Music musing
I bought the most recent Beck album a few months back. It’s called The Information. At the time, I played it once, thought “ooh, that sounds quite good”, and then forgot all about it (I was obsessively relistening to Dexy’s Midnight Runners at the time, and wondering how a band that good manage to be pigeon-holed as a one-hit novelty act by half the people I meet). Then a couple of days ago my media-player shuffled Strange Apparition to the top of the deck. It’s the fourth track on The Information, and within a couple of bars it’s clearly a Beck track. But at the same time it’s also the best track to get left off Beggar’s Banquet. Just like the song Peaches and Cream (on the Midnite Vultures album) where Beck manages to sound exactly like Beck but also like Prince in 1989, Strange Apparition manages to combine the very best idiosyncrasies of two entirely different sounds.
I do like it when musicians can incorporate their influences without drowning in them. Go Beck! Oh, and I’m going to nominate Nausea (off The Information) as the best use of bass in the past 12 months.
Speaking of influences though… for the past three or four years, almost every time I heard a new guitar band I’ve been forced to say “hmmm… it’s a bit limp really… I mean, it’s Talking Heads without Byrne‘s intelligence or the kick-ass rhythm section, right?” That’s what modern guitar music sounds like. And while I got the occasional nod of agreement, it seemed to be just me who thought this way. Because — let’s face it — people are still buying the shoddy imitations rather than getting hold of the recently reissued originals and hearing it how it should be done.
Yeah, yeah, maybe it’s just me getting old. But y’know, I don’t think that’s it… the very thing that annoys me about the recent resurgence in guitar music is precisely how old and tired it sounds.
A few days ago however, I heard a radio interview with Brian Eno and discovered that at least I’m not alone in thinking that Arctic Snow Monkey Patrol are to Talking Heads what Oasis are to The Beatles. He seemed quite freaked out by the fact that thirty years after he’d helped create a particular guitar sound, half the new guitar bands in the charts seem to be recycling it really badly. Apparently he’s currently producing the new Coldplay album. The interviewer asked what it would sound like… “Not like Talking Heads. And not like Coldplay either. That’s for sure.”
I don’t like Coldplay. But I’ll probably give their next album a listen out of interest.
Also, can someone please tell me why only about twelve people seem to have heard of The Legendary Pink Dots? The height from which they shit on most modern music can only be measured in fathoms. Or leagues. Some olde worlde hefty unit of measurement anyway. A unit that means business.
The Pink Dots are making some of the most inventive music currently being recorded. OK, granted, they do have a tendency towards the occasional bit of inaccessible psychedelic freakout. But that’s just one element of an almost absurdly eclectic sound. The most recent album, Your Children Placate You from Premature Graves, opens with two minutes of sinister piano over the sound of distant children at play… interrupted briefly by a psychoanalytic voice asking whether or not “you suffer nightmares” and if so, whether you’d like to describe them? It then shifts gear into what could best be described as a hymn. A really really fucked up hymn set against a wall of discordant saxophones. But a hymn nonetheless.
It’s The Legendary Pink Dots at their best. You know how I was saying that so many modern bands sound so very similar? How they all seem vaguely reminiscent of Talking Heads with all the best bits removed? One of the truly great thing about the Pink Dots is that there’s none of that. When you buy a Legendary Pink Dots album you’re picking up something that sounds like nothing else in your record collection. You need to leave music entirely, and head on over into literature — to Philip K. Dick — to find another “lyricist” like Edward ka-Spel. And the music seems to emerge from dark post-apocalyptic cathedrals… it’s rich and diverse, and it’s held together by an atmosphere more than a musical style.
And nobody else does saxophones like the Legendary Pink Dots. Or spooky samples.
Still on a musical theme… well somewhat… I’ve been relistening to some of the Radio Savage Houndy Beasty cds recently. RSHB was a Leeds Student Radio project run by some friends of mine (two of them have blogs incidentally… Dreamflesh and Bristling Badger) which inhabited the same soundscape as Chris Morris’ Bluejam a couple of years before he got there. And by and large, RSHB was funnier and had better monged soundscapes. Sometimes it was the deep-fried freakouts live from the studio that made the show, and sometimes it was the one-off pre-constructed pieces. This download page has a few of the best moments, while the CDs can be purchased for a stupidly low price on this page.
I really couldn’t pick out one single download as representative of what you’ll hear on RSHB. I’ll instead point you towards a couple of my own personal favourites. For anyone familiar with the classic Bauhaus track Bela Lugosi’s Dead (and thought staring at the floor, putting your hands into the pockets of your long black coat and shifting awkwardly from side to side was dancing), you really need to hear RSHB’s version… Bela Lugosi’s Dad (4.4MB mp3). Or perhaps you’d like to sample the delights of Meat (5MB mp3)? And if that all got a bit intense (as it has a tendency to do) then relax and drift off to the beautiful ambience of Rainy Porch Horse Blues (6MB mp3). Mr. Eno himself would be proud.
Oh, and if you’re In The Mood (3.2MB mp3) for some gratuitous swearing, then you really can’t go wrong with RSHB.
Just on The Information, it’s got to be Think I’m In Love for me. It’s the Glass Onion guitars that do it.
May 5th, 2007 | 8:01am
by Justin
I’m old enough to have bought MSABAF when it came out (not to mention Real Life, Unknown Pleasures and Entertainment!), so I can echo the rant about these young people and their fancy so-called modern music, although it seems slightly off-target to my ears – surely it’s the Kaiser Chiefs/Editors/Maximo Park/Futureheads/etc who are ripping off Talking Heads and doing it badly, not Coldplay/Snow Patrol/Athlete/etc? Unless you think they’re all ripping off the slow tracks on Fear of Music, which I suppose is possible. And I wouldn’t put Arctic Monkeys in either group – Alex Turner’s not a bad writer.
I actually never got round to buying The Information, which makes me feel very old and dull. I’ll catch up with it some time. The thing with the stickers didn’t appeal to me, I have to say.
Where’s that Love review then?
May 5th, 2007 | 10:21am
by Phil
Strange Apparition’s great, yep.
As for RSHB’s ‘Meat’, I do have to make sure I’m not near any sharp drops whenever I listen to that again. It invariably cripples me with laughter and sends me physically falling all over the place. Richard says he played it at a recent Nurse With Wound thing at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, which seems wonderfully fitting.
May 5th, 2007 | 3:28pm
by Gyrus
You’re right Phil. I’m being unfair on the Arctic Snow Monkey Patrol. I just like the way their names mash up and, along with Coldplay, they do — to me at least — fall into that other trend in modern guitar music that irritates me… the band that sounds like every other band that sounds like that. It’s all just so bloody limp and unenthusiastic to my ears.
Which isn’t to say that great music isn’t being made today. It is. And if people listen to it, then that’s great. But if someone is listening to a ball-less soul-less Talking Heads-lite, I want to grab them by the lapels, give them a gram of speed and a copy of MSABAF, and tell them to listen to it on the way to an Alec Empire gig.
Let’s see them listen to the Kaiser fricking Chiefs after that!
May 7th, 2007 | 12:16am
by Jim
Justin, the whole album is excellent. Definitely up there with the best things he’s done. And as I say, I really love the way he can incorporate his influences yet still remain original. Nobody did that like Prince did it… it was only years after getting into Prince that I listened to a lot of James Brown, Parliament and Sly & The Family Stone and realised that Prince did it at all! But Beck is definitely cut from the same wood.
I’m trying to imagine “Meat” played over huge speakers in a large auditorium, Gyrus. I would dearly loved to have been there. “Nurse With Wound” at Queen Elizabeth Hall? That’d be a great venue for Steven Stapleton. I saw a live performance of Music For Airports there, within a couple of weeks of “An Evening with John Peel and Digital Hardcore”. The most hectic and the most chill gigs of the decade, and the venue was weirdly appropriate for both.
I’ll never forget Alec Empire — clearly inspired by the incongruity of the venue — inciting a massive stage invasion and then, realising that it was John Peel’s birthday bash, apologetically asking everyone to climb down from the stage as “we don’t want to get John Peel into any trouble”.
The first act of the night was Christoph De Babalon, and he spent half an hour making a noise that sounded like someone tuning-up jet engines. Now that’s hardcore.
May 7th, 2007 | 12:30am
by Jim
There was a squat party in Utrecht with an anti-vegan theme. A dimly red-lit hallway was draped with strings of sausages and had Meat on repeat play, all night.
i recently relistened to some RSHB for the first time in yonks, the 2001: A Spaced Oddyssey album. Way better than I remember it. Little Donkey is fuckin great, really beautiful and yet totally twisted at the same time. flight Instructions is killer too, had me helpless with lughter and yet mindstretchy amazed at the same time.
May 7th, 2007 | 9:58pm
by merrick