stuff may reveal the devil telling you to put heroin in your ear but slowing it to half speed reveals the sound of Bristol, 1997.

And so they played in New York with an orchestra, then disappeared again. Armando had a point, but I think if you’re going to lay into anyone from that era for being surplus to requirements, it should be bloody Morcheeba, with their car advert cod-blues toss, not this lot - at least Portishead were trying. But that’s for another post.

Buy.

mp3: In Shock
website: http://www.throwingmusic.com/

On the way back from a horribly rainy lunchtime this afternoon, I walked into the lift and ‘In Shock’ came on my mp3 player.

And it cast me back to the old days, when I would frequent Throwing Music Online, Kristin Hersh’s internet home, where around the time of new releases, something akin to the most intense parts of The Crucible would occur in text form - individual posters would reel backwards clutching their eyes, screaming in a shrill manner, while glaring at the ceiling, “I saw The Devil put 4 songs from Sky Motel on Soulseek!” or “Jesus and his saints will cast out those who fileshare Works in Progress 2, you are stealing the sacred communion from the mouths of her babes!” and so on, but these days, we’re all a bit more insouciant about such things. I mean, as a fan, I would buy Kristin’s new album if it consisted of a recording of her accidentally dropping things on the floor and apologising, to be honest, but it’s always nice to have a preview.

This waiting around just seems so…’90s. But to stay on the safe side, here’s an already broadcast radio version of the song, ‘In Shock’. I don’t want to be burned as an mp3 witch by the marginalised hordes. If I’m pretending I haven’t got the whole album, I’d say “it bodes well for the album”. But as I do already have it, you may as well know that I think the album is great, and a lovely surprise in places.

And so there I was in the lift, rained on, cold. ‘In Shock’ cheered me right up. I like the way the piano and guitar have a duel, geographically, somewhere about 10cm between my ears, which tickled my little brain. It made me jiggle about like some sort of dislodged egg for 15 seconds until someone came into the lift and I turned it down. I might sometimes get excited, but I’m also polite. I like listening to loud music, but I don’t want anyone having to witness me listening to loud music. Goes to show, there are limits, you know.

Pre-Order (if in the US and get free mp3s)

mp3: Momus - Tape Recorder Man

Pretty much Nathan Barley in 20 years’ time, Momus has the unerring capacity to amuse and irritate in equal measures, sometimes within the same line of a song, never mind an album. Having moved relatively recently into the world of writing about, to quote Armando Iannucci, “things with curves in”, ie design, he seems less and less interested in the musical side of things, which is a blessing in one way, but I still have a soft spot for him. When he’s good, he’s very good indeed. He is however a master of sabotaging the slickness inherent in pop, adding bitter or gauche ingredients that make him less palatable and usually putting off those who won’t make that final leap towards appreciating his music.

And this song typifies that music very well - opinionated, witty, catchy, but just as you’re sucked in, out come the irritating vocals that force you to decide whether to stay in your seat or not. It’s a pretty funny and barbed little song, and while his last few albums haven’t registered with me in the same way, I’m happy to wait in the meantime while he chucks out a few more articles about minimalist Stuttgart body-based voice collective MediaSlurp or Laotian turmeric chairs.

mp3: Pulp - Mile End

Pulp’s B-sides were often more interesting than the albums as they gave Jarvis just that little bit more slack lyrically to really have a go at someone, whether it’s himself, dirty old perv teachers or just southerners in general. Take the fantastic The Professional, for example, after Jarvis appeared to hit some sort of post-mega-success meltdown; whereas This Is Hardcore showed the more palatable effects of his angst, The Professional was just embittered, unhappy, self-loathing at its best: “I’m only trying to give you what you’ve come to expect/Just another song about single mothers and sex/You’ve heard it before, it’s nothing special - you can do it the hard way, or you can be…a professional.”

Or PTA, on the Mis-shapes single: “I’ve never had a woman before/I was too scared to touch the girls in the Poly/And I don’t know what it’s like to be young/Cos all my life I’ve been knocking on forty”.

So it is with Mile End, one of my favourite Pulp songs. It’s so bloody jaunty for a song about the absolute dregs of humanity. When I visit our office in London, the Underground stop is on the Central Line, and as we whizz rapidly westwards, I see Mile End just sitting there towards the easterly side of the route and I wonder if it really is anything like how he sings: “The lonely kids come out at night, they kick a ball, and have a fight, and maybe shoot somebody if they lose at pool… The pearly king from the Isle of Dogs feels up children in the bogs, down by the playing fields, someone sets a car on fire…” The best part is all the northern jibes at the end at the expense of bloody southerners - “Leave it ahhht!” “Lend us a foiaahhhver!” It’s a mess alright, it’s…Mile……….End. And the noise after he sings the title at the end of the chorus sounds like something from The Thing. Aptly.

mp3: Madder Rose - Swim

Summer 1992.

1. I’m back from university after my first year. I’m all excited as I’ve just bought Spiritualised’s Lazer Guided Melodies and I listen to it all the time. It makes me feel like I’m like, different yeah? My aunt, normally a missionary nun in Venezuala, has set down those admirable duties briefly to come to my horrible no-horse town which sits equidistantly between Liverpool and Manchester in order to visit her relatives. On her way downstairs, she walks past my bedroom. “Is that U2?” she says, genuinely curious. “Um, no”, I reply, trying to shield the disgust - she’s my favourite aunt.

2. A few days later. I’m sitting again in my bedroom, it’s really hot outside, I’ve got all the windows and door open and I’m listening to Henry’s Dream by Nick Cave. My exciting signed copy. Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry starts. My aunt walks past again. “Hmm… Is THAT U2?” she asks, hopefully. “Um, no”, I say, a little bit more sympathetically than last time, wanting to let her down gently. “It’s Nick Cave”. “Well, I like it. It’s kind of like what the band plays in our village - very dramatic!” “Ah, right.” Off she goes.

3. Undetermined time after this, maybe a day or even a few hours later. I’ve put on Madder Rose’s album Bring It Down. I only like Swim and Beautiful John - the rest seems kind of boring, but I like “The way they stared, you thought that they adored you” as a line from Beautiful John, and the lovely glissando guitar of Swim makes me happy. I’m just moving it back to Swim and yes, my aunt comes by again. She stops at the doorway. “OK, is THIS U2?” she says, smiling. “Yeah, it is”, I reply. She beams at me, says, “See, I’m not so out of touch!” and carries on down the stairs.

Buy.

mp3: Throwing Muses - Bright Yellow Gun

Again! You’d be forgiven this is a bit of a cop-out, all this constant Muses applause, but when the random factor lights its light on one of your favourite songs, you shouldn’t ignore it.

I’ve always been unsure about the album (University) this single’s taken from; Bright Yellow Gun is just majestically great, but this was the first of any of Throwing Muses’ albums where I found I actually - whisper it - didn’t like some of the songs. The song University reminds me of Ozzy Osbourne/Lita Ford ballad Close My Eyes Forever, which I am convinced to this day has the same guitar sound and also a striking similarity between Ozzy’s seemingly fifty-tracked vocals and the cooing babyish echo of the screeching baby Kristin rather indulgently features.

If you can’t love Bright Yellow Gun for it’s great lyrics (You eat one apple a week to survive…), then admire it for it’s ace A-minor to G to A-major to G verses and D-minor to C coda, and the fact it doesn’t actually have a chorus. It’s a classic of simple songwriting, which is why, despite dodgy production here and there which is no better exemplified by the samey University, Kristin Hersh still reigns strongly over my musical life.

Buy.

mp3: Stephen Fry - Saturday Night Fry ep 1

Well, I thought I’d try a bit of comedy. No, not me, that would be horrendous; I looked for the first piece of comedy that turned up on my Zen this evening and resolved to put it on here, and lucky you, it’s the first episode of Saturday Night Fry.

Despite (sometimes perfectly just) accusations that are often levelled against Fry, including an almost insurmountable smugness, becoming almost exactly the type of Establishment figure he used to lampoon, being a voiceover slag of the worst water, oh, and let’s not forget, Peter’s Friends, one of the worst and self-satisfied films ever made, I can’t help it. I think he’s great. I always have, even when he lets me down by pretending he’s stupid, like he did in those Twinings tea ads.

And so it’s a pleasure to give away something still relatively rare - a not-very-well-known 6-part radio comedy he made for Radio 4 in 1988, Saturday Night Fry, with his Cambridge Footlights pals such as Emma Thompson and Hugh Laurie, and other types like Alison Steadman and Jim Broadbent. It’s quite simply one of the best things he ever did… I’m not going to review it for you as every time I try I just end up sounding like some middle-aged idiot from the Radio Times, so you just have to give it a go yourself. But remember - it’s Stephen Fry. It’s brilliant.

In about 1993, he was doing a book signing in Waterstones in Glasgow. As we were students, some friends and I didn’t have enough spare cash for a book each so we bought one and asked him to sign it five times, which he duly did. Now, one guy in particular, Ben, was a massive fan of Fry’s and was really quite in awe of him when we all gathered round the table. “To To To To To” wrote Fry in the book’s front plate. “Dermot Donald Ben Colin Colin” (there were two Colins). “Lots Lots Lots Lots Lots” “Of of of of of” “Love Love Love Love Love” “Stephen Fry”, at the bottom. Ben pipes up in a kind of joky, bit nervous voice,
“You’ll need a new pen after that!”

and thinks to himself, “Oh, that was a bit of a pathetic thing to say.”

Stephen Fry, the man he idolises, looks up and says, “Sorry, what was that? I didn’t catch what you said.”

Ben then has to repeat the lame-o line to him. He said it was the longest sentence he’s ever had to say. After Ben’s let the words slip out of his face once more, Stephen laughs almost imperceptibly. Just politely, almost. Ben’s reminded of this whenever he sees Fry’s face. I like that.

If you like it, get it here at a slightly lower sound quality.

mp3: Michelle Shocked - The Ballad of Patch-Eye and Meg

Michelle Shocked represents to me the sheer work you had to put in sometimes, pre-pre-internet, to locate music you knew you liked but had never seen; sure, you read a review of it, or saw a poster, but trying to actually get your hands on some records was amazingly frustrating. Years ago, in 1988, in fact, I searched for the album The Texas Campfire Tapes, from which The Ballad of Patch-Eye and Meg is taken, in vain. After many months of searching, nigh on a year, I think, in fact, I eventually I found it at Probe in Liverpool, yelped in delight and shelled out my 9.99 (for the vinyl), took it home all excited, and it didn’t leave my turntable for weeks.

I loved its sound - recorded verbatim, it seemed, with trucks passing and crickets chirping. The songs were sweet and witty, her voice teetering into Minnie Mouse territory occasionally, but that just, to me, made it all the more attractive. I was 15 and this was the first time I’d heard music recorded in this way; instead of beautifully produced, arranged and polished, this was personal, intimate, seemingly just for my ears only - she even messed up endings occasionally (”..you hear girls trying to play barre chords!“), like a real person. The Ballad of Patch-Eye and Meg’s a perfect example of her great storytelling.

Buy - and I’ve just noticed from this site that she’s released a 2CD set of TCT with 23 extra tracks. God, life’s so much easier these days.

mp3: Brian Eno - Bonebomb

I find it hard and rare to be shocked these days by music, that is, in the real, physical sense - to have it swipe a bearclaw at my sensibilities, leave me dazed, even, by its power, even close to tears. This closing track of Eno’s last album, Another Day On Earth, manages to do just that to me every time I hear it, and on repeated plays, I’ve found the feeling doesn’t diminish.

The idea for the song was taken from a newspaper article Eno read where an Israeli doctor discussed the fact that one of the major causes of death and further injury in suicide bombings is human shrapnel fragments from the bones of the bomber themselves.

This is grim stuff, undoubtedly, but he doesn’t parade around the showground with flags a-flying telling us all what we know already; instead, manipulating words recited impassively by poet Aylie Cooke, he brings out a ghostly, broken story with such humanity that ‘Bonebomb’ just won’t go away after you hear it, and puts the rest of what’s already a really good album in the shade - probably why he wisely stuck it on at the end.

mp3: Helium - Vibrations

I don’t often get to listen to Mary Timony these days, but I still love her. Wee Mary and her underwear sewing hands…

Before she went solo, she was of course fronting Helium - a band whose back catalogue was a struggle to complete around five or six years. I did manage to pick up the album The Magic City (which this song is from) second hand around 2000 or so, but almost everything else was out of print for some time and it took a lot of patience, online shopping and help from travelling friends to complete my Helium collection.

Timony’s work is pretty much instantly recognisable. It’s the tunings, arpeggios and her rather sullen voice, and for some reason I’ve always been hugely attached to it. I came to Helium too late unfortunately, so never got to see them live, but at least I got to see Mary supporting Sleater-Kinney in Glasgow once. Let’s not go into the time we tried to drive to Amsterdam for her, got lost and missed the concert…

Oh, and she’s now an official member of the Kill Rock Stars family.

mp3: Kenickie - Nightlife

Ahh, 1997… Kenickie were so much fun while they lasted, it just obviously couldn’t go on that long, really. Nightlife is the just about the peak of Kenickie brilliance, a song that simultaneously makes me want to go out right now and confront the horror of (say) Glasgow on a Saturday night head on and have a superb time, and also reminds me of the sheer incomparable violent drunken nightmare terror misery of a Saturday night in (say) Glasgow and makes me want to stay inside the house forever wishing the sun would come up.

You can’t doubt the proud insight of lines like “Can’t work with heavy coats/They’re not revealing/Have to see each other’s clothes/So we’re all freezing”. Thing is, you can’t sit and dissect Nightlife any more than you would a 3am kebab, so I just listen and be glad I’m safe and warm and domestic tonight, not hazily wondering why the bouncers are  looking at me funny, and the cloakroom’s shut. And that’s not my coat ticket anyway. I’m sure the number had a 9 in it. And it was blue. I feel sick.

Buy.

mp3: Cocteau Twins - Carolyn’s Fingers

It seems my selections are always all a bit “popular”. I’m not as good at the seeking out new music thing as Steven, and for the first time, this random thing has bitten me on the arse - on the strength of this first one, it seems I’ve got a heap of music on my mp3 player I don’t even like.

I think I must have put this Cocteau Twins stuff on because I bought the damn best-of CD and thought I should at least try and like them. I’m a fully paid-up 80s 4AD fan, keen on the big hitters like Pixies, Throwing Muses, Breeders, even stomaching stuff like The Wolfgang Press and (pre-Motown) His Name Is Alive on occasion, but my God, how long is it going to take before I even remotely like the Cocteau Twins? I just can’t get over the idea they sound like someone rhythmically hitting a goose. With a baby.

So it’s fortunate that it was at least one of their more immediately poppy, tuneful ones that the Zen alighted upon instead of the more nails-down-a-blackboard
goblin-in-a-tunnel stuff. It’s quite a sweet song, Liz trills, the guitars don’t screech too much and you come away happy and quite relieved, and look, the title’s even in English so you can actually remember what it’s called.

Buy.