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

As seems so often to be the case, I am & have been working very slowly, with many distractions, on various relatively substantial bits of writing, but playlists are easy and fun to do, so here’s a sort of roundup of some of the stuff I’ve been listening to so far this summer, which, now that I look at it, makes summer 2017 seem a somewhat bleak and haunted time. Ho hum.

One of the key points of this playlist is that, in an effort to make myself listen to different things rather than the same old stuff, I filled my mp3 player with things I either didn’t know or hadn’t really listened to, with very mixed results. Inevitably, I ended up removing most of the stuff and replacing it with things I definitely like, but some of the things in this list are survivors from the experiment.

Pekko Käppi & K:H:H:L – Matilda (Svart Records)

This is mostly a pretty cool dirty psychedelic rock album by Finland’s foremost player of the bowed lyre, Pekko Käppi and his band, but although I enjoyed it, it mostly washed over me until one track, Hullu Tyttö (‘crazy girl’, or so Google informs me) popped up in a shuffle at a low enough volume that I couldn’t tell that the vocals were in Finnish. A beautifully mournful and soothing bit of rained-on, hungover sounding Americana (I thought maybe something by The Band or, at a push a late Byrds track I didn’t remember had snuck onto my playlist. But it turned out to be Pekko Käppi & co, and in fact, out of the context of heavy psychedelic garage rock his lyre playing (sonically very much like a hardanger fiddle on this song) really shines. The whole album is good, but Hullu Tyttö is by far my favourite track on it.

Staying with Finland (and indeed Svart Records), I’ve been listening to this since the beginning of the year and as I’ve lived with it, it’s gone from being a good album with a couple of great songs to one of the best albums I’ve heard this year:

Ghost World – Ghost World (Svart Records)

Again, an album I like despite the fact that it’s not really my cup of tea. It’s not that I didn’t like grunge the first time around (I liked quite a lot of it early on, especially Babes in Toyland, Mudhoney and Screaming Trees, early Soundgarden plus odd songs by Sebadoh, Afghan Whigs, Buffalo Tom etc), but there are few genres or fashions that I have gone off of so quickly and feel so little nostalgia for. But if there is a category that Ghost World fits into, it’s grunge. And it’s great, if noisy, catchy, adolescent-sounding angsty rock is your thing. It’s not my thing, but I love this anyway; it’s like Dinosaur Jr with a female singer (Liisa, vocals/guitar,) who is utterly fantastic.

Televisio – Televisio (Ektro Records, releases July 14th)

Yet more Finnish music, Televisio’s slightly primitive and clunky electronica is made by the duo I. Larjosto (synths/drums) and Jussi Lehtisalo of Circle (synths) and, in the manner of primitive electronic music since the dawn of time, it has a strangely soulful quality.

https://soundcloud.com/ektrorecords/televisio-kakkonen

Thy Worshipper – Popiół (Introibo ad altare Dei) (reissue, Arachnophobia Records)

From Finland to Poland, Thy Worshiper’s 1996 classic is pretty much everything that haters of mid-late 90s black metal hate; as melodic as it is heavy, replete with acoustic passages, symphonic bits, female vocals etc etc; and it’s great. They may not be as big as Behemoth, or as notorious as Graveland, but Thy Worshiper have great tunes, excellent musicianship and above all, intensely melancholy atmospheres that make this album a perfect showcase for the virtues of grandiose, late-blooming 90s black metal.

Blue Öyster Cult – Spectres (Columbia Records, 1977)

I got the Blue Öyster Cult Complete Columbia Albums box set a few years ago without having to pay for it. At 16 discs, it’s a whole lotta BÖC and it’s fair to say I’ve never really gotten to know it all yet, to say the least. Having the albums on my mp3 player, naturally their songs started to pop up on shuffle all too often, but occasionally in a revelatory kind of way. I always quite liked the band and knew a handful of their songs quite well. But one day the song Fireworks – a supremely catchy and – as is their way – slightly creepy piece of shiny rock that should have been a single surprised me and I decided to check out its album, Spectres in detail. It turned out I already knew the intentionally moronic-but-fun anthem Godzilla, the even more moronic but less fun R.U. Ready 2 Rock and a couple of the other tracks. None were quite as good as Fireworks, but most had some of its baleful charm. Bearing in mind the disclaimer that I like 70s hard rock bands like Black Sabbath and Kiss, this is a brilliantly polished album that combines the intelligence, goofiness, mystery and riffs that gave the BÖC their own distinct aura and charm. It’s a good one.

Wreche – Wreche (Fragile Branch Records)

One of the strangest, but strongest debut albums I’ve heard for a long time, US duo Wreche manage to take the guitars out of black metal (and replace them with a piano), without losing any of the essence of the form. An intense, evocative, disturbing and in its way, desolately beautiful album, perfectly realised.

And that may be enough for now.

This Friday’s weekly musings have a specific subject: the ‘Extended Play’ (EP):

Just when the album as a physical format seemed to be dying out, the (somewhat overstated) vinyl renaissance came along, reiterating the obvious; that songs are great, but sometimes a collection of songs, sequenced in a certain way, is even better. But what of the EP? Of all the available ways of collecting recorded music (apart, of course, from the cassette single/“cassingle”) the EP has always had the least secure place in the pantheon of formats. Actually pre-dating the LP (for practical/technical reasons; it was easier to fit a few songs on a piece of shellac or vinyl with the cutting equipment available), once the long-player became available it inevitably eclipsed the EP in ‘value for money’ terms. That said, early album reviewers often complained about the amount of lesser quality music that padded out LPs – but the ‘extended play’ was nevertheless sidelined, although most major artists continued to release them sporadically.

The virtues of the EP remain obvious though; at their best they are essentially albums without filler (and at a lower price); and indeed throughout the early 90s many indie bands (especially in the shoegaze scene) produced their best, most representative work on EPs. But all this is because a couple of things I’ve heard this week reminded me of the virtues of the format because they exemplify them perfectly:

Dia – Tiny Ocean (Manimal Records)

Tiny Ocean is the debut release by Dia (composer/singer Danielle Birrittella) and it’s a beautifully complete, mature and rich piece of work, based somewhere in the realms of shoegaze, cinematic, baroque pop and folkish singer-songwriterdom, but not quite belonging to any of those genres. Quick summary –

Opening song ‘Covered In Light’ is like a gorgeously extended lush swoon, Danielle’s angelic vocals floating on a velvety cushion of ethereal synth and strings. By contrast ‘Synchronized Swimming’, though no less melodious, is tuneful, percussive and achingly wistful, the musical texture more organic and less unearthly. It’s an outstanding, lovely piece of work and perhaps the most affecting of the songs on the EP. ‘Tiny Ocean’ drifts in on a warm haze of strings and flows peacefully but mournfully, a soothingly downbeat track with a beautifully subtle melody. The waltz-time, ukulele-led ‘Gambling Girl’ strips the sound back before building into full-blown baroque pop with an outstanding vocal performance, while ‘St Paul’ is a short but very sweet folk-tinged lament and the EP (which is very nearly an album) ends on a high with the insistent beat and languorous melody of ‘Big Man’ leaving a warm, tingling silence in its wake.

Tiny Ocean’s perfection is reinforced both by its rich, seamless sound, courtesy of some well-known producers (Joey Waronker, Tim Carr and Frankie Siragusa) and also Danielle Birrittella’s talent for knowing when a mood/tempo change is required. Dia differs in this respect from much dreampop (which it resembles to an extent); its sweetness – at least in EP form – is never overpowering or boring. The richness of sound is necessary with all the layers involved – indeed, it’s impossible to imagine Dia’s music in a rough, demo state, although it’s probably just as lovely – but in the end the sound, wonderful though it is, wouldn’t mean much without the excellent songs to justify it.

Dia Website

Dia on Facebook

Dia on Instagram

A contrast in almost every way is …

Debz – Extended Play (Choice Records)

The self-explanatorily titled debut EP by New York’s Debz is brash, trashy, smart, new wave-influenced snotty lo-fi punk-meets-synth pop and its seven short songs are a peculiar but very potent and refreshing mixture of swagger and vulnerability, dismissive scorn and detached heartbreak.

The more aggressive songs like ‘Plastic Wrap’,‘A Real Romance’ and ‘Lobster Eggs and Maggots’ are minimalist grungy punk rock with great primitive drumming, tons of attitude and Debz’ imperious, slightly robotic singing voice. It’s not just posturing punkiness though; the strident, bleak and alienated “Did I Die” is one of several songs that cut deeper than my introduction might suggest. In fact, there’s a surprising range of mood in the (relatively) more gentle songs, like the self-referential pop culture collage of “Barbizon” and the surprisingly tender and desolate “Love, Love, Love, Love. Love”. The uncomfortable but addictive mix of ebullience and bleakness carries through to the final, very short primitive synth-led track, “Big Time Baby”.

They may be at different ends of the stylistic spectrum, but in its own gaudy, dayglo way, Extended Play is every bit as much a work of art as Tiny Ocean is; abrasive and appealing, it’s a perfectly formed EP and, better still, it’s available on 7” vinyl, which I will be purchasing shortly.

Debz’ website

Debz’ twitter

and that’s all for now!

Tag: primitive

Play For Today – Current Playlist 26th June 2017

Weekly update: the charm of the EP