Elk City – “Cherries in the Snow/Los Cruzados” (album tracks, 2007)

Advance download from their homepage plugging the just issued “New Believer” and from the Friendly Fire Elk City page in the case of Los Cruzados. Very pure power pop, pounding drums, strong but sweet vocals and clanging guitars…even tubular bells and “oh-la-la”s. 17 dots namechecks the New Pornographers and I’m inclined to agree. Fabulous guitar break and hook after pop hook -in fact, so many hooks, one almost forgets that the actual song gets kind of squeezed into a corner. “Los Cruzados” showcases Sean Eden (ex-Luna), the newest recruit and is a gorgeous Fleetwood Mac slink of a song, fronted by a singer who sounds like Debbie Harry always imagined she sounded.

Thom York – “The Eraser” 2006

This is a CD I’ve been obsessing over for months. At first, it seemed like a bunch of Radiohead demos, a stop-gap whilst they were off the road and out of the studio. The music seemed too sparse, too much like a the best bits from a full notepad pre-editing. The lyrics were a familiar gumbo of paranoia and mirror- fracture musings, maybe a little more nakedly so than usual. On the other hand, they were good demos. The loops were off-kilter Auterchre-isms but never jarring with the (very up-front vocals) and little runs of etude-like piano kept tinkling across these potentially sterile soundscapes like solemn mice.

I kept listening.

It’s the voice that starts to pull you in, alternately a choirboy singing a requiem and the greatest tenor in the world moaning about his horrid day at the office whilst making it sound like day 327 at Guatanamo Bay. “Harrowdown Hill” hooked me first, a skittering beat and a deeply reverbed vocal, atmospheric synths fading in and out of a fearsomely paranoid (sorry, that word just won’t keep out of anything written about Yorke, will it?) run out complete with snapped bass accents and a chant of “It was a slippery slippery slippery slope/I feel me slipping in and out of consciousness”. Then the rest of the record followed in short order. “Atoms for Peace” could almost be a ballad with a positively lushly melodic line for the vocal, undercut by insect whines and lyrics like “The wriggling, squiggling worm inside/Devours from the inside out”.

The dread never stops (“So how come it looks so beautiful?/How come the moon falls from the sky?”) but the ultimately, it’s the intrinsic gift of Yorke’s voice (never more starkly recorded than this) that carries us through.

It’s on XL so there’s probably a big website somewhere.

RTX – “Western Exterminator” 2007

“Western Exterminator” is a fun kind of record and functions rather like that icky American oil that glides straight through your gut without leaving an ounce of fat behind. But in a good way. All the noise and shallowness of the best 80’s LA metal and it’s, like, Jennifer Herrera so if you’re a die-hard trendster, it’s big hair rock that it’s OK to like! RTX is, of course, Royal Trux sans most the vowels and Neil Hegarty (off Hexxing and Howling in the other corner). Appropriate, really, since Herrera’s singing seldom bothers with anything as easy as intelligible syllables, being swathed for most of the record in layers of relentless, barbed-wire harmoniser and phasing. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Opening title-track “Western Xterminator” is a red herring, unwinding in a sinuous groove of acoustic guitar, Sanatana-like sustain and bongos. Well, maybe tabla, but this is the eighties we’re re-living here. “Balls to Pass” (whose?) is where things hit a particularly greasy groove that never lets up over the next forty minutes. This song could be almost-cool-for-ten-mintes Faster Pussycat (remember “Don’t Touch That Dial, That’s My Favourite Record”?). “Black Bananas” is Riot”or Sammy Hagar when he did his old stuff from Montrose. “Dude Love” is prime early Guns’n’Roses. (I should mention that her guitar player utterly ‘kicks ass’, as the saying goes). “Wo-Wo Din” takes on Anthrax and early grind. And so on. It’s a lightening trawl through the highlights of a genre probably best experienced at second hand in the hands of expert plagiarists, bearing in mind that this is plagiarism a la Kathy Acker. “Knightmare and Mane” is probably a big lighters-aloft ballad, though the vocals are so exceptionally tortured that it could be her shopping list.

You get the idea. Big, dumb, ferocious fun and a fixture on my iPod for weeks. It finishes with “Rat Will Kill”, a crushing four-square plod and framing a riff that the present shambles masquerading as the Crue would kill for, disapating into a lengthy cruise off into the sunset with more blissed-out Santana-isms. Marvellous.

Experience the world’s worst band website ever or the marginally better RTX myspace page. Or even buy Western Xterminatorat Amazon. Yes, I’ll get a kick-back. Oh, inverted world etc.

Low – “Drums and Guns” (2007)

This is turning into a bit of vintage year, and the new album by the National hasn’t even come out yet.

I wasn’t a fan of 2005’s “The Great Destroyer” – Dave Fridmann’s production killed it for me. There were some good songs but somehow, it didn’t give me the chills the way a good Low record used to.

Now this record doesn’t give me the chills either. This utterly fucking terrifies the wits out of me. Take “Breaker” (wrongly ascribed as “Cake” in my last entry). Kicking off with ‘Our bodies break/and the blood just spills and spills’ keened over deadpan handclaps and a spluttering beatbox with the percussion and vocals panned hard left and right respectively, broken up only by a messy squall of guitar. “Dragonfly” is set over a loop that mid-nineties Swans would have done credit to and the harmonies have a raw immediacy that feels like Sparhawk and Parker are singing straight into your ear.

Distracting, alienating electronics are scattered all over the record but always to good purpose. Sometimes, it feels like there’s just a wash of white noise in the background and those voices. When drums do appear – and you won’t really notice until ‘Sandinista’, it’s a low, martial brush right up against the insides of your speaker cones. Violence and images of mental fracture are everywhere – ‘The streams are bright, rosy red’ ‘All soldiers must/All little babies must die. Song titles include “Murderer” and “Violent Past”. The former passes on a gentle challenge to God (‘Lord/You may need a murderer/someone to do your dirty work’) over a rising roll of snare and bass pulse. It’s the closest thing here to ‘traditional’ Low but transformed, recast by all that’s gone before.

At the risk of sounding grandiloquent, it’s music fit for the times. More challenging, sparser, tougher – ice on a battlefield, wind through a broken window. The voice of a unassuming but frightening stranger telling you the truth.

Low’s homepage is at http://www.chairkickers.com/

Low – video for “Cake”

Well now. My faith is restored – even the backwards guitar works. And as for the video, it’s a privilege to witness what is surely the mother of all ongoing midlife crisis.