an alan smithee war

Watch out, this starts off being almost insultingly elementary, but then gets complicated and probably even self-contradictory quite quickly.*

*a perhaps necessary note; “Allan Smithee” is a pseudonym used by film directors when they wish to disown a project

Countries, States and religions are not monoliths and nor are they sentient. They don’t have feelings, aims, motivations or opinions. So whatever is happening in the Middle East isn’t ‘Judaism versus Islam’ or even ‘Israel versus Palestine’, any more than “the Troubles”* were/are ‘Protestantism versus Catholicism’ or ‘Britain versus Ireland’.

* a euphemism, which, like most names for these things is partly a method of avoiding blame – as we’ll see

Places and atrocities aren’t monoliths either; Srebrenica didn’t massacre anybody**, the Falkland islands didn’t have a conflict, ‘the Gulf’ didn’t have a war and neither did Vietnam or Korea. But somebody did. As with Kiefer Sutherland and Woman Wanted in 1999 or Michael Gottlieb and The Shrimp on the Barbie in 1990 and whoever it was that directed Gypsy Angels in 1980, nobody wants to claim these wars afterwards. But while these directors have the handy pseudonym Allan Smithee to use, there is no warmongering equivalent, and so what we get is geography, or flatly descriptive terms like ‘World War One’, which divert the focus from the aggressor(s) and only the occasional exception (The American War of Independence) that even references the point of the war. But, whether interfered with by the studio or not, Kevin Yagher did direct Hellraiser: Bloodline just as certain individuals are responsible for actions which are killing human beings as you read this. Language and the academic study of history will help to keep their names quiet as events turn from current affairs and into history. Often this evasion is done, perhaps even unknowingly, for purely utilitarian reasons, but sometimes it is more sinister.

** see?

As the 60s drew to its messy end, the great Terry “Geezer” Butler wrote lines which, despite the unfortunate repeat/rhyme in the first lines, have a Blakean power and truth:

Generals gathered in their masses
Just like witches at black masses

Black Sabbath, War Pigs, 1970

There is something sinister and even uncanny in the workings of power, in the distance between avowed and the underlying motivations behind military action. Power politics feels like it is – possibly because intuitively it seems like it should be – cold and logical rather than human and emotional. It doesn’t take much consideration though to realise that even beneath the chilly, calculated actions of power blocs there are weird and strangely random human desires and opinions, often tied in with personal prestige which somehow seems to that person more important than not having people killed.

Anyway, Geezer went on to say:

Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor

Still Black Sabbath, War Pigs (1970)

And that’s right too; but does that mean Butler’s ‘poor’ should take no responsibility at all for their actions? In the largest sense they are not to blame for war or at least for the outbreak of war; and conscripts and draftees are clearly a different class again from those who choose to “go out to fight.” But. As so often WW2 is the easiest place to find examples; whatever his orders or reasons, the Nazi soldier who shot a child and threw them in a pit, shot a child and threw them in a pit. His immediate superior may have done so too, but not to that particular child. And neither did Himmler or Adolf Hitler. Personal responsibility is an important thing, but responsibility, especially in war, isn’t just one act and one person. Between the originator and architects of the Final Solution and the shooter of that one individual child there is a chain of people, any one of whom could have disrupted that chain and even if only to a degree, affected the outcome. And that degree may have meant that that child, that human being, lived or died. A small thing in a death toll of something over 6 million people, unless you happen to be that person.

As with the naming of wars and atrocities, terms like “genocide” and “the Holocaust” are useful, especially if we want – as we clearly do – to have some kind of coherent, understandable narrative that can be taught and remembered as ‘history’. But in their grim way these are still euphemisms. The term ‘the Holocaust’ memorialises the countless – actually not countless, but still, nearly 80 years later, being counted – victims of the Nazis’ programme of extermination. But the term also makes the Holocaust sound like an event, rather than a process spread out over the best part of a decade, requiring the participation of probably thousands of people who exercised – not without some form of coercion perhaps, but still – their free will in that participation. The Jewish scholar Hillel the Elder’s famous saying,  whosoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved the entire world is hard to argue with, insofar as the world only exists for us within our perceptions. Even the knowledge that it is a spinning lump of inorganic and organic matter in space, and that other people populate it who might see it differently only exists in our perceptions. Or at least try to prove otherwise. And so the converse of Hillel’s saying – which is actually included in it but far less often quoted – is Whosoever destroys one soul, it is as though he had destroyed the entire world. Which sounds like an argument for pacifism, but while pacifism is entirely viable and valuable on an individual basis as an exercise of one’s free will* – and on occasion has a real positive effect – one-sided pacifism relies on its opponents not to take a cynically Darwinian approach, which is hopeful at best. Pacifism can only really work if everyone is a pacifist, and everyone isn’t a pacifist.

*the lone pacifist can at least say, ‘these terrible things happened, but I took no part in them’, which is something, especially if they used what peaceful means they could to prevent those terrible things and didn’t unwittingly contribute to the sum total of suffering; but those are murky waters to wade in.

But complicated though it all is, people are to blame for things that happen. Just who to blame is more complicated – more complicated at least than the workable study of history can afford to admit. While countries and religions are useful as misleading, straw man scapegoats, even the more manageable unit of a government is, on close examination, surprisingly hard to pin down. Whereas (the eternally handy example of) Hitler’s Nazi Party or Stalin’s Council of People’s Commissars routinely purged heretics, non-believers and dissidents, thus acting as a genuine, effective focus for their ideologies and therefore for blame and responsibility, most political parties allow for a certain amount of debate and flexibility and therefore blame deniability. Regardless, when a party delivers a policy, every member of that party is responsible for it, or should publicly recuse themselves from it if they aren’t.

The great (indeed Sensational) Scottish singer Alex Harvey said a lot of perceptive things, not least and “[Something] I learned from studying history. Nobody ever won a war. A hundred thousand dead at Waterloo*. No glory in that. Nobody needs that.” Nobody ever won a war;  but plenty of people, on both sides of every conflict have lost one – and, as the simple existence of a second world war attests, many, many people have lost a peace too.

*Modern estimates put it at ‘only’ 11,000 plus another 40,000 or so casualties; but his point stands

But the “causes” of war are at once easily traced and extremely slippery. Actions like the 1939 invasion of Poland by the armies of Germany and the USSR were, as military actions still are, the will of certain individuals, agreed to by other individuals and then acted upon accordingly. You may or may not agree with the actions of your government or the leaders of your faith. You may even have had some say in them, but in most cases you probably haven’t. Some of those dead on the fields of Waterloo were no doubt enthusiastic about their cause, some probably less so. But very few would have had much say in the decisions which took them to Belgium in the first place.

The buck should stop with every person responsible for wars, crimes, atrocities; but just because that’s obviously that’s impossible to record and even if it wasn’t, too complex to write in a simple narrative, that doesn’t mean the buck should simply not stop anywhere. Victory being written by the winners often means guilt being assigned to the losers, but even when that seems fair enough (there really wouldn’t have been a World War Two without Hitler) it’s a simplification (there wouldn’t have been an effective Hitler without the assistance of German industrialists) and a one-sided one (it was a World War because most of the leading participants had already had unprovoked wars of conquest). But does the history of Western colonialism, the treatment of Germany by the Allies after WW1 and the dubious nature of the allies and some of their actions make Hitler any less responsible for the war? And does Hitler’s guilt make the soldier who shoots a child or unarmed civilians, or drops bombs on them any less responsible for their own actions?

Again; only human beings do these things, so the least we can do is not act like they are some kind of unfathomable act of nature when we discuss them or name them. Here’s Alex Harvey again; “Whether you like it or not, anybody who’s involved in rock and roll is involved in politics. Anything that involves a big crowd of people listening to what you say is politics.” If rock and roll is politics, then actual politics is politics squared; and for as long as we settle, however grudgingly or complacently for pyramidal power structures for our societies then the person at the top of that pyramid, enjoying its vistas and rarefied air should be the one to bear its most sombre responsibilities. But all who enable the pyramid to remain standing should accept their share of it too.

So when you’re helplessly watching something that seems like an unbelievable waste of people’s lives and abilities, pay close attention even if you don’t want to, because the credits at the end may not tell you who’s really reponsible.

 

 

 

music in quarantine: march 2020

 

This is another roundup of new music that seemed interesting enough to me to check out. Not, you might think, an ideal time to be releasing a new album; and yet, with the majority of music sales, despite the resurgence of vinyl, still being digital and with the majority of people currently being at home, why not? So here are some things. The release dates were I think still good at the time of writing, but no doubt may be subject to change, as – paradoxically – so many things are in this weird limbo. But enough of that:

Ande
Vossenkuil
Self-Released
Release date: 3 April 2020

Ande from Belgium is a one-man (Jim Christiaens) black metal project – not exactly a rarity, but Vossenkuil is an extremely well-realised album. The music is pretty much what you’d expect from the artwork; atmospheric and melancholy, although it’s fairly heavy and raw too. There are obvious comparisons with bands like Wolves in the Throne Room and Drudkh, but what it reminded me of the most (especially perhaps because of its thick, mournful guitar tone) is Forestheart by Marblebog; which I think is hugely underrated and therefore mean as a compliment, but anyway, that’s the general kind of nature-nostalgia-darkness area Ande is working in. Every aspect from the overall sound to the raw vocals is good, with the excellent drums making it a bit better than the usual woods ‘n’ lakes ‘n; misery black metal album. Ande website: https://andeband.wordpress.com/

 

Funeral Bitch
The 80’s demos
vic records
Release date: out now
A foolish name, you might think; and yet there have been no less than three different bands called Funeral Bitch. This is the first and best of the three, the one formed by Paul Speckmann in 1986-8 between different incarnations of the much better known Master. Funeral Bitch were much in the same vein; extremely fast and rough (though still anthemic) death/thrash, with Speckmann’s hoarse bellowing a bit too prominent in the thin mix. That said, the demos are imbued with a real raw vitality that could arguably have been lost with the kind of production favoured by the big-name thrash bands of the era. It’s a real time capsule of the more extreme end of the 80s thrash scene and there’s a fair amount of intentional silliness too; a key but often forgotten feature of era. Interestingly, the guitarist is Alex Olvera, better known for his tenure as bassist with mid-level speed metal band  Znöwhite around the same time. Only essential for Master fans, but generally fun, even if the live tracks are (appropriately) ‘rough as guts’ as they say down under.

Kariti
Covered Mirrors
Aural Music
Release date: 17 April

Kariti is a Russian-Italian singer of dark folk music and, after an extremely peculiar and archaic-sounding voices-only intro, Covered Mirrors becomes an album of moody semi-acoustic songs which are not especially folk-sounding, but are very pretty indeed. The guitar sound is crisp and almost tangible, and the vocals (mainly in English) are clear and mournful, as befits the album’s themes of ‘death and parting’. It’s a beautifully grave and austere record, with an intimate quality that (especially through headphones) brings the listener extremely close to the performance, while remaining emotionally remote and unreachable: a perfect album for a time of quarantine, if not one that will cheer anyone up.

Kool Keith x Thetan
Space Goretex
Anti-Corporate Music
Release date: April 10th
Alternately really great and very silly indeed, the sci-fi theme/concept behind Space Goretex sometimes gets in the way of the music. At its best the marriage of the unusual (but mostly surprisingly low key) musical textures of Thetan (beats, bass, synth, theremin, rather than the usual powerviolence) with hip-hop legend Kool Keith’s iconic delivery makes for a unique, distinctive sound. It’s something of a landmark album too, featuring Keith in all of his guises (Dr. Octagon, Dr. Dooom and Black Elvis), but although vocally he’s on superb form, the lyrics more often than not tend to be a bit puerile, though perfectly delivered with his usual flawless fluency. As sound, it’s a brilliantly realised collection of sophisticated and moody hip-hop, but unless sexually-oriented comicbook themes resonate deeply with you that’s mostly all it is; but as such it’s a pretty good album.

https://youtu.be/cyHD4q3hGzU

Manes
Young Skeleton
Aftermath Music
Release date: April 18th
Always a surprise to find that non-mainstream musicians still release singles, but that’s what Manes are doing; and, like their last album, the superb Slow Motion Death Sequence it’s black metal in feeling only; musically the title track is a kind of eccentric and brooding widescreen gothic rock (I guess; it reminded me a bit of the Planet Caravan type early Black Sabbath ballads and musically but definitely not vocally a little bit of Fields of the Nephilim; there’s no electronic element on this one). It’s beautifully recorded, the title track warm and limpid but with an undertone of unease that builds throughout. The B side (is that still what it is for a digital release?) is Mouth of the Volcano, an atmospheric doomy semi-electronic chug built around a strangely familiar spoken word section that  can’t place and featuring Asgeir Hatlan (last heard in Manes on 2014’s Be All, End All) and some spooky Diamanda Galas-ish vocals from Anna Murphy (ex-Eluveitie) and Ana Carolina Skaret. An unsettling but very listenable pair of songs and so a single worth releasing; and with beautiful artwork too.

Midwife
Forever
The Flenser
Release date: 10 April
More solemn, downbeat but mostly very pretty music. I had never heard Midwife (the solo project of Madeline Johnston)  before; on this album at least, it’s a bare, guitar-based sound with some ambient electronic elements, sort of shoegaze-y but not. The nearest comparison I can think of (not that anyone asked for one) is Codeine circa Frigid Stars. Forever was inspired by the unexpected loss of a friend and the music is as fragile and mournful as you’d expect. The sound is warm, clear and intimate-sounding – aside from the vocals, which are distanced by a strange spacey, reverb effect; perhaps for the best as the raw emotion is rendered slightly remote and universal, rather than immediate and personal. It’s clearly not an album for all moods: although the closing track S.W.I.M. speeds up to a Jesus and Mary Chain-esque plod, Forever is consistently slow and elegiac and nothing really lifts it out of its furrow of sadness: but beautiful for all that.

Nyrst
Orsök
Dark Essence Records
Release date: 24 April
More black metal, this time from Iceland. Pretty standard (in a good way), polished but not symphonic black metal, modern but very much influenced by the classic Scandinavian bands (maybe more the second-and-a-half wave, like Kampfar than the classic Mayhem-Darkthrone-Burzum axis) it’s all very well put together and has plenty of muscle and melody. Two things save it from just being yet more (and there is a lot of it) proficient ‘grim & frostbitten’ black metal – firstly, some strange and very Icelandic anthemic moments; I say very Icelandic only because those moments remind me a bit of some of the epic, windswept bits in Solstafir’s music. Although recommended by the label for fans of fellow Icelanders Misþyrming, Nyrst, though inhabiting more or less the same kind of sub-genre, definitely have their own sound and style.  (I highly recommend Misþyrming’s Algleymi by the way). The second thing that sets Nyrst aside is the dramatic, not to say eccentric voice of Snæbjörn, which goes above and beyond the standard raw black metal vocals in a highly expressive way that sometimes reminds me of one of my favourite harsh singers, Ildanach of Absentia Lunae.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7KqqGRe8-I

Ols
Widma
Pagan Records
Release date: 17 April
And another one-woman folk project. Ols (Polish singer and multi-instrumentalist Anna Maria Oskierko) is very different from Kariti though, and Widma is a primitive, ritualistic sounding album with none of Covered Mirrors‘s accessible, almost pop sheen. Widma does sound traditional, but it’s more akin to Wardruna and the archaeological end of pagan folk music than the glossy Clannad-ish kind recently heard on the latest Myrkur album. This is, by contrast, pleasantly droning and primal (and in that respect reminds me of an album I bought via MySpace many years ago by Eliwagar), but still full of lovely melodic bits and the kind of mysterious forest-y atmosphere you’d hope for from an album with this cover. Although solemn and archaic, it’s probably the least melancholy listen here with the very notable exception of Kool Keith.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLwMN9PX47U

 

Weserbergland
Am Ende der Welt
Apollon Records
Release date 24 April
A contrast to everything else here, Norwegian collective Weserbergland’s second album consists of one 42 minute track, but it’s not the krautrockinfluenced prog of their Can/Tangerine Dream-flavoured debut. Instead, it’s a chaotic but weirdly coherent kind of collage which consists of performances on conventional-ish instruments: guitar/strings/sax/turntables, cut up, messed about with and reassembled into a kind of melancholy, cinematic symphony. The strange, unpredictable stuttering percussion seems like it should disrupt the flow of the piece, but somehow the jerkiness becomes part of the mood and it all flows perfectly, if not in a straight line. It’s really not like anything else I’ve heard, but reminds me a little of Masahiko Satoh and the Soundbreakers’ 1971 classic avant-garde jazz-prog-whatever album Amalgamation in its sheer ear-defeating unclassifiable-ness. I’m sure it won’t go down in history as such, but this may be a definitively 2020 release.

 

yesterday was crazy; D’Angelo’s Voodoo by Faith A. Pennick

 

Faith A. Pennick
D’Angelo’s Voodoo
33⅓ books

D’Angelo c.2000 by Mark Guthrie

This review may not be fair to writer/filmmaker Faith A. Pennick and her excellent book, not because I didn’t like it – it’s great – but because since I was sent the book (by now onsale), events that don’t need mentioning here have overtaken it a bit. On the plus side, probably more people have more time to read and listen to music than they have in living memory, so maybe it’s not all bad. And Pennick’s book, among other things, is an extended argument for really listening to an album as opposed to just letting it play while you do other things.

 

If you read my review of Glenn Hendler’s Diamond Dogs book you will probably have realised that I have quite a lot to say about Bowie (and in fact one of the few moments of pride in my writing career such as it is, is that I got to write an obituary for Bowie in an actual print magazine – and that, on reading it now I still agree with myself – which is not always the case!), whereas with D’Angelo’s Voodoo, the opposite is true; Hendler was adding to my knowledge of an artist I love, Pennick is telling me about someone who I previously knew almost nothing about. As I mentioned in that previous review, as a music journalist people are never shy about telling you what they essentially want is the music not the writing; but for me, most good writing has an element of Thomas Hardy’s dictum about poetry: “The ultimate aim of the poet should be to touch our hearts by showing his own” and in the case of the music writer that means engaging you (or rather me) whether or not one has an interest in the music itself. Here Pennick scores very highly; the narrative of how she came to know and love Voodoo manages to remain direct and personal while also bringing in all of the cultural/historical and musical context necessary to be more than a kind of diary entry.

I came to the book thinking that I didn’t know anything by D’Angelo at all*, and while setting the scene, Pennick invokes a list of artists that is – to my taste in music – both encouraging (Erykah Badu, De La Soul, Angie Stone) and, though admittedly important,  offputting (Michael Jackson, Lauryn Hill). But as it turns out, the fact that I didn’t know D’Angelo’s ‘greatest hits’ is not all that surprising; a key point in Pennick’s book is about how D’Angelo’s career was defined, for better or worse, by the video for Untitled (2000) – but that single didn’t chart in the UK and if I was aware of him via osmosis at all, it would have been from the trio of singles from his previous album Brown Sugar, that made the Top 40 here five years earlier.

*in fact, I should have known that his vocals (and sometimes his musicianship) appear on records by people like Q-Tip and The Roots that are more my cup of tea than his own music.

DAngelo in Electric Lady Studios, where Voodoo was recorded

But by 2000, even if Untitled had been a hit here, the chances are I would never have seen that video. Like many people of my generation, I had a pretty good grip on what was in the top 40, whether I liked it or not (and usually I liked it not), up until the mid-90s, when Top of the Pops (TOTP), the UK’s Top 40 music TV show, was moved from its classic Thursday night slot to a Friday. This may seem a little thing, but for background, during my childhood there were only 4 (and pre-1982 only three) TV channels, which meant that, if a family watched TV at all, there was a pretty good chance that they were watching the same things as you were; and most people I knew watched TOTP – so all through school, what was at number one was common knowledge (to be fair it probably still is for school age kids). By the mid 90s (actually, any time after one’s own taste had formed), watching the show was largely a kind of empty ritual or habit but still; it did give, pre social media, a general sense of where pop music and pop culture were at at any given time.

In 2000, when Voodoo was released (I am surprised now to find that TOTP was still on at that time, albeit not in the classic slot and beginning its slow decline that ended in cancellation in 2006), aside from odd bits of experimental hip hop heard through my brother, like Kid Koala’s Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, classics like The Wu-Tang Clan’s The W and occasional forays into UK indie like Badly Drawn Boy, I was rarely listening to any music recorded after around 1975; Bowie, Funkadelic, Lou Reed, John Cale, early 70s funk, old blues and early Black Sabbath were [probably what I listened to the most. So D’Angelo passed me by; not that I think I would have liked Voodoo much at that time anyway.

But Faith A. Pennick is persuasive; I listened to Voodoo. And she is not wrong; despite lyrics that veer from great to obnoxious (just a personal preference, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a song I liked for more than one listen whose theme is how great the performer of that song is), the album is meticulously put together, perfectly played with skill and heart – and to my surprise, with a beautifully organic sound – and in the end the only thing that puts me off of it – while in no way reducing its stature – is D’Angelo’s voice(s). It’s not that he isn’t a great singer, he clearly, demonstrably is; but the album coincides with/crystalises that period when R’n’B vocals tended to consist of multi-layered murmuring and crooning. I didn’t really like it then and it’s still not for me now – although the immediate and noticeable lack of autotune is incredibly refreshing. I used to love robot voices as a kid, but now that the slight whine of autotuned vocals is ubiquitous whenever you turn on the radio, it’s nice to hear someone who can sing, singing. In fact, for me, if you pared the vocals on Voodoo down to one main, direct voice and gave it the clarity of the drums and bass, I’d like the album a lot more; but it wouldn’t be the same album, and that’s my deficiency, not Voodoo’s.

For me, the main strength of D’Angelo’s Voodoo (the book) is in the way that Pennick weaves her own personal relationship with album and artist and the album’s cultural/socio-political background together. Voodoo wouldn’t sound the way it does without Prince or 60s and 70s funk and soul; but neither could it have come from someone without D’Angelo’s own personal background in gospel and the African-American church, and Pennick, as an African-American woman responds to the album in ways that would be inaccessible to a white, male writer in Scotland if not for her book. Why an album sounds the way it does is always personal to the artist, but also specific to the era and culture they come from, and how an audience – on a mass or individual level – responds to that album adds depth to the work and determines its stature. Pennick brings these strands together seamlessly; concise, informal and yet powerful, in its own quiet way the book is a virtuoso performance, just as Voodoo is.

 

what January 2020 sounded like

 

Despite the portentous title, this is a round up of things I was sent by nice PR people that sounded interesting, since I said at some point a while ago that I’d do this regularly (and why not?) so here they are, in alphabetical order, because that’s simplest.

Artist: Collectress
Title: Different Geographies
Label: Peeler Records
Release Date: 6 March

I mentioned it here, but have to say more about it now that I know it a little better. If their previous album Mondegreen sounded like music from a benignly haunted doll’s house, Different Geographies has the same gently spooky charm, but takes (even by their standards) strange departures,  like on Mauswork, where their oddly Victorian string arrangements blend with electronic elements, or the beautifully wistful single In The Streets, In The Fields, a truly timeless melange of strings and modern sounding percussive elements and howling noises; which sounds much prettier than that description would suggest. Even within the album – and its individual pieces – it’s unpredictable and hard to define, with songs like the busy Landscape taking unexpected twists and turns during its five and a half minutes.
As with all of Collectress’s work, the music on Different Geographies is strongly visual and does strange things to time; a magical, otherworldly record full of delicate moods and strange musical non-sequiturs.

Artist: Little Albert
Title: Swamp King
Label: Aural Music
Release Date: 27 March

I’m always a bit dubious of the blues as a style, rather than as the product of a specific, African-American culture from a specific time period, but since it definitely is one (and really, if one can accept Eric Clapton as a blues musician then anything goes), I can say that this is a very cool sounding record, notwithstanding that it was made by a young white Italian guy (Alberto Piccolo) best known for his work in doom metal band Messa. Doom is of course the closest metal comes to the blues, and there’s a monolithic, Black Sabbath quality to some of the songs here, notably the cover of Robin Trower’s Bridge of Sighs. In fact, it’s a pretty good album if you like gritty, bass heavy blues of the late-60s type; it sounds great, and the most worrisome factor, Alberto’s vocals, are actually really good; his voice isn’t as powerful as his guitar playing, but emerging from the darkness with a hint of reverb it’s more than acceptable. With all the caveats that come with a heavy blues album from 2020, Swamp King is kind of awesome.

Artist: Nuclear Winter
Title: Night Shift
Label: self-release
Release Date: 7th February

Very polished, melodic death metal (at times almost like death-power metal) from Zimbabwe, this is essentially not my cup of tea at all. I’m always curious to hear music from places not normally associated with that kind of music and sometimes (there’s a great Saigon Rock and Soul album that I think I’ve mentioned before, also that Mongol Metal split from 2015 and last year’s compilation Brutal Africa of death metal from Botswana) it really shows artists approaching familiar musical ideas from a really different perspective. Here it doesn’t; with no disrespect to Gary Stautmeister – who wrote, played and sang everything here aside from some guest vocals – this is an album of classy modern death metal which could have just as easily come from Sweden, France or wherever. The plus points are that he writes cool riffs (Blueshift) and solos, can do both raw and melodic vocals well, as well as writing proper songs. The minuses – well, none if you love this kind of music. I can absolutely imagine Nuclear Winter signed to a label like Relapse or Nuclear Blast; he’s very good at what he does and if you like those Scarve/Sybreed type of bands, give it a go.

Artist: Pia Fraus
Title: Empty Parks
Label: Seksound/Vinyl Junkie
Release Date: 20 January

Something like an Estonian Slowdive-meets-Drop Nineteens, Pia Fraus have been around for ages (22 years!) and this is their millionth (I think sixth) album. It has a great title and is incredibly nice. As shoegazey/dreampop type albums go it’s pretty upbeat, wistfully happy, rather than wistfully sad and mostly relatively up-tempo with at times (like Love Sports) a Stereolab kind of texture.
The female (Eve) and male (Rein) vocals go very nicely together (hence the Slowdive/Drop Nineteens comparisons, they are rarely – exception; Slow Boat Fades Out – quite as ethereal as My Bloody Valentine) and although it’s hard to choose highlights from an album where all eleven songs are quite similar, it stayed nice all the way through without getting boring* and never became twee, so that’s an achievement in itself. I don’t know enough of the band’s other work to say how good the album is by their standards, but if you like the atmosphere of those Sarah Records, Field Mice kind of bands, but not their ramshackle amateurishness, this is highly recommended.

*if you’re in the mood for pop-shoegaze. If you’re not I imagine it would be extraordinarily dull

Artist: Revenant Marquis
Title: Youth In Ribbons
Label: Inferna Profundus
Release Date: 20 January

British black metal of the ultra-mysterious one-nameless-entity type, I really liked the imagery and atmosphere surrounding the album before I even heard it and the music didn’t disappoint. It’s the (I think) fourth RM album, but I’ve only heard bits and pieces before so I guess I’ll have to get the others now. Murky, very rough (it sounds loud even when played quietly), atmospheric and extremely black, it reminds me of early Xasthur and the chaotic obscure nastiness of Manierisme, though it’s never quite that eccentric. The key to its non-crapiness is that, just about gleaming through the surface noise and thunderous rumbling are strange queasy melodies, often simple but very effective and, crucially for this kind of music, every aspect (music/lyrics – insofar as one can make them out/themes/imagery) works together to make something bigger than the sum of those parts. And though the album rarely really gets better than the superb opening duo of Menstruation (a kind of ceremonial intro) and Ephebiphobia (actual black metal), it maintains that quality throughout. Hating teenagers and school (specifically Tasker Milward School; a moody highlight is The Blood Of Lady Tasker) is, oddly, a theme that runs through the album, though I guess that’s no less than the title promises. Loved it.

Artist: Sunny Jain
Title: Wild Wild East
Label: Smithsonian Folkways
Release Date: 21 February

After a Zappa-ish opening fanfare, Indian-American percussionist Sunny Jain and his excellent band bring together a vibrant and sometimes slightly indigestible mix of Morricone-esque rock and jazz with south Asian elements. It’s very good; at times it reminded me a bit of one of the all-time great soundtracks, Rahul Dev Burman’s Yaadon Ki Baaraat, but also the superb Kaada/Patton album Bacteria Cult. At times the album takes on a droning quality which gives it a very positive, summery feel, but at times, most noticeably on Osian, that becomes a loud, busy, blaring quality and a few more of the beautiful, quiet moments would have made it an easier record to love. That said, I haven’t heard anything else quite like it and it’ll definitely be on my playlist for a while.

 

Anatomy of an Earworm

Despite the title, this isn’t really about earworms as such – although they certainly have a place here – this is to do with the background music/soundtrack to your – or my – life. There are serious, life-changing conditions like ‘Musical Ear Syndrome” (kind of a musical tinnitus) where the sufferer constantly hears music and in the cases of artists like Kristin Hersh or Nile Rodgers, these kinds of phenomena (not that theirs are the same, as far as I know) can be part of what fuels their creativity. That isn’t me. What I – and I suspect many people – have, is songs I already know, playing ‘in the background’ more or less constantly.

I decided to try to keep track, for a day, of what those songs were. Not an easy task, as trying to remember them if one doesn’t make a note of it is extremely difficult, once the moment has passed – and also because it seems likely that focusing on that background noise might well alter the experience.

Be that as it may, I tried to make a note whenever I could throughout the day, of what was ‘playing’ – and it’s an odd mixture. Most surprising to me are how few of the songs are ones I would normally listen to, or like, or have listened to or heard (to my knowledge) recently. Also surprising is the segue from one to another, which happens mostly without noticing and which seems to have no logic to it that I can see. The medleys are even stranger. Also odd that events like conversations, concentrating on work, watching TV etc seem to have little or no impact on the flow of the music, it just gets quieter for a bit.

So here, with many gaps, and with a few notes and repeat offenders marked in red – is my internal playlist for today. It is still ongoing of course (currently James Taylor’s cover of Tom Waits’ Shiver Me Timbers). I don’t see any patterns, but I do notice that most of these songs are surprisingly cheerful given what I mostly listen to on purpose; so that’s nice.

The day began around 6am with a shower; a key place for earworms and related music, in my experience – without further ado…

  • Barbizon by Debz
  • Don’t You Want Me by The Human League (I have never liked this song)
  • Young Hearts Run Free by Candi Staton
  • What’s The Frequency, Kenneth, by R.E.M.
  • Keep on Running by The Spencer Davis Group (but with silly alternative lyrics relating to what I was doing at work at the time)
  • Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da by The Beatles (one of the few Beatles songs I really dislike)
  • Van der Valk theme tune (I have never seen Van der Valk, why do I know the theme tune??)
  • Save Your Love by Renée and Renato
  • Street Life by The Crusaders
  • I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend by The Ramones
  • Smokebelch I by The Sabres of Paradise (mainly just the bass)
  • Your Smiling Face by James Taylor
  • Orfeo ed Euridice – a particular bit from (I think) Act 1 of Gluck’s baroque opera
  • The Invisible Man by Elvis Costello
  • Knock Out Eileen by LL Cool J & Dexy’s Midnight Runners (strangely likeable mashup given my hatred of one of these songs – found on youtube)
  • Theme to Monty Python’s Flying Circus
  • Only Shallow by My Bloody Valentine (actually a non-existent, jaunty , squeaky synth-pop cover of the tune of the verse to this song, I’d like to really hear it)
  • jingle from a TV advert for Mitchell’s Self Drive c. 1981 (with the lyric that kids used to sing to it: ‘Mitchell’s Self Drive/Where people eat pies”)
  • I Only Want To Be With You by Dusty Springfield
  • It’s A Shame by Bilbo Baggins
  • Temples of Syrinx by Rush
  • Rockit by Herbie Hancock
  • NIB by Black Sabbath
  • Car Thief by The Beastie Boys
  • Hook It Up by The Donnas
  • How Deep Is Your Love by The Bee Gees (the verse of this song gets stuck in my head often)
  • Your Woman by White Town (genuine earworm that was stuck in my head for days, I had no memory of what it was, didn’t remember the lyrics and had to search for ages to discover what it was; irony – hated it then, hate it now)
  • The Eye of the Witch by King Diamond
  • Good Times, Bad Times by Led Zeppelin
  • Georgie Girl by The Seekers
  • Uh-Oh, Love Comes To Town by Talking Heads
  • Bergerac theme tune (not actually seen Bergerac since the mid 80s)
  • I’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts (just the tune, but still!???)
  • The World In My Eyes by Depeche Mode
  • medley: You Can Call Me Al by Paul Simon & Down Under by Men At Work (had this bizarre medley playing in my head every morning for months; oddly when it’s not ‘playing’ I can’t work out where the segue happens)
  • The Neverending Story by Limahl
  • Good Times by Chic
  • Fascination by David Bowie
  • Lovely Day by the Pixies
  • Graceland by Paul Simon
  • Shiver Me Timbers… but that you know.

Hmm.

 

 

Right vs. Good – a rambling digression about the arts

 

This is not all about black metal, or all about music even, but it essentially began with the De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas Alive album that Mayhem, the pioneers of Norwegian black metal, released towards the end of last year.

PART 1: MUSIC

mayem

Despite somewhat lukewarm expectations, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas Alive is a very good album and therefore highly recommended to Mayhem fans, especially those who value the band’s early/90s output above their subsequent work.  Like the Velvet Underground’s Live MCMCXIII album (released, coincidentally, while the Norwegian black metal scene was at its most intense and chaotic), it seemed beforehand like there was too much water under the bridge, not just within the band itself, but in music, in the world even, for any of the very particular magic the band had created at its peak to have survived. Arguably this was even more so in the case of Mayhem, because the 1994 De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas album, iconic though it is, is to many people (though I am not one of them) itself only a shadowy version of what it should have been, had the band’s classic lineup survived. In that sense (and only really in that sense), De Mysteriis… is strangely like The Beach Boys’ Smiley Smile (1967), a very peculiar and almost entirely inappropriate comparison that I’ll make again later.

So; a good album, and very likely a great show if you were lucky enough to be there; the band is powerful and the music is atmospheric, as it should be. Attila Csihar (vocals) gives a typically eccentric but (for that reason) typically great performance; Necrobutcher (bass) and Hellhammer (drums) bring the irreplaceable aura of authenticity to the proceedings, while also generally playing very well. But for all that Teloch and Ghul are, by any method that exists for quantifying such things, far “better” guitarists than original Mayhem guitarist/founder/composer Øystein ‘Euronymous’ Aarseth was (and in fact both of them are fantastic throughout), the guitar solo on ‘Freezing Moon’ (the yardstick by which I measure all performances of the song) isn’t right. So there’s that. The band is not alone in this; many, many great artists have recorded good or even excellent versions of the song, and none of them (that I’ve heard at least) have got it right; not least Mayhem themselves. Rune ‘Blasphemer’ Eriksen was and is also an infinitely superior guitar player to Euronymous in most respects, but the versions of ‘Freezing Moon’ on the Blasphemer-era live albums Mediolanum Capta Est (1999), Live in Marseilles (2001), European Legions (2001) etc, etc are far less good than the live versions of songs from the band’s then-recent albums.

All that said, Euronymous himself didn’t always play the solo right either (actually, the version on De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas itself is ‘good enough’ – in that sense, the new live album does do it justice); but in the definitive versions of the song (the best probably being the one on the ‘official bootleg’ Live In Leipzig (1990) – there’s some slightly obsessive stuff about the 1990s live recordings here) it’s a thing of spectral, affecting majesty; quite at odds with the prevailing tone of frozen emotionless-ness that black metal is popularly supposed to embody. Indeed, it’s one of the central paradoxes of the genre that, for all its focus on the cold and dead, it’s a kind of music that is all about extreme emotion and feeling. More than most music in fact, black metal stands or falls on feeling; that hardest of musical elements to define or indeed to create deliberately. Dressing in black leather and spikes and painting your face is one thing, but you don’t scream and cut yourself like Mayhem’s Dead (Per Yngve Ohlin) or Maniac (Sven Erik Kristiansen) because you don’t care about anything. You hopefully don’t do it because it’s cool either; and when Dead was doing it c.1988-90, it really wasn’t cool. So anyway; on the new live album, the all-important solo isn’t right, not because the right notes aren’t played in the right order, but because – although it certainly sounds like the band are playing with passion and intensity – it doesn’t feel right. Still, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas Alive is a very good album. But is it as good as Live In Leipzig? Unless you value listenability and high quality sound above all else – which is in itself fair enough and certainly easier on the ears – the answer has to be no. Still, it’s an album very worth having if, like me, your favourite Mayhem songs (mine is ‘Life Eternal’) were never in the band’s live set while Dead was alive (ah, the fun of writing about someone called Dead).

So anyway, that solo; it’s good, so why isn’t it right? On the face of it, this could be one of those cases where sterile perfection* loses out to inspiration and/or passion but I don’t think it is. In any case, the technical perfection vs passion/originality argument is one I don’t really believe in. It gets used a lot when talking about people covering Jimi Hendrix songs, or when people are being insulting about Yngwie Malmsteen, so let’s call it the Malmsteen/Hendrix correlation.

*for all his precision when on form, Euronymous himself was mostly not notable for sterile perfection; for example it sounds awfully like he plays the all-important solo in the wrong key on the notorious but mostly brilliant Dawn of the Black Hearts bootleg

Straight away, any comparison of this type shows that the criteria involved are completely useless for analysing music (or indeed any art form short of architecture, where a lack of technical skill would have disastrous results). Here’s a syllogism of sorts: Yngwie Malmsteen can play Hendrix’s solos but Jimi Hendrix probably couldn’t have played Yngwie Malmateen’s – so therefore Yngwie is a better guitarist, right? Well, obviously (at least I think it’s obvious), no.
On the face of it that might seem to mean that technical skill is not the most important factor in being a great guitar player, which is true – but is not the whole truth. Yngwie may not be better than Hendrix, whatever that would mean, but nevertheless he is a great guitar player, and he would not be a better one if he played more like Jimi Hendrix, or for that matter, if he played more like an arch passion-over-precision player like Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols, James Williamson of The Stooges or Johnny Thunders. Moreover, Yngwie’s music at its best is entirely passionate and feeling-ful, while also being extremely technical. Like the classic virtuosi through the ages, Yngwie happens to express himself best through the medium of extreme technical ability. As did Jimi Hendrix of course, in a less neat and streamlined/traditional kind of way. But at the same time, to say that Malmsteen or Hendrix would have been better in the New York Dolls than Johnny Thunders, or have been better in the Ramones than Johnny Ramone is also very obviously untrue. This is a very long way around just to say artists are at their best while being themselves, but that is probably one of the logical conclusions, if there are any; Euronymous was great at being Euronymous, while Teloch & Ghul are probably best at being Teloch & Ghul. If they were great at being Euronymous then they would be better off being in a Mayhem tribute band than being in Mayhem.

the three ages of Smile
the three ages of Smile

To bring back the Beach Boys again, since I said I would, one of the closest parallels for the kind of nonsense I have been writing about De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas Alive that  I can think of, is with the odd trio of records, Smiley Smile (1967), Brian Wilson Presents Smile (2004) and The Smile Sessions (2011, recorded 1965-71). Brian Wilson probably isn’t the only person who rates Brian Wilson’s Smile the most highly of the three, but he is definitely in a small minority. Smiley Smile may have essentially been a work of expediency, a slightly silly mish-mash – albeit one full of incredible music – completed for partly commercial reasons, but it’s nevertheless imbued with the atmosphere of the psychedelic zeitgeist of 1967; one of the elements which is most obviously missing from Brian Wilson’s Smile (the Beach Boys being the other, even more obvious one.) It is, however, a neat, sunny, well-recorded, impeccably performed collection of songs. More, in a way, like an orchestra recording a symphony than a band playing an album. Meanwhile, The Smile Sessions has it all; inventiveness, insanity, atmosphere – it is practically all zeitgeist – fantastic songs and, at its heart, a brilliant if somewhat confused band, often audibly grappling with material which is making their brains hurt. Still, the Malmsteen/Hendrix correlation doesn’t work here. Brian Wilson’s band is flawless in their technical interpretation of the music – but no more so than the Beach Boys were, and for all their undoubted skill, they are certainly not better musicians than the Beach Boys either. What’s missing is the messiness, the inspiration; which makes one wonder about modern interpretations of the great classical works versus the performances in the composers’ lifetime. If Purcell for example, could hear a modern performance of Dido and Aeneas would it sound  as plastic to him as the least exciting moments of Brian Wilson’s Smile do? We can never know, which is probably just as well.

The problem of living up to one’s past work is one that any successful artist with a long career comes up against. In music (that I like) there are some very obvious examples; when Paul McCartney performs Beatles songs or Morrissey performs Smiths songs, there is obviously an authenticity there that is lacking in a cover by another artist; and often they sound good and the fans love them, but no-one would pretend that it’s the same as hearing The Beatles or The Smiths. That of course may be as much due to the listener as the performer, but not always. Black Sabbath has had several vocalists who are infinitely ‘better’ at singing than Ozzy Osbourne, but not one of them could sing ‘Iron Man’ without sounding a bit laughable. Bruce Dickinson is the only Iron Maiden vocalist who can sing ‘The Number Of the Beast’ et al correctly, but he doesn’t sing Paul Di’Anno’s songs as well as Paul Di’Anno did. And that’s just the singers. You would think any guitar player with the ability and the right equipment could sound like Tony Iommi, but even on the strangest, least Black Sabbath-like Black Sabbath albums, the guitars sound right, where even in the best covers, they usually don’t, quite. I was lucky enough to meet Thomas Gabriel Fischer of Celtic Frost/Tryptikon a few years ago and asked him how – given the multitude of different guitars, amps and production budgets he has had over the years – his guitar tone (not his style or playing, just the actual sound it makes) has remained so recognisable from the first Hellhammer demo to the latest Triptikon album. He told me ‘it’s the way I play it.’ And even though it’s hard to see how that can be right, it must be.

All of the above reinforces that simple and obvious point; art is subjective, so be yourself. No-one can be you like you can. But again, that is not the whole story. As the evolution of Smile suggests, the further one travels from the initial inspirational impulse, the less powerful the vision can be; which makes sense and seems to be confirmed by the work of many visual artists and writers.

PART TWO: THE VISUAL ARTS

Partly, the perception that art can overwork and dilute the original vision comes from modernist taste; the revolt against academic art that began with the Romantic movement and was confirmed by following generations of artists and theoreticians all the way through to the 1960s, looking to (what they sometimes patronisingly perceived) as ‘untutored’ art produced by cultures other than their own, ‘naive’ artists, the mentally ill,  children; people who they felt were closer to the unadulterated forces of creativity than the trained professional artist, writer or musician. The willingness and ability to enjoy the incomplete, sketchy and unfinished (a classic example; John Constable’s rough oil sketches vs. his highly finished works) is perhaps a mostly modern phenomenon, but I don’t think it’s just pretentiousness. In Hans Holbein’s great portraits of the 1500s, such as those of Lady Audley and Lady Guildford, something – some kind of vitality – has been lost – or perhaps traded – the fleeting for the permanent – between the original pencil sketch and the final painting.

Hans Holbein the Younger - Lady Guildford
Hans Holbein the Younger – Lady Guildford

Similarly, Ingres, one of the great technicians of the neoclassical period, could produce a painting of skill and beauty like the 1807 portrait of Madame Devauçey, but somewhere seems to have lost something of the life that was so perfectly captured in his original study. And the moral of this is? Is there one? Capturing something and creating something are not the same thing, and anyway, painting a portrait is both. Not only essentially ‘realistic’ artists like Holbein and Ingres, but also, arguably, artists like Brian Wilson, Jimi Hendrix, Yngwie Malmsteen and Euronymous are doing both; it’s just that away from ‘realism’ of one kind or another, the dividing line between capturing and creation is eroded, sometimes to the point of non-existence. Inspiration isn’t one, unchanging thing; Live in Leipzig doesn’t capture the first, time Euronymous played/created the solo – it is simply the best version he happened to play while being recorded  – and for all I know he preferred the final version on De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas anyway, just as Ingres almost certainly preferred the finished painting of Madame Devauçey, not least because he had managed to replace the fleeting, lifelike effect of the sketch with something classic, monumental and perfect.

Ingres - Lady Devauçay (1807)
Ingres – Lady Devauçay (1807)

PART THREE – WRITING

Writing, too has parallels with all of these things which, if anything, take this piece even further from any kind of definitive conclusion. While Wordsworth preferred his complete and, to most modern readers, slightly lifeless version of his great autobiographical poem The Prelude to the more vivid early version, it was in the nature of the work itself – the Growth of a Poet’s Mind – that the early version couldn’t be definitive in the sense that the final one is. It wasn’t supposed to be a work of youthful energy and if we prefer the young version we are almost certainly wrong to do so, from Wordsworth’s point of view. And yet it feels like The Two-Part Prelude (1798-9) and The Prelude (1805) are right, where The Prelude (1850) is only good. It’s easy to forget from Wordsworth’s later works that the aim of the Romantics was (initially at least) for the absolute opposite of an artist like Ingres; simplicity (though neoclassicism values simplicity in a different kind of way), vividness & the fleetingness of life, rather than monumentality, rigidity and academic perfection. But as The Prelude demonstrates, not all ideas are simple and not all ideas – even simple ones – are best expressed simply. But I think that our instincts tend to tell us otherwise. (I’ve said similar things while making a different point a long time ago)

Having struggled through it and even enjoyed roughly half of it on the way, I would be among the majority who agree that James Joyce’s Ulysses is absolutely his masterpiece, but by almost any criteria aside from originality (of execution, rather than theme etc) most readers would find his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to be ‘better’. The ‘difficult’ nature of Ulysses itself inspires a kind of confidence; while being far more ‘lifelike’ than A Portrait… it feels blatantly, intimidatingly clever, where Portrait… feels life sized and familiar. Somehow it feels like masterpieces should be clever, perhaps more than they should be enjoyable. As with music, the pigeonholing of literature into ‘popular’, ‘genre’, ‘literary’ etc creates a sense of hierarchy that is essentially meaningless. If nearly everyone likes and understands and relates to A but hardly anyone likes, understands or relates to B in what way can be better than A? What are the criteria, if not human responses to the work?technical ones? Who outside of academia cares about those? And who outside of academia cares what academics think, most of the time? But all that said, is Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man better than Ulysses? I don’t think so.

On a more homely and yet more epic scale (see: genre vs. literature), the four volumes of J.R.R. (and Christopher) Tolkien’s The War of the Ring (or indeed the full 12 volumes of The History of Middle Earth) are fascinating, engrossing and full of drama and excitement. But I don’t think anyone would pretend that it’s as good as The Lord of the Rings. This, despite the fact that the excitement of creation (the sketch vs the finished painting) is more vivid everywhere in the pages of The War of the Ring than it is in The Lord of the Rings. And yet for some reason Bingo Bolger-Baggins and Trotter have not replaced Frodo and Strider in the hearts of Tolkien fans.

So; what I am left with is platitudes and contradictions – art is not a science; sometimes inspiration is better than polish; sometimes polish is better than inspiration; sometimes simplicity is better than complexity and vice versa. Great art comes easily; great art doesn’t come easily. It’s better to be a genius than a craftsperson. Being a genius is no use unless you are also a craftsperson. Nothing is true, everything is true. So I’ll end with this; I don’t think there’s any method, scientific or otherwise, that could prove that standing in a gallery looking at the Mona Lisa is a ‘better’ experience than standing in a gallery looking at an exact reproduction of the Mona Lisa; but somehow, it is. I would like to think that, even without the knowledge and emotional baggage we bring to these things, that that is still true. But it might not be. Anyway, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas Alive is really good, but that solo on ‘Freezing Moon’ isn’t quite right.

 

Ride On A Golden Wave: Uriah Heep’s …Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble

Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble (Vertigo/Mercury, 1970; Bronze shortly thereafter)

This year (2016), BMG begins an extensive reissue campaign of releases by one of the original Spinal Tap-influencing ‘rock dinosaur’ bands, the mighty Uriah Heep. Along with an anthology, the first of these releases is, logically enough, the band’s 1970 debut – one of my favourite albums of all time – …Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble. This album is probably not cool. Judging by the mostly negative reviews it got in 1970 (‘If this group makes it I’ll commit suicide’ and ‘it’s too loud, too repetitive, too predictable’ are representative quotes) it never was cool, but 46 years later it can stand proudly alongside any of the hard rock, blues rock, progressive rock or rock-rock albums of its era.

And it was an era of rock; bear in mind that that particular year also spawned Deep Purple In Rock, Black Sabbath AND Paranoid, Led Zeppelin III and many more and, while the mighty Heep are perceived to be a relatively underground cousin of Deep Purple & co, they too ponced around the US in Lear jets and limos in a way that few new rock bands do nowadays. Judged on those 1970 albums alone, the band were clearly up there with the best. Slightly less heavy (but who wasn’t?) than Black Sabbath, more jazzy and poetic than Deep Purple, more riff-centric and bluesy than (1970-era) Led Zeppelin,  …Very ‘Eavy… is monolithic but nimble, straightforward but, except in its most bludgeoning moments, not at all simplistic.

Unlike most decades, the 60s is often felt, culturally, to have a clear and decisive ending; from the perspective of nowadays, the Stones at Altamont and the Manson Family in Death Valley ended the peace & love/flower power era that was already shaken by the revolutionary events and protests of 1968. But the pre-Uriah Heep story, that of a band called Spice, (essentially Heep sans organist Ken Hensley), talent-spotted while playing in ‘The Blues Loft’ in High Wycombe, could not be more redolent of the hippy era. To me, the best work of Uriah Heep always has a hazy aroma late 60s underground optimism and …Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble is a kind of time capsule of a world almost as distant and quaint now as the Victorian Age. This was a time when – as the great Charles Shaar Murray wrote (in a Cream magazine T-Rex article in 1972, just as the world moved into another cultural phase) – “Any gentle freak who believed that Nostradamus and King Arthur were alive and well in a UFO hovering somewhere over Glastonbury Tor, or who read Tolkien and Moorcock over his brown rice and apple juice, just had to own the Tyrannosaurus Rex albums...” It was these kind of freaks, one assumes, who in their less gentle moments, wanted to rock out to Spice. In High Wycombe. Incidentally, it may be this very hippy-hangover aura that prevented Uriah Heep from being as influential on the metal scene as their contemporaries, Black Sabbath (whose musical background in blues rock was very similar). Indeed, I can personally testify that the whole flared-trousers-and-moustaches vibe of the Heep (as well as the slightly bland rock they were putting out at the time) was enough to prevent some 80s metal kids from checking out their older work.

spice

Anyway; Spice became a pretty well known band on the progressive rock circuit in the dying years of the 60s. In fact, their music as preserved on the first few LPs is very much ‘progressive’ in the late 60s blues rock sense (in which sense Led Zeppelin were also progressive), but not in the sense that ‘prog’ came to mean as the 70s wore on. Mick Box, founder, guitarist and, to this day the real heart of Uriah Heep, began as a jazz player and it was perhaps this more than anything, that coloured the heavy blues rock that Spice played; parallel to the British Blues boom but not really part of it, the band used elements of the blues, but they were never constrained by its structures.

The Band

Mick Box: guitar

mick

(highly underrated as player, composer & all-round riffmeister)

 

 

 

 

 

David Byron: vocals

DByron

(a versatile, very English-sounding rock voice, equally at home with swaggering, earthy blues-rock vocalising and delicate fantasy

 

 

 

 

 

Ken Hensley: organ, guitar, vocals etc.

kenhen

(Without Hensley Uriah Heep would have been far more like a standard late 60s blues-rock band)

 

 

 

 

 

Paul Newton: bass, vocals

newton

(in the classic 70s tradition the bass is loud, clear & occasionally funky on this album; co-wrote lots of the songs.)

 

 

 

 

 

Alex Napier – drums (on half of the album)

alnapier

(great, agile and subtle drummer, not as thunderous as some contemporaries, but for my money up there with the best; retired after leaving the band I believe)

 

 

 

 

 

Nigel “Ollie” Olsson: also drums, plays on a few songs

olsson

(another great drummer; went on to play with Elton John after his stint in the Heep)

 

 

 

 

 

THE ALBUM

1. Gypsy (Mick Box/David Byron)
The perfect opening track; after the busy little intro the simple, bludgeoning guitar/organ riff provides an excellent backing for David Byron’s authoritative vocal, establishing the Heep as a band of (for the time extremely) heavy sound and somewhat whimsical, romantic preoccupations; hippies in fact. Excellent organ and guitar soloing and harmony backing vocals by pretty much everyone make this a superb manifesto for the band’s approach. 70s heavy rock par excellence

2. Walking In Your Shadow (Paul Newton/David Byron)

An excellent funky drum intro which should be (has been?) sampled leads into a dynamic blues-rock song with another perfect vocal by David Byron. The song is a relatively understated version of the kind of pleased-with-itself blues rock swagger that Whitesnake were to excel in later in the decade, and it has an excellent Mick Box solo too.

3. Come Away Melinda (Hellerman/Minkoff)

A delicate and drama-filled version of the much-covered melancholy anti-war folk/protest song. Byron’s clear enunciation and expressive voice make the most of the (possibly slightly twee and pretentious) post-apocalyptic lyrics. Lovely mellotron-flute intro and lovely acoustic guitar; the key word is ‘lovely’. The great vocal is made even better by imaginative use of stereo.

4. Lucy Blues (Mick Box/David Byron)

A somewhat quizzical and sad blues-rock song, Lucy Blues is, despite occasional claims at the time that they were Led Zep clones,  the closest Uriah Heep comes to Led Zeppelin on this album; not all that close. And with all respect to the iconic Robert Plant, David Byron managed the same kind of expressiveness without the melodramatic whimpering and screaming. As the original sleevenote remarks; ‘hardly unpredictable but rather pleasant’. Nice piano work adds to the barroom blues feel, far less epic than the usual Heep sound. Byron’s English accent gives the song a strange and unique flavour, as it tends to do on all of the more blues-based material – one of the features that makes early Uriah Heep so distinctive. Meanwhile, Ken Hensley proves himself master of the classic blues Hammond organ solo too.

5. Dreammare (Paul Newton)

Side two commences with one of the heavier songs on the album. Dreammare has an ominous organ intro, a strangely funky, reverby riff and a suitably feverish quality, enhanced by the speaker-to-speaker shimmer on the vocals. A nicely bad-tempered, squalling guitar solo too. This is perhaps the only song where the claims of sheer noisy unpleasantness could be deemed fair enough; for non-rock fans anyway.

6. Real Turned On (Mick Box/David Byron/Paul Newton)

Proto-Whitesnake swagger again (but even more so), Real Turned On is a cocky mid-tempo blues-rock tune with an angular riff, several good solos, tons of slide guitar by Ken Hensley and a good naturedly sleazy David Byron trying to lure a young woman with wine and so forth. Unreconstructed 60s freewheeling sexual (and arguably, but arguably not, sexist) revolution rock, it ends, oddly, with screeds of apocalyptic feedback.

7. I’ll Keep On Trying (Mick Box/David Byron)

Archetypically 70s flared-jeans hard rock, with organs, screaming guitar and an impassioned David Byron vocal. The tune skips between sinister-toned, portentious organ and wailing vocals and nimble-fingered fiddlyness during which every band member gets to show off, before settling into a heavy blues riff. There are tranquil interludes and dramatic, siren-like guitar and even a Zappa-esque wah-wah solo. If you don’t like this, you probably don’t like Uriah Heep; fair enough.

8. Wake Up (Set Your Sights) (Mick Box/David Byron)

The final track on the album is also the most ‘progressive’, jazzy one, which manages to encapsulate all of the facets of early Heepdom in six minutes. The intro has David Byron intoning ‘aaahhh’s over a bass and organ scales before a dramatic, grandiose verse about justice prevailing, before the music becomes a kind of hoppity, percussive jazz with some excellent bass playing and very understated guitars. As the song builds (with some enjoyably silly vocalising; ‘justice, justice, just-iiiice‘ etc) it breaks not into rock but another jazzy verse/chorus and then a lovely soft pastoral interlude before fading out. Byron’s vocal is highly theatrical and generally one of the best he ever recorded and it’s just an excellent, dynamic end to a superb album that people don’t like as much as I do; their loss.

daheepAs if all this wasn’t enough, the album is housed in one of the great rock sleeves of the era: a fallen warrior (David Byron in fact) covered in cobwebs, the darkness surrounding him only broken by the (superbly-fonted) logo and title. The gatefold features a photo of the band onstage.

heepin

The album was released in the US in a different and slightly inferior form (missing Lucy Blues, and featuring instead the great Bird of Prey from the band’s second album, Salisbury). The US album is simply called Uriah Heep and its cover – a kind of dragon/wyrm thing – is not one of the great rock sleeves of the era.

usheep

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Although …Very ‘Eavy …Very ‘Umble is one of those rare perfectly formed albums that can only be marred by adding bonus tracks to, it is also one of those albums I have to own on multiple formats, and the 1996 CD release adds bonus tracks, thus:

Gypsy (single edit)
What is says; a shorter version, omitting the organ intro & so forth. Pretty great, though unnecessary

Come Away Melinda
An early version recorded by Spice before they changed their name to Uriah Heep. Interesting, not hugely different from the album version really, but  Byron’s vocal has less feeling and it’s generally not quite as good.

Born in a Trunk
A rocking Spice tune, this features the kind of dynamics that early Heep excelled in, plus another strangely English David Byron vocal and some great funky drum breaks.

BMG’s latest version is in all regards superior to the 1996 version: wisely retaining the whole of the original album (but with beautifully remastered sound) as disc one of two, it adds an entire (and to be fair, slightly inferior) version of the album on disc two. These are unreleased (earlier or alternate takes) of most of the songs, plus the US mix of Bird of Prey and a nice Spice track called Magic Lantern.

Although the earlier versions are, naturally, mostly not quite as good as the finished ones, they are nearly there and, while Spice without Hensley can never equal Uriah Heep, that late 60s atmosphere, an indefinable (and you would think incompatible) mixture of unpretentious ‘let’s just get up and play’ attitude and love of airy, fantastical romance is present in its most concentrated form.