alternative rock - TL:DR (That's Long, DID Read)

Belated weekly update: If You Want To Feel…

So, I’m taking far too long faffing with the more (relatively) substantial things I’ve been working on, so in the meantime I will try to reinstate the weekly updates. Just to stop the whole thing becoming too repetitive, this one is in a very slightly different format from the usual playlist etc (though not massively different to be honest). So anyway; here are some things…

If You Want To Feel… slightly heartbroken, in a teenage kind of way…

Listen to – American Anymen + Lise – Oui EP

I love this beautiful little release. It’s a lovely collection of wistful, charming songs that reminded me in various ways of Daniel Johnston, Bright Eyes, Jad Fair, BMX Bandits and other groups whose work is similarly uncluttered and direct. People label this kind of thing twee, but if it is then I guess my feelings are twee, too. Oh – and this is available for FREE!

If You Want To Feel… like you belong to the Multiverse…

Find out what was going on in your local area, in a period that interests you. It’s easy and fun, unless of course you find it difficult & boring. Previously I have read about The Beatles in Kirkcaldy (a surreal thought) but I was recently reading about about the local activities of the suffragette movement and discovered several things that I felt I should have known for years. Not only was a local railway station which I have been to many times rebuilt in 1913 after being burned down in (allegedly) a suffragette attack, but, more definitely, the prominent suffragette, Ethel Moorhead, has very local (to me) connections. She left her childhood home in Dundee to study as a painter in the studios of Whistler & Alphonse Mucha – which is interesting enough – but a few years later, after joining the WSPU, she was arrested many times, being subjected to the usual sadistic treatment under the ‘Cat & Mouse Act’. After one of her lesser offences, she was locked up in a jail (nowadays just offices) that I walk past almost every day. She then proceeded to wreck the bathroom and flood the building. This happened in the town where I went to High School, but the (mostly very good) history teachers I had either didn’t know about it, or didn’t think it worth telling the pupils about. And yet, knowing this kind of thing makes history far more vivid and alive (and paradoxically ghostly) than the kind of standard issue textbook things that are (or were; not been to school for years) usually taught. Incidentally, I think the school really should have explained the horrors of the Cat & Mouse act. Saying women on hunger strike were ‘force-fed’ is not untrue, but doesn’t really capture just what the authorities were doing; especially here in Scotland.

If You Want To Feel… like the 80s cyberpunk future is still the future

Listen to – Anvil Strykez – Anvil Strykez

I have written a review of this great album for Echoes and Dust so won’t say much here. But if you were living in an early William Gibson novel, or the kind of 80s cartoon that is at least 50% chase or fight sequences, this would be the soundtrack

If You Want To Feel…like simple concern for your fellow human beings is less important than political ideology

Look at every major political party in the UK right now. If however, you don’t want to feel that way, look at the many people and institutions fighting for the rights of people of all kinds and trying to improve the lives of people and make your own opinion known. There are probably more people fighting and campaigning for human rights and equality than at any time in the history of the western world; this is a good thing. One of the saddest things about UK politics in 2017 is that there are many such people even within the main parties; but on the whole, their voices are being made subordinate to the political aims of those parties.

If You Want To Feel… like the internet is like all the encyclopaedias in the world, only better

Sign up for some of the many great newsletters put out for free on the web. Your interests may not be the same as mine, but I have never yet had a single newsletter from any of these without finding something of interest:

Messy Nessy – this site covers so many areas; culture, pop culture, history, art, architecture, society – and its regular newsletter is great

The New Yorker – you already know what The New Yorker is – brilliant journalism, politics, art, culture, cinema, fiction, you name it; they recently had an unpublished F. Scott Fitzgerald story for christ’s sake! For free!

FEMigré – Vonny Moyes’ blog is fairly new, but has already built up an extremely thoughtful & considered series of articles, looking at society & the world from a feminist viewpoint, which challenges not only the cultural status quo, but dogma of all kinds.

Gail Carriger’s Monthly Chirrup – mainly for fans of Miss Carriger’s books perhaps, but in addition to news relating to her steampunk fiction, the Chirrup often takes in Victoriana of all kinds, fashion and humour and is highly entertaining in its own right.

Zero Tolerance Magazine – okay, I write for ZT, but the newsletter includes lots of extreme metal-related news/offers etc as well as keeping readers up to date with the ZT blog

Museums & Galleries – most really good museums & galleries have worthwhile newsletters, the Tate & V&A etc are good but one of my favourites is The National Museum of Women in the Arts which has links to their excellent blog as well as the usual updates etc

If You Want To Feel… like you’ve run a marathon while being hit over the head with a hammer – but in a good way

Listen to Never – Demo 2017

Never are a punk band from Brighton and play intense, cathartic & exhilarating hardcore/noise-ish music with lots of heart. It makes you feel better by making you feel worse

If You Want To Feel… like the music scene in 2017 is as vibrant and essential as it always is, here’s a current playlist – why break with tradition entirely?

Ghost World – Ghost World (Svart Records)

archetypically teenage neo-grunge, Finland’s Ghost World have made a fine debut album which, incidentally, includes my favourite ‘ooh’s of the year so far (on the track ‘Drain’, if you’re interested)

The Moon & The Nightspirit – Metanoia (Prophecy Productions)

Hungarian pagan folk music which is probably as influenced by fantasy as by actual folk traditions; but it’s a lovely, slightly spooky and thankfully not very cheesy album nonetheless.

Ummagma – Winter Tale/Frequency

Ummagma’s almost unclassifiable* mix of dreampop, shoegaze, ambient electronica, synthpop etc etc (*see?) is at its best on the Frequency EP, a collection of extremely fresh and delicate but never throwaway tunes made with the collaboration of luminaries such as Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins & OMD’s Malcolm Holmes. Winter Tale is jointly credited to Ummagma and equally-unclassifiable (or maybe not) dreampop pioneers A.R. Kane; and it sounds like both groups, which should please anyone who likes to float on a dreamy cushion of beautiful, harmonious noise.

wildcard: Coldfells – Coldfells (Bindrune Recordings/Eihwaz Recordings)

I’m not actually sure how much I like this yet; rough, harsh, Thorns-like black metal/doom with strangely melodic choruses. Hmm. A few listens in and the riffs and rough bits are great – the choruses take some getting used to, in this context though. But interesting and I’m sticking with it, so definitely not a thumbs-down.

Current Reading: I’ve been on an Orwell bender of late; currently reading his diaries, which are alternately great and dull, as one might expect of something that is in part a record of how many eggs his hens are laying etc.

Also –

The Vorticists (ed. Mark Antliffe & VIvien Greene)
Gail Carriger – The Finishing School (series)
Samuel Beckett (shorter prose works)
Steffen Kverneland – Munch
The New European (newspaper)

Current Viewing:

The Last Kingdom (series 2, BBC)
Logan (pretty good, if ridiculously violent & bleak)
Shadow of a Doubt (1943) Hitchcock masterpiece with Joseph Cotten at his charmingly sinister best

So anyway, enough for now? Until next time!

Play For Today – Current Playlist 3rd January 2017

A new year, a (slightly) new look, yet another playlist! This time, things I am listening to as the year begins, including (naturally) some things that I got for Christmas…

Patti Smith – Radio Ethiopia (Arista, 1976)

2. IC Rex – Tulen jumalat (Saturnal, 2017)

3. Aidan Baker w. Claire Brentnall – Delirious Things (Gizeh Records, 2017)

4. Kristin Hersh – The Grotto (4AD, 2003)

5. Jeff Parker – The New Breed (International Anthem, 2016)

6. Scott Walker – Pola X (soundtrack, Barclay Records, 1999)

7. Wardruna – Runaljod; gap var Ginnunga (Indie Recordings, 2009)

8. Hardingrock – Grimen (Candlelight Records, 2007)

9. Endalok – Úr Draumheimi Viðurstyggðar Signal Rex, 2017)

10. A Tree Grows – Wau Wau Water (Rufftone Records, 2016)

11. Kristin Hersh – Crooked (Throwing Music, 2010)

12. The Beach Boys – Holland (Brother/Reprise, 1973)

13. Ela Orleans – Circles of Upper and Lower Hell (Night School Records, 2016)

14. Julie’s Haircut – Invocation And Ritual Dance Of My Demon Twin (Rocket Recordings, 2017)

15. Yurei – Night Vision (Adversum, 2012)

16. Jesca Hoop – Memories Are Now (Sub-Pop, 2017)

17. Christine Ott, Tabu (Gizeh Records, 2016)

18. The Veldt – In A Quiet Room (Leonard Skully Records, 2017)

19. Kiss – Dynasty (Casablanca, 1979)

20. Heikki Sarmanto Serious Music Ensemble – The Helsinki Tapes Vol 2 (Svart Records, 2016)

Inevitably, the releases of the year, 2016 (grand finale!)

Before the release of the year, here are some honourable mentions (that are not necessarily less good than the ones I wrote about, but which I didn’t get round to writing about. There will also be omissions that I will probably mention later, when I remember them)

The honourable mentions…

Prophets of Rage – The Party’s Over

Jenny Hval – Blood Bitch

Iggy Pop – Post Pop Depression

De La Soul – …and the Anonymous Nobody…

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – The Skeleton Tree

Shield Patterns – Mirror Breathing

Trees of Eternity – Hour of the Nightingale

A Tribe Called Quest – We Got It From Here…Thank You 4 Your Service…

Kate Carr – I Had Myself a Nuclear Spring

Abbath – Abbath

Jeff Parker – The New Breed

Cate le Bon – Crab Day

Eno – The Ship

and finally – my choice for…

Release of the Year, 2016!

Kristin Hersh – Wyatt At The Coyote Palace (Omnibus Books)

I have written extensively about this album/book both here and for Echoes and Dust so will try not to repeat myself. 2016 was (externally, and I hope personally) a good year for Kristin Hersh. In addition to this long-awaited solo album, she released the excellent Bath White EP with her band 50FOOTWAVE and recently completed a successful solo tour, which I was lucky enough to catch one of the dates of (I wrote about it here). Wyatt… ended up being my album of the year because after months of listening I haven’t got anywhere near wearing it out. It’s a warm, intimate encounter with a fellow human being, a beautiful, mysterious, heartbreaking piece of work that ultimately feels strangely familiar. No other album this year has found a place in my heart in the same way this. It’s great.

Happy New Year & best wishes for 2017!

Play For Today – Current Playlist 25th November 2016

After many delays, another week, another playlist…

1. Kristin Hersh – Wyatt At The Coyote Palace (Omnibus Books, 2016) Review here!

2. Stench Price – Stench Price EP (Transcending Obscurity Records, 2016)

3. Baby Tears – Succubus Slides (Choice Records, 2016)

4. Bethlehem – Bethlehem (Prophecy Productions, 2016)

5. The History of Colour TV – Wreck (Cranes Records / Weird Books, 2016)

6. Lush – Gala (4AD, 1990)

7. A Tree Grows – Wau Wau Water (Rufftone Records, 2016)

8. Kristin Hersh – Sunny Border Blue (4AD, 2001)

9. LL CoolJ – Radio (Def Jam, 1985)

10. Rachel Mason – Das Ram (Cleopatra Records/Practical Records, 2016) Review here!

11. Ela Orleans – Circles of Upper and Lower Hell (Night School Records, 2016)

12. Eric Dolphy – Out To Lunch! (Blue Note, 1964)

13. Wu-Tang Clan – Wu-Tang Forever (BMG, 1997)

14. Paul K – Omertà (2016)

15. Christine Ott, Tabu (Gizeh Records, 2016)

16. The Raspberries – The Raspberries (Capitol Records, 1972)

17. Isasa – Los Días (La Castanya, 2016)

18. Daniel Land – In Love With A Ghost (2016)

19. Miles Davis – Jack Johnson (Columbia, 1971)

20. Matriarch – Revered Unto The Ages (self-release, 2007)

Play For Today – current playlist 27 October 2016

Naturally some crossover with last week’s since my attention span isn’t all that horribly tragic…

1. Kristin Hersh – Wyatt At The Coyote Palace (Omnibus Books, 2016) Review here!

2. ThrOes – This Viper Womb (Aesthetic Death, 2016)

2. Black Angel Drifter – Black Angel Drifter (Bastard Recordings, 2016)

3. Daniel Johnston – The What of Whom (Stress Records, 1982)

3. Rachel Mason – Das Ram (Cleopatra Records/Practical Records, 2016) Review here!

4. Debz– Extended Play EP (Choice Records, 2016) Review here!

5. Suzanne Vega – Lover, Beloved; Songs from an Evening with Carson McCullers (Amenuensis Productions, 2016)

7. Eno – Another Green World (Island, 1975)

8. Jandek – Chair Beside a Window (Corwood Industries, 1982)

9. Public Enemy – Yo! Bum Rush The Show (Def Jam, 1987)

10.Kate Carr – I Had Myself A Nuclear Spring (Rivertones, 2016)

11.Rachel Mason – Gayley Manor Songs (self-release, 2015)

12. Lugubrum, Face Lion Face Oignon (Aphelion Productions, 2011)

13. Charley Patton – The Complete Recordings, 1929 – 1934 (JSP Records, 2008)

14. Esmé Patterson – We Were Wild (Xtra Mile Recordings, 2016)

15. Opeth – Sorceress (Nuclear Blast, 2016)

16. Neil Young – Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (Reprise, 1969)

17. The Mothers of Invention – Absolutely Free (Verve, 1967)

18. Miles Davis – Miles In The Sky (Columbia, 1968)

19. Suicidal Tendencies – Suicidal Tendencies (Frontier, 1983)

20. Absentia Lunae – In Vmbrarvm Imperii Gloria (Serpens Caput Productions, 2006)

Album Review – Kristin Hersh – Wyatt at the Coyote Palace

Kristin Hersh – Wyatt at the Coyote Palace

(Omnibus Press 2CD + hardback book)

I’ve been listening to/reading Kristin Hersh’s new album/book Wyatt At The Coyote Palace (out on the 28th of October from Omnibus Books) for a couple of weeks now, and it just keeps getting better. I can’t remember hearing a more wearily grown-up line than ‘Back when everything was gonna be alright’, and Wyatt… , a double album of mainly acoustic (though not necessarily gentle) songs, is full of complicated adult feelings and the kind of powerfully resonant phrases (musical and lyrical) that have always filled Hersh’s work.

The beautifully-produced hardback book + CD format too, is familiar from some of Hersh’s earlier work, and it’s hard to think of another artist who works so well with the realities of the music industry as it is in 2016. Her work with the non-profit CASH (Coalition of Artists and Stakeholders) and determination to work independently from the mainstream music industry, in collaboration with her fans, as well as her acknowledgement that there is (or should be) something special about the album as a physical object means that albums like this, or Throwing Muses’ Purgatory/Paradise are pleasing works of art as well as collections of songs.

Wyatt At The Coyote Palace is a true solo album; where the artist not only writes and sings all the songs, but even plays all of the instruments (including guitar, cello, horns, upright bass and piano and even some instruments she built herself) as well as using found sounds recorded during her many travels. Like her solo work from ‘94’s Hips and Makers onwards, the album feels not only personal, but intimate; an encounter with another human being’s interior monologue; warm, ironic, tender, obsessive, at times desolate. The subjects of the songs – even when partly elucidated by the sometimes-related anecdotes that make up the book – remain enigmatic, but all the more emotionally charged for being allusive rather than explicit. Which is not to say that the language Hersh uses is at all obscure or flowery; quite the opposite in fact, its compact and sometimes bluntly straightforward quality (‘I’m still fucking fried post-ablutions and plane drain’) makes the words, and the feelings behind them resonate and linger in ways that the blatantly cathartic platitudes of angry or angst-ridden rock rarely do. Readers of Kristin Hersh’s brilliant 2010 memoir, Rat Girl will find that the awkward punk rock teenager who belonged nowhere and everywhere is touchingly still there, much as she was, only buried inside the wiser, more philosophical (“if we watched all moments as carefully as we watch car crashes, we’d never fuck anything up.”) and well-travelled mother of four.

Where sonically, the tone of the album is warm, richly textured and organic, it is emotionally extremely variable (troubled, tired, happy, resigned), but the book by contrast has a humorous, wise and self-aware tone. A dialogue between Hersh and an unnamed interlocutor, it consists of a series of ironically light-hearted anecdotes about the singer’s many brushes with near-death and disaster, interspersed with the song lyrics. The stories are in many cases intimately related to the songs – often seeming to be the incidents that inspired them – but rather than the stories ‘explaining’ the lyrics, often it feels like the songs reveal the emotional depths that the stories, in their wry delivery, often imply, rather than describe. There are also (if one listens to the album first) some revelatory moments in the text which give life to apparent non-sequiturs in the lyrics (‘street puke’s not your fault!’ being one particularly striking example.) The title, as I should probably have mentioned earlier, relates to Hersh’s son Wyatt’s relationship with the surroundings of the recording studio during the time the album was being recorded, adding another layer of intimacy to the enclosed world of the album.

It won’t surprise fans of Hersh’s solo career to find that Wyatt at the Coyote Palace only occasionally sounds like Throwing Muses; mainly in its more dynamic, straightforward moments, as when ‘In Stitches’ switches gear from its opening tense-but-tranquil verse to the forcefully strummed and catchy (but still quite tense) verse/chorus, or the rock-flavoured prowl of single ‘Soma Gone Slapstick’. Mostly, the listener is alone with Kristin Hersh, which is as always a wonderful and fascinating place to be. Wyatt At the Coyote Palace, with its themes of communication and miscommunication, growing up and not growing up, catastrophe, near catastrophe and the essential mundanity of both, is autobiographical, but it’s autobiography as collage, as poetry even; the oft-made comparison with Sylvia Plath has never felt more apt. As Philip Larkin noted about Plath, whose writing he admired almost unwillingly, ‘it’s hard to see how she was ever labelled confessional’ – and like Plath’s poetry, Hersh’s songs convey an emotional charge (not least because of the strength of her expressive voice), but from oblique and fragmented narratives. As music, though, it isn’t fragmented; although many of the tunes are growers rather than immediate in their appeal, the beautifully warm and rich sound makes it an addictive listen which repays close listening. In fact, Wyatt… is an immersive experience; the use of photographs and illustrations in the book and – especially through headphones – the closeness of the music and the use of found sounds and half-heard conversation – feels like life. And when a great artist invites you into their life it would be rude not to meet her half way.

Play For Today – current playlist

It’s been a while, so without further ado or elucidation, here’s some of what’s on the turntable (and equivalents) at present:

Kristin Hersh by Billy O’Connell

1. Kristin Hersh – Wyatt At The Coyote Palace (Omnibus Books, 2016)

2. Jingo de Lunch – Perpetuum Mobile (We Bite Records, 1987)

3. Rachel Mason – Das Ram (Cleopatra Records/Practical Records, 2016)

4. Naia Izumi – Natural Disaster EP (self-release, 2016)

5. Hobbs’ Angel of Death – Heaven Bled (Hell’s Headbangers/High Roller Records, 2016)

6. Suzanne Vega – Lover, Beloved; Songs from an Evening with Carson McCullers (Amenuensis Productions, 2016)

7. Bessie Smith – The Complete Recordings, Vol 1 (Columbia/Legacy)

8. Ghosts of Sailors At Sea – Red Sky Morning (Faded Maps, 2016

9. Dorje – Centred & One EP (Invisible Hands Music, 2016)

10.Drudkh/Grift – Betrayed By The Sun (Nordvis/Season of Mist, 2016)

11.The Mothers of Invention – Burnt Weenie Sandwich (Reprise Records, 1971)

12. Gentlemans Pistols – Hustler’s Row (Nuclear Blast, 2015)

13. Kaada/Patton – Bacteria Cult (Ipecac, 2016)

14. Maki Asakawa – Masi Asakawa (Honest Jon’s, 2016)

15. Nightsatan – Nightsatan and the Loops of Doom (Svart records, 2014)

16. Pilot – From the Album of the Same Name (EMI, 1974)

17. Haar/Ur Draugr – split (ATMF, 2016)

18. Wardruna – Runaljod – Ragnarok (By Norse Music, 2016)

19. Scott Walker – Scott 3 (Phillips, 1969)

20. The Stupid Daikini – Everything is Fine (self-release, 2015)