Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 63 / the alternative music tabloid
Karen O They Don’t Love You Like I Love You
Run The Jewels Arthur Russell Virginia Wing Ariel Pink Weyes Blood Alan McGee
contents
welcome
Ariel Pink – 12 ALAN MCGEE – 16 ARTHUR RUSSELL – 18 WEYES BLOOD – 22 RUN THE JEWELS – 24 VIRGINIA WING – 26 KAREN O – 28
Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 63 / the alternatIVe musIc tabloId
Karen O They Don’t Love You Like I Love You
Run The Jewels Arthur Russell Virginia Wing Ariel Pink Weyes Blood Alan McGee
c o v er Ph o t o g r a phy G em h a r r i s
You know you’re getting old when you start to not just feel nostalgic, but revel in it, which makes me something like 110. It’s not the healthiest state of mind to be in, as Karen O reminded me this month, although I suspect it’s something that subsides the further you move away from the wrong side of 30. At 32, I certainly feel less nostalgic than I did when I was 28 or 29. It’s a cruel side effect of music – as songs soundtrack our first everything, it all seems so romantic at the time; nobody ever tells you that those same songs will forever remind you that that was then, and now you’re old. The key is to enjoy those triggers when they occur, but not chase them. Karen O, I was surprised to hear, is not one for nostalgia, despite what her debut solo album might so patently suggest. ‘Crush Songs’ – released last month via Julian Casablancas’ Cult Records – is more than a record about the past; it’s a record of the past, recorded 8 years ago, as Yeah Yeah Yeahs toured their second album, ‘Show Your Bones’. O was 27 at the time, distracted by boys and enjoying the adrenalin of falling hard, “in search for the one.” Considering she’s now fond ‘the one’ and has been happily married for two years, it doesn’t seem like the actions of “a future person”, to release into the world ‘Crush Songs’s’ 15 highly personal tracks, which remain in their original, delicate state – scratchy home demos of voice and acoustic guitar. It’s something I wanted to ask O about when she came to London to play two small shows in support of the record. And what of releasing these songs as they are – shouldn’t Karen O’s debut solo album be a high-kicking indie pop crossover, with high production value, a slick marketing build up and a steady run of flamboyant theatre shows? You’d have thought so, although I suspect expectation is a little too geared towards the past for Karen Lee Orzolek. Stuart Stubbs
Co ntact
Contr ib u tor s
A dve r tising
i n fo@lou dandq u ie t.com
Amy P e ttif e r , au stin l a ike , Chr is Watke ys, daisy j o ne s, dav id zammitt, Danie l D y l a n-W r a y, dan ke ndall, Danny Cante r , Elinor Jone s, Edg ar Sm ith, Fr ankie Nazar do, jack do he r ty , JAMES f . Thom pson, jame s we st, Janine Bu llman, je nna fo x to n, joe g og g ins, josh su nth, le e b u llman, Gab r ie l G r e e n, Ge m har r is, Mandy Dr a ke , Nathan We stle y, Owe n Richa r ds, P hil Shar p, Re e f Y ou nis, Sam cor nf or th, samu el ba l l a r d, Sam Walton, T im Cochr a ne , thomas may, tom f e nw ick
a dve r tise @l o uda ndquie t.co m
Lo ud And Qu ie T PO Box 67915 Lo ndon NW 1W 8TH Ed itor - Stu ar t S tu b b s Art Dir e ctor - Le e Be lche r Sub Editor - Ale x Wilshir e fi l m e ditor - IAN ROEBUCK
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T his M o nth L &Q L o ve s a nne tte l e e , be n ha r r is, C a r o l ine B e a she l , ha nna h go ul d, l iz l a gno , l o u go o dl iffe , l ucy hur st, m a tthe w ingha m
The vie ws ex pressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessari ly reflect the opinions of the magazine or its staff. All rights reserved 2014 Loud And Quiet LTD. ISSN 2049-9892 Printed by S harman & Com pany LTD . Distributed by loud and quiet LTD. & forte
THE BEGINNING
Yorke’s Notes The month’s hidden headlines, revised / Wu-Tang are continuing on their quest to release music on nonconventional formats, announcing that new record ‘A Better Tomorrow’ will initially be available on a preloaded portable Bluetooth speaker. Made by Boombotix, 3000 speakers have been made, costing $80 each. www.wutangclan.com You can now read Loud And Quiet via a new iOS app from issuu, making for a sharper experience on iPad and iPhone. www.issuu.com
Try this at home Make Me a Belieber: Peter Yeung’s 7-day diet of this guy / Why I elected to force-feed my ears with Justin Bieber for a week: despite having never listened to a whole Bieber track (the diaphanous, unofficial YouTube version of his ‘U Smile’, 800% slower, aside), I retain an unhealthy dislike for the teen titan from the Lilliputian town of Stratford in Ontario, Canada. As do the quarter of a million Americans who signed an online petition earlier this year, requesting that Bieber be deported. But why? This 20-year-old boy – privy to 75 million facebook fans and more Twitter followers than Barack Obama and David Cameron combined – is in many ways a quintessential example of the American dream: the self-made man. He was the son of two very poor teenagers: JB’s mother, Pattie Mallette, was an alcoholic high-school dropout who experimented with LSD, while his father, Jeremy Jack Bieber, abandoned the family and went on to pursue a career as a tattooed martial arts fighter called LordRauhl. Friends and family had encouraged Mallette (a devout Christian) to abort the child, but she resisted, and by the age of five, her multitalented son could already play the drums. At 13, Bieber gained attention busking – with enviable projection, and astounding whininess – when trying to earn enough money to visit DisneyWorld. Soon he was spotted online by future manager, Scooter Braun, singing an occasionally soulful, yet sickeningly saccharine cover of Ne-Yo’s ironicallytitled ‘So Sick’ at a local talent show. A bidding war eventually ensued between Usher and Justin Timberlake, and as a YouTube comment on the video puts it: “And so, cancer was born.”
Since then the silky-haired swagster has put out three studio albums, been a part of twenty-six singles, and released twenty-four unfailingly excruciating music videos. His 2010 debut ‘My World 2.0’ is pipsqueak, production-line tedium, the follow-up, a Christmas album called ‘Under the Mistletoe’ (2011) continues the insipid, spinelessness, which brings out my inner, misanthropic scrooge. ‘Believe’ (2012) is mawkish, Justin Timberlake-aping noise, made to placate Bieber’s millions of lachrymal fangirls, while last year’s output, ‘Journals’, was received with collective apathy, failing to break the UK’s Top 40. I must admit that during my week I didn’t listen to Bieber’s entire back catalogue – I have boundaries – but there are also limits on how much his vacuous melodies could infuriate me. Admittedly, his flaws are extensive: he’s a wealthy, white R&B singer; he greeted the President by saying “What up, my dude?”; he published an autobiography at the age of 16; he has a gargantuan, smarmy ego; he once observed that Anne Frank would probably have been a Belieber.The examples continue ad nauseum. Consequently, some act as though Bieber Fever is as threatening to humanity as Ebola. But the teen idol is no more repugnant than the system that has spouted him, and I have managed to avoid his music up until now with ease. It is late capitalism that we should instead direct our vitriol towards, rather than its product. So, in that sense – also noting the terrible, swarming power of his innumerable fans against any detractors – I can tentatively declare: Ich bin ein Belieber.
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Kickstarter is a wonderful thing, that this month raised $45,100 for El-P to remix the new Run The Jewels album exclusively using the sounds of cats meowing. Geoff Barrow, Zola Jesus and others will help bring the ridiculous ‘Meow The Jewels’ to life, which started out as a joke pre-order package for El-P’s and Killer Mike’s new album ‘RTJ2’. www.runthejewels.net Kim Gordon will publish her autobiography on 24 February 2015. Titled Girl In A Band, the book reportedly documents Gordon’s life in art and SonicYouth, from childhood to present day, including the breakdown of her marriage to Thurston Moore in 2011. www.harpercollins.com Dirty Beaches, the solo project of Alex Zhang Hungtai, is over. Hungtai announced the end of DB via Twitter, just 7 days before the release of his sixth album, the completely instrumental ‘Stateless’. He went on to say that new music would follow in 2015, under a different name. www.dirtybeaches.blogspot.co.uk Also on the funeral pyre this month, Crystal Castles are over since Alice Glass walked away from the group, Klaxons are looking done, stating that their current tour will be their last, and even the invincible Beady Eye have called it day. Please, no tears, it’s not that funny. Dom Yorke
books + second life
Art Rock Reef Younis investigates what rock stars do next No.5: The inverted case of Neil Buchanan / the £5,000 prize in the process.Two albums quickly follow – ‘Red White and Slightly Blue’ in 1978, the self-titled ‘Marseille’ in 1979 – as do tours supporting the likes of Judas Priest, Nazareth, and Whitesnake. The world is at the young guitarist’s feet: Marseille are sharing press inches with Iron Maiden and a US tour beckons. But in 1980, Marseille’s management company, Mountain Records, dissolved and left the band with no deal, money or equipment. Buchanan left as a result but got a break into television after meeting a producer of kid’sTV programme Saturday Banana when Marseille played the show. A decade of various presenter jobs gradually built up to the crucial launch of Art Attack in 1990 and he’s never looked back since. Much. In 2010, Marseille announced they were reforming and ready to take advantage of a “whole new generation of rockers” inspired by Art Attack’s international audience. For a few years, it meant that you could have found Neil soloing away in his Weller haircut, vest, and black choker in the back room of a North West pub. It’s not his most edifying image – it’s a long way from bespoke £700 jumpers – but when you’ve sold the rights to a kids’ TV show for £14 million, let’s face it, he probably doesn’t give a fuck.
Whether you grew up watching Tony Hart, Rolf Harris, or even the late Mark Speight, it seems written (somewhere) that everyone has a children’s TV artist they can fondly, or not so fondly, reference. Aside from catching bits of Tony’s reserved patience – and Morph’s witty repartee – Rolf’s Animal Hospital (and court) appearances, and Mark’s sad tabloid demise, though, for many of us of a certain age, Neil Buchanan will always be the true afterschool Artila the Hun. With his groovy, wacky creations, Buchanan made Art Attack an institution; after all, how many kids’ TV presenters could convince the Bank of England to lend them £250,000 to create a massive version of the Queen’s face from £10 notes, inspire a deranged few to believe he’s Banksy, or instigate the level of NSFW Art Attack episode edits that inevitably end with a gallery of cartoon cock and balls? Only one, decked out in a customised £700 red jumper, apparently. Yet it all could have been very different… It’s October 31, 1977 and 16 year old Neil Buchanan is on an early path to rock stardom. His band, Marseille, have just been crowned winners of the ‘UK Battle of the Bands’ by Queen’s Brian May and Roger Taylor at Wembley Arena, scooping
by j anine & L ee bullman
Perfidia by James Ellroy
Springfield Road by Salena Godden
Random house
Unbound
James Ellroy, “the Demon Dog of American literature”, as he has become known, has decided with his latest book to take us back to where it all began. Perfidia serves as a prequel to pretty much every novel Ellroy has ever written – and especially his ‘LA Quartet’ series. In it we meet characters already familiar through earlier novels like The Black Dahlia (1987) and watch them form as we follow them through the tangled web at the underbelly of recent American history. As always with Ellroy – delivered in his own relentlessly pessimistic style – the focus is on Los Angeles, on the dark side of the Hollywood dream factory and Perfidia proves once again that there is no finer noir writer alive.
Salena Godden (also of London-based ska-punkbreakbeat duo SaltPeter) follows up her recent poetry anthology (Fishing In The Aftermath Poems 1994-2014 – Burning Eye Books) with a lyrical and witty memoir painting a portrait of the artist as a young girl. Springfield Road tells the wide-eyed tale of Godden’s childhood as the daughter of a jazz musician and a go-go dancer set against the lovingly rendered backdrop of 1970s Hastings, England. Springfield Road’s prose wavers effortlessly throughout, from tender poignancy to raw, gritty realism and this lovely book serves to remind us that however much the world has changed in the last forty years, in many ways it is still exactly the same.
loudandquiet.com
The Establishment. And how they get away with it. by Owen Jones
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Allen Lane / Penguin.
They have more money than you, they went to better schools and universities than you and they live in nicer houses. They demonise the poor while guarding the rich and in The Establishment, Owen Jones (author of Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class) exposes the very real threat that they pose to democracy. Media moguls, corporate CEOs, bankers and politicians are shown up for the grubby shills they are in Jones’ piercing and insightful appraisal of the structures that hold us all firmly in our place. Which all makes The Establishment feels like an important and timely book, impossible to read without wanting to kick over the statues and start all over again.
getting to know you
Steve Ignorant While Crass were doing more than their bit for politicised punk music in the late 70s and early 80s, few would have thought their vitriolic singer capable of the acoustic music he’s now making with new band Slice Of Life, who release their contemplative debut album ‘Love And A Lamp-post’ this month / The thing you’d rescue from a burning building Either people or animals.
The best piece of advice you’ve ever been given “If you’re drinking and driving make sure you’ve got a car”
What talent do you wish you had? Drive a car. Your Biggest Fear That the only pub in my village closes down.
what is the most overrated thing in the world? “Champagne”
What’s your biggest turn-off? Arrogance.
Your pet hate CD/DVD plastic packaging because it’s impossible to remove the discs without putting your fingers all over it. If you could only eat one food forever, it would be… Chips.
The worst date you’ve been on I can’t say I’ve ever had a bad date, but once I was asked by a friend to meet a bloke who wanted to interview me about Crass and he turned out to be a complete nutter Your hidden talent Cracking my knuckles.
Your guilty pleasure Watching reruns of On The Buses.
The best book in the world is... Kes by Barry Haines.
The celebrity that pisses you off most even though you’ve never met them Bono.
The worst present you’ve received An Action Man figure that wasn’t the real Action Man but the inferior one that had a squashy head. The film you can quote the most of Withnail And I. Favourite place in the world Sea Palling, Norfolk. Your style icon Harold Steptoe.
The worst job you’ve had Collecting broken photocopy machines accompanied by a diabetic who refused to take his medication.
The characteristic you most like about yourself My ability to listen to other people. Your favourite item of clothing My hat.
Your favourite word Godverdomme, which is Dutch for god damn it.
Your biggest disappointment Seeing the Sex Pistols at Hammersmith. I don’t think it was their fault, it was just one of those gigs that we all have where it just don’t do it.
Who would play you in a film of your life? A very young Tom Courteney (Billy Liar).
The one song you wished you had written ‘ALFIE’ by Burt Bacharach
What would you change about your physical appearance? My wrists, they are too thin to wear a watch. What is success to you? Being able to eat vegetarian food in pubs and restaurants. What would you tell your 15-year-old self? Take it easy but take it.
The most famous person you’ve met Björk
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Tell Me About It
Ariel Pink Last month, Ariel Marcus Rosenberg made indie headlines when comments he made about Madonna led label mate Grimes to accuse him of continuing misogyny. David Zammitt spoke with the anti-pop outsider to give him a right to reply, and also discuss his eccentric new album ‘pom pom’, being a people person and not believing everything you read Photography: nathaniel wood / writer: david zammitt
Interviewing Ariel Pink can be a testing experience. Every sentence seems to twist and turn down an unforeseen wormhole; every initially measured response seems to morph into a rant as he pulls back his arrows and aims them at his many gripes. Governments, the press, Grimes – even the writer of this very article – all come in for criticism at the hands of Mr Pink. But just when I’m ready to hold my hands up and admit to being utterly and helplessly lost in the middle of one of his many diatribes, he’ll yank himself back from the edge and tie his verbose ramble right back to the question, giving the distinct impression that, despite pushing to the outer reaches of relevance, this is a character who knows exactly what he likes, what he isn’t so fond of, and what he wants to say. When it comes to engaging with yet another music journalist, he is in turn prickly (“Just because you guys are bitter and you don’t fucking get out of the house enough.”) and disarmingly vulnerable (“Put me in the best light.”). Consistently energetic, however, it is to his credit that he comes across as infinitely passionate regardless of the topic. Apart from his hair care regime, which, sadly, he is quick to dismiss as a frivolous area for discussion. No matter; it’s all symptomatic of the bundle of contradictions that find themselves bound up in the mind of Ariel Marcus Rosenberg. When he isn’t addressing all of the noise around his music, Pink seems much more at ease. The recent spat with Grimes and the resultant accusations of misogyny, that hypothetical Madonna collaboration, not to mention that recent band split and the lawsuit it precipitated are all just part of a growing canon of issues he finds himself batting off. And while he often doesn’t appear to want to do
himself any favours, when he speaks about his music he seems to become unburdened. “We made a beautiful thing,” he says of the upcoming madcap opus ‘pom pom’, a collection which he has described as the first truly solo Ariel Pink album. It seems to remind him of why he started making music in the first place; before Animal Collective ‘discovered’ him and threw his outsider pop out into the world, when the sounds he made in his bedroom were to be found only on a couple of coverless CD-Rs. “People love music,” he enthuses. “It’s a labour of love, so why not do it?” “Making music is a lot like dealing with life.”
You sort of just do it. I approach music like I approach everything in my life. I see something that’s scary in front of me, or something daunting, and I attack it way before I know what I’m doing. Essentially, you just get into it and you say what you mean and you say what you feel. You play the music as you feel it. I just go with my gut and I don’t think about it too much. And then things get locked into a record and then you can refer back to it and people can enjoy certain things that are sealed for reference. And then you can relive these moments, if they’re good enough, over and over again. And they take on this quality of having been there forever in this weird way.
was the start. It started with one person, it started with two people, it started with a classroom, or a job, and then I started meeting other people and started to interact with individuals and the world at large and strangers. And basically, you know… I don’t know who my fuckin’ audience is. They’re all still strangers to me. I’m not asking to hear any kind of feedback about what people feel when they experience my music. I have no idea if it’s really happening. It may as well not be happening because it’s not happening in front of me 99.99999999% of the time. 99% of what you’re going to hear about what I’m doing is not true. I interact with the world of Twitter, and the world of interviews and people and fans in a very, very voyeuristic way. I essentially pretend like it’s not there. It’s almost like wishful thinking. If I were to think it was there I might get stage fright or something. I might actually start to get self-conscious or something like that but I really don’t think that I’m on everybody’s mind like that. I don’t think that at all. I’m one of many distractions. There are so many distractions and there’s lots of people who are vying for your attention a lot more than I am, that’s for sure. Even people that are peddling my name as the distraction de jour, they have more vested interest in distracting you with me than I do.
“I came from the mud.”
“I always felt way too famous for my own good, even when I was nobody”
I came from being unknown in my bedroom and there’s only one way, and that’s up. You can’t get more unknown than that. I’ll always be known to my parents but… I did leave my parents’ house eventually and that was a good thing probably. And that
It was always a matter of tempering down that instinct to be the centre of the universe. Obviously, that’s not a healthy thing to think about. It’s a narcissistic thing. It’s a defence mechanism and we all have it to a certain degree because we all like to
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think that we have souls and we have a unique place in the universe because we’re comforting the baby in us. We need to be individuals. We can’t be just clones that are just bumbling about without a rudder. We sort of find these special things in ourselves and these are things that were definitely cultivated in me from a young age. I felt like I was just bred to be an artist. I think that was almost a mistake. It was a freakish thing. ‘Oh, he’s good at art,’ and then it backfires and it’s like, ‘Oh shit. He’s an artist now.’ I think that’s the kind of thing that I became acutely aware of as a sensitive Cancerian. I kind of grew up thinking that I was an artist and then at a certain point I was like, ‘That’s bullshit.’ Everybody wants to think that they’re an artist because it keeps them poor and it keeps them happy not being a piece of shit, consoling themselves. It’s starving artist syndrome. So basically I ditched that art mentality and I went for something that I really believed and loved, which was music. And music was a much more pedestrian pursuit. You could be a musician and be the dude. “The world isn’t fair and you just have to be a little bit more of an asshole and own it”
I basically was trying to get everybody that I could to be on the record, being open to integrate anybody at any given moment. I just basically wanted to make sure that everybody didn’t know what their place was. That was my key. As opposed to the band dynamic blah blah blah. That went kaput with the lawsuit that I had, and I’m not going to go into that but basically I had to fire everybody and then start from scratch. And of course I’m not any less vulnerable to a lawsuit or anything like
Tell Me About It
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Tell Me About It
that’s good for the world, and making people happy and that kind of stuff. That’s really what we should be always focused on. We should put our immediate families and all that stuff first. We need to sort that stuff out before we get all wrapped up in whether Woody Allen is a rapist or not. “I stick with what I know”
It’s my ears and my intuition and my commitment to the first idea that I had about it. In that sense, I never really progress. You’ll never see me incorporating rap any time soon or making any real strides in any stylistic futuristic direction. It’s just melodies and it’s beats and it’s grooves. This is my little formula. It’s not too dissonant. It’s just melodic movements and I’ve got all these little parts, thousands of little parts, that can be connected at random like Legos and made, in threes and fours like DNA, I throw them into this mesh pot. They’re all pretty interchangeable. They’re just building blocks that you sort of start from and then you get to throw some personality on top of it to distract everybody from the banality of the whole thing. “Who is Grimes?”
I love it. I love how Grimes is my only adversary. We’re not going to mention Madge. Madge is the real cash cow but we’re not going to make this clickbait. We’ve got to bring it back down to size, because she’s been tormented by her own fans in defence of the queen. Let’s just keep it between me and Grimes for a second, because we’re both on 4AD and she’s pretty much the girl version of me. Let’s duke it out. I think we need a celebrity death match.
that, in fact I make myself way more vulnerable to it. No contracts, no signoffs, the record label freaks out. I don’t own this stuff. [In 2012, former Haunted Graffiti drummer Aaron Sperske filed a $1 million suit against Rosenberg, claiming to have cowritten songs on ‘Mature Themes’. The two parties have since settled out of court]. Politics and that kind of stuff can be fun in its own way if you open yourself up to the cruel realities of this world. It’s not a fairy tale.That’s what I thought that I did with this record. I didn’t let anybody bully me around on this record, or pressure me or make me feel like I had to bend over backwards to thank them or to show my appreciation for their wonderful contribution and their essential contribution, which… every contribution was essential to this record. It wouldn’t be the record it is if it were other people involved, so in
that sense it’s extremely the product of these unique talents and musicians and my being able to orchestrate and juggle the responsibilities of being a very, very unpredictable boss.” “I’m a people person”
This is the thing that people don’t know, and it might not come across over transcription when you’re reading it online or whatever. If you’re in the room with me and I’m saying these things to you that seem patently ridiculous and laughable, there’s a human there and you do get that vibe. There’s something missing from the transcription of these things that gives people the false sense of a madness. There’s nothing mad about it; it’s about loving people and it’s about enjoying the process of working with others and taking direction, not being afraid to take direction, not feeling
ashamed or feeling slighted by it. These are all things that musicians have to deal with all the time. It’s not about ego, it wasn’t about me – lest you think it is – it’s about making the thing good and right. These are things that typically need someone directing the proceedings and I was the one that was doing it this time. “We’re stimulation junkies who are dying for something to talk about”
I see myself becoming much more unable to process all the different channels involved, the different sources of information. It’s endless. I do most of my work when I’m not talking. This is the exception – this is work as well as the opportunity for me to flex another muscle. I think, to take it down a notch, it’s really all about doing the good work, doing stuff
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“Anything that I say can be construed as misogynistic because I’m the man saying it”
So if anybody wants to hurl my misogyny at me, they have that, but not only that, if they want to hurl my racism at me, my total personality and my white privilege and my heterosexuality, they can go right ahead. I’ve got no defence. But I don’t subscribe to things that I don’t like, and pay attention to them or follow them to not like them. Who does that? Why is Grimes even linked in with my… oh, I guess she got linked in because she was probably following Madge. I hope she wasn’t following me, because that would be really sad, for people to follow people that they don’t like. I’m much more blissfully unaware. I pay attention to things and I’m typically in love with, myself, so I automatically love it. [Laughs] I don’t spend much time thinking about the things I don’t like. I’m a positive guy.
record head
I
have enjoyed this Record Head series. Simon Raymonde at Bella Union’s enthusiasm still makes me smile. I’ve experienced the fantastic laugh of Rough Trade’s Jeanette Lee, and admired Daniel Miller’s Moog at Mute headquarters. Discussing death with Sub Pop’s Jonathan Poneman was cathartic whilst Peter Thompson at PIAS crackled charisma with a business brain. None of the interviews, though, were as downright funny and honest as the hour I spent with Alan McGee. These record heads, these pillars of independence, all had something in common. On their own terms, sure, they all possessed a drive to succeed. “I don’t think it just applies to the music business,” McGee is quick to point out. “To be successful at anything is all about will power; having the will to do something is probably stronger than having the love to do something. I have seen a lot of people succeed who are not that talented to be honest. I mean take Bono, he’s not that talented, he’s a good showman but he can’t write a fucking tune.” Here he is, the old acerbic McGee. The guy from Glasgow not afraid of anyone. He might have got sober and relocated to a quiet corner in Wales but he’s still got fire in his belly. McGee is much more than the mouthy stalwart he’s perceived to be, though. He’s dangerously positive and upbeat about the future, or his future, at least. “I don’t really have a label anymore, we’re doing Creation Management and I am stopping the label thing completely now as we have the Jesus and the Mary Chain and Wilko [Johnson], so I really want to get back into the management side of things. It’s all going to go with streaming and so you might as well just fucking face up to it and just get on with it. “I am interested in new bands and you are but most people aren’t bothered at all; they’d like to see some pony band from the ’90s do their album 10 or 15 years later. I know everyone has to make a living but it’s
fucking bollocks. “I have just bought a chapel as well; we have got a full license last week. Once the Mary Chain tour finishes this year I can start putting dates in next year for my chapel, it’s just a little venue in the middle of nowhere in Wales. It would probably be in one of the top three strangest venues in the whole of Britain, it’s fucking incredible, y’know? It’s one of the most life affirming projects I have done…” I cut him off. Not because Alan’s chapel isn’t interesting – I stop him as we’ve been chatting for twenty minutes without mentioning Creation Records once. I haven’t even managed to tell him that his book was the inspiration for Record Head. So we talk about his book for a while and its unflinching honesty. He must have left something out, though. “There were lots of things I wish I could have included but I think I would have been sued! The thing about rock and roll is that the truth is always stranger than fiction. You could say McGee is a fantasist but the truth really is stranger than fiction. Irvine Welsh is one of my best mates and when he writes, almost all of those stories are true, and he just changes the names. I think people were a bit shocked as [the book] was quite honest about my childhood and about what I came through. The only thing I would counter that with though is that it was probably no different to anyone else who is 54 and from up North – when I say up North I mean North of Watford. There was a lot of abuse but it wasn’t sexual, it was all violence you know, which came from my parents. I came through that and I think a lot of people were shocked that I spoke openly about it, but I don’t think you should hide shit like that. I am opinionated and a lot of people like that, a lot of people hate that, too, so what can you do!? I have had a lot of success, which is great, but it comes from my upbringing; being told you’re a piece of shit or you’re a fucking little cunt,
you’re fucking thick and that’s fine but that’s probably what drives me and I have stuck it right up my mum and dad’s fucking arse!” Creation was independent, but it was never indie. Alan McGee’s pioneering, reckless and fantastically obtuse record label was rock and roll and fiercely competitive. Over a period of a decade and a half, McGee’s temerity and bold taste put him at the forefront of alternative music as he brought us The Jesus and the Mary Chain, House of Love, My Bloody Valentine and Primal Scream amongst others. Before he discovered Oasis he’d brokered a remarkable deal with Sony and made millions. “Yeah, well the record label back in the ’80s and ’90s was all about rock and roll,” he says. “It was about living the life as mentally as you could and having the balls to do it – fuck the consequences and we all did suffer the consequences at some point.” Alan’s ambition took Creation to places other labels couldn’t reach. With Sony there was a 51% to 49% split in Creation’s favour. “That didn’t mean anything,” says McGee. “At the end of the day they could buy the label off of us if they wanted. The real art was that they wanted to buy the shares off the label, and they tried to buy them for a considerable amount of money and what I managed to do was threaten them enough, saying that I would get such bad press for them, I bullshitted enough and they gave me 14 and a half million to carry on the
deal. That was the nineties, that was when people paid stupid amounts of money, y’know.” The cash came with Oasis. Creation was motoring before the Gallagher’s came along but they’d go much faster, and with that came more partying and more excess, at a time when McGee’s escalating drug use took him to the edge. “I mean, that was going on since about ’87, from my marriage break up. I was told by my first wife that I was a loser, which was probably a bit hard to swallow by about 1995 when I was the king of Britpop, but never-mind. I probably started drinking and taking drugs around that time and then I kind of collapsed in ’94 and then got myself together at the end of ’94 and carried on, y’know.” Do you regret missing the Brit-Pop party then Alan? “No! I was there,” he balks in disbelief. “You can’t read into what you see in all these documentaries, you know? I was missing for 9 months in 1994, from February and even then I would see Noel for dinner and he’d come round my house while I was rattling from too many prescription drugs, you know. I was out of rehab by October and back working by November, so I was only really out for about 9 months and then I saw the rest of it. I did see the rest of it sober, though, and I watched them party and I have got to be honest, watching them party made me feel good to be sober!” By now, McGee is in full flow. There’s a refreshing lack of modesty in his storytelling but it somehow feels true rather than boastful. “I come from fuck all in Glasgow, I went to comprehensive school, my mum was a shop assistant and my father was a panel beater. If I didn’t end up doing music, what would I have ended up doing? I would have probably been a criminal, to be honest. I would have probably got into credit card scams or something like that. I was OK at football, but I was never going to play for one of the big teams; the only
Alan McGee It was Alan McGee’s autobiography, Creation Stories: Riots, Raves and Running a Label, that inspired this year’s Record Head series – a collection of interviews with the people behind some of the most iconic independent record labels in music history. It seemed only right that we saved him for our final instalment Photo g rap hy: ph il sh a r p / wr iter: ia n roebuck
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the thing I was any good at was music and if that didn’t work out well we know crime pays, I mean, look at the bankers, do you know what I mean, it’s like they’re the new rock stars.” Talk turns back to football, Alan being a Rangers fan from an early age. “I was OK, you know. I mean, did you ever watch that show Soccer AM? That thing with the hole in the wall, I only went and scored. I sent it to Noel who didn’t comment but Liam did say, ‘fucking hell, I am never going on that show if you scored, I will look like a right cunt if I don’t score and you do.’” That angry 16 year old from Glasgow, what would he have thought of his famous trip with Noel to Downing Street at the height of his fame? “I think we both got a bit of shit, didn’t we? I have got to be honest, I don’t give a fuck about what anybody thinks, anybody at all, except maybe my daughter.” What about modern politics then, and the recent Scottish referendum for independence? “If you call that a legitimate election then you are on drugs. I mean, Scotland will never be able to be let loose as they’ve already sold that oil twice over, do you know what I mean, so we were never going to get out. Scotland has had enough, there’s something like half a million people going to banks or on benefits and it’s fucked. It’s not like London; it’s the opposite of that. “I am not a hypocrite; I live in a really nice posh hotel when I am in London and I live in a fucking mansion with 26 acres in Wales. I have had it large and I am living it large, but at the end of the day my sisters live in Scotland and if I didn’t support them, one of them, for a start, then I don’t know how she would get through.” It’s astonishing how far McGee’s influence spreads. Recently we’ve seen The Libertines reform, a band Alan managed through their tumultuous second album. My Bloody Valentine have also returned after a 22-year absence. “Aye, almost every cunt,” is his typically droll reaction. Infamously, the two-year long recording of MBV’s ‘Loveless’ nearly bankrupted Creation and McGee seems reluctant to talk about such a seminal work. “I don’t listen to ‘Loveless’ but I am mates with Kevin [Shields],” he tells me. “I had dinner with him unbelievably a couple of months ago in Dublin – we’re good with each other. Bizarrely, in some ways we are quite alike – we are both totally single minded. For Kevin, [releasing ‘m b v’ in 2013] was fantastic; he didn’t compromise and it was everything he said he was going to do. He told everyone to go fuck
themselves and he put it on the website, which was fucking great.” For a man who supposedly rubs people up the wrong way, McGee is known most of all for his loyalty. He keeps his friends, although he didn’t see Carl and Pete take to the stage again. “I was so happy for them,” he tells me. “They’re a brilliant band. I was probably wrong trying to clean up Peter – I should have let nature take its fucking course – but if caring about somebody is wrong… I tried to clean him up and all I tried to do is keep someone alive, so you know…” But the band closest of all to McGee is one he never gave up on –
Primal Scream. “I really love them,” he says. “I mean, it’s a pity as I never really see Bobby anymore, he could basically be kind of like…” McGee falters. “I mean, I live in Wales he lives in London – it is what it is, but there is a lot of love there. They were my friends growing up, you know, and it’s terrible that Robert died. Unfortunately it was when my wife was in Africa so I couldn’t actually make it to the funeral, but yeah, that kind of got to me a bit because he never made it to 50. Sometimes you can be too strong, luckily with people like me, Bobby [Gillespie] and Andrew [Innes], we were weak and we all fucking
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collapsed through drugs at one point or another and all got clean, but with Throb being the horse that he was, he just kept going.” We end where we started, and that’s talking about family and death. For such an upbeat conversation our own mortality comes up over and over again, I tell McGee. “Well, my family died in their ’50s,” he says with a raw of laughter. “My mum died when she was 54, my granddads died when they were 56 and 58, so you know, if I live another ten years then I will break a world fucking record. I’m going out with a bang that’s for sure, I’ll die managing a band.”
retold
A Growing Echo le ft a n d o p po s i te , Arthur Russell, p ho to courtes y A ud ika Reco r ds wr iter: DA NIEL DYL A N WRA Y
As Yep Roc and AIDS charity Red Hot release a new tribute record to cellist, composer and disco pioneer ARTHUR RUSSELL, the two men closest to him remember the man who so desperately wished to bridge the gap between the avant-garde and the populist loudandquiet.com
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Entrenched in contemporary music history, we are consistently (and banally) reminded of the punk/disco standoff that once supposedly polarised the growth spurts of alternative music in the 1970s. It was shredded clothes, studded jackets and “disco sucks”, or it was sharp suits, cocaine and Studio 54. Under reflective retrospection the lines are a little more blurred; numerous groups (chiefly Talking Heads and Blondie) are attributed as being visionary crossovers, fusing the ‘spirit’ or ‘essence’ of punk with the sass, sex and groove of disco and flavours of arthouse funk. While the Velvet Underground blended the most potent and perfect mix of pop and avant-garde a decade earlier, it is perhaps Arthur Russell to whom the ’70s are owed when it comes to amalgamating seemingly contradictory musical forces in such revolutionary ways. However, while the old story goes that only a handful of people bought Velvet Underground records but those that did started bands, Russell never reached that status or influence in his lifetime. Russell cast his net far and wide, spending much of his early musical days not simply experimenting but radiantly flourishing in various genres: pop, classical, folk, repetitious dance grooves, stark minimalism, avantgarde and charged disco. If the glistening purity of the musical movements taking place in the 1970s was based on fresh sounds, anticonventionality and progressive ideas, then Russell was unquestionably its acne-scarred angel. Russell sadly died in 1992 from AIDS, survived by his partner Tom Lee who now runs his musical estate. Whilst only releasing one full solo LP during his lifetime (1986’s ‘World of Echo’ – Rough Trade) Russell has, in the last decade, become an almost constant presence in underground music circles, and increasingly overground ones, too. Through a series of reissues, collections of unreleased work, a film documentary, a book and the omnipresence of the Internet, he has become more widely recognised in
recent years than many thought would ever be possible. Testament to this is the latest Russell-related project ‘Master Mix: Red Hot + Arthur Russell’, a compilation album of covers of Russell’s work by a slew of contemporary artists, including some fairly mainstream figures, with Jose Gonzalez taking on ‘This is How We Walk on the Moon’. Red Hot is a charity organisation that fights AIDS through popular culture, also responsible for the hugely successful ‘Dark Was the Night’ compilation in 2009. This new compilation (released this month by Yep Roc) is a culmination of Russell’s increasing popularity in recent years. It features the likes of Hot Chip, Devendra Banhart, Scissor Sisters, Robyn, Sufjan Stevens, Blood Orange, Cults and Phosphorescent, and is a solid album: a varied, largely interesting, tribute to an artist who seems impossible to truly grapple to the floor. Its real success, however, is in hitting home the true idiosyncratic beauty of Russell’s own work. Reaching the end of the album’s twenty-six tracks, one is not just overcome with these new interpretations, but inspired to pick up an Arthur Russell record and revel in every second of it. This is not a criticism of the artists’ work on the compilation – there are some truly
“If Arthur had a criticism of a colleague’s work or project, he felt the person would want to hear it” lovely and unique takes on his work, here – but instead a reminder of Russell’s ingenuity. No album can give us further insight into the man himself, though. His music is becoming more ubiquitous yet any sense of identity belonging to him almost becomes lost or muddled along the way. And so, in this position of increasing exposure to
his music, I set out to speak with people close to him, in an attempt to get a deeper insight into the workings of an artist who, strangely, with every fresh sonic revelation gains a new layer of personal mystique.
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orn and raised in Iowa, Russell started playing the cello and piano at an early age. He left for San Francisco at 18, moving into a Buddhist commune. Here he would study Indian classical music at the Ali Akbar College of Music and would soon meet beat poet Allen Ginsberg, with whom Russell would collaborate with and accompany, musically, at live poetry readings. Russell moved to New York and continued to study at the Manhattan School of Music but was soured by the experience, with his tutor calling one of his avant-garde compositions “one of the most unattractive things I have ever heard.” He soon ended up as Music Director of The Kitchen, an avant-garde performance space. During his time as director (197475) he began to show his fondness for pop music, using his position as a platform to show that avant-garde and populism were not necessarily enemies, although his bookings of groups such as Talking Heads and the Modern Lovers supposedly triggered a series of grumblings amongst many within the avant-garde community. He would go on to work with members of both groups in the outfit The Flying Hearts, an ensemble that would exist throughout much of the rest of the decade. He also nearly became a member of Talking Heads and an early cut of the group’s classic ‘Psycho Killer’ features Russell on cello – Google it. Russell would soon delve head first into disco, initially as an attendee at Studio 54 and soon as an innovative creator, under monikers such as Dinosaur, Dinosaur L and Loose Joints – the Larry Levan mix of ‘Is It All Over My Face’ would slay dance-floors during its tenure and would later go on to be one of disco’s most sampled records of all time. At this time, Russell
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was simultaneously working on various other solo and collaborative projects, marking the beginning of a rich musical period. Peter Zummo was one of these collaborators and would prove to be Russell’s longest-serving musical colleague and producer, with the two working together on almost all of Russell’s releases. He recalls the fertile – now legendary – time that was 1970s New York. “I was one of many young adults who came to New York then, and maybe it was a Zeitgeist, but we felt free to find ourselves through creative and boundary-crossing activity, often with a foolish disregard for the necessity of earning a living,” Zummo tells me. “Of course, we were encouraged by the inspired generation – or half-generation, really – that preceded us: John Cage and his contemporaries among the musicians and composers, experimental dance, performance art, Fluxus, rock and roll, free jazz, Latin jazz, and the best and worst of mass media. At that time, though, the city itself was more the enemy than a civilised infrastructure for culture. Manhole-cover explosions in the street could spoil your lunch. Electrical blackouts and subway fires could spoil your whole day. However, the number of young artists was probably at least an order of magnitude lower than it is today, so we had a chance.” Similarly,Tom Lee, Russell’s partner, recalls a magic in the air around that period. Reflecting on a Talking Heads concert that was the pair’s first ever date, he says: “As with many things, Arthur made casual mention that Ernie (bass player with The Flying Hearts) could get us into the Central Park show, probably part of the ‘Summerstage’ series of concerts, of The Talking Heads and B52s, who were both so hot then, the summer of ’78. We went and I remember being fairly close and star struck, thinking my friends were not going to believe this, but at the same time, I wasn’t exactly ‘out’ with all my friends, and so I thought about that side of things, too. It turned out that Arthur wasn’t ‘out’ to his musician friends as well. Nonetheless, word was that there was
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an after party at the Mudd Club and we could get in. Again, Arthur was not so good with leaning on others or taking advantage of social situations so we were relying on Ernie, or maybe someone from Sire Records, to get us in. So, we got in and it was so crowded that it was kind of a bust. That said, I was floating on air walking home along Lafayette Street to either mine or Arthur’s apartment afterwards.” Whilst dabbling with a variety of collaborative musical experiments, “we shared an interest and background in Indian, Western classical, electronic, pop, rock, conceptual, jazz and other music, as well as in other media,” says Zummo. “We spent many afternoons sight-reading Christian Wolff’s Exercises in a basement rehearsal studio. We made crazy recordings and discussed aesthetics.” Some of Russell’s most distinguished and haunting music came from moments spent alone experimenting with his voice and cello, which occasionally he would carry down to the Hudson River, simply sitting facing the water as he played. Russell’s cello work is almost frighteningly recognisable; the scratchy warmth that vibrates forth is instantly his, an almost submerging of the strings – streaks of watery echo-soaked pulses. His voice can shimmer from a strained whisper to a deep-set hum, it can send ground shaking rumbles through speakers as seamlessly and beautifully as ones that will shatter your windows – richness and warmth, sharpness and softness expertly blended. Russell managed to create a bizarre concoction in almost mirroring his chosen instrument with his vocal ability, the two becoming a melded compliment, spinning around one
“Given Arthur’s stated intention, he saw the disco as a temple for higher thought and contemplation” another like dancing partners locked in a tight embrace, two individualistic units moving seamlessly as one. Friend and collaborator Phillip Glass perhaps said it most accurately: “This was a guy who could sit down with a cello and sing with it in a way that no one on this earth has ever done before, or will do again.” Russell too was a fervent worker, obsessed with working on song after song (many of which remained unfinished) and being the impoverished musician he was Lee would loan him money to buy cassettes to record. “I have told the story of giving him money for cassettes as a way of demonstrating how sharing the intimate experiences of having a life together just gradually began to occur over time,” he says. “That said, his obsessive copying of quarter inch tape onto cassettes in order to listen to various takes of one song was the method in which Arthur worked. It was a routine for him in order to consider the different takes of a song, or the addition of a particular instrument or vocal on a track – this was just a way in which I helped to serve as a conduit to that end. When I listen to some of those cassettes now I am transported back in time because they represent the working versions of songs.”
“He was funny, serious, driven, meticulous and never tame,” Zummo tells me when discussing Russell’s working methods and the personality traits accompanying them. “He was reserved and had a sense of propriety that was sometimes almost Victorian. Arthur’s capacity for taking in and processing information was formidable. His sense of social and interpersonal interaction was lively. He could be difficult, as were we all. If Arthur had a criticism of a colleague’s work or project, he felt the person would want to hear it, however uncomfortable or unsolicited the advice was. [However] first and foremost, he was a great musician and composer. And we should never forget that Arthur wrote his music. A written musical piece is distinct from a performance or a recording of it. I often wonder whether people currently putting out their versions of his work have access to his original 02
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manuscripts. Or are they transcribing from various recorded versions? If the latter, they’ll end up with an interpretation of an interpretation. Vital information can be lost in the process. I’m a fan of going to the source, which includes the written music, as well as the recordings. “Arthur’s writing is elegant but also full of asymmetry and unexpected rhythmic, melodic and harmonic moves. Some may view these as anomalies and eccentricities, but in Arthur’s case, it’s more correct to embrace and enjoy them. Then the material allows people to perform in their own unique or peculiar manner.” Lee offers a little more on Russell’s personality with a wonderful, somewhat stylistically emblematic, anecdote. “While Arthur could become enraged over a mishap in the recording studio, and hold tight to his opinions on a political position, I have to say that in our life together he was a kind and gentle person. He wouldn’t kill an ant. At one point our apartment was overrun by roaches and he was the most benign caretaker of them. I think he thought he could just ease them out with an encouraging word and a gentle sweep of his hand. The worst time was when he was letting a friend’s former girlfriend stay with us along with her two huge parrots! The birds would be flying around the apartment, bird poop and seed everywhere, which encouraged more cockroaches and mice. I couldn’t have been more flustered nor he more unflappable!” The quiet storm that is Arthur Russell’s voice, the closest thing we have to a personal interaction, seems even more fitting in light of memories of a tenderness to creatures and a deep affinity for nature and water. In a very rare 1987 interview (after the release
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of ‘World of Echo’) he elaborated on his ideas for his own music around this period and the elementary inspirations that encompassed them. “‘World Of Echo’ isn’t a complete version of echo,” he said, “it’s a sketch version of echo. I want to do the full version, which will have brass bands and orchestras playing outdoors in parks with those bandstands that project echo. I also want to have Casio keyboards on sailboats. Have you ever been on a sail boat? It’s so quiet, all you hear is wind and sea.” These insights into Russell’s personality and working methods are somewhat rare and this leads me to ask Zummo if, as a result, we are left with any grave misconceptions about Arthur Russell as an artist today? “I wouldn’t use the word ‘grave,’” he says, “but some aspects of the story become emphasised in a way that distorts the blend. Today, the attitude toward the dance club part of his work seems to assume that it was Dionysian, whereas, given Arthur’s stated intention of finding rapprochement between popular and serious music, he saw the disco as a temple for higher thought and contemplation. Another distortion arises in reference to Arthur’s sexuality. Today, many aspects of sexuality are misunderstood or overemphasized, and that has happened to some recollections of him. Arthur saw homosexuality as a progressive, forward-looking state of being, but there are also heterosexual chapters in his story.” While Russell’s work, and various interpretations of it, are now readily and easily available, this is largely due to the hard work and passion of a lot of people, most centrally Tom Lee who has dedicated his life in the wake of Russell’s death to getting the world to hear his music. Lee’s love and dedication is wonderfully captured in the excellent
0 1 – A r t h u r R u s s el l a t h i s n ew y o r k h o me, p h o t o c o u r t es y A u d i k a R ec o r d s 0 2 – A r t h u r R u s s el l , p h o t o b y T o m L ee, c o u r t es y A u d i k a R ec o r d s 0 3 – T o m LEE , s p ea k i n g i n Ma t t W o l f ’ s W i l d C om b i nat i on 0 4 – A r t h u r R u s s el l , p h o t o b y C h u c k R u s s el l , c ou r t es y A u d i k a R ec o r d s
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Matt Wolf documentary Wild Combination, a process that Lee reflects on. “From the moment Arthur died until now, I am always proud and pleased that people are drawn to his music,” he says. “I thought the Phillip Glass release of ‘Another Thought’ might be the one and only representation of him posthumously. After that I lived in great hope that Geoff Travis from Rough Trade would step up and release what he had paid and guided Arthur to create but the timing was just not there for him. I preface my answer here with that background information because countless people traipsed up those six flights of stairs to our apartment, for me to make them tea, coffee and cassettes in high hopes of more releases. They all saw the re-release of ‘Go Bang!’ or ‘Is It All Over My Face?’ as the only avenue to working together. Steve Knutson [Audika Records – home to Arthur Russell’s archive] turned that all around! He lovingly embraced those rough mixes and buried treasures of dusty tape piles that I believed in so dearly. Matt [Wolf] followed the mission Steve and I were on. I never felt I could interfere with Matt and tell him how to tell this story. After countless conversations I grew to have too much respect for the artistry that Matt brings to filmmaking. This was a journey for him, too. I still have the introductory letter he wrote to me in
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hope of working together. I had grown so weary of such entreaties that when I got his letter in June of that year, I barely took it seriously and thought that I wouldn’t interrupt my summer in Maine and didn’t respond to him until I returned in September! All a long-winded way to say that the process was extremely cathartic,” says Lee. “The most profound moment for me was when Matt interviewed me and gave me a chance to re-live my coming to love Arthur. I was in a bubble long after the camera stopped.” I ask Lee if the ongoing, renewed interest in Russell’s work has a personal impact on him.With a new, celebratory project coming out pretty much once a year, is there an inability to let the memories settle? “I will admit that usually after I’ve responded to questions such as these, or hosted a new acolyte in the study of Arthur Russell I am exhausted. It brings me back to those days and I wish I could stay there. Soon after Arthur died, and he battled and suffered for a number of years, I would walk around the city, back and forth to work in SOHO, listening only to his music. I still hoped I would turn a corner and see his impish smile. When Dustin and Devandra visited last spring I was transported back again to the days of first sharing Arthur’s music and when they left that evening I was indeed, a little lost.”
Girl Allowed Natalie Mering never wanted to be a solo artist, but sometimes boys can be dicks, and so she was forced to go it alone. Fortunately, it’s given us WEYES BLOOD, Mering’s bewitching pastoral psych project
“Come on, I’m harmless.” The deep voice reassures me over a crackling transatlantic telephone line. “It’s not my goal in life to be intimidating.” Perhaps the aura of a brooding spiritual force just comes naturally to Natalie Mering, the 26 year-old Pennsylvanian behind Weyes Blood. After all, she’s already spent the best part of a decade producing music variously described as “a series of haunting singular atmospheres filled with disquieting beauty,” “dark interludes of spectral psychedelic folk” and “a rhythm of destruction that portends something ominous.” Even her stage name references Southern Gothic writer Flannery O’Connor. We’re here to talk about ‘The Innocents’, Mering’s new, second LP, out now on Mexican Summer. In my
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own (very positive) review of the record a couple of months ago, I wrote that the really scary thing about the album is Mering’s voice – a deep, fullbodied moan that sounds far closer to the androgyny of Nico than it does to any folksy songstress. Now here she is, trying to reassure me with that same scary voice. “My personality, it’s not like my music,” she laughs. We’ll see. Mering is a Los Angelino by birth but spent her early years just outside of Philadelphia. She learned piano from her mother in her childhood and also started on guitar thanks to her musician dad, who had previously played in a locally popular band around LA. “He was a new waver! They opened up for the Knack, Oingo Boingo, people like that,” Mering laughs. I suggest that you can’t hear much in the way of
Photogra phy: guy e pp el / writer: james f. thom pson
gated drums and keytars in the sounds of Weyes Blood. “Yeah,” she says, “although I guess he might have related more to my music when he was playing in garage bands, like in high school in the late ’60s.” With such a solid musical grounding, Mering hoped to find kindred spirits at school to play with and was dead set against the idea of going solo. “There were a group of guys and I wanted to be in their band so bad,” she recalls, with a bitter laugh. “They would invite me to play so they could use my amp and then they wouldn’t let me be in their band. The vibe was ‘No girls allowed’ pretty much across the board in my town so I couldn’t find a band to be in.” In the end, we’ve probably got Mering’s small-minded school pals to
thank, at least in part, for her distinctive sound. Instead of joining a band (“they all just wanted to play grindcore, scream, hardcore anyway”), Mering channelled her energy inwards, buying herself an eight-track and recording from around the age of 15. It was a cathartic process, she says. “All that resentment, oh wow, yeah… I definitely didn’t want to be a solo artist but it became another necessity, like the only thing that I had going on.” Having found her musical footing, she headed to Portland, Oregon to study, where she soon crossed paths with Tom Greenwood and his offbeat psychedelic collective, Jackie-O Motherfucker. Mering briefly joined the band before dropping out of university and heading to Baltimore for the city’s music scene, where she met a boyfriend who ran a farm. Dovetailing nicely with a lifelong fascination with nature, she decided up sticks once more to rural Kentucky to help with the farm, before moving on yet again to New Mexico to harvest wild herbs for tinctures. Having heard Mering’s darkly pastoral music, it’s not too great a stretch of the imagination to picture her roaming fields and forests amidst the morning dew. Mering eventually ended up in New York through a combination of circumstance and creative restlessness, preordained by breaking up with her boyfriend right about the time she’d grown tired of her adopted rural habitat. “I guess I realised that, fulltime, that life wasn’t for me because I know I’m supposed to be making music. I realised I had to be urbanised to produce the kind of music that I wanted to. I couldn’t go back to Baltimore because it’s too small, although I daydream about moving back there all the time. I also think I was seeking, you know, more extreme experiences and I just wanted to be near people; kind of the classic New York thing.” After years of hawking cassettes and EPs, Mering released her first bona fide album, ‘The Outside Room’, on Not Not Fun in 2011. It’s a record that’s as fascinating as it is challenging, awash with organs, tape delays, offbeat tunings and of course Mering’s forlorn vibrato quiver. It’s less a collection of songs and more a series of distorted psychedelic folk soundscapes, drifting in and out of focus. She describes the record as a “steering of sonic happenings,” which sounds about right. “It’s kind of like a daydream,” Mering elaborates. “There’s a song about dreams on it and a lot of the
material around that time was kind of inspired by dreams I was having. I was having really intense dreams all the time, so I was kind of like building a dream geography in my mind, like a simple picture of the actual planet. And I was so fascinated by that and I just couldn’t believe that reality couldn’t be as rich and amazing as your dream.” Since then, the focus has been less on soundscapes and more on song craft. FM radio apparently played a role in shaping the new record, although it’s hard to imagine a track like ‘Some Winters’ getting much airtime from Steve Wright on a Sunday. All the same, there’s certainly a much greater sense of structure and focus on ‘The Innocents’. “You also become a better musician though,” Mering adds. “I figure I’ve got a lot better at structure and composition and just kind of playing things straight but having the interesting elements be subtle, which I think is the best way the interesting elements can be. Like a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, you know, and the sugar here is the song structure.” If Mering is at ease talking about the song-writing process, influences – or even tangential references – are something of a challenge. In fairness, her music seems impervious to the changing of time and the seasons, as though existing in a permanent state of transition between autumn and the winter. In previous interviews she’s mentioned pre-Bach classical music but I wonder if there are any more contemporary touch points. Silence. “It’s not easy,” she eventually concedes. “I don’t really have any. I like Ariel Pink, even though my music doesn’t sound anything like him. Oh and I really like [experimental singer-songwriter] John Maus. He went to college with Ariel Pink and he makes music that’s very dark and brooding, kind of Renaissance-y and baroque-sounding. If you heard his music you’d be like ‘Oh yeah right, now I get it.’ He’s fabulous!” I eventually find out that Sonic Youth were another formative influence and it’s not difficult to see why. The New York alternative trailblazers themselves strived beyond musical archetypes and opened the doors to a world of unconventional tunings and song structures for Mering in the same way they have for generations of alternative musicians. “I think what was so appealing about Sonic Youth was their background in experimental music, classical, free jazz and all that stuff,” she says, animatedly.
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“Like you get into them and then you get into a bunch of other stuff.” Being a huge fan of the band myself, I’m glad to have found some common ground between the two of us and start quizzing Mering on supporting front man Thurston Moore’s side project, Chelsea Light Moving. “Yeah I feel bad but… I don’t like him anymore,” she interrupts, stopping me dead in my tracks. Oh dear. I suggest this might be down to Moore’s well-documented marital infidelity (his marriage with bandmate Kim Gordon broke down in 2011 following a long-term affair). “No, it was before that actually,” Mering corrects me. “When I met him I just didn’t like him as a person anymore and it sort of tainted my experience of being in music. I had looked up to him so, so much and I think at that point I decided to be like, ‘Okay, you’re just a dude and I actually don’t need to look up to you so much.’ But I love Kim – she’s my favourite aspect of the whole band – and I like [guitarist] Lee Ranaldo. I don’t want to talk trash, though.” She stifles an awkward laugh. If it’s clear Mering doesn’t want to dwell on the subject, it’s equally obvious that the experience made quite an impression and warrants further discussion. She lets out a sigh as the sound of a train rumbles away in the background. “I think what I didn’t like about the whole situation was that being a girl playing in underground music, the first thing people would say to me is: ‘Oh, Thurston’s gonna love your music, he’s gonna want to put out your record and you’re gonna be buddies.’ It just felt like, damn, it’s so sad that as a woman in music you have to be ‘saved’ by some dude that likes to horndog on young women.” Cue more nervous laughter. I get the feeling there’s a lot more to this than Mering is willing to let on but in the interests of closing the interview on a positive note (and avoiding any libel suits for Loud And Quiet), we move on. In any case, there are better things to talk about. For one thing, Mering is heading back to the UK in February on tour. For another, a new record is already in the works. “I have it actually written,” she reveals. “I’m going to be promoting this one and touring extensively but then hopefully getting straight back to the studio. I don’t know how much I should talk about it yet. It’s going to be like the porridge in Goldilocks. The first one was like mama’s porridge, the second one is papa’s porridge and the next one will be the perfect porridge for me.”
On the How two seasoned rappers pushing 40 made the hottest hip hop record around: this is Run The Jewels Pho tog ra phy: Je re my Jennings / w r i t e r : t om f e nw ic k
“I should’a got it cut before we started our tour and now it’s really bothering me. I mean, hats are always an option, but you know how disturbing it can be when you have a bad haircut and then you let it grow out?” El-P is having a bad hair week. “I mean, stuff like this can really fuck up your day... I don’t think enough people recognise that shitty haircut anxiety can plague men.” He laughs. “Other than that, I’m doing pretty good.” I have been trying to get in touch with Run The Jewels for a couple of weeks now, but scheduling conflicts and the finalisation of their second album have left them with limited time in the run up to its release. When I eventually manage to pin down the pair, I only half manage that, the larger than life presence of Killer Mike conspicuously absent having gone AWOL earlier in the day. “I’m going to have to apologise in advance,” says El-P from his hotel room in Memphis. “I don’t actually know where Killer Mike is. I think he might still be asleep.” Run The Jewels are on what El-P describes as a “pre-tour tour”. And with a career that spans over twenty years prior to the formation of this project, El-P (born Jaime Meline) is an old hand when it comes to life on the road. That doesn’t mean it’s any easier to deal with the day-to-day grind, though. “It’s the downtime that’s hard,” he tells me, “especially when you get a day off and actually have to think about life. And after a while that tour bus that started out looking really cool begins to take on a dingier tone; everything starts to look a bit more
ragged and depressing... So if you didn’t have a show at night, you’d probably want to fucking kill yourself.” He laughs. “But those moments when I start to sink into mild despair always get erased when me and Mike are on stage. It’s an explosive moment of energy and I never tire of the interaction between me, Mike and the people who support our music.” Run the Jewels are an astonishing success story. A super-group comprised of two best friends in their late-thirties – with over three decades in the music industry between them – who are poised to release the most anticipated hip-hop album of 2014. It’s the kind of mid-career rebirth most artists could only dream about, but as El-P tells it, the road has been long and fraught. “Right now, I’m just running with a creative momentum that’s been handed to me,” he says. “But in order to get to that place it was a tumultuous and cathartic experience. I lost everything I had. I lost everything I’d worked over a decade for. All my money, my label, my whole scenery just changed. I got humbled and emerged from it knowing the only thing that has been a constant in my life was music. So I vowed to keep doing it and stopped involving myself in things that were not making me productive or happy”. It was around this time that El-P met Killer Mike while handling production duties on the Atlantan’s sixth studio album. “When I met Mike the creative energy sparked in a way that’s impossible to create on our own,” he says.
The end result was Killer Mike’s career high, 2012 album ‘R.A.P. Music’. It was via this creative fusion that a strong bond of friendship formed and the pair decided to team up for what – at the time – could have almost been a one off record. El-P says: “We thought we’d have a successful tour off the back of it, maybe a couple of runs and then segue into our solo records.” Released for free in digital formats, 2013’s ‘Run The Jewels’ surpassed all expectations, as it garnered overwhelming acclaim from critics and fans alike. No one was more surprised than the group themselves. “We knew people would like the record, because we liked the record and we’re huge music fans, but we didn’t know how big it would get,” says El-P. “But for lack of a better term, it blew up and surprised us both. I was genuinely thrilled and a little bit in disbelief. I’ve been around long enough to recognise when something feels different and that’s what we’re seeing here.” What’s perhaps most intoxicating about the Run The Jewels dynamic is how it manages to be thoroughly current, yet throwback to a style that’s been missing in hip-hop for quite some time. We live in an age where solo artists are put on a pedestal and
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rap groups have become an anomaly (or a gimmick), something that El-P is very aware of. “Yeah, it’s funny because what we’re doing is not a new idea, anyone who’s been a music fan – or has grown up listening to classic rap groups – knows Run the Jewels is a homage to that sound.We’re harkening back to a big part of what this music once was. And it’s funny that such an old school idea is now refreshing. I guess it’s a testament to the cyclical nature of things; this style has now come back around and we’ve picked up the mantle.” I note that it’s a mantle that has weighed heavy on some of RTJ’s antecedents, though – there’s a long list of hip-hop groups, including EMPD who El-P talks of as a huge inspiration, that eventually suffered bitter implosions. “Yeah, but when you’re young and in a band, the creative connection comes before you know each other as people, or before you’re a fully formed human,” he reasons. “It’s tough because you don’t know who the fuck you are and you have to grow up under intense conditions, where people are relying on you and you’re relying on other people. “When I was younger, Company Flow was my life,” he says, remember
run
his three-man group that was in operation from 1993 until 2001. “It was the most important thing I had... the only thing I had. It was validation of all of the bullshit I’d gone though as a kid. So when that ended, I was devastated and couldn’t imagine what was next, but after a while I figured it out and was fine. And that’s been a valuable experience.” It’s an experience that has formed at the core of Run The Jewels and means Mike and El-P can shrug off concerns of groups that never quite went the distance. “Mike and I aren’t two starry eyed people jumping in to something that’s over our heads,” he says. “We know who the fuck we are and that’s never going to change. I don’t think either of us feel like we’ve got all of our eggs in this basket and that alleviates a lot of bullshit.” He pauses. “I mean, that’s the reason why this new record is happening – because we’re still having a lot of fun.” The new record – succinctly titled ‘Run The Jewels 2’ and once again available for free from the duo’s site – began to take shape fairly quickly after the release of their debut; unimpaired by a geographical separation of several thousand miles and a thick fog of weed smoke. “We’d record in stages,” El-P explains. “I’d do
a month or two of pre-production alone, then Mike would come over and we’d lock ourselves away in a recording studio in the woods of upstate New York.Then we smoke copious amounts of marijuana, drink, hang out, listen to tons of music and wait until lightening strikes. After that I’d go back home and work on whatever we had.” It’s a process that – to an outsider – seems rather labour intensive, but in the world of Run The Jewels it’s clearly a winning formula. “Right now I’m in the zone and I don’t ever want to leave it. It’s what you strive for as a writer or an artist. Trust me.” El-P Laughs. “It’s a
“I lost everything I had. I lost everything I’d worked over a decade for. All my money, my label, my whole scenery just changed”
hell of a lot easier than sitting in your room half naked, with a loaded gun, weeping to the skies for inspiration.” The finished product is not only one of the year’s finest albums, but one of the finest hip-hop records in recent times, the pair improving on the ground they laid with their debut by redoubling the ferocity of their rhymes and the intensity of El-P’s production. It’s a record that perfectly encapsulates their sound: a furious sonic uppercut of insane braggadocio, sinuous rhymes and intense beats, with a host of diverse cameos – from Zack De La Rocha to Diane Coffee, to… err… Police Academy’s Michael Winslow – that on paper seem as if they would jar, yet within the confines of El-P’s production never distract from the bigger picture. It’s also a far darker record than their debut – and richer for it – harnessing some of the energy you might readily associate with Mike and El-P’s politicised solo work. “I think we knew going in that if we wanted to do this again we had to make sure that we’re creatively fulfilled.” El-P tells me. “With that first Run The Jewels LP we hit on something really cool but there’s a difference between what we do in our solo work and what we do in Run The Jewels and
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we wanted to draw on a little bit of that spirit into this second record. “Some of my favourite groups always went darker on their second record. I mean when ‘De La Soul Is Dead’ came out there was something really special about it, because it was clear these dudes were angry, so there’s a legacy to rap group albums that’s been laid out for us. Of course, there’s also more hilarity and ridiculousness, but in amongst the whirlwind of ridiculous shit-talk, you’ll find more intensity. I’m not gonna lie: I think it’s just a tougher fucking record”. He pauses. “But at the same time, it’s a delicate balance, because you don’t want to lose the thing that made people like you in the first place and I think we pulled it off.” But despite this influx of grittiness to their work, the pair don’t ever want to be taken too seriously. As evidenced by the fan-funded project ‘Meow The Jewels’ in which $40,000 has been raised to re-record their latest LP entirely, but with cat sounds as the backing. “I mean, I love that. It’s just who we are,” explains El-P. “I take music seriously and my music can be very fucking intense, but I can’t take myself too seriously. I don’t think there needs to be a dichotomy between being able to be funny and fucked up. I mean, if I applied that same intensity and seriousness to the way I live my life, I would fucking run outside and shoot people.” He pauses for a moment. “So in order to protect the world I have decided not to take myself so seriously... That’s all I do and I don’t really worry about the rest.”
Impenetrable Little Fortress Virginia Wing set out to make a debut album void of a specific time and place, and in doing so are a progressive reminder of how immersive and inventive guitar music can still be Photogra p hy: jenna foxton / writer: daniel dylan w ray
It can often feel like you’re being constantly hit over the head with new bands, largely due to the vast number of platforms and outlets hedging their bets in the modern age, eager to say they were there first. The method of natural, fortuitous discovery has primarily been replaced with that of the hard sell, or so it seems. There’s a refreshing sense of the withheld and unknown about Virginia Wing, though. They were all in a few other different bands prior to this one, but that’s neither particularly interesting nor relevant in this context. They released a single on Critical Heights and an EP on Faux Disc (two labels hardly shy of housing a generous host of new ‘buzz’ bands), yet their presence online is minimal, few interviews exist and the press release that accompanies their debut album, ‘Measures of Joy’ (released last month via Fire Records), is taut and succinct. We are told that the album “Is a work of psychedelic majesty that avoids the rockist trappings that many contemporary bands fall into; speaking to everyday anxiety and isolation and in contrast, seeking to evoke an inner world of pastoral fortification.” And that “The startlingly realised collection draws influence from the radiophonic sounds of Broadcast, the kosmische wonder of Cluster and the rhythmic propulsion of This Heat whilst never directly emulating any particular style.” Which turns out to be pretty accurate. It also happens to be one of my favourite records of the year. Nestled in an empty, basement room of a London pub, I sit down with the three-piece of Alice Merida Richards, Sam Pillay and Sebastian Truskolaski with the intention of unearthing one of the year’s greatest shot-in-the dark records. It turns out the group are indeed somewhat selective about what information is out there. “Ubiquity isn’t necessarily a good thing, is it?” says Pillay, as the ongoing swing of the nearby toilet door
and the blast of the hairdryer starts a pattern for our conversation during the next hour. “We turned down a lot of stuff because there’s no point in just answering the same question over and over again, is there? Although I’m not saying for one second we’re inundated with press requests and we’re turning them down.” “It’s not like we’re cultivating some mysterious image,” says Richards. The group started as a bedroom project of Pillay’s and blossomed into a three-piece with Truskolaski’s extensive drum palette being utilised and Richards being brought on board to sing and initially play bass. However, it soon turned into a collective project, with them creating a shared vision. The group’s sound has changed fairly drastically since their initial incarnation, it’s grown and flourished, developed and deepened, something the group are all too happy to let the public see, despite an apparent trend from others who don’t want to. “The band has never really been more than the three of us – and again we’re not trying to cultivate any sort of mystique,” says Pillay. “It would have been very easy to just change the name of the band when Alice first started singing and the first single came out but it implies that you’re worried about growing up in public, which just isn’t an issue for a band of our size. A band operating anywhere outside of London has no problem with that, it’s just a process of a band coming together…” “You don’t just come out as this fully formed thing,” notes Richards. “… but in London it seems that you’re way more encouraged to be like that,” continues Pillay, “like you only have a finite amount of time to be like, ‘this is what we’re about’. Everyone follows the same paradigm and it seems weird – just do what you want, it doesn’t matter. But as the three of us we knew what we wanted to set out to do.” Which was?
“Maybe something a bit more immersive than some of the guitar stuff I was coming up with. Guitar music can be very immersive, you know? Just not when I write it. “I think on the EP we sound like a very straight forward indie band or a guitar band with a kind of veneer of experimentation on top and that just comes from not really knowing what you’re doing when you’re recording – wild stabs in the dark.” “The album started with this list of things that you want your output to be,” says Richards. “And the biggest thing is the self editing process,” says Pillay, “especially when making music at home. Because you have a seemingly endless amount of time, you can be pretty maximalist with things, just adding more layers and making these ridiculous songs. When we started, like Alice says, it was as literal as us having a list of things that we like and wanted to put in there. I remember writing down specifically ‘woody repetitive bass’ and ‘layered drums’; there was this Niagara record that we really liked… “… Or I want processed vocals like in ‘God Is Alive, Magic is a Foot’ by Buffy Saint-Marie,” says Richards. “Or I really want a bit in a song that is like that bit in a song from ‘Parallelograms’ by Linda Perhacs, or a bit like this song that White Noise do. You just kind of have this wish list.” “Objectively, I can see it’s definitely a very derivative way of writing music,” says Pillay, “but there’s also something very satisfying about it, especially when you’re coming from such an abstract place, having a literal list of things and points to achieve. It was actually quite exciting seeing it all written down, as you would with a Christmas list.” Richards [to Truskolaski]: “It’s like being a kid. Like you used to say that when you were a kid you used to design your own tour buses?”
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Truskolaski: “Yeah. When I was a kid that was my favourite thing. I used to draw cross sections for camper vans when I was like eight or nine. I was obsessed with it for a while.” Understanding this method of making lists of musical parts, sections and references makes sense. The resulting album is indeed a busy one. CAN-like drum flurries explode from inside heady fogs of Broadcast-tinged atmospheres. From the opening song to the rest of the record is a varied, immersive bubble that floats and frequently shifts in tone, tempo and pulse, yet all the while maintaining a wonderfully coherent sound. It’s testament to the group’s ability to, as they say, “self-edit”, because the album feels like it could have been a messy, ill-conceived affair. “All the best records, I think, are an issue of posterity,” says Pillay. “I’ve never really gotten anything from a record that, say, gives me an insight into the downtown scene of the ’80s or anything like that. People are inherently narcissistic; they want to put their own feeling on it – I know I do. “The only thing that we actively
sought to do, and I don’t know if we necessarily have, was for it to be this world with no time – it’s not trying to be specifically evocative of a place, a time or an era or anything like that; it’s just something that you can reflect with.” “We wanted to avoid having this imprint of London 2014 and actually make the record into its own world and own universe and everything that ties into that feeling,” says Richards, with Pillay concluding: “I’ve always liked, when listening to music, that feeling of being in an impenetrable little fortress.” The group, whilst very keen to stress their enjoyment of playing live shows, are also a little selective about when and where they play, often finding it difficult to find venues and line-ups that they feel can allow them
to perform at their best. “Unfortunately, we are quite selective about what we play, but only for the benefit of the people watching us,” insists Pillay. “To be blunt, people think we’re dickheads because we turn down the odd show or that we’re not into their kind of thing. You know, I have plenty of friends who are in bands that I think are great but I have no intention of operating in the same way [as them].” “We’re not an easy band to place on a bill as well,” says Richards. “It can sometimes feel like you’re playing to the wrong crowd yet at the same time you don’t know who that crowd is.” Pillay: “The closest we’ve gotten in terms of outlook, and how well we’ve been received, is with Hookworms, specifically in Leeds. All bands that operate at this level, we’re not in the entertainment business. There doesn’t
“People are inherently narcissistic; they want to put their own feeling on it – I know I do”
need to be this façade, there can be this [existence of] ‘well, this is shit, you think it’s shit, so let’s just stop.’ Why bother? This is the thing that blows my mind – that small bands, who ostensibly should be doing it for themselves because they get creative fulfilment out of it, operate in the exact same way a huge rock band would. It’s tragic. “Going back to the Hookworms thing, I think it’s the most comfortable we’ve ever felt playing. You know, sometimes it’s nice to feel like you stick out a bit, but that was the happiest because I felt like we stuck out enough because we weren’t just someone trying to rip off Hookworms and then at the same time it wasn’t ‘who are these dickheads?’.” The same can’t be said of some of the responses to Virginia Wing’s Metronomy tour support. “I’m not a mad, mad Google yourself kind of person,” says Pillay, “but when we toured with Metronomy, all of us were like unbridled with finding out what people thought because we felt so out of our depth. It was interesting because there would
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be loads of people getting into it and then you’d see some people on their phone just disdainfully looking at you and I know they are going to write something fucking horrible about me and I’m literally playing right now, like whilst I am playing you are writing something about us. Some of them were awful, one person hash-tagged ‘ear-rape’. That was along with ‘worst support band ever’.” “It was a rape joke,” says Richards, “and no one likes those!” Tomorrow the band are meeting new super fan and BBC Radio 6 Music broadcaster Tom Ravenscroft, and ‘Measures of Joy’ is likely to create many more admirers still. The idea of turning this into a job or career, however, is implausible to the group, as Pillay tells me through one final blast of the hairdryer whooshing through the toilet door. “It’s classic cliché stuff, but as soon as you start doing that you are artistically compromised. I would absolutely hate, hate, hate to get a certain element of this record that was successful and continue with it for no other reason than because it was popular.”
True Romance Karen O has been crushing hard her whole life, distracted by boys, infatuation, what could be and what never was. Eight years ago, with Yeah Yeah Yeahs at the height of their powers, she documented her romantic obsessions on a basic tape machine in her New York apartment and a number of hotel rooms. Last month, these raw home demos that were never meant to be heard by anyone else were released as her debut solo album, because there’s nothing so pure as a crush Photography: gem harris / writer: stuart stubbs
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wenty-seven, in case you haven’t heard, is an important year for rock stars. It’s when they die. Or, in Karen O’s conveniently symmetrical case, when they “live how you’re supposed to live.” For O (born Karen Lee Orzolek to a Korean mother and Polish father), this golden year fell between 2006 and 2007, and it was then that she wrote and recorded‘Crush Songs’, a collection of home demos that would become her debut solo album some eight years later, released September 2014 via Julian Casablancas’ Cult Records. I briefly met O in the summer of ’06, as a wide-eye intern at Reading Festival. I was arranging a photo shoot with Yeah Yeah Yeahs and three teenage fans who’d won a competition to introduce the band on the main stage that evening. I remember that O appeared more bashful than the starstruck kids – not what I was expecting after three years of watching her screech across stages in wrecked Chuck Taylors and tattered mini skirts, pumping sweat and posturing with a devilish grin of smeared lipstick, her glittery eye shadow smudged and on the move across her face. Of course, she did all of that come show time, dressed partly as an emerald green dragon in purple leggings, with flames burning up her Cons. I can’t imagine there’ll be much of that tonight, at O’s second and final London show in support of ‘Crush Songs’. It’s been an understated tour for what she calls “a small, little record”, in venues her band outgrew even before their debut album was released in 2003. Demure in a ball gown and uncharacteristically still, O has spent the last couple of weeks watching people make out to her songs; her threadbare, scratchy almost-songs, preserved in their newborn state by an eavesdropping tape machine. ‘Crush Songs’ is a deeply personal record, from its subject matter (real life infatuations with four boys of note, including the man O would go on to marry in 2011) to its pimply, unprocessed presentation and lone acoustic guitar. Some of the tracks were pretty much written as she sings
them; most refuse to repeat themselves like conventional pop songs do. Just as they get going, they fade to nothing. They are without flesh and skin, because they were never intended to be heard by anyone else, just as a diary writer doesn’t make pretty letters that live under the bed. It’s hardly the record that anyone was expecting from the new millennium’s Iggy Pop, and accordingly it’s left some fans frustrated. Part of that stems from what we consider Karen O to be, versus the shy, unassuming woman who arrives at our photo shoot completely alone and suspiciously punctual. But it’s also down to the unfulfilled potential of some of these songs. ‘Visits’, ‘Day Go By’, ‘Native Korean Rock’ and the particularly faint, closing ‘Singalong’ all feature melodies that are beautiful but fleeting. Presumably, a track like ‘Maps’ started out in a similar way, and look how well that turned out once it was given a good meal. “Yes, totally. I was going back and forth, vacillating on that,” she says when I ask if taking these old demos into a studio to rerecord them had ever crossed her mind. “But I feel like my intentions for putting them out more produced were just not pure. They were things like, ‘because it would be more accessible,’ or, ‘because more people would enjoy it’, it wasn’t like, ‘because it’ll sound so much better’ – it was more like thinking about it from a commercial standpoint, and it’s like, fuck that, y’know? So I’d think about it but always ping-pong back to, ‘ah, fuck it’.” Karen says she asked a few friends what they thought, including Dave Pajo, Slint guitarist and a touring member of Yeah Yeah Yeahs since 2009. In February of the same year that Pajo joined the band he released a lo-fi album of Misfits covers played on an acoustic guitar. ‘Scream With Me’
left an impression on O, who admired the record’s simple beauty and good humour. Once it was her turn to potentially release something even more skeletal, Pajo was a strong supporter of leaving the tracks well alone. “Beyond all of that, you just don’t get this kind of stuff,” says O, sat on the roof of West London ballroom, Bush Hall. “These songs, it wasn’t me trying to write a song; it was me working through emotions and feelings and love shit and life. And a lot of them, what you’re hearing is the first time I’m even putting it down. It’s so raw and authentic, and there’s a primacy to them that I don’t feel that you hear so much. It’s not a common thing, and when I listen to them now they transport me back to those moments, and I felt like there’s nothing that I can reproduce in a studio that can give me that same feeling.” “A lot of things get lost in translation with Yeah Yeah Yeahs,” she says. “Demo love, y’know, it’s a real thing, and a lot of people are stricken with it. We do demos and I don’t know if we ever capture the same feel and essence of the demo in the produced version, but, y’know, we can’t really put out a bunch of demos. So this was refreshing, to be able to do that.” But there are moments on ‘Crush Songs’ that you want a little more of; there are melodies, in particular, that you want to hear more than once. “But that’s the other cool thing about it,” she insists. “They’re like… what’s the word…? fuck… They’re kind of like haikus or something, because it’s kinda nice that they’re so short and that I haven’t embellished them, because really, in the end, you don’t need any more than is there, because I think I’ve got the point across. I’m not a waffler – writing lyrics is like getting blood out of a stone for me, so once I get it, [clicks
“I didn’t feel that the world needed another dance-pop Karen O record – that’s the last thing the world needs” loudandquiet.com
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fingers] there it is. That’s actually harder to do than jam out for a while, for a lot of people, but for me, it’s generally my style to keep it as simple and pure and to the point. “I think a lot of people were thinking it was going to be a banging dance-pop record, because that’s what a lot of gals do when they break off and do their solo thing, but I wanted to make it clear that it was this lo-fi, small, personal, quiet record. I think I got that across alright, but that was important, because there’s always expectations. I didn’t feel that the world needed another dance-pop Karen O record – that’s the last thing the world needs, actually.” Karen says that she doesn’t consider ‘Crush Songs’ to be her debut album, “because I wrote it when I was very much ensconced in Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and I never actually intended on releasing these songs in the future.” Perhaps that makes it all the more perfect as a solo debut. After all, when musicians step away from the bands they’ve made their careers in, isn’t it to set straight all those assumptions we’ve made about them over the years? Isn’t it to prove that they are people, too, rather than a percentage of a whole that moves as one? It’s not to say that Karen O isn’t the high-kicking, maniacal whirling dervish that flamboyantly careers around the stage with Yeah Yeah Yeahs – in part, at least – but the sweet, naïve Karen O that whispers on ‘Crush Songs’ is surely closer to how she exists day to day, even eight years on. That’s certainly how it seems on meeting her, from her nervous laughter that peppers the conversation when reassuring ‘y’know?’s don’t, and the occasional randomly placed ‘fuck’ – a reminder that she is still the woman who screams “as a fuck son, you sucked” on ‘Bang’. “The ‘fearless’ performer, on stage with Yeah Yeah Yeahs, it doesn’t come naturally to me at all,” she says. “I’m very shy and I have lots of social anxiety [laughs] so I’m like one of those performers – there’s a lot of us. “The first time that that ‘character’ came out was on the dance floor, probably. When I was living in New York in my early twenties there was a
mod dance night, like a soul revival night, and I started getting drunk and sliding across the floor on my knees and tearing up the dance floor, and that’s when that started coming out. But the first Yeah Yeah Yeahs show, I was really nervous and I had about four margaritas before I went up there. I was wearing white pants, a white wife-beater and I cut these black duct tape heart pasties to put on my nipples, and then I doused myself in olive oil because I wanted to look sweaty, because whenever you see live rock photos of the legends, like Iggy or whatever, they’re just drenched in glistening sweat. I wanted to go on like that, even though it was, like, seven in the evening. So I covered myself in olive oil and it was stinging my eyes up there, and it just kind of came out. There was some Dutch courage going on, but you can’t make that stuff up.” And then that set you up to get up there again without all the margaritas and olive oil? “Oh no. I mean, I only did the olive oil once [laughs], but it was then a spiralling down and out of control; a continuation of drinking and stage antics for about 2 years, until I fell off the stage in Sydney, and that changed everything. That really sucked by the way – I mean, it was horrible. It was a nightmare.” On 9 October 2003, at The Metro Theatre, Sydney, Australia, halfway through Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ fourth song, Karen fell off the front of the stage and into the photo pit. She made it back on to the stage to finish the number, and then gave ‘Maps’ a go whilst holding an icepack on her head. Then she conceded the inevitable. “I’m off to hospital,” she told the audience. “I just stopped being an idiot [after that]. It was a warning,” she says. “The fact that I didn’t break my back or my neck was a pretty big deal. Or that my head didn’t get crushed because a monitor fell on my head. “I was terrified to get back onstage after that, and I had to get on stage two days later [famously, she was pushed on stage in a wheelchair by her then boyfriend Angus Andrew of punk band Liars]. But I realised that the drinking was a crutch and that there’s ways to command an audience where it’s not coming from the alcohol, it’s coming from within me, and I’m still learning about that.”
B
orn in Busan, South Korea, Karen Lee Orzolek grew up in Englewood, New Jersey, spending her formative years at a private school where she didn’t fit in. She got into punk bands via a childhood friend and her peers from a neighbouring State school, but it was Neil Young that made the greatest impression. “I remember being really struck by how odd his voice sounded,” she says, “high pitched and nasally but his songs were so beautiful, and it struck me that if he can sing, okay… It put that seed in my head. And then someone turned me on to Neutral Milk Hotel and ‘On Avery Island’, and again, Jeff’s [Mangum] voice is pretty unconventional but it sounds like he’s singing his heart out. So I just tried singing along with him in my car in New Jersey when I was driving around and stuff. I just thought, I guess anyone can sing as long as they’re singing their heart out – I might be totally wrong about that, but that’s the idea I had in my head.” Karen pauses for a second. “So anyone can sing as long as they sing their heart out, Dutch courage, some olive oil and you’re a fucking rock star.” She laughs, extending a finger with each step on her threepoint plan. “My best friend from childhood took voice lessons her whole life,” she says. “I always thought that was weird.” In 1998, O arrived in New York City, having transferred to NYU to
study film. She’d followed a boy there, although that was as good a reason as any. “If you grow up a half hour drive from NYC there is always this reminder of greatness in art, culture and business that gets under the skin,” she says. It was a town she quickly felt at home in, and would become synonymous with. NYU Film would leave its mark too, and Karen has never been far from the movies since, collaborating on soundtracks for House Of Wax in 2005 with Har Mar and Jackass 2 in 2006 with Peaches. Also to the silver screen she’s given cover versions of Roger Alan Wade’s ‘If You’re Gonna Be Dumb’, Bob Dylan’s ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ and Led Zeppelin’s ‘Immigrant Song’, for Jackass 3D, I’m Not There and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, respectively. For a time, O dated Director Spike Jonze, who remains a close friend to this day – one that she has worked closely with on a number of projects. Most notable are the complete soundtrack to Jonze’s 2009 adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are and the more recent ‘The Moon Song’, from 2013’s Her. Although (slightly) more produced, it’s ‘The Moon Song’ that resembles ‘Crush Songs’ the most, or vice versa – an unfussy, doe-eyed lullaby, joined only by a barely-there acoustic guitar and mooned (ahem) to itself, O’s voice cracking as it eeks out of the register of a whisper. It makes you realise just how filmic ‘Crush Songs’ is, even in its raw state. ‘The Moon Song’ was enough of a success that people really should not have been thrown by O’s non-discopop debut. It earned her an Oscar nomination in 2014. She performed the track at the awards ceremony. “Somehow I managed to have a blast,” she says, “but my experience would have been very different if I hadn’t performed. It’s so fun and fascinating to be a part of the show.
There should be a documentary on the local actors they hire to play the A-list actors in rehearsal, who give acceptance speeches in their place while they run through the show. That’s gotta be a head fuck... which is the theme for the night in general.” The same year that Karen enrolled in college she took guitar lessons from a guy with a mullet called Rick. The first two songs she learned were by Neutral Milk Hotel and Mazzy Star. She met Nick Zinner in 2000, around the time she was writing “folky love songs”, which Zinner would dutifully play slide guitar over. Her first show was at an open mic night at Sidewalk Café on 6th Street and Avenue A. By her early twenties she’d discovered PJ Harvey via the singer’s ‘4-Track Demos’ compilation, and would soon take her lead from the Brit’s visceral sexuality. As she told Pitchfork earlier this year: “I remember listening to [‘4-Track Demos’] and being like, ‘Whoa.’ She’s in her bedroom tearing open her insides, and her legs are wide open. I felt so voyeuristic listening to that record, more so than anything I’d ever listened to up until that point. It felt like I was up to no good, and it was an awesome feeling. Her stuff was unbridled, feral, really sexual. I listened to that record and thought, ‘Wow, just think of what you can do if you access those parts of you as an artist.’” Karen admits to having been “boy crazy” up until the moment she married British video Director Barney Clay in 2011. “I’ve crushed hard my entire life,” she tells me, but insists that 27 proved a particularly susceptible year. “It was a golden time for me. I was single,” she says, and pauses. “Sorry, it always goes back to love with me. I just felt really free. It was a weird year, where I just felt like I had this new lease of life. I was extra adventurous that year, and I was trying everything out and I was trying all of these people
“I’ve always been very love-centric and love obsessed, so it was a huge distraction until I found someone” loudandquiet.com
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out, too, and I just had this confidence. And all the while I was searching for someone… Sorry,” she says again, “I’ve always been very love-centric and love obsessed, so it was a huge distraction until I found someone. Nowadays, not so much, but at that time we’d just come off of touring our second record [‘Show Your Bones’], and the touring for that was really cathartic because the making of the record was so traumatic [a rift between O and guitarist Nick Zinner reportedly fractured a band with two opposing figureheads]. There were all these factors that made me feel really open to love and life. I was just going for it, living how you’re supposed to live.” I tell Karen that I’m surprised to hear her say what a positive time it was – much of ‘Crush Songs’ has it down differently. “Love’s a fucking bitch / Do I really need another habit like you? / I really need / Do you need me too? / I believe it’s gonna leave me blue,” she laments on ‘Rapt’. ‘NYC Baby’, meanwhile, pines for a love stuck at home while O faces a life on the road alone; ‘Body’ features the aching lines: “If you love somebody, anybody / There will always be someone else / So make it right for yourself.” I could go on. “But that dark shit is as good as light shit,” she says, spoken like a seasoned pro in crushing hard. Of course, she’s right – that’s what makes a crush a crush: the impending sense of doom paired with the total abandonment of reason and logic. For any crush to be virtuous and true, the odds need to be stacked against you, otherwise you’re not trying hard enough; otherwise you’re not completely out of your mind. Crushes, in their very nature, are superficial and unattainable. They are fuelled by lust and fantasy and risk and injustice, and in that sense aren’t a majority of pop songs crush songs, rather than love songs, from Katy Perry to ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’? “I was thinking about that because I figured someone would ask me about it. In many ways there’s not a huge difference – a crush song and a love song are the same – yet I feel that with crush songs, it’s just the beginning of love, the early stage where it’s all fantasy and it’s all projection and melodrama – all the fucking best stuff is the crush, y’know? And even the heartbreak and the unrequited aspects, y’know, it’s good. And then love songs
are, I feel, a bit of a different animal – similar, but a little further down the line. The crush is all feelings that come rushing in; the fantasy of what could be or what never was. “When you fall in love, you’ve got so much to gain but you also have to kill off some stuff too,” continues O. “You have to murder parts of your heart too, y’know? Because I think that every love that you ever have always stays with you, but you can’t have too much of that lingering around in order to make space for this new thing and to commit to being with ‘the one’. So there has to be loss as well, so there’s mourning and there’s grief for what you have to lose to gain. So a lot of these songs are working through that
– there’s loves that had to go in order for a new love to come, and y’know, there’s a lot of mixed emotions with it.” It’s one thing to reminisce about an old flame to oneself, though, and another to broadcast your eight-yearold love letters to the world. Is it not strange, revisiting these crushes that you sobered up from so long ago? Karen laughs her hardest yet. “No, it’s not strange, because it’s so fucking romantic! Being married is not as romantic as heartbreak, and the adolescence of love is obviously more romantic than the maturity of love, so it’s nice to revisit those feelings of your adolescence.” Can I take that to mean that you’re a nostalgic person?
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“Not so much, y’know. I’m like more of a future person. I don’t get too stuck in the past, but it’s so awesome to have those feelings well up inside of you again. It’s a good drug. “Being nostalgic is a problem because it means you’re not living in the present – you’ve got to create new memories, right? – but for me I miss the here and now by thinking, ah shit, what’s next?”
Reviews / Albums
09/10
Hookworms The Hum Wei r d Wor l d
Photography by Jenna Foxton
By S am Wal ton . In sto re s No v e mbe r 10
The first sound on ‘The Hum’, Hookworms’ second album, normally accompanies the final moments of a timebomb countdown in a suspense thriller. For 25 horrifying seconds, the ticking-clock-urgent-bleeping stabs swirl dizzyingly around the speakers while imaginary visuals jump-cut ever tighter around a diminishing digital read-out. The clock hits zero, there’s an infinitesimal pause and then blam – the roof comes off. What follows is ‘The Impasse’, two blistering minutes of mushroomcloud-laying speaker-shredding garage rock squall, and within 150 seconds of setting needle to record the debris is everywhere, Hookworms have breathlessly set out their pagan spacerock stall and the band are gliding, unwavering, to a cruising altitude. There can’t be many albums released in recent years that spring
out of the blocks with this ferocity. What makes that instant flash all the more striking is how diametrically different it is to its predecessor: ‘Pearl Mystic’ began with nothing more than walls of ambient drone glowing and growing over the same time it takes ‘The Impasse’ to turn up, chuck the TV out the window and check out again. But ‘The Hum’’s opener serves to distance the ensuing record not just from ‘Pearl Mystic’: like the initial violent blast-off that lifts the Space Shuttle out of Earth’s gravity, ‘The Impasse’ forcibly detaches Hookworms from their surroundings, and the album that follows is an experience akin to floating in space – one is aware of hurtling, unrestrained, but the accompanying airlessness makes that experience feel serenely still. And it’s in this paradox that ‘The Hum’ revels so
impressively, and which renders it such a giant leap on from the band’s debut album. Where ‘Pearl Mystic’ rejoiced in broad sonic splatter, ‘The Hum’’s precision chaos is militaristic in its deployment: even at its noisiest, ‘Beginners’’ teutonic pump recalls the straitening intensity of Steve Reich, and ‘Off Screen’, the album’s most strung-out moment, still broods with a muscular, emotionally wrenching potency. That said, ‘The Hum’ is still clearly a follow-on piece – the linguistic abstraction rolls over from their debut seamlessly, and the three instrumental interludes here are numbered ‘iv’, ‘v’ and ‘vi’ to continue the sequence begun last time round. But it also reads like a conclusion. Where ‘Pearl Mystic’ faded to an open-ended fuzz black, promising more, the finale here is the most anthemic, air-punching closing-
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credits style song Hookworms have ever recorded: when ‘Retreat’’s triumphalist climax is snipped clean with a disconcertingly neat hi-hat hit, it’s an unexpected statement of finality from a band that has hitherto made endlessness its watchword. And perhaps that’s the point of ‘The Hum’. After all, for all Hookworms’ horizon-chasing, this is also, overwhelmingly, music to drive off cliffs to at 500 miles an hour, preferably with the Feds closing in, in a last-gasp apocalyptic act of livefree-die-young escapism. It makes for phenomenally exciting, white-hot music, a multi-sensory trip directly engineered to leave you physically exhausted, wide-eyed and panting. With that decisiveness, ‘The Hum’ feels like the end of the first chapter of Hookworms; equally, there’s a sense that a band this relentless ain’t never gonna stop.
Reviews 08/10
Ariel Pink Pom Pom 4A D By Davi d Zamm i tt. In sto re s N o v embe r 17
Ariel Pink has said in the past that he sees his music as a form of therapy, and when he creates songs like the seventeen crowbarred on to ‘pom pom’ – his first ‘solo’ release since shedding the Haunted Graffiti part of his moniker, whatever that means – it doesn’t take much of a leap to imagine his work as the product of psychiatric healing. This, it seems, is the musical equivalent of the souvenir binder of drawings clutched under the arm of a departing asylum patient. A rare example of that totem of rock opulence, the double LP, it takes even the ‘White Album’’s or ‘Freak Out!’’s oddest moments and jacks up the weirdness. But existing outside
of the accepted norm, surely, is the foremost reason for art’s very existence, and it is much too simple to label his work as outsider music and move on. That’s not to say that ‘pom pom’ isn’t self-indulgent. A few of the songs sit somewhere between nursery rhymes and radio jingles (See: the ad nauseum repeated phrases on ‘White Freckles’ or ‘JellO’’s grating chorus of, “I, I, I eat Jell-O / I, I, I eat corn.”), while ‘Dinosaur Carebears’ is as sugarcoatedly irritating as it sounds. Neither is the hair metal of ‘Negativ Ed’ and ‘Goth Bomb’, which improve with repeated listens. But ‘pom pom’ is, on the whole, much more than mere curio. Pink not
only manages to shoehorn an impossible embarrassment of melodies into the album’s 69 minutes – aesthetically it covers a ridiculous amount of pop ground – but there is also a genuine emotional depth to this record; it’s just that it’s passed through the 36-year-old’s warped, sardonic lens first. Though Pink deals with reality by taking the piss, when you peel back that puerilecum-deviant sense of humour, there is pain on ‘pom pom’. ‘Dayzed Inn Daydreams’ hides a deeper message behind its faux-Western cinematic bluster as the hero laments the difficulty his younger, painfully shy self had in engaging with the world. Lead single ‘Put Your Number In My
Phone’, for all its whimsy, points to a very plain longing for more profound, more rewarding relationships with the opposite sex, while it isn’t difficult to decode the graver message in ‘Picture Me Gone’’s titular refrain as he imagines the photographs left on his cloud storage after he himself expires. Pink recently claimed to have received overtures from Madonna’s ‘people’, who were supposedly interested in procuring his songwriting services. It’s testament to the strength of this unique pop talent that no matter how apocryphal that statement proves to be, it’s a move that would be one of Madge’s shrewdest.
It’s probably fair to say that the grime scene isn’t what it used to be, although that’s not necessarily a criticism; the genuine innovators of the movement needed to find a way to distance the tag from the rappers who had gone on to release commercial drivel after promising starts as underground artists. Accordingly, one of the genre’s most promising new proponents is actually making the sort of music that bears little superficial comparison to the records that the
Dizzee Rascals and Wileys of the world were making; Miles Mitchell has generated some feverish press attention with his downtempo instrumentals for a while now, and ‘Parallel Memories’ is his fulllength debut. As a body of work, it’s impressively cohesive; the mood, dark and often foreboding, is consistent right the way through, and his beats are as minimalist as ever. This is an album that very much goes at its own pace; it’s so slow, in fact, that at
times it feels longer than its actual duration – ‘Sweet Boy Code’, in particular, which features a brooding turn from Dark0, seems to run much longer than just two minutes twentyseven. That’s kind of the problem with ‘Parallel Memories’ – its minimalist restraint means that it gets repetitive pretty quickly, although there’s more than enough here to suggest a seriously bright future for Mr. Mitch, especially if he can pace things better next time around.
06/10
Mr Mitch Parallel Memories Pl an et Mu By Joe Go gg i n s . I n sto re s D e cembe r 1st
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Albums 0 7/ 1 0
0 7/10
05/10
09/ 10
Ausmuteants Order Of Operation
Landlady Upright Behavior
Gala Drop II
Richard Dawson Nothing Important
Aa rgh t
Ho m e t ap e s
G o l d c hann e l
W e ird W o rl d
By J ames F . Th omp so n. In sto res NOV 17
B y Reef Y ou ni s . I n s t ore s N o vem ber 2 4
By s am wal t o n. I n s t o re s N o v e m ber 2 4
B y T h o m a s M a y . I n s t o res N o v 2 4
Sounding like the bastard progeny of Suicidal Tendencies and Devo, with Jay Reatard for an uncle, Ausmuteants are as novel as they are utterly derivative.The Australian four-piece are at least honest enough to wear their early-eighties new wave and LA punk rock influences on their sleeves; one particularly raucous track is even called ‘1982’ for goodness’ sake. As on last year’s debut, proceedings here are heavily pivoted on the overbearing synth stabs and inscrutable yelps of front man Jake Robertson, who seems to revel in purposeful juvenility with tales of botched suicides (‘Felix Tried to Kill Himself’) and police brutality (‘We’re Cops’). Look beyond the ostensible mindlessness, though, and the degenerate aesthetic of ‘Order of Operation’ is an artful construction, with a lockstep rhythm section and studiously scuzzy production. Paradoxically this actually makes the record a bit less listenable than it might have been, coming across slightly straitjacketed. Still, there’s enough going on here to make this bastard worth a listen.
‘Upright Behaviour’ is an album bursting at the seams. A carnival of melodies dip and dart like angry birds, time signatures change with the unpredictability of the DeLorean speedo and Adam Schatz’ yelp leads the parade. Greedily pulling everything into a shifting art-rock din, every track is an adventure, and packing in the theatrics, ambition and intelligence the way Schatz manages to must be exhausting. Opener, ‘Above My Ground’ is playful, dramatic, and simmering with soul – its marching snares and rolling bass providing the insistent backdrop to Schatz’ barks and pleads. Bent with a skewed darkness, title-track, ‘Upright Behaviour’ comes off like a better adjusted version of the pAper chAse, as Schatz’ contrasting theatrics writhe with the similarly wired energy of John Congleton’s monochrome nightmares. It’s a flash of dischord that lets the death and loneliness of the subject matter briefly surface. But in the face of ambitious arrangements and endearing hooks, Landlady have already charmed you with their wonderful racket.
Gala Drop is a quartet from Lisbon, signed to a New York label, who have recruited a veteran Detroit techno producer, Jerry The Cat, to sing on their second album. And if that doesn’t summarise their pan-global approach, ‘II’’s first three tracks will: ‘You & I’ combines chewy dub basslines with fizzing acid synths, ‘Big City’ aims for a desert-jam west African highlife bounce, and ‘Sun God’ appropriates prog’s stylings for an extended wig-out. Unfortunately, the unintended consequence of this internationalism is that ‘II’ ends up sounding rather rootless and ephemeral; each track is perfectly tasteful, but that politeness gets cloying over the course of an album. Gala Drop clearly aspire to the psychedelic sprawl of Fela Kuti or the man-machine perpetual motion of Battles but, while their proficiency is undoubted, ‘II’ is desperately in need of those acts’ personality. Instead, this is the kind of record that won the Mercury Prize 15 years ago and became up-market helpline hold music – it’s competent, and expertly constructed, but also frustratingly listless.
It may be bookended with two atonal noise-poems for solo guitar, but ‘Nothing Important’’s title track has a superficial air of progginess, with its tragicomic autobiographical content and gargantuan length. “A toby jug filled to the brim with curtain hooks / A sheepskin rug discoloured with tobacco smoke,” croons Newcastle’s Richard Dawson, although with little of the pathos that a more literal artist might have adopted to relay such an image. For, the pathos – if there’s any at all – of Dawson’s narration is continually displaced by this parade of objects, unheeding and aloof. And, likewise, Dawson’s taut, muscular music is heard not in the abstract but within the unavoidable context of the physicality of its creation. The knotted guitar lines contain all the pain of blistering fingers, all the force of splintering wood and the howl of his vocals thrusts up against the very limits of his bodily capabilities; chaotically disintegrating to the point of ecstasy. ‘Nothing Important’ is a rhapsody of the material, the messy, and the intensely human.
‘Different Every Time’ is aimed as being an introductory musical accompaniment to an upcoming biography of the same name about Robert Wyatt. The album takes in his career from the early Soft Machine and Matching Mole days through to his solo work and also includes a second disc of collaborative projects including varied work with the likes of Björk, John Cage and Hot Chip. It may serve as a means to introduce a novice to the wonderful world of Wyatt but it’s a meaty one at that,
coming in at two and a half hours in length. The opening ‘Moon In June’, from Soft Machine’s 1970 album ‘Third’, takes up 20 minutes by itself, and is perhaps the finest example of pastoral progressive rock, and how of substance the Canterbury movement was. Beside the following ‘Signed Curtain’ – a track from Wyatt’s following Matching Mole group – it also demonstrates the singing drummer’s versatility as a songwriter, as he introduces a short,
postmodern string to his bow, by way of him knowingly mapping out what constitute a song. For the already familiar, it simply cements Wyatt’s position as one of the most original and unique artists to have ever existed in contemporary music. For those who are approaching this album – and Wyatt himself – fresh from the pitch black, that realisation is likely just around the corner as the breadth of musical ingenuity and creative flair displayed on this record is truly staggering.
09/10
Robert Wyatt Different Every Time Domi n o By Dan i el Dy l an Wra y. I n sto re s No v 17
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Reviews 05/10
0 8/10
05/10
07/ 10
iamamiwhoami Blue
Antony & The Jonsons Turning
The Drink Company
The Wharves At Bay
To Wh om I t Ma y Co n ce r n
Ro ug h T r ade
MEl odi c
G r ing o
By c h ris wat key s. In sto res Nove mb e r 10
By Ja me s F. T ho mp s o n . I n s to re s No v 1 0
B y jo e g o ggins . In sto re s d ec em b er 8
B y Ha y l ey S c o t t . In st o r e s n o w
Sweden’s Jonna Lee is not only a musician, but a multimedia artist; we, the audience, are asked to experience her music not in isolation, but as part of an audiovisual project. Thus each of the individual songs that make up the synth-drenched electropop found on ‘Blue’ is accompanied by a video – beautifully shot, expensive-looking clips with a watery theme, all sweeping seascapes in slow motion and exquisite natural landscapes.They’re populated by Lee herself and several black-clad, faceless figures, representing who knows what – perhaps shadows from her character’s past, or facets of her subconscious. The visual aspect of the project is so superbly expressive that it feels churlish to denounce something so brave, ambitious, and visually compelling, but the music does need to stand up by itself, and it only occasionally does so – in the likes of ‘Thin’, which is very like some of Kate Bush’s more haunted moments, and in the moving vocals of ‘Blue Blue’.This project falls down in what should be its most important part: the music itself.
In 2006, Antony Hegarty could do just about anything he wanted. The singer-songwriter had won the Mercury Music Prize the previous year for ‘I Am a Bird’, the second album from his baroque pop vehicle Antony and the Johnsons.The record – a harrowing document of Hegarty’s experience growing up as a transgendered person – was an unlikely smash hit, catapulting the New Yorker and his band straight into the mainstream. Emboldened by all this success, Hegarty collaborated with experimental filmmaker Charles Atlas on ‘Turning’, a series of daring audio-visual performances across Europe. This release captures the London leg of the tour at the Barbican in full, featuring tracks from the first three Johnsons albums along with two previously unreleased gems, stripped-down piano ballads ‘Whose are These’ and ‘Tears Tears Tears’. Hegarty’s bluesy cadence is front and centre throughout, while the band stay firmly within late night jazz confessional territory. It’s an imperious performance for fans and a perfect primer for newcomers too.
The Drink’s PR team were granted an absolute open goal when putting together the press release for this debut record; the fact that they became the first unsigned band in Rough Trade history to have their EP’s stocked by the legendary London store is a neat nugget with which to introduce the band, but you wonder whether that might actually become a little bit of a hindrance to them – remember when The Boxer Rebellion made it into the charts whilst unsigned? Course you do. Remember what they did next? Probably not. It might be best, then, for The Drink to make their music their focal point, but that might be difficult on the evidence of ‘Company’; there’s plenty of good ideas here, but they’re messily executed. The guitars seem to be working against Dearbhla Minogue’s floatily-delivered vocal on ‘Beasts are Sleeping’, whilst on ‘Junkyard’ it’s the stuttering percussion that grates. Ultimately, ‘Company’’s too repetitive to really demand your attention; ‘Bantamweight’ is the standout track, and the title sums up the album, too.
Having read up on London trio The Wharves, the fact that they are women was an iterative and persistent theme; we live in a world where the average person is still incapable of understanding that gender is not intrinsically linked to one’s ability to create music. Similarly, conventional wisdom dictates that any “all-female” band with a propensity for multi-vocal harmonies is indebted to the ’60s girl groups of yore. While The Wharves (who feature ex Kasms member Gemma Fleet) are no doubt vocally influenced by those groups – particularly on ‘Scarlet for Ya’, which is indicative of the band’s perfect pop sensibility – it’s structural, progressive folk that dominates this debut album, alongside myriad disparate influences – including psych and minimal rock – which makes for something quite diverse and often singular. In all, vocals are perhaps a little too prominent and startling – no doubt heightened by the gleaning production – but ‘At Bay’’s most prevailing quality is within the captivating songwriting and rich compositions.
Pop “Alex G” into your search bar and the overwhelming result will be a Philly-based songstress, currently set on wooing Arianators with slickly-produced music videos and galling vlog entries. This baffling universe of high street fashion-clad pop hopefuls imposing their inane jibber-jabber on mini-armies of vacuous pubescents is worlds away from that of namesake Alex Giannascoli, a Temple University student who’s instead filling his HQ with unpredictable loner rock.
From the Pixies-esque squealed lick on opener ‘After Ur Gone’ to the amateurish and affecting piano of curtain call ‘Boy’, this debut album proves to be a mad swirl of influences – with Big Star-ish jangle and Elliott Smith-like introspection at its core. However, the record’s best moments are often its briefest and most delicate; ‘Rejoyce’ sounds how Broken Social Scene’s ‘Anthems For A Seventeen-Year Old Girl’ might if it was given further off-kilter lilt by Youth Lagoon’s Trevor Powers, while
‘Icehead’ dwells in similar lackadaisical territory. Elsewhere, Built to Spill’s college rock inspires brasher outbursts, like ‘Harvey’. Meek and powerful at the same time, ‘DSU’ is an otherworldly spin on the coming-of-age soundtrack – the sort that’ll creep out under the bedroom doors of an enthusiastic subset. But most interestingly, Alex G’s approach is a nuanced and more intricate update on that of the genre’s forefathers, which marks him out as a beguiling proposition.
0 7/ 1 0
Alex G DSU L u c ky N u mber By J ames West . I n sto res NOVEMBER 10
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Albums 08/10
0 7/10
05/10
07/ 10
The Czars Best Of
King Gizzard & Lizard Wizard I’m In Your Mind Fuzz
Golden Fable Ancient Blue
Trash Kit Confidence
Fu l l o f j o y
up s et t h e r h y t h m
By s am c o rnf o rth. I n s to r es n o v em b er 1 0
B y Th o m a s M a y . I n s t o r es d ec em b er 1
The rag tag, alliterative absurdists behind King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard deliver ‘I’m In Your Mind Fuzz’; a joyous journey of frantic and ferocious psych that should appeal to anyone who has ever been in (on into) a garage band. These guys play as if sound tracking a mixed martial arts bout between Conan Mockasin and Unknown Mortal Orchestra, once again proving there is something deliciously off kilter in the waters of the southern hemisphere. The first four tracks are essentially one long jam, returning intermittently to the same stampeding bass/drums combo that tramples your brain into a sweaty submission. Guitars meander off on self-indulgent jaunts, especially in ‘I’m Not In Your Mind’, but it’s all kinds of fun. The second half of the album is a little more varied, with the fuzzy funk of ‘Am I In Heaven’ and sunshine pop of ‘Her & I’, but throughout the record King Gizzard don’t take themselves too seriously (you’ve seen the name), making them the kind of band that everyone wishes they were in.
Golden Fable must be every park ranger’s favourite band. The Snowdonia trio’s dream pop easily evokes the picturesque scenery of their local landscapes – so much so I reckon they are National Trust approved. Their second album, ‘Ancient Blue’, largely draws upon the same palette of organic folk music and assortment of electronic synths that their debut, ‘Star Map’, did, but while Rebecca Palin’s angelic voice and the serene instrumentation may intertwine cleverly enough, this new album lacks any real substance. It is a polite, pleasant and gentle collection of predictable songs that wash over you without offering any lasting impression. Quite rightly, Palin’s vocals have earned comparisons to Elizabeth Frazer’s distinctive delivery, but where Cocteau Twins were capable of crafting bold, otherworldly soundscapes (as were Dead Can Dance and This Mortal Coil, who are also notable influences here), Golden Fable simply can’t. It is hard to invest yourself in an album that sounds like a bunch of offcuts from a John Lewis advert.
Whether Trash Kit’s eloquence is the result of accident or design is an ambiguity fundamental to their music’s humble charm. The London trio’s fidgety energy is belied by its rough-hewn amateurism and lyrical quaintness: less ‘Antidotes’-era Foals, more Raincoats-obsessed school band. “We spent, summer, waiting, for summer, to co-ome,” sings frontwoman Rachel Aggs, her stop-start melody stumbling atop a chiming single-chord guitar riff. The tone is not one of nostalgia, but rather poignant acknowledgement of the present’s continual passing. In short, it’s a bit twee; and in that sense ‘Confidence’, the group’s second full-length, feels more suited to the late-noughties milieu from which their debut album emerged four years ago. But Trash Kit’s aura of meek simplicity rarely comes at the cost of their music’s robust momentum: horns augment the already-sprightly textures of taut rhythmic motifs with fleeting vocal harmonies providing pithy punctuation. ‘Confidence’ is bedroom dance music of rueful and equivocal romanticism.
Fryars, aka Benjamin Garrett, is one of those prodigiously talented, electro-leaning solo artists whose overarching ambition, and the complete creative control they wield over their music, can sometimes appear to smother their ability. This album, his second after an unjustly muted debut in 2008, almost got a release in 2012 off the back of a couple of promising singles, but label issues halted that momentum in its tracks. A switch to Fiction Records and a reboot sees Garrett
hoping that late 2014 will prove more fruitful. ‘Power’ is a highly polished record, forty-five minutes of mostly poised, pristine pop music, but the greater part of it just feels, well – thin. It’s the sort of music you might hear over the high-end sound system of a cool fashion boutique; there’s little here to quicken the pulse or move the soul, just an anodyne wave of pleasant but unfeeling sound, served up via overwhelmingly clean production.
It’s in the songwriting that ‘Power’ falls down; while admittedly ‘Can’t Stop Loving You’ is a piece of very fine soul-pop, elsewhere ‘China Voyage’ is a straight-up croon-fest, and if you performed a straight synths-for-guitars swap on ‘Sequola’ you’d have a thuddingly cheesy stadium rock ballad. At the very end of the record, there’s a sixty-second orchestral vignette, a fleeting glimpse into the true talent of Benjamin Garrett, but it’s there and gone so quickly as to leave no impact.
Bel l a Un i on By Ch r i s Wat keys. I n sto re s D e ce mbe r 1
He ave nl y B y H e nry wi l k i ns o n. I n s to re s D e c e mb e r 1
It scarcely needs saying that for the vast majority of musicians a life in music is a long, tough, financially unrewarding road. And while John Grant is currently, deservedly, enjoying both commercial success and critical acclaim, for a period of ten years from the mid-nineties onwards he was leader of a band who garnered a decent amount of the latter but precious little of the former. This retrospective, drawn from the three Czars albums released by Bella Union between 2000 and 2004, bears the unmistakable hallmarks of Grant’s songwriting – brushed with melancholy, starkly beautiful, and brimful of lyrics, which are at times laceratingly truthful and at others bitterly self-recriminating. Highlights include the beautiful male/female harmonies of ‘Lullaby 6000’, the simple piano and violin-led ‘Los’ and the alt-country infused, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Blly-esque ‘Paint The Moon’. Whaddayaknow, John Grant has always been the musical genius he’s now recognised to be, and this record shines a powerful light into a musical history worthy of exposure.
05/10
Fryars Power F i c t i on By Ch r i s watkeys. I n sto re s No v e mbe r 17
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Reviews 05/10
0 6/10
04 /10
07/ 10
The Voyeurs Rhubarb Rhubarb
2:54 The Other I
TV Smith I Delete
Dan Bodan Soft
H eav en l y
B e l l a Un io n
TVS
D FA
By S am C o rn f orth. In stor es No v e mbe r 10
B y He nr y W il k in s o n. I n sto r e s N o v e mb er 1 0
By J ame s We st. I n st or es N o v em be r 1 7
B y David Z a m mitt. In sto r es N o v em be r 1 6
Charlie Boyer and The Voyeurs have renamed themselves The Voyeurs. This isn’t a bold reinvention though. Despite shedding his name from the bands’, ‘Rhubarb Rhubarb’, just like their debut, is dominated by Charlie Boyer’s uncontrollable, quiver. It also draws upon a similar palate of ’70s music to their debut, with a combination of glam rock jams (‘Train To Minsk’ and ‘Stunners’) and slower foggier moments (‘May You Will Stop’ and ‘The Smiling Loon’). While The Voyeurs continue to competently conjure up their own concoction of psychedelic music, it isn’t brain frazzling or mindbendingly good enough to enable you to ignore the undecipherable stories that Boyer sings about (At one point he sings about “feeding the ducks” followed by “images of being in love”). ‘Clarietta’ was a solid debut with some promising moments; the brightest of these were the band’s menacing post-punk stomps that strutted along confidently, and it is these that are missing from their follow-up. Pursuing a more trippy sound has left The Voyeurs lost without their playful pomp.
With a name that pinpoints the exact moment in a Melvins track that defines their aesthetic, 2:54 have been nothing if not headstrong and focussed since their inception. Their second album, ‘The Other I’, carries an equally revealing title referring as it does to the Thurlow sisters’ near telepathic connection via a line from poet Percy Shelley. From the stomping rhythm and desperately yearning vocals on opener ‘Orion’ through to the driving dark wave of ‘Raptor’, this is indie music with grand pretensions. A literary influence runs throughout, too, with ‘Tender Shoots’ based on a selfpenned short story. The best tracks, ‘Sleepwalker’ and ‘Monaco’, simultaneously strike a rare balance between anthemic and understated, rooted in the grunge of Nine Inch Nails and A Perfect Circle but delivered via the dreamier tones of Warpaint. Elsewhere, though, they fail to live up to their lofty, faintly revolutionary aspirations and deliver tracks like ‘Crest’ and ‘South’; polished but lacking energy and ultimately, one feels, a bit too palatable.
Although The Adverts wouldn’t be a pointless answer on the BBC game show if contestants were quizzed on British punk bands, they’d earn you a much lower score than The Sex Pistols orThe Clash. One of the main factors contributing to this may be their short-lived career (although, times being what they were, they did release two albums in as many years). Still, their former frontman, TV Smith, has managed to carve out a long solo career for himself. On this sixteenth solo album, Smith shows that he is as politically charged as ever as he lyrically explores social issues of the modern day on appropriately named tracks such as ‘Cutbacks’, ‘First One To Sign Up’ and ‘It Don’t Work’. Unfortunately though, these themes are set amongst chugging drive-friendly acoustic rock that has more than a whiff of the material served up at a local boozers open mic night about it. While ‘I Delete’ sadly can’t be erased from your memory with copious amounts of alcohol consumption, the weird contrast between meaningful lyrics and naff music luckily makes it very forgettable anyway.
Having moved to Berlin from his native Montreal, new DFA recruit Dan Bodan has appropriated the harsh twilight sounds of the German capital and breathed into them a warm, disarming humanity. As he gradually found his voice, his early work bore too close a resemblance to the plaintive, understated disco of Arthur Russell, but ‘Soft’ finds Bodan sculpting a sound that is singular and remarkably confident. Blending tender electronic soul, sultry vocal jazz and heartbreaking synthpop with production that is in turns gentle and unapologetically abrasive, Bodan covers love’s full spectrum of emotions. Standouts include ‘Romeo’ – a sumptuous, 3am RnB jam – and ‘Reload’, a track that punctuates gossamer Russell-esque organs with Amen breaks and yet which works beautifully. ‘Soft As Rain’, however, is the album’s real high point – this is the last slow dance of the night if the DJ can’t decide between Spandau Ballet and Lapalux. James Murphy himself would be proud of the decadently full-bodied tom-tom sound. Oh, and his voice isn’t bad either.
The 1980 release of ‘Fourth World Music: Possible Musics’ ushered in a new way. Through a truly democratic fusion of Western modernity (electronics, studio production) and an organic ‘Third World’ atmosphere of spirituality (provided by improvisational instrumentation) Jon Hassell intended and achieved a sum of two distinct worlds – first and third – and thereby created another – the titular ‘Fourth World’. Aspirational artistic manifestos aside, the sounds created represent
a unique counterpoint. Treated trumpet, Ghatam and Conga percussion, and a diverse, subtle mix of electronics exchange a special dialogue in a constantly astonishing landscape. Forget the conventional partitioning of ‘tracks’, this is a fluid segue through an exotic tundra. Scenes of firelit ceremonies and snake charmers dictated by close air and tropic haze. To highlight a few special elements and moments within this; the trumpet is an exorcism of
exhalations, as if directly threaded through to Hassell’s lungs, the bass frequently provides a spiritual kind of funk, and the percussion unerringly hypnotises. ‘Delta Rain Dream’ is a vivid phantasmagoria, and the mammoth ‘Charm (Over “Burundi Cloud”)’ is founded on a bed of crystal drone. With Hassell as the edifying orchestrator, and Brian Eno in tow as an advisory presence in production, this record brought forth a neglected but significant revolution in sound.
08/10
Jon Hassell & Brian Eno Fourth Music World Vol. 1 GLitt e rb ea t By Tim Wilson . In sto re s No ve mbe r 24
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Albums 0 7/ 1 0
TV On The Radio Seeds V i r gi n E M I By Ree f You n is. I n sto res No v embe r 17
Perpetually billed as forwardthinking music intellectuals, TV on the Radio have carried that mantle for the best part of 15 years. It’s a title that’s well deserved: full-length debut ‘DesperateYouth, Bloodthirsty Babes’ was a dissonant masterclass of pulsing electronics, wrestling tensions, and Tunde Adebimpe’s restless vocals; ‘Return to Cookie Mountain’ stirred up a sonic cyclone of primal anthems that sound as vital now as they did in 2006, and the dense yet hopeful ‘Dear Science’ emerged as the band’s most commercially successful release to date. Anger and ingenuity have always been the power driving the feral vocal howls and Dave Sitek’s
peerless production, but setting such a consistently brilliant pace inevitably made fourth album ‘Nine Types of Light’ a relative step down. And after the devastating death of long-time member Gerard Smith, shortly after that album’s completion, it became a long way down. Death hangs hopeless and heavy on ‘Seeds’. Even set against the patience and serenity of ‘Nine Types of Light’, the pleading vocals of ‘Quartz’ and the gentle throb of the mournful ‘Careful You’ make this an uncharacteristically subdued opening. But from political anger to hopeful redemption, from grim commentaries to love, life and loss, TVOTR have rarely shirked the
difficult issues. Here it’s no different, just more cathartic. Moving away from the swimming ’80s dynamics and cavernous percussion, ‘Could You’ brings the Saturday Night Live bluster with showy brass pomp that feels as robust as a half-hearted smile. There are no such concerns about the killer hook and feisty melancholy of ‘Happy Idiot’, though, as it blooms into an impeccably catchy Coxon-meetsNew Order earworm. It brings us to the downbeat ‘Test Pilot’ which is arguably the straightest song the band has ever written – a devastatingly tender slow jam fraught with Tunde’s falsetto croon, and the kind of tumbling guitar
iridescence with which you want Explosions in the Sky to break your heart. On ‘Love Stained’, they move onto similarly contemplative ground, veering towards ‘Silent Alarm’ era Bloc Party before re-discovering some spirit on a conflicting, mini battle between surging sonic triumph and sparse arrangements that ultimately feel unresolved. TV on the Radio have always made a righteous noise. Steeped in deep-thought, oozing soul, and fired by an impulse to either shake your fist or move your feet, we hoped for more of it here. But as they try to reassure themselves on the pleading ‘Trouble’ it seems this time round they just want to reflect.
‘Frozen by Sight’ originated from a commission for the 2013 Festival of the North East, in which Paul Smith from Maximo Park and Field Music’s Peter Brewis set some of the former’s travelogues to music. And while the album is attributed simply to those two, it’s pleasingly greater than the sum of its collaborators: intrigue comes from both musicians operating at a knight’s move from their usual habitat and, refreshingly, neither one kowtowing to the constraint of their parent band.
Accordingly, occasional flickers of the yearning romanticism that characterises Maximo Park’s lyrics are in evidence, but on the whole Smith prefers to offer up artfully detached polaroids of everyday throwaway scenes and derive poignancy from the distance rather than intensity of the narrator. Equally, Brewis’ evocative instrumentation is recognisably his, but with the Field Music spikes sanded off: rich, stately string quartets alternate between stoic sadness and playful smirk,
depending on the nature of Smiths’ character studies, and the results often glide closer to contemporary classical than anything more uniform. Not quite songwriting, soundtrack or improvisation, ‘Frozen By Sight’ is a wonderful curiosity shop of a record that balances quirk, sincerity and freshness with great poise, and sounds exactly how the product of people-watching the world over should: idiosyncratic, emotionally invigorating and pleasingly set apart from the pack.
09/10
Paul Smith & Peter Brewis Frozen By Sight Me mp h i s In du s trie s By S am Wal t on . In sto res No v e mbe r 17
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Reviews / Live
My Brightest Diamond Village Underground Shoreditch, London 28/ 10 / 20 14 wr i ter : S am Walto n Ph otogr a ph er : s teve ase njo
The first confounding act of tonight comes before Shara Worden has even taken the stage: My Brightest Diamond’s choice of walk-on music, which plays on for several minutes after the house lights have dimmed, is burbling, nagging and faceless electronica, standing in no little contrast to her own melodic, knotty and characterful chamber rock. The second comes immediately afterwards: Worden and her backing band – a two-piece rhythm section straight from Central Casting’s
“jobbing muso” file – are playing not through standard indie-rock amps but something more akin to Fabric’s hulking subs, rendering ‘Pressure’’s opening drum solo closer to a kidneyrumbling splash of Carl Craig than anything one could reasonably expect from an act signed to a label called Asthmatic Kitty. The rest of the set continues with the intensity of its opener, and Worden revels in it.The transforming of songs from ‘This Is My Hand’ into propulsive stompalongs, in which
the bass and drums do all the heavy lifting, allows Worden’s operatic vocals to soar and swoop around the arrangements with compelling grace, and when she does eventually revert to solo voice and guitar briefly for tear-jerking torch song ‘I Have Never Loved Someone’, the shift in force feels wonderfully intimate. In her final act of defiance, Worden encores with a cover of ‘Fever’ that sees her vault over the monitors and into the crowd, impishly skipping through her audience with
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the microphone, delivering different verses of Peggy Lee’s classic to unsuspecting individuals. The sight of her, barely five foot even with her towering quiff, exchanging twirls with bespectacled and slightly dazzled gig-goers varies from the satisfyingly subversive to the somewhat awkward, but Worden’s sense of rebelliousness shines through regardless: if there’s one refreshing take-home from tonight, it’s that My Brightest Diamond is not to be told what to do.
Reviews
Vashti Bunyan St. Pancras Church Kings Cross, London
Death From Above 1979 Plug, Sheffield 2 4 / 1 0/ 2 01 4 w r it er : D a n ie l D y l a n W r a y
0 8/ 10 / 20 14
P h o t o g r ap h er : T a s h B r ig h t
wr i ter : E dgar S m ith
It’s strange to think DFA 1979 were once considered to be at the heart of a dance-punk revolution. Whilst the tip-tap rapid-fire high-hat and occasional cowbell may exude a mild air of disco on their 2004 debut, filtered through the live vessel that is 2014 DFA they’re more akin to Motorhead than anything their namesake record label may put out. In the ten years that have separated the duo’s records, they’ve not expanded a great deal in their output but the more-of-the-same approach seems to work as far as tonight’s extremely lively crowd are concerned; a crowd, that when the duo slip in a chorus of the Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me’ into the breakdown of ‘Romantic Rights’, go bananas.There are moments of running through the motions but also times when the pair ignite and make wonderfully stirring, cacophonic expulsions.
Vashti Bunyan 2.0; the artist in her post T-Mobile ad years is a bangleclad hippy mum. Thankfully the three decade-plus hiatus before 2005 did nothing to the ageless quality of her voice, as crucial to her songs as it is for Sibylle Baier’s or Pete Shelley’s. Untouched by the old-woman warble of Leonard Cohen, pastoral lyrics hover immaculately level above her murmured finger-picking. This clean, weightless tangle of sound breezes through enduring greats like ‘Diamond Day,’ ‘Rose Hip November’ and ‘Train Song,’ interspersed with whispered explanations and tracks from this year’s ‘Heartleap’. A digital acid squelch from somewhere in her set-up keeps intruding. While it couldn’t be more out of place, it only underscores the intimacy of this tiny church rather than ruining the set – another example of Bunyan’s resilience.
Avi Buffalo Assembly Hall Islington, London 10 / 10 / 20 14 wr i ter : S am confo rth
For someone who sings “Bitch, I’m on fire”, followed by, “You’ve got magnum desire, I’m a cheeseball on fire”, on their new album, it is surprising how ordinary the opening of tonight’s show is. Avi ZahnerIsenberg and his band are plighted by poor sound, with their glorious melodies and the singer’s trademark falsetto getting lost in the vast space. Once the anxious figure settles, though, his vocals soar on ‘Memories of You’ and ‘What’s In It For You?’, two of the few songs that manage to match the height their studio counterparts reach. Still, there is a moment tonight when the band leaves Avi to play acoustically on his own, where during the poignant ‘Overwhelming With Pride’ a glitter ball dreamily reflects light around the room, perfectly capturing the appeal of Avi’s glimmering yet fragile music.
A Winged Victory For The Sullen Milton Court Concert Hall, London 13/1 0 / 2 0 1 4 wri te r: S am wa l to n P hoto gra p he r: s am wal to n
A Winged Victory for the Sullen are at their best when their beatific swells of noise subvert rather than mimic traditional anthemic songcraft: after all, the band’s slow, melancholic chord progressions – mostly in conventional key and time signatures – owe far more than their ambient peers of Eno and Stars of the Lid to standard rock stylings. Accordingly, yearning stringquartet suspensions soar highest tonight when clouded in the electronic static of Dustin O’Halloran’s various throbbing machines, and Adam Wiltzie’s (himself half of Stars of the Lid) lullaby compositions are most poignant when amplified by themselves over and again to achieve an aggressive loudness. Indeed, the band’s use of Milton Court’s full dynamic range and impressive acoustics is most striking tonight, and atones for occasional diversions into soppy solo-piano tinkle.
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Live
Annie Clark’s latest stage incarnation of St Vincent is not so much a live gig than a theatrical statement, complete with bouts of rigid choreography and sporadic performances atop a high central podium. Across festival stages this summer, such originality was a delight, but six months of hard touring has clearly dulled the magic, with each band member now simply on rails, the dance moves unwittingly awkward and even Clark’s improvisations – usually so engaging and knotty – giving off an air of willthis-do. It might not look like it from the forgiving photographs (I mean, how many musicians throw kung-fu shape, however enthusiastically), but compared to St Vincent’s Primavera performance, particularly, the difference is palpable. While the elegant songcraft and Clark’s musicality still shines, a naff portentousness overwhelms her set, punctuated by two rather whiffy inter-song monologues worthy of Winona Ryder’s character in Heathers. It’s a pity: at her best St Vincent is a mesmerising performer. Tonight, she frequently has trouble inspiring even herself.
St, Vincent Roundhouse, Camden Town 25/ 10 / 20 14 wr i ter Sam Walto n Photo gr aphe r Ro y J Baro N
Antlers Hackney Empire Hackney, London
How To Dress Well St. Philip’s Church Salford, Manchester
Caribou Koko Camden, London
Gulp St. Pancras Church Kings Cross, London
24/ 10 / 20 14
23/1 0 / 2 0 1 4
08/10/2014
1 3 / 1 0/ 2 01 4
wr i ter : C hr i s Watkeys
wri te r: J o e Gogg i ns
wri t e r: Pe te r Yeun g
w r it e r : Sam uel B alla r d
There aren’t many bands around right now who play the kind of music Antlers do and who sell out venues like the (immensely beautiful) Hackney Empire. It’s a mark of their quality and a gradual progression from raw, visceral guitar-heavy beginnings to a considered, orchestral, polished maturity, that they can do so. It’s all gotten very serious in this band’s world; recent third album ‘Familiars’ was a step along that path, and tonight they play with a different, more mature kind of intensity. In a set almost entirely from ‘Familiars’, golden brass trade turns for centre stage with frontman Peter Silberman’s exquisite falsetto. At the end of it all, Silberman looks drained, emotionally exhausted, like a stage actor who’s given every ounce of themself to the performance. It’s because he does so that Antlers, live, are such a rare and special thing.
“I really don’t know why anybody would be religious,” says Tom Krell mid-set as he details a ‘disappointing’ trip to the crypt under tonight’s venue this afternoon. He’s pushing his luck, and not just because the charming vicar of St. Philip’s Church is in attendance (pulling pints, no less) – Krell’s also risking meandering into the self-righteous territory inhabited by Dawkins and Gervais. Neither of those men, though, have a voice as arresting as Krell’s; he brings his superb third record ‘What Is This Heart?’ to life tonight with a fourpiece band and impressive visuals, but it’s really his fabulously powerful vocals that are the centrepiece, and ultimately have the crowd out of the pews and forming a throng around him at the front of this old church. It’s fully justified, too – Krell’s performance is worthy of his gorgeous surroundings.
The annual North American caribou migration is one of the most breathtaking wildlife spectacles on Earth, and the same goes for the eponymous Canadian electronic artist, who begins his album tour – a seasonal migration, of sorts – for ‘Our Love’ at London’s Koko, in majestic and masterly form. The Grade-II listed former theatre is an apt setting for the epic journey that Dan Snaith and his accompanying three-piece band take us on: billowing synth to angelic vocals, tribalistic house to tender melancholia, throbbing maximalism to hedonistic dance. It’s this final facet that is now most apparent; with the euphoric light show, the carefully constructed build-ups that orientate this output squarely toward the dancefloor. Snaith, a doctor in pure mathematics, conducts it all with peerless precision.
Set within the ancient walls of St Pancras Old Church, this show was always going to have an ethereal quality to it. However, add a Super Furry Animal (bassist Guto Pryce) and his dream-folk wife (Lindsey Leven) to the mix and you are almost on another planet. Flying through debut album ‘Season Sun’, Gulp play a rapturous set in front of a psychedelic backdrop that helps to enforce their natural, organic sound. Given Leven’s innocent stage presence, there is more than a hint of Nico running through the band, minus the Teutonic dark undercurrents. Stand out tracks ‘I WantTo Dance’ and ‘Let’s Grow’ feel perfectly at home within the holy walls of this north London house of prayer, on a good night’s work for the band, even if the performance errs more on the side of druid than diocese.
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Cinema
That’s a R ap!
08/ 10
by Tom Fenwick
Time Is Illmatic might showcase Nas as one of the finest rappers of his generation, but his lasting contribution to cinema prior to this documentary was as the lead in Hype William’s risible 1998 directorial debut Belly . Some rappers have managed to turn their hand to acting with far greater success. So with that in mind here are the five best and five worst rappers turned actors (Raptors?).
THE BEST 05. Ice T ‘Cool Tracy’ to his friends, Ice-T was acting before he’d even released his first LP; making his cinematic debut way back in 1984 with a role in Breakin’. Although he didn’t get into the business seriously until the early ‘90s, he’s been making up for it ever since. Bringing his brand of pimp swagger to the screen as a mutant marsupial (Tank Girl), a drifter on the run (Surviving The Game) or the coolest cop to ever wear a giant beret (New Jack City).
04. Ice Cube The second ice in this acting cool box, Cube’s had some ups and downs in his career, but gradually he’s proved himself a reliable and somewhat versatile character actor, recently proved in his very funny role as the police chief in both the 21 Jump Street movies. His most memorable part, though, is still Doughboy in grammatical nightmare Boyz N Tha Hood; delivering the movie’s powerful coda...“(America) don’t know, don’t show, or don’t care about what’s going on in the Hood.”A powerful statement that still resonates twenty years later.
03. Andre 3000 Since it became apparent that Andre Benjamin isn’t terrifically interested in music anymore, he’s steadily grown in confidence as an actor. And while he’s got a relatively short
resume compared to some others on this list, he seems to be making the sort of interesting choices that mean he’s one to watch. Whether that’s in laugh-out-loud comedies with Will Ferrell (Semi-Pro), the weirdest Guy Richie film ever (Revolver) or critically acclaimed biopics (Jimi: All Is By My Side).
02. Queen Latifah One of only a handful of rappers turned actors to receive an Oscar nod for their work onscreen, Latifah’s ability to switch between comedy and drama with ease has more than proved her talents, while her innate warmth and charm seems to keep us coming back for more, even if her filmography is a bit of a mixed bag.
01. Tupac Shakur After meeting an untimely end one infamous night in Las Vegas, 2Pac has still managed to release seven posthumous albums, a figure that almost rivals the number of films he appeared in during his brief lifetime. Despite his notorious feuds and gangster attitude he seemed to have a natural aptitude for the screen, leaving us with some great roles, in particular the wholly underrated black comedy Gridlock’d.
THE WORST 05. Mos Def Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def, formerly Dante Beze, formerly Dante Smith... phew!) started acting at fourteen. Since then, he’s brought his unique brand of stilted, spacedout, wide-eyed acting to everything from Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy to The Italian Job and 16 Blocks. It’s not so much that Bey’s performances have been terrible but – as his filmography suggests – he may need a better agent. At least one who gets him a role that lives up to the quality of his musical career... or at least reads these terrible scripts before signing him up.
04. LL Cool J Why do Ladies Love Cool James? Is it his multi-Grammy award winning career in rap? Is it his sinuous rhymes? Is it his abs? Maybe. But what we can say with certainty is that it isn’t his varied and interesting acting career. His most enduring contributions to cinema see him play a wise-cracking cop, a wise-cracking chef, a wise-cracking NFL player, a wise-cracking security guard, a wisecraki... you get the idea.
03. Ludacris While his hip-hop career might have waned in recent years, his acting career has taken off. Which is a shame, because while Luda’s career started out with huge promise and the double whammy of Hustle & Flow and Crash, now he’s edged into the arena of the banal (see the cultural nadir that is New Years Eve).
02. DMX DMX sure is persistent. That’s the only possible explanation for his inexplicably lengthy career. While he got his start opposite Jet Li and Steven Segal, his most recent credits include a film with the screen giants Vinny Jones, Armand Assante and Michael Madsen. But if you need a man to hold a gun and look slightly confused on your poster then DMX is your man – and probably for a low, low price.
01. 50 Cent Fiddy is one of the few actors who can honestly say he played himself on screen and still failed to sell the role. And yet Get Rich Or Die Tryin isn’t the low-water mark in his body of work. If you’re a connoisseur of sobad-they’re-fun movies then 2011’s All Things Fall Apart comes highly recommended; wherein Fiddy lost a tonne of weight to play a character who’s only marginally less terminally ill than his acting career.
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Nas: Time Is Illmatic director : one 9 writer : Eri k P ar k er S tarrin g : N as, Q T ip, A licia k e y s
‘Illmatic’ is that rarest of things: absolute perfection. A street-level snapshot of life in New York on the fringes of society; redefining the second epoch of rap and launching the career of an icon. And twenty years on it still feels as potent as the day it was released in 1994, its influence remaining untarnished despite the ups and downs of Nas’ latter career. New documentary Nas: Time Is Illmatic is a fitting testament to the legacy of that LP. In gestation for over a decade, the writer/director partnership of Eric Parker and One9 eschews conventional music documentary tropes in favour of an analytical tone – concerning themselves with the implications of ‘Illmatic’ as a social and cultural document. So rather than just being yet another ‘making of’ documentary, that focuses on the nuances of the album’s production, the film looks into the impact that Nas’s early life, his family and the residents of New York’s Queensbridge projects all had on the themes of ‘Illmatic’. It’s a creative decision that means – alongside obligatory interviews with the LP’s producers such as DJ Premier and Q-Tip – the film meets Nas’ father (Jazz trumpeter Olu Dara), tracks down his teachers, and rediscovers his boyhood friends. But it is perhaps the time spent with Nas’ brother – Jungle – that is the most poignant. In another particularly heart-wrenching sequence, Nas returns to Queensbridge and relive the moment his best friend was murdered. The film, running at a surprisingly brief 74 minutes, could feel sprawling. But, through a mixture of One9’s deft collage-like directorial style and a narrative structure based around ‘Illmatic’’s song titles, it manages to tie its seemingly disparate elements together. The result is a touching story that will shed an entirely new light on something you thought you knew so well.
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Cliff marTinez shopping
Eagulls
Charles Bradley How is this man still smiling?
lee ranaldo
CourTney BarneTT T.r.a.s.e
TeeTh of The sea
From Leeds to Letterman
+ Martin Creed Planningtorock Wild Beasts Simon Raymonde Liars Angel Haze
Plus Erol Alkan & Daniel Avery The War On Drugs sylvan Esso Molly Nilsson Mark E. smith Jonathan Poneman Rustie
k at y b The reTurn mission
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EMA Daniel Miller Slint School of Language 65Daysofstatic Lizzo Lorelle Meets The Obsolete
wa r pa i n t a l l yo u n e e d i s l ov e , d e a t h a n d da n c e
Metronomy
DFA 1979
+ albu ms of the year da r k s i d e c at e l e b on ho ok wor m s Ja m e s bl a k e fa t w h i t e fa m i ly n e w wa r b a r ry ho ga n & at p
It must be love
Don’t Call It A Comeback
Plus: Vashti Bunyan — Banks — Chris Lombardi — Protomartyr Shura — Sleaford Mods — Peaking Lights
Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 62 / the alternatIVe musIc tabloId
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+ Slowdive La Sera Trash Talk Luke Abbott Olga Bell Matt Berry
No joke
John Grant in Iceland
+ Tom Vek Sharon Van Etten Jeanette Lee The Space Lady Little Dragon Resident Advisor Quilt
GOAT
Mac DeMarco
Edwyn Collins Iceage Suicideyear Kindness Cooly G Peter Thompson
LOUDANDQUIET.com
Party wolf idiot tennis Game. Set. Twat.
catchphrase Say what you see
Kevin McCallister
IDIOT
Kevin McCloud
Home Alone
FAME
Don’t build a home alone!
“You guys give up yet? Or are you thirsty for more?”
MOST LIKELY TO SAY
“You guys should give up!”
“Shit! Are you ok?”
LEAST LIKELY TO SAY
“How much you’ve spent is your business”
The iron in the face
IDIOT POWER PLAY
Not lying to your face, even when you need it
This is how killers start
“So we don’t recycle then?” “Nah!”
GAME, SET & MATCH
crush hour Finding love in a hopeless place
Celebrity twitter
I was the guy who finally built up the courage to sit next to you at Reading Station, you were the girl who immediately changed carriages. Not a fan of egg sandwiches? Nervous Traveller
Kim Jong-un @K-i-m-m-y
7m
Sad to hear about my man @DennisRodman. Annnnd lunch! Lol. : Reply
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48m
Kim Jong-un @K-i-m-m-y @DennisRodman. Huh? For real? But you’re a guy?
To the buff guy in the red jacket who I was explaining the rules of Stictly to at Clapham Junction, you look soooo cute when you fall asleep. Keeeeep Dancing! ;-P Girl with glitter nail varnish
: Reply
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Kim Jong-un @K-i-m-m-y
2h
@DennisRodman. Lol. There’s been so many funny rumours, like when people said you wore a dress : Reply
To the butter fingers who accidently spilt her coffee in my face at Baker Street, I still mean every word of what I said. So when are we going out? Suited man with Duff Beer tie. 40.
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Kim Jong-un @K-i-m-m-y
4h
Well, that was a long poo. Lol.€#kiddin : Reply
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) Have you seen this!? What are we going to do, Ian!?
) Maybe if all three of us enter twice we’ll have a better chance of winning?
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Disclaimer: The representations of the persons herein are purely fictitious Catchphrase answer: That’s riiiiiiight!!!! It’s ‘Learning to live with it’
Photo casebook “The inappropriate world of Ian Beale”