This will be short. There are so many great tributes online today, written by people who know a lot about Aretha Franklin, or who actually knew her. I am much sadder at her passing than I expected, even given the inevitability of it after the last few days of reports. So anyway, I can’t think of much to say really. The facts; like most people of my age I have been aware of her music in some way or another (radio, films, TV; everywhere) my whole life. At some point in my late teens or early 20s I got two cheap ‘best of’ compilation tapes (‘the 60s’ – with most of her best known hits – and ‘the 70s’, which was a revelation) at which point she became, and has since remained, one of my favourite singers.
I don’t think it’s too much to say that those tapes changed the way I think about music. Music is of course completely subjective; how much you like some singer or some piece of music has little or nothing to do with how ‘good’ it is; but be that as it may, there has never been a better singer than Aretha Franklin, and there never will be either.
beautiful Aretha in the 60s. Haven’t found who the photographer is, but will credit when I do
Stunning return to form for Germany’s ‘dark metal’ overlords.
4. The History of Colour TV – Something Like Eternity (Cranes Records/Weird Books, 2017)
The third album by Berlin indie/shoegaze/noise rock trio The History of Colour TV has some powerfully Sonic Youth-like squalling as well as some really good tunes.
5. Ma Rainey – Black Eye Blues (1930)
Heartbreakingly sad but also funny and rebellious blues performance by one of my favourite blues singers, with brilliant guitar playing by Tampa Red
6. Heikki Sarmanto Serious Music Ensemble – The Helsinki Tapes, Vol 1, 2 & 3 (Svart Records)
Great, previously unreleased live recordings from the Finnish jazz scene. I was initially a bit disappointed when a singer appeared on some of the recordings, but in fact ‘The Pawn‘ from Vol 2 (featuring Maija Hapuoja) is a moody ‘Riders on the Storm‘-esque masterpiece.
7. Daniel Land – In Love With A Ghost (2016)
Much as I hate the term ‘dream pop’, it does suit a lot of the lovely, gently melancholy music on this album
Cool and unusual hip hop/trap type stuff, she has a style that is not quite like anything else (disclaimer – that I know of)
9. Isasa – Los Días (La Castanya, 2016)
The second album by Spanish guitarist Isasa has a mellow, slightly hungover charm, it’s spare, basic sound, accentuating his beautiful guitar playing and the atmospheric power of the tunes.
10. Tom Waits – Nighthawks At The Diner (Asylum, 1976)
One of my favourite Tom Waits albums, a funny, boozy and cheerfully melancholy live album (albeit recorded in somewhat contrived surroundings) I hadn’t listened to it for ages but I love it just as much as always.
11. 11Paranoias – Reliquary For A Dreamed Of World (Ritual Productions, 2016)
Forbiddingly sludgy and somewhat psychedelic doom with, crucially, great songwriting to make it more than just a cool sound – an addictive album.
12. Effie – Pressure (2016)
I was sent the promo of this single in the spring and just never got around to listening to it because I assumed it wouldn’t be my cup of tea; and it isn’t really. But it’s pretty good r’n’b/pop really, and she’s got a very cool voice.
13. Mithras – On Strange Loops (Willowtip Records, 2016)
Supercharged progressive death metal, maybe their finest album to date
14. The Fall – Grotesque (After The Gramme) (Rough Trade, 1980)
Maybe my favourite Fall album (definitely one of my favourites; so many great tunes, best of all ‘Gramme Friday‘, ‘Impression of J. Temperance‘, ‘Container Drivers’ – actually they are nearly all great.
15. The Staple Singers – Will The Circle Be Unbroken (Buddha Records, 1969)
Re-release of some of the family’s early gospel recordings, incredibly soulful and atmospheric.
Rachel Mason has done so much work in so many fields (performance art/non-performance art/filmmaking/music/etc/etc – check out her website for a cross-section) that it’s easy to immerse oneself in her work. In music alone she has amassed a vast and varied discography within just a few years.
Where her earlier albums like the couldn’t-be-more-my-cup-of-tea work of towering genius Gayley Manor Songs(2015) were simple, home-made, stark, and direct and the conceptual The Lives of Hamilton Fish (also a film) was sprawling and dramatic, Das Ram is a full-blown modern pop-rock album, full of catchy songs with a flamboyant, very New York flavour, reminiscent at times of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Talking Heads or even (at its most pop) Lady Gaga.
photo by Chris Carlone
Opening track ‘Roses’ launches the album with a dramatic, lilting and atmospheric intro before kicking into gear with new wave-ish guitars and a rock/dance beat. It’s catchy and full of pop hooks, but Mason’s excellent vocal perfectly delivers the troubled, even mournful lyric (‘I sometimes think that life is evil/it’s just something that fills me with dread’) that uses the rose as a symbol not only of beauty and romance, but also of the pain and transience of life. As a lyric, it’s perfectly judged; as densely layered as poetry, while as simple and direct as the best pop music. ‘Heart Explodes’ by contrast feels less spontaneous, carrying on with the metaphysical preoccupations in a more theatrical, almost Kate Bush-like way, Mason’s expressive voice(s) bringing the song to a chorus that is a peculiar crescendo made from conventional romantic language, genuine wonder, exultation and distress.
Mason’s voice is again at its most powerful on the less-straightforwardly-satisfying ‘Sandstorm’ on which she winds together enigmatic images of miscommunication (‘I believe in lies about the world’) with escalating intensity over a prowling skeletal electronic funk that wouldn’t be out of place on a Grace Jones record, building tension but never quite releasing it. For a sense of release, the strutting electro-pop/funk cabaret fantasy of single ‘Tigers In The Dark’ follows; a kind of Talking Heads/Franz Ferdinand/Lady Gaga hybrid that, unlike her earlier folk/acoustic work feels 100% the work of a performance artist; the song is great, but the delivery, the theatricality is everything. As with Bowie (among others), the artificiality expresses the soul of the performer/character far more than something more apparently earnest would.
By comparison, the pulsating electro-pop of ‘Marry Me’ feels more like a vehicle for its complicated, beautifully detailed lyric and less an embodiment of it, although the contrast between the long, passing-of-time-obsessed verses and the simple, plaintive chorus (‘marry me/carry me over the hearth where a lost soul can hide’) grows more poignant as the song wends towards its end. A highlight of the album, it makes up in naked vulnerability what it loses to ‘Tigers…’ in glitzy disco-ness. ‘Queen Bee’ is one of the more penetrable lyrics on the album, using the image of the queen bee as a straightforward metaphor for loneliness, alienation and dependency (‘those friends were never real friends’) and the music captures the lyric in its stolid, regimented plod, with some very effective buzzing textures to reinforce the central image and some folk-inflected singing from Mason.
For a few dissonant seconds, ‘Cancer’ seems set to be the album’s darkest track, but then it unexpectedly breaks into a kind of rockabilly trot, albeit one spattered with peculiar squelches, squeaks and sound effects. Although not as grim as expected, it’s not the easiest-on-the-ear song on the album, sounding at times like two or three songs being played at once, and its chant-like vocal and slightly atonal chorus make it one of the more nerve-jangling songs in her catalogue.
Das Ram ends on a relatively more harmonious, if abrupt note with the angular funk verse/sweeping chorus of ‘Heaven’, which has a kind of early 80s, Ippu-do feel, before ending suddenly after the somewhat expected hedonistic refrain of ‘you and I are getting high.’
photo by Kerwin Williamson
Taken as a whole, Das Ram, is a bold, exciting and accessible album, utterly different from the acoustic/folk rock textures of Mason’s earlier works like Hamilton Fish…, Turtles or indeed the raw, homemade quality of Gayley Manor Songs. In fact it’s not like any Rachel Mason album I’ve heard (though I haven’t heard them all). Only a handful of artists have convincingly made a gesamstkunstwerk in the idiom of popular music without falling into the trap of overblown pretension – and most of those have spread from the music world outwards. With the confident, powerful Das Ram, Rachel Mason has become one of an even more select group – an artist who has learned to express herself with equal authority in whatever medium she chooses – and who seems to have fun doing it.
Heartbreakingly sad but also funny and rebellious blues performance by one of my favourite blues singers, with brilliant guitar playing by Tampa Red
