I’ve been looking forward to “23″ a lot but was a little worried about the involvement of Alan Moulder, responsible for some of the most generic productions of his day, said day being largely the late eighties/early nineties – shoegazer central, in other words. My first listen seemed to confirm my worst fears. Everything that marked Blonde Redhead off as a something different from the mainstream of the hazy dream-pop crowd seemed to have been buffed away. Title track “23” wafted in on a hazy of generically skittering beats, gleaming washes of guitar and Kazu’s high, just-this-much-short-of-a-squeak vocals. What followed seemed nice – the odd track stood out and I liked the electronic touches and flashes of white noise, the male vocals seemed much less irritating than on previous records – but it all seemed a little bit too easy.
Then I listened to it on shuffle by accident and it suddenly seemed like a different record.
The problem, I think, isn’t so much the production as the sequencing – there’s a clutch of perfectly marvelous pop songs, with a lot more dissonance and jagged edges than one might at first suspect but the record as whole is mixed and ordered so as to seemingly efface itself as much as possible. But start off with “Spring and Summer Fall” which marries a joyous pop hook with a classic Sonic Youth pulsebeat and some nifty harmonies and the record, despite the gauzy mix, kicks off in a whole new way. “Publishers” programmed beats and duet-style interactions between Kazu and Amadeo are lushly entrancing. “Heroine” is less of a progression from “Misery is a Butterfly”, sounding more like polite chamber pop than anything else. “Dr Strangelove” features Kazu at her most Gallic and affecting, though the arrangement seems to feature a disturbing amount of cowbells. “The Dress”, with it’s zither arpeggios and heavy breathing takes what could be an overly precious moment into three minutes of quiet menace and suspense.
So. Much better than a disaster then but not the headrush it might have been. It is, in fact, a very 4AD sort of record but not necessarily in a bad way. Think 60s cult movie soundtrack music, Jane Birkin and the Sonic Youth of “NYC Ghosts and Flowers” (look, that’s a much better record than everyone thinks it is). Oh, and produced by Alan Moulder. I’ve ended up listening to it a lot. Maybe I’ll even learn to live with the original running order one of these days.
You know, there’s any number of trendy items backed up on my iPod at the moment. But I just haven’t got to the point where I want to write anything about any of them.
In fact, I’ve been trying to work up enthusiasm about the new Blonde Redhead album all day without any real success. Maybe tomorrow.
Meanwhile, Henry Rollin’s favourite band at the height of their pomp:
Writing about RTX the other day bought Thin Lizzy very much to mind. Thin Lizzy were the band at my school. Everyone went to see them on the Black Rose tour. Except me. I hadn’t listened to them for maybe five years when I turned on Tommy Vance in 1986 and found myself in the middle of a tribute show to Phill Lynott whose huge, passionate heart had finally given up the long fight with smack that had killed the band in the early eighties.
Recently, I’ve been playing “Johnny The Fox” a lot. Maybe “23″ will have to wait a little longer.
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.
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.
“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.
involvement of Alan Moulder, responsible for some of the most generic productions of his day, said day being largely the late eighties/early nineties – shoegazer central, in other words. My first listen seemed to confirm my worst fears. Everything that marked Blonde Redhead off as a something different from the mainstream of the hazy dream-pop crowd seemed to have been buffed away. Title track “23” wafted in on a hazy of generically skittering beats, gleaming washes of guitar and Kazu’s high, just-this-much-short-of-a-squeak vocals. What followed seemed nice – the odd track stood out and I liked the electronic touches and flashes of white noise, the male vocals seemed much less irritating than on previous records – but it all seemed a little bit too easy.
at Amazon. Yes, I’ll get a kick-back. Oh, inverted world etc.