Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 64 / the alternative music tabloid
A z e a l i a
b a n k s
Girl Unafraid + Viet Cong Ought Ghost Culture Silver Apples PCPC Paul Smith & Peter Brewis Albums of the Year
contents
welcome
Albums of 2014 – 14
There was a time, not so long ago, when it looked like Azealia Banks was destined to be a nearly something. ‘212’ – the 23-year-old Harlem rapper’s fully formed, out-of-nowhere debut single – promised her (and us) the world, but shortly after signing to Interscope and releasing her 2012 EP ‘1991’ on the most major of major labels, everything went tits up for one very simple reason: Banks wanted to be one thing (cool, to simplify the matter), and Interscope wanted her to be something else (a popstar, to hit the nail on the head). Interscope continued to dismiss a majority of the music she presented to them, and so the intervening years have been defined more by what Banks has said (about other artists, and in an unforgiving manner all of her own), than what she’s put to tape. And that is a particular shame for two reasons: 1.) Because Banks, plain as day, sure can rap, and 2.) Because the public feuds belie Banks’ more sensitive self. The latter is not something any of us at Loud And Quiet were aware of before photographing and interviewing Banks in her hometown this month – just that, rather miraculously, Interscope had freed her from her contract and allowed her to retain her debut album, ‘Broke With Expensive Taste’ – a record she promptly released on a label formed by her manager. Record companies hardly have a reputation of doing that, just as most rappers rarely put out albums as lawless and sprawling as Azealia Banks’. In truth, ‘Broke...’ can be a patchy listen, but it frequently buzzes with a fearless confidence of youthful bloody mindedness, and its overall ambition is something to admire. Its creator hopes that it will finally give us something more to talk about, besides who Azealia Banks hates this week, and talking to David Zammitt, she also discusses embracing depression and why she feels lonely when she’s not on the road. Stuart Stubbs
ought – 16 Silver Apples – 18 Paul Smith & – 22 Peter Brewis Ghost Culture – 24 PCPC – 26 Viet Cong – 28 Azealia banks – 32
Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 64 / the alternatIVe musIc tabloId
A z e A l i A
b A n k s
Girl Unafraid + Viet Cong Ought Ghost Culture Silver Apples PCPC Paul Smith & Peter Brewis Albums of the Year
c o v er Ph o t o g r a phy g u y epp el
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 be n a yr e s, j a m ie wo o l ga r , K a te H e a d, ke o ng wo o , L a ur e n ba r l e y, M iche l l e K a m ba sha , S e a n ne w sha m , w il l l awr e nce , 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
Health Care At the end of 2013, we asked our favourite noise band, HEALTH, to review the past year, as seen from their vantage point in Los Angeles. For better or worse, they’ve done it again for 2014. Here are the headlines that really mattered to the people of America, from January to December / BILL COSBY Race relations in America were set back another 50 years when Bill Cosby, winner ofTime magazine’s prestigious “Safest Black Man on Earth” award turned out to be a serial rapist (allegedly, of course). This may not hit the British public, but Jello is never bringing back the pudding pop. Also, your kitsch “Cosby” sweater is now a “Rape” sweater.
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY HIGHEST GROSSING AMERICAN FILM
SIR IAN HOLM SHITS IN A BURGER KING SINK
Guardians of The Galaxy is the highest grossing film of 2014 in the United States. It is the sequel to the 2012 film Rise Of The Guardians.
This might not have happened, but my heart tells me it did.
WAYNE STATIC DIES AT 48
EBOLA The 1990s revival hit a fever pitch as the virus put up its biggest numbers yet, finally getting its foot in the door of the hallowed American market. Even The Beatles didn’t have their own checkpoint when they landed at JFK.
THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR DIES AT 54
Ill us t r ati o n : D i o g o Fr eita s
there’s no such thing as bad press. Presently their envelope-pushing, edgy video content has been a fixture of international news, garnering them their biggest audiences yet. Let’s hope they can sustain this controversial new direction.
The tragic story of the Native American is an irrepressible dark region of this country’s psyche. The trail of tears finally ended with the loss of our last great savage brave.
ISIS We haven’t heard much from L.A. based postmetal outfit ISIS since they disbanded in 2010. Evidently they’ve reunited and relocated to the Middle East where they have been producing some their most provocative work to date, completely eschewing lengthy song structures in favour of establishing an Islamic state. Their new work has been publicly denounced by the United Nations and even the American President, but we all know
Wayne Static, one of America’s most beloved musicians died in his sleep on November 1st, 2014. Static was best known as the founder and frontman of the industrial metal band Static-X.
worse for the 80-year-old billionaire, who fresh off his ‘bad beat’ in L.A. would have probably also shot the unarmed teen “seven or eight times”, according to witnesses. The incident inspired an ongoing series of protests and civil disorder in the St. Louis suburb. On November 24, a grand jury chose not to indict the cop or Mr Sterling for their actions, reigniting civil unrest and precipitating the largest race related country-wide protests since Rodney King hit the big time… GO CLIPPERS!
YOU CAN’T JOKE ABOUT PAEDOPHILIA AT A DINNER PARTY IN 2014 No matter how cool your girlfriend says her friends are, they still aren’t going to think it’s funny… trust me.
KIM AND KANYE GOT MARRIED
TOMMY RAMONE DIES AT 65
Who cares, America is still furious at Kim for breaking the internet with her striking horse ass. My shit was out for weeks.
Sadly succumbing to the accursed disease that befell his three brethren… Four Ramones dead. Four Rolling Stones still fucking alive.The world is a crazy place.
2014 CELEBRITY PHOTO LEAK I jerked off to a bunch of photos of J Law and a ton of other beautiful girls I’d never heard of on August 31st 2014… and again on September 11 (never forget).
WORLD CUP 2014
CIVIL UNREST IN FERGUSON, MO
The scientific opinion on climate change is that the Earth’s climate system is unequivocally warming, and it is extremely likely that we are totally fucked. Easy come easy go.
Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year old black male, was shot to death after an altercation with a cop, but it might as well have been 2014’s “bad luck kid” Donald Sterling, who was recently forced to sell the Los Angeles Clippers basketball franchise after making a series of Mel Gibson-esque remarks that were caught on tape. 2014 went from bad to
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We did OK. Once we get American black kids into soccer you’re all fucked.
CLIMATE CHANGE
HEALTH COMPLETED AN ALBUM Believe it or not, Ripley. Hold on to your dick, first quarter 2015.
books + second life
Bad Boy For Life? Reef Younis investigates what rock stars do next No.6: The pastor formally known as Ma$e / clean” but that didn’t extend to things going on behind the scenes. On the business side of things, a full-time gig with 50 Cent’s G-Unit was reportedly blocked by (now) P.Diddy refusing to release Ma$e from his contract, and on the personal side, Pastor Betha was busily, secretly, filing for divorce. Tired of the hypocrisy, and their pastor’s predilection for bouncing between church life and thug life, the churchgoers began to stay away. So as his marriage dissolved, and contractual battles with Diddy simmered away, God’s call was sent to voicemail, and Pastor Betha was officially ready to become Ma$e once again. It was a return met with a chorus of confusion, damnation and demonising but he came First Testament-prepared on fourth album, ‘Now We Even’. Winding up on ‘Niggaz Wanna Act’, he raps: “I greet ‘em with the 9 if they ever keep what’s mine/ if I lose I get loc, put a fool in the yoke/two to his throat, take his jewels and his coat”, conjuring up a Sunday congregation where weapons are either left at the door or dropped onto the collection plate.Whether Ma$e has been chasing redemption or retribution all these years, on the pulpit or in the studio, when it comes to pastor rappers, the Lord works in mysterious ways. Apparently.
In the mid 90s, Ma$e had the hip-hop world at his feet. Latching onto the white coat tails of (then) Puff Daddy, the mentor and young emcee set about tearing up the billboard charts, making it rain, and busting out a jumpsuit selection big enough to protect the U.S. population from the next ‘killer disease’ pandemic. After featuring on a raft of Puff’s tracks, Ma$e quickly lived up to his billing as Bad Boy Records’ golden boy by shifting over 250,000 units of his 1997 debut, ‘Harlem World’, in its first week, and followed that up with more Billboard chart success through second album, ‘Double Up’, two years later.That same year, though, Ma$e responded to a call from the big man himself – not Biggie from beyond the grave; God! Apparently. The switch from Puff protégé, and selfprofessed “bad boy for life”, to passionate pastor saw Mason Durell Betha leave the rap game and establish congregations in churches in Phoenix and Atlanta. Desperate to avoid the fast-track to Hell, Betha’s religious odyssey lasted five years before he eventually gave into temptation and returned with third album, ‘Welcome Back’, in 2004. Faced with juggling God’s gospel and the OG lifestyle, Ma$e told us he was “just a bad boy gone
b y j a ni n e & L ee b ullma n
Black Neon by Tony O’Neill Bluemoose
Tony O’Neill has a musical past that includes stints with Kenickie, Marc Almond and The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Black Neon is his fourth and best novel yet (following 2012’s Sick City) and tells the tale of anti-heroines Genesis and Lupita as they hit the road with a suitcase full of cash to distance themselves from the body of the drug dealer they just murdered, and embark on a wild journey into the dark heart of hidden America. The noir sleaze and bittersweet cheap thrills we’ve come to expect from O’Neill crack and fizz through the prose but are joined in Black Neon by a maturing approach to the art of the story, and the result is a fierce and electrifying novel. If you only read one of his books, make it this one.
Remembered for a While by Nick Drake, Gabrielle Drake, Cally Callomon John Murray
Taschen
Forty years on from his passing and the fragile music and sturdy myth of Nick Drake still haunt the culture. Drake has sung softly into the ears of every generation of musicians that have followed him and his albums sound as heartfelt and direct today as when they were first recorded. Remembered for a While is a poetic, delightful and fascinating mix of never before seen photos, handwritten lyrics and scrapbooked press clippings as well as interviews with friends and family and excerpts from Drake’s letters. A beautifully made and exquisite book built solely out of love for it’s subject, Remembered for a While is a perfect companion to the songs that inspired it.
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Rock Covers by Jon Kirby, Robbie Busch, Julius Wiedemann
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As heavy as a box of vinyl and as wild as the record collection you wish you owned, Rock Covers is a beast of a book and an absolute must for anyone who ever fell in love with the artwork on the albums that changed their life. The iconic covers you’d expect are all present and correct, accompanied by a collection of left-field oddities that’ll have you scouring record fairs and charity shops looking for Mae West’s sixties shimmy garage rock LP or the only album the ‘You Know Who’ Group ever made. The sheer variety of lovingly curated covers on display is breath-taking and Rock Covers offers a fitting tribute to the artists, designers and photographers who made the art-form breathe.
getting to know you
Antony Hegarty Last month, Antony & The Johnsons released ‘Turning’, an experimental audio-visual live CD/DVD collaboration, between Antony Hegarty and filmmaker Charles Atlas. As one of our most fascinating and genuine recording artists, we asked Hegarty to fill in our Getting To Know You questionnaire / What talent do you wish you had? Memory. Your Biggest Fear Eternity.
Who would play you in a film of your life? “Meryl Streep”
The worst job you’ve had I worked on an assembly line in a disk drive plant.
what is the most overrated thing in the world? “oil”
Your favourite item of clothing Givenchy Bambi sweatshirt. What’s your biggest turn-off? Asparagus.
Your favourite word Feral.
How do you want to die? Eaten by wild animals.
Your pet hate Sky god religions.
The celebrity that pisses you off most even though you’ve never met them Kermit The Frog.
If you could only eat one food forever, it would be… Plenty of salad. Favourite place in the world The Arctic.
The film you can quote the most of Hail the new puritans by charles atlas
The greatest misconception about yourself That I am somehow male.
What would you tell your 15-year-old self? Thank you and I love you. The worst present you’ve received A flea collar. Your best piece of advice for others Suspend judgment against yourself during creative processes.
The worst date you’ve been on It was with a hairdresser.
The characteristic you most like about yourself “my legs”
Your hidden talent I’m a good break up counselor.
What would you change about your physical appearance?
Your biggest disappointment Fake recycling.
“what wouldn’t I change?”
Your guilty pleasure Storm watching. What is success to you? Love and tenderness.
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the list
Albums of 01
02
03
04
05
Ought ‘More Than Any Other Day’
Caribou ‘Our Love’
Hookworms ‘The Hum’
Mac DeMarco ‘Salad Days’
Sleaford Mods ‘Divide And Exit’
( Ci ty Sl ang )
(We i r d W o rl d )
(C apt ur e d T r ac k s )
( Ha r b in g er So u nd )
06
07
08
09
10
Iceage ‘Plowing Into The Field Of Love’
Shabazz Palaces ‘Lese Majesty’
Suicideyear ‘Remembrance’
Protomartyr ‘Under Color of Official Right’
Run The Jewels ‘RTJ2’
(C on s tel l at i o n )
(S ub P op )
(Softwa re )
(M atado r )
( M a s s A pp e a l)
(Ha rd l y A r t )
11
12
13
14
15
Luke Abbott ‘Wysing Forest’
The War On Drugs ‘Lost In The Dream’
Metronomy ‘Love Letters’
Eagulls ‘Eagulls’
FKA Twigs ‘LP1’
(B o rd er C omm uni t y)
(S e cre t ly C an adi a n)
(Be ca us e )
(P a r t i s a n )
( Yo u n g T u r k s )
16
17
18
19
20
Todd Terje ‘It’s Album Time’
Dean Blunt ‘Black Metal’
Quilt ‘Held In Splendor’
EMA ‘The Future’s Void’
Goat ‘Commune’
(Ol s en R eco r d s )
(Ro ug h Tr ad e )
(Me xi ca n S u mm e r)
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(C i ty S l a n g )
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( Roc k e t )
the list
The Year 2014 21
22
23
24
25
School Of Language ‘Old Fears’
East India Youth ‘Total Strife Forever’
Virginia Wing ‘Measures of Joy’
A Winged Victory For The Sullen ‘ATOMOS’
Grouper ‘Ruins’
(Me m ph i s I n du s trie s )
(Fi re )
( St ol e n)
( K r a n ky )
(E ras e d Tap e s )
26
27
28
29
30
Young Fathers ‘Dead’
Weyes Blood ‘The Innocents’
Stefan Jaworzyn ‘Drained of Connotation’
Sun Kil Moon ‘Benji’
King Creosote ‘From Scotland With Love’
(Bi g Dad a )
( M e xic a n Su mm e r)
(Cal d o V er de)
(B la c k e s t Ev e r B la c k )
( Dom in o )
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32
33
34
35
Angel Olsen ‘Burn Your Fire For No Witness’
Kate Tempest ‘Everybody Down’
Damon Albarn ‘Everyday Robots’
The Antlers ‘Familiars’
Jessie Ware ‘Tough Love’
( B ig Dad a)
(Pa r lo ph o ne )
(T ra n s g r e ss i v e)
( Isla n d)
36
37
38
39
40
Lana Del Rey ‘Ultraviolence’
Simian Mobile Disco ‘Whorl’
Wye Oak ‘Shriek’
Scott Walker and Sunn O))) ‘Soused’
Clark ‘Clark’
(J agja gu wa r )
(Poly do r )
( A nti)
(C i t y S la ng)
(4 A D)
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( War p )
You Can Dance If You Want To Best experienced at face value, the debut LP from Canadian band Ought is our Album Of The Year Ph o to gra ph y : jenna f o xt o n / wr iter: th o mas ma y
The area clustered around London’s Kings Cross St. Pancras International station is uncanny in its flows and currents, its unexpected seduction. It feels both tight and loose, abundant and scarce. I wander down an impossibly wide street, ducking into a migrainously-lit Italian restaurant. Inside, people struggle to be heard, straining their voices over the clatter and their tongues against the unfamiliar contours of a foreign language. Suitcases are crammed under tables, held between legs. We’re all about to leave/only just arriving, minds already elsewhere and elsewhen. Later, in a pub nearby, I seedily watch as a singles’ night gains in anxious momentum. Gestures alternately overwrought and guarded, laughter convincing, the room is thick with suffocating self-analysis – everyone observing, everyone wanting/not wanting to be observed. Collisions of bodies, of eyes, sex like a black hole at the centre of it all: unsaid, unacknowledged, but its gravitational pull irresistible and inescapable. Everywhere the thought: “What the fuck do I do, here, now?”
I
t’s a grey November evening and I’m killing a couple of dead hours before Ought’s set at the Scala, a majestic 1920s former-cinema and the host, only a few days before, to the 2014 UK Twerking Championships (a real thing). “We looked for the Harry Potter thing, but couldn’t find it,” singer and guitarist Tim Beeler tells his audience later, referring to the luggage trolley lodged halfway into the wall between Kings Cross’ platforms 9 and 10. It’s a bizarre non-attraction, seen by most only through the distorting lens of a viewfinder – a surreal semantic dead-end fracturing the blankness of the station’s hanger-like “wait and consume zone.” And drinking in the faint absurdity of the Kings Cross area – its weird sense of busy emptiness, its transience and distance – feels like an apt prelude to Ought’s air of mildly amused alienation. “Something that we’re interested in, definitely, is things you can’t really put your finger on but that
are, nonetheless, very real and pertinent to how you think about yourself and your life and et cetera,” Beeler tells me during our meeting earlier in the day. We’re huddled in a corridor on the Scala’s top floor, the band sat against the wall as I reluctantly perch on the only available chair. “So an example of that is in ‘Gemini’” – the closing track from the Montrealbased group’s debut album ‘More Than Any Other Day’, our album of the year – “the lyrics are: ‘I retain the right to be disgusted by life, I retain the right to be in love with everything in sight’. It’s like total opposites.” I ask the group about a song, as yet unreleased but already a regular fixture of their live show, entitled ‘Beautiful Blue Sky’. As the track’s circling beat builds in insistence, its lyrics tighten from an impressionistic string of objects (“warplane”, “condo”, “new development”) to a high-paced repetition of non-sequiturs, a mess of linguistic surplus and refuse (“fancy meeting you here”, “how’s your day been”). And then it breaks, space arrives, and Beeler pronounces: “I am no longer afraid to die, it is all that I have left.Yes.” Later in the evening, this final word is accompanied by a brief flick of his head backwards, his delivery simultaneously coloured by self-aware resignation and sighing contentment, cautious ecstasy. “I am no longer afraid to dance tonight,” his tone now of mock seductiveness, “it is all that I have left. Yes.” “And that bit has a similar thing in my mind, of essentially polar opposites,” he tells me, referring to the combination of ‘die’ and ‘dance’. “And yet like when you can’t really get at it, when you can’t really find the words for particular feelings, sometimes all you can do is kind of shoot for the other end and know that what you’re getting at is somewhere in between those things. “Somewhere between feeling we’re, you know, really messing things up. We’re… not doomed but…” Here, he pauses, laughing. “... things can be fairly dire. And yet not wanting to slip into nihilism and total hopelessness and still wanting to transcend that in a sense. Wanting to accept that, sometimes you need to focus on things
that are a bit more of the moment, and a bit more related to fun, and joy or whatever. So holding both of those things at the same time is in essence what’s happening in that moment.” This attempt to accommodate two competing thoughts – or, less concretely, feelings and senses – in one’s mind motivates much of the fraught ambiguity of Ought’s music. During the near-title track of the group’s debut, Beeler announces, with intense fervour, that “today, more than any other day, I am excited to make decisions between 2% and whole milk”. And at this moment, there’s a simultaneity of the meaningless and the meaningful – the banal and the profound – that bestows this decidedly run-of-the-mill decision with an aura of strange significance. “The joke about the 2% milk thing is that that’s fucking meaningless,” drummer Tim Keen tells me, “that it doesn’t mean anything. But at the same time you do make these decisions, and they do have impact, and there are other things you can do in the world. So how do we wrestle with these two ideas at the same time, and you have to be able to – and that’s hard. A challenging thing to wrestle with – to find what you do have urgency for and don’t, and what is meaningful. And if you do that too long you end up in this circle where you wonder what meaningful things there are. The point is that we don’t have answers.” Matt May, the group’s keyboardist,
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elaborates: “I feel like lots of musicians write in that very small, or quotidian, very experiential, personal style. So it’s sweet that we get talked about as doing that, because we do do that. But I think there’s quite a hidden history of people doing that, for aesthetic reasons, or for political reasons, or it’s just how they write songs. So I think, yeah, those things are simultaneously significant and insignificant. Like which milk you buy… Sorry to harp on that one,” he says, looking across to Beeler, “we need a different example.” Beeler interjects in a singsong voice, smirking with a semi-feigned fear of failing to top this much-quoted lyric: “Se-cond al-bum…” “Those kind of things are these small moments, but those are the things you actually do,” May continues. “These big ideas and big crises – and fears and anxieties – are super real, and very much affect the way that you live on a day-to-day basis, but that’s very much like a material sense, manifested through how you treat people, and what you buy… So in the sense of things being very everyday, very quotidian, very small, for me that just makes sense in how I interact with the world.” It’s key to the band’s lyrical appeal – we all make tiny, inconsequential decisions that mean the world to us. “I don’t interact with global capitalism, I interact with the store around the corner and conversations with friends,” concludes May.
L&Q Album e of th year
“I
feel like irony is one of those words where in my head a blinder goes up,” Beeler tells me, reacting to my first use of the word as I attempt to describe the ambivalent sense of detachment – bemused observation – that pervades the group’s music. Perhaps flowing outwards from, or at least gathering around, the elements of pastiche often identified in their fidgety post-punk (not least in Beeler’s wired, David Byrne-like vocal delivery), this supposed layer of selfawareness is something the group are keen to downplay, if not dismiss completely. “We’ve been asked stuff surrounding the irony question before and I’ve thought on it – for me it boils down to your direct connection into the thing. Something which can look ironic or whatever – it could be a silly artefact which you present exactly the same way – but you totally dig it. “Like two posters,” he says, “one of which is collage-based and ’80s style, and one is like ironic ’80s. The other is essentially the same artefact so they’re hard to differentiate. I feel weird describing, or talking about, the moment between the person who made the thing and how it came out. Because really all that matters is: are you excited about it, is it fulfilling some creative desire, or do you enjoy having it around? I definitely
understand bringing something in for its kitsch factor, if it’s not something that you’re attached to or actually enjoy, for me that supersedes whether or not it’s ironic.” But aren’t these two artefacts – the ’80s poster and its ironic pastiche – created, circulated, experienced in specific cultural contexts? They might be the same artefact in a material sense, but surely the meanings of these signifiers – these styles, genres – change according to the time and place of consumption? “At some level you either like the thing or you don’t,” says May. “As you said, everything exists in this world of signifiers, so the reason you like something is complicated. But I don’t necessarily think there is that much value in going, ‘oh, okay I like this thing, do I like it because it is a referential thing to this thing?’, and boiling it down to all the reasons. Maybe there’s a certain selfconsciousness – and a fear-based selfconsciousness – in irony. Again, we really don’t experience this that much in our world.” Despite the group’s vocal resistance to the idea that irony is a concept particularly relevant to discussions of their music – claiming on numerous occasions that it’s not part of their “world” – it is difficult, as a listener, to ignore the presence of the often humorous, knowingness that
surrounds even their music’s most earnest moments. ‘More Than Any Other Day’, is, after all, a record so clearly influenced by Talking Heads, The Velvet Underground and Pixies, at various points, to varying degrees. So as the conversation returns from this detour around the meaning and value of the term, I ask explicitly: is there any pastiche in Ought’s music? “I think it’s complicated, because of the difference between… not eliteness, but knowingness and cheekiness,” Keen tells me, but only once we’ve briefly wrangled over the meaning of the term pastiche – a word that, just like “irony”, the group seem cautious to adopt themselves. “I think you can do something which is rooted in a very apparent genre and do it with a wink, without necessarily being entirely mocking. I think there’s this very complex duality: it’s not so much like ‘oh here we are making fun of this thing, or mastering it,’ or whatever. And it’s not so much the other way: ‘look at us we’re completely original, we have no reference to anything.’ There’s some sort of middle path you have to take, and if you can do that with a sense of humour, I find it helps negate the scary end of it.” “I would just go back to what Tim was saying about it,” says May, “in that what we do is sincere in that it’s not meant to poke fun at, or see how funny it is that we can do this. And it comes
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from a place of music that we like, and like playing, so in that sense it’s sincere. There’s also a cheekiness in it. You could take it too seriously – and to present everything straight-faced and deadpan would be disingenuous and insincere. The cheekiness to me is just like a part of the fact that this is… We take it seriously but we don’t think it’s this grandiose thing, like we’re doing this totally unique thing that nobody else has ever done. I mean that would be preposterous. And really silly in a different way.” As happens so often in our conversation, we return again to this sense of dualism that exists in numerous guises throughout Ought’s music. Of course, any pastiche, or indeed irony, within the group’s work is present only as a foil – a countermelody – to its simultaneous directness, its immediacy: neither sufficient, both necessary, these competing registers combine into the resulting fullness, arresting and beguiling in its ambiguity. Later that evening, the group introduce ‘Beautiful Blue Sky’, the final song on the set-list, with the announcement that “this is the dance track”. And as we’re told “you can dance if you want to… leave your friends behind”, the cleverness of the reference to ’80s band Men Without Hats is held in taut counterpoint with the deeply felt desire to do just that.
retold
The First Man In Space Even in the fertile, lawless year of 1967, the primitive, synthesised sound of Silver Apples sounded like nothing else, out-weirding progressive jazz and the most far-out psychedelic rock’n’roll. Then came a tonne of bad luck, as surviving member Simeon Coxe recalls to Daniel Dylan Wray Photography: tash bright / writ e r : da nie l dy la n w r a y
“I had my first brassiere thrown at me last night,” says Simeon Coxe as we sit down in the foyer of a Dutch hotel in front of an open fire. “It landed right on my shoulder, right in the middle of ‘Oscillations’. That was something.” For the seventy-six-year-old Coxe – originally one half of psych rock duo Silver Apples, and now the project’s sole member – the road to his current European tour has been a long and rocky one. In early 2015 he will release a new, sixth album, ‘The Alabama Sessions’, which will mark a staggering forty-eight years since the release of Silver Apples’ eponymous debut. In between that period there are tales of Hendrix, lawsuits, paralysis, death and more – a story Coxe talks me through, and one that is as unique and unpredictable as the music his group has made since 1967. Born in Tennessee, it was in New Orleans that Coxe began to develop a taste for music during his formative years. “When I was a teenager I used to skip out on basketball games and go down to Rampart Street and listen to people like Big Momma Thornton and Fats Domino and Dave Bartholomew who were just playing in the bars. That was the music I was into. Then I got to New York and started singing in rock’n’roll bands and it expanded into the pop and soul stuff of the time.” When Coxe moved to New York he
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initially followed a more traditional rock route, fronting a rock standards group, The Overland Stage Electric Band, although it was here he began to play with an oscillator. Attempting to incorporate the strange new sound into a live performance, his entire group quit, save for drummer Danny Taylor who, like Coxe, believed in the wonky, experimental sound. And so Silver Apples was born. “Our sound came from my inability to play music,” Coxe tells me. “I was just beeping and bopping along behind Danny’s drumming. Until I got better at what I was doing we were just kind of trapped and letting Danny carry the show. I just floated on electronically behind him.” Soon Coxe’s skills grew and so too did his set up. More kit. More oscillators. More strange sounds. In 1967, whilst electronic music was still largely primitive and modular synthesisers were only just beginning to appear on mainstream records (a preposterously expensive cost, and so limited to the stadium bands of the day), the unique set-up of Silver Apples soon attracted Robert Moog. “Moog called my manager Barry [Bryant] and said ‘can I look at what you’re all doing?’, and we said sure and Moog came and spent the day. They never took any of our ideas because he was the real deal – and one
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paper called what we were doing ‘hippy technology’ – but he was just curious to see what we were up to. He was the real electronic guy and I was just a street rock’n’roller who was buying up these cheap old oscillators for two dollars and trying to make them work. We really were street poor dirt people – I was living in my van.” After spending six months locked in a practice space honing their sound, which at that point encompassed an idiosyncratic meld of jazz, space rock and futuristic electronic explorations, Silver Apples played their first ever show. To 30,000 people in Central Park. “I was scared to death,” says Coxe. “Every time I look at that picture I shudder because it was just astonishing to go out and play for the first time in front of all those people. They just stared at us mostly. We followed this band called Children of God who were this wonderful, all black, soul band who played a mixture of gospel and pop soul and they were very popular in New York and everybody was standing up and cheering and then out we come and start with ‘Oscillations’ and they just stood there and stared at us. That was very unnerving. ‘How do we get these people going?’. We never did,” he laughs. Coxe’s homemade set-up grew and grew, until it was named ‘The Simeon’ (by manager Bryant, not by Coxe).
Consisting of nine audio oscillators piled on top of each other and eightysix manual controls to control lead, rhythm and bass pulses with hands, feet and elbows, it would also include radio parts, lab gear and a variety of second hand electronic junk. It was truly a one-off creation, not without its problems. “We used what technology we had,” says Coxe. “We had no idea how to hook this stuff up or transport it, nobody to make a telephone call to. We were hanging over the cliff the whole time. I always took a soldering kit with me to every single gig and I almost always had to use it. Something would always break. Piling stuff in the back of taxicabs and then out again, something would break.” As Silver Apples continued to grow, expand and experiment further, the aim, perhaps counter to popular belief, was not to go even weirder but to bridge a gap and make their sound appeal to the masses. “We’d never seen anything like what we were doing before, but that didn’t mean it was good,” says Coxe, “it just meant it was unusual. For us to convince people that something unusual was also something good was a steep mountain to climb. We were always trying to be more normal, not more far out, because most of the criticism we got was that we were too freaky, too strange, too
out there. Every record label that came to see us would say, ‘it’s too weird, it’s too far out. Even our jazz division wouldn’t take it’.” Finally, Kapp records took an interest and while insisted on the songs being trimmed down and edited for radio appeal, they largely took the band as they were. Coxe says: “We were so happy to have a label we didn’t give a damn.” The self-titled debut album that came in 1968 is a musical blueprint that took a decade for many others to catch up with, fusing rock, psychedelia and electronica with poetry. It broke new ground with every track. Predictably, the general public didn’t really get it, and despite the group’s attempts to reel it in, it was still largely a pretty strange record. It wasn’t without its notable admirers, however. On a John Peel interview, John Lennon was asked what he thought the next big thing was to which he replied: ‘watch out for Silver Apples.’The group would go on to play with Jimi Hendrix several times also, although the only recorded version of their many collaborations comes in the form of a take on ‘The Star Spangled Banner’, as both were aiming to perform it at separate concerts. Danny Taylor had previously been Hendrix’s drummer, turning down an offer of going to England at the invitation of the
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Animals. “At the time Jimi was just another blues player,” says Coxe. “He wasn’t famous or anything, so Danny stayed, thank goodness for me – I don’t know where I would have been without Danny saying no. Danny and Jimi stayed friends forever and we ended up in the studio together many times; he would jam with us and us with him.”
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he duo moved towards their second album, ‘Contact’, which was released in 1969, but instead of proving to be the record to switch the rest of the world onto their freaky sound, it was one that killed their career. The band worked in an unlikely sponsorship deal with American airline PAN AM, and the front cover of the album featured the duo in a plane cockpit with the company’s logo clearly visible. But that wasn’t the problem. The artwork on the back featured a plane wreckage. To PAN AM the assumption was clear – they were an airline now associated with catastrophic crashes and a couple of stoned-looking musicians. Coxe remembers the period painfully. “Everybody lost money,” he says. “I think it destroyed Kapp records. But everybody has to sign off on something like that, including PAN AM and their
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legal team – they were sponsoring that thing. Somehow, someone in PAN AM got his nose bit the wrong way and he started the ball rolling the other way to get rid of the thing. They got a judge to get an injunction to get all the records taken off the shelves, all the distribution of the record nationwide was instantly shutdown, which of course meant zero income and they even got some sort of a temporary hold put on us to stop us from performing any of those songs live. They even confiscated Danny’s drums. “PAN AM felt really threatened by us using that plane crash on the album. That left us with a terrible reputation amongst record labels. They treated us like we had leprosy. We already had a third album recorded and we could not get anyone to even listen to it. It ruined us, it ruined the record label but actually PAN AM is now out of business and I’m still in business. So, small victories. “Danny and I could not play anywhere,” Coxe continues. “I took a job as a DJ in a little club and Danny went and worked for the phone company. Barry took what savings he had and went to Copenhagen; he disappeared. We had no record label and no prospects of getting one; we weren’t allowed to play anywhere, plus enormous bills to pay from the third album we’d recorded. We just ducked, hid under the couch. That’s what happened.” The duo retreated from music, feeling defeated. “I felt like the big, bad evil legal gremlin had got in and destroyed an art form,” say Coxe. So soured by the experience Coxe turned his back on music altogether. “I stopped listening to music. I have a blank
of the late ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s. There are twenty or so years in there were I didn’t listen to music and I said that this was bullshit as an art form, and I wasn’t having anything to do with it.” And then a phone call came from a friend at a NewYork art gallery opening one night in the ’90s. “They called me and said: ‘listen to this, they are playing your music’. She said you should come up here, it’s on a CD and I said: ‘What?! We never released a CD!’, and she said: ‘here it is, it’s in my hand’. Then I started digging and it wasn’t long before I found a tonne of stuff: pirates, bootlegs, CDs, people claiming they were me.” Silver Apples had disappeared so far from anything remotely resembling the musical limelight that there was indeed someone pretending to be Coxe. “One guy with a beard in San Francisco was going around playing ‘Oscillations’ in bars saying he was Silver Apples. I had to get a lawyer to shut him down. Really. I had to get a New York lawyer.” Interest was renewed but no money was coming in because all material in circulation was illegal bootlegs. Silver Apples then returned to the stage. “It was so daunting returning and I had zero confidence in thinking that I could pull it off,” Coxe tells me. Much of his equipment had gone, too. “It got flooded out in a hurricane in Alabama,
most of it. I have a few pedals and a couple of oscillators, but most of the whole rig was stored in a house that got destroyed by Hurricane Frederick in 1979 and most of my equipment was floating out into the Gulf of Mexico.” During this period the pair pulled appreciative – often famous – crowds who had caught up with the group’s output, allowing them to finally release their lost third album, ‘The Garden’, in 1998. The same year, bad luck struck the group once again as their tour van was forced off the road, resulting in a serious collision. Coxe broke his neck, rendering him completely paralysed. Determined to return to music, he would make close to a full recovery, but it was a slow and challenging battle, which he owes to the good grace and consideration of one doctor. “I was lying there, totally paralysed from the neck down, and this surgeon that had been working on me brought in a keyboard, a synthesiser, and put it next to the bed and just walked away, didn’t say a word. Just left it there. I learned how to pick up one hand and get it on the bed rail and then move it to touch a key to make a note. It was a huge part of my therapy that he thought of doing that, even though I couldn’t play piano before I was paralysed.” “I still haven’t completely recovered, but you’d never know it. I have limited sensations in my fingers
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and my toes, I have almost no upper body strength, but it’s nothing compared to what they thought. My family was told don’t expect too much but it was that damn keyboard. When lights were out I would wiggle myself around and get a foot on the floor, even though I couldn’t feel the sensation I could feel the pressure. I learned how to judge the pressure little by little and next thing you know I am able to take steps around my bed. One time the nurse walked in to give me my midnight shot or whatever and she saw me in there and then they realised they had to do something and got me on therapy. They’ re still writing papers on it now and discussing it.” Whilst in recovery, and while Silver Apples diminished once more, Danny Taylor sadly passed away in 2005. But Coxe remained determined and returned solo as Silver Apples in 2007, using real life drums samples of Taylor playing in his new, more electronically focused ‘The Simeon’. Tour dates have since been steady, official reissues have been put in place that Coxe can now see royalties from and a renewed interest in the group has continued to grow year on year. It’s something Coxe is humbled and somewhat surprised by. And yet looking back on his near fifty year musical adventure, he finds himself in a place where he’s perhaps never been happier or more creatively fulfilled. “There’s something magical about that,” he says. “I’m always the oldest person in the room. I’m seventy-six years old and there’s nobody in the rock’n’roll game doing it, that I know of, doing it to the extent I am – they’re not touring with the intensity that I am and I’m recording all new material. The audiences are treating me as though I’m 25 years old – the music that I’m doing – they say – has no time on it. A girl threw a brassiere at me last night – it’s not like I’m seventy-six years old, I’m just a guy who is out there doing it and I’ve been doing it for a while but there’s no age connected to it somehow, in an odd way. I don’t feel old, I look in the mirror and I say ‘who the frick is that?!” Coxe is gearing up to release ‘The Alabama Sessions’ in 2015, the lead single of which, ‘Missin You’, suggests the album could be something quite remarkable. The album’s title is a homage to Coxe’s now home, somewhere where he finds peace yet whose music is still considered too weird, even now. “It’s nice and warm all the time,” he says. “I can go out on my sail boat. I’ve written lots on my sailboat. That’s where I am now, there’s not a venue around that understands what I’m doing. It’s been fifty years but they still don’t get it. I’m getting more resistance in Alabama than I ever got in New York, but I don’t care; that’s where I go for my peace.”
IN CONVERSATION
Paul Smith & Peter Brewis A month after the release of their joint LP, ‘Frozen By Sight’, Maximo Park’s Paul Smith and Field Music’s Peter Brewis discuss with one another the art of modern collaboration, with a little help from Sam Walton Photogra phy: dan kendall / writer: sam walton
“I want to continue to evolve, and that evolution is not a regular graph, which makes it very difficult to establish my stuff under any sort of brand, which I don’t mind. Peter and I could have both made similar-sounding records by ourselves for eternity and have quite a hefty bank balance, but it was never of interest to us, and I suppose that’s why you find yourself in a pub talking to me and Peter now: because collaboration so often feels like the next thing to do.” – Paul Smith of Maximo Park The artist collaboration is more prevalent now than at any time in pop’s 60-odd year history. Each weekly scan of the top forty shows up a greater number of “featurings” and ampersands, and even away from the charts, interband cross-pollination is no longer the rarity it was twenty years ago, fetishised like some indie equivalent of Fantasy Football. Of course, the modern digital world has allowed ideas to be shared at speeds and across distances that make time and geography virtually irrelevant, but is there something other than convenience that feeds into successful, interesting collaboration? Does it keep individual musicians on their toes, keep bands more harmonious and the average listener playlist a more interesting place? I sat around a table with Paul Smith from Maximo Park and Field Music’s Peter Brewis, themselves collaborators on the wonderful curio ‘Frozen By Sight’, which pairs Smith’s travel writing with Brewis’ idiosyncratic arrangements, to discuss what makes collaborations fun, fruitful and fundamental to artistic progress. Sam Walton: What do you both think makes for a successful or satisfying collaboration? Paul Smith: Well, setting out quite strict parameters helped us, and I think that’s important. I asked Peter initially, ‘I’ve got these words – have you got any music that you want to use for something? Are you happy with me putting these funny words on top?’ And then he sent me things that instantly I was drawn to – really interesting,
challenging pieces of music, but still distinctive Peter Brewis compositions – and I just fitted words to it. Peter Brewis: That sounds about right. It was commissioned to be a live performance, though, so we had to decide on the performance parameters too. So I basically went round to your house one day, didn’t I, and by the end of that day we’d decided on tuned percussion, strings, a guitar and that’s it, and that on each song we’d try and give each element of the ensemble a feature. PS:… And that structure was important. It was important also to have the opportunity to do something different. Like, another parameter from the start here was that we weren’t going to change the words, because when I’m in Maximo Park the words are fluid – they have to change to the structure of the song, and rhyming and being catchy is part of what we do. But with this, it was quite a different challenge: it was how to fit the music around the words a lot of the time… PB: … Which worked because I didn’t have anything really at that stage. As I remember it, the process went, ‘shall we do something?’ Then, ‘yes, we should do something.’ And one of the satisfying things was that we could agree what we were going for from the start because we’ve known each other for a long time and know each other’s tastes... PS: …Which overlap quite well, which was good. PB: Yeah they overlap in various places. It was either the semi-orchestral chamber folk pop thing that we do or it was just going to be a straight-up blues band. PS: Oh yeah, I forgot about that idea. Thing is, we have talked about doing that – in jest, but also, ‘actually, let’s make a blues record’… [There follows an earnest and amusing discussion in praise of Free’s ‘Fire & Water’ album] SW: How does collaborating individually, with another individual, differ from being in a band? Do you feel a bit like you’re cheating on your bandmates?
PS: Well, in Maximo Park we have a very open relationship! You hear of bands splitting up and I can’t really see the point unless there’s some ego problem, especially when there’s a prime opportunity to collaborate with somebody who you respect, who you think could enhance what you’re doing. And in terms of how it differed from working with the band – it was easier, because there’s only one other person! PB: It’s slightly different for me, because when me and Dave [Peter’s brother] do Field Music, we try and change each other’s songs to suit what we want to do with the records, so there’s always a slight tension there. But with this, because we didn’t know what we were doing, it was an easier collaboration. It was definitely seen as an experiment: we took your lyrics and used them to dictate the structure of everything… PS: …Which again is quite different for me – I’m very used to constant refining until you feel like you’ve got this recognisable pop song. SW: Do you think collaborations will affect how you make future music with your parent bands? PB: I hope so. Even if it’s just a reaction against it, there will be things that we’ve done during ‘Frozen By Sight’ that you can’t unlearn, things that we’ve tried and have worked. Musically
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there are lots of things that I’ll pick up and take to a new environment. PS: Yeah, I agree. And a collaboration like this sets you up to do more things in this vein, as people are now prepared for it, meaning that I can scratch lots of different, weirder musical itches outside of Maximo Park instead. And you’re right about reacting against it, too: I want each record I make to be quite different from the next one, but with a group the changes are always subtle because it’s five people pulling together, finding the intersection of the Venn diagram where we all agree, asking, ‘how can we pull this along and evolve, and not destroy somebody’s idea of what the band is?’ But with collaborations like this, you can get stuff out of your system. You can go, ‘right, I’ve done that now, what next?’. I feel that doing things like this opens a lot of doors. For example, you probably won’t be able to hear anything off ‘Frozen By Sight’ in the next Maximo Park album, because in a way, doing this was an outlet: I will always feel like a pretty emotional kind of person, and I will always be quite extroverted in some ways that I can get out by performing with the band. But I can also feel quite introverted sometimes, and want to describe the world and not necessarily be that emotional, and at those times it’s perfect that I can do something more like this. SW: Is there any way that you feel you missed out on something else by collaborating? PS: Well I’m sure a few people will listen to ‘Frozen By Sight’ and go, ‘oh god these guys have lost it!’. I mean, we were talking in the car on the way down here and David [Brewis, who’s playing in the ‘Frozen By Sight’ touring band] read out this French review and it said, ‘it doesn’t sound like Maximo Park, and it doesn’t sound like Field Music, so what’s the point?’ But what can we do about that? Nothing! Then again, I don’t much want to anyway. PB: Exactly. I mean, on the one hand it’s an understandable complaint, but then again that’s why you have band names – as brands – so then when it’s just this
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guy and this other guy, there’s nothing to harm, and it can only be something to have a stab at. I don’t feel awkward about having a stab at things, and having a stab is one thing that’s more difficult as a collective than as an individual: it gets cumulatively harder the more people you have in your band to convince everyone else to venture away from a path. SW: Do you think being from the same part of the world makes
collaboration easier? PS: Perhaps, but it would be hard to gauge why. I guess Peter and I come from fairly similar backgrounds – working-class parents but suburban upbringing where we’ve both been encouraged to do what we want, in terms of our temperament – and geography probably helps there. PB: One thing I would say about where we live though is that there’s a very good support network of people who
will help each other realise their visions or goals, so that you don’t have to compromise: you can do the thing that you want to do, and everyone will all help out. You always know that there are people around in Sunderland and Newcastle that might be able to help you with stuff – we’re always in debt to people doing us favours, and vice versa. SW: Why this collaboration now? Did ‘Frozen By Sight’ feel like
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something that was always going to happen, given that you’ve known each other for so long? PB: We have talked about it for about ten years, doing something... PS: ... And actually we did one little thing ages ago, didn’t we – that art exhibition in a house, where we did some harmonies and sang some songs. But in terms of a full-blown collaboration, we’ve both been very busy, and very focussed on what we were doing, and in some ways I think it’s good to establish yourself. I think that’s something that I always wanted to do – to be able to say, ‘right, well I’ve done that now, Maximo Park feels like it’s solid, and I can always come back to that’, whereas if we’d have done something earlier on, it might’ve thrown a spanner in the works. PB: That’s true. It’s almost like the bands are our foundations and need to be solid first. I mean, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything like this ten years ago – I wouldn’t have had the knowledge or the confidence to do something musically like this. On that level, a lot of good collaboration is about timing, about getting to a point where you’ve amassed knowledge and experience and different ways of solving little problems. SW: So now you’ve timed it right, is this going to be a one-off collaboration? PB: It’s hard to tell – the next time we get around to doing anything together it’ll probably be another ten years or something. Or maybe not. But if we do do something else, it’ll be completely different. PS: But it does feel like the beginning of something, maybe… PB: … Felt like a one-night stand to me mate – we’re never going to see each other again. PS: Oh no! I can’t believe that. I got a tattoo and everything. PB: Scribble it out. PS: But I know what you mean though – it does feel complete, like there doesn’t feel like anything extra to it that we want to do. So in one sense, that’s good and it puts a lid on it, and you can move on to the next thing. Having said that, I’ve discovered that I like writing like this, and writing descriptive things, and so to do another twelve songs, or two or three really long songs – I don’t rule anything out. It just comes down to whatever feels right. PB: I think as long as we have a set of very simple rules again, like we had for this one – the words are going to stay the way they are, and we’re going to have this given set of instruments – then I feel we can do anything collaboratively.
Scratching An Itch James Greenwood is the unsung talent behind one of the best electronic albums of the past five years. But ‘Drone Logic’ wasn’t his, unlike his minimal, gloomy debut LP as Ghost Culture Photogra phy: Roy J. Baron / writer: reef younis
You’ve heard James Greenwood without actually hearing much about him. Over the last few years he’s worked with, and played keyboards for, Death in Vegas, graduated from making “terrible” bedroom productions with Dan Avery to co-writing the impeccable ‘Drone Logic’, and has signed with the eclectically brilliant Phantasy Sound for his debut album as Ghost Culture. With an expertise grounded in his work as a studio engineer, it helps explain the remarkably high production values that surfaced on 2013’s ‘Mouth EP’, and that also make his self-titled LP a massively absorbing listen. It owes a lot to Greenwood’s brilliantly understated arrangements – gossamer synths, taciturn vocals, and snaking basslines all wind, pulse, and coil their way through minimal space and darkness – but, crucially, it’s the sound of a musician stepping out of the shadows with a determination to finish the unfinished. As much a triumph of technical skill as creative will, Ghost Culture is an assured statement of taking control – that he’s making the switch from the studio to centre-stage sound absolutely effortless is all the more impressive. Reef Younis: You played one of your first live shows the other night, how did it go? James Greenwood: Yeah, it was my second show, really enjoyed it. It was packed out, got a good response to every song. The reason I started making a record is because I wanted to play it live. I’ve had enough of watching people stand behind laptops but, whatever, that’s the way they want to do it – I want to do a show. I’m going to start off doing it by myself then hopefully get a band together, but it’s actually been quite difficult because I made the whole record on one synth, so it was either get six of those and six people, try and play it live, or just do it another way. It sounds completely different from the record but I think that’s a good thing. RY: Is it important for you to have a
sense of excitement and spontaneity in the live show? The sense that it could go wrong. JG: Yeah, there’s definitely that, and it definitely could. I’m trying to adapt the sound so it’ll sound better live, instead of putting it all on a backing track and trying to mimic everything on the album. I’ve got three synths and a drum machine and I’ve tuned all of them into what I think will be the best sound for each song live. There’s not a lot of stuff but there’s still the danger I could forget something or I could make mistakes, but if you can’t make a mistake, it’s not live. RY: Did you always have one eye on the live show while making the record? JG: It was definitely in mind but it was more I’d base the arrangements of the songs and keep an eye on the live elements; like I could extend one bit, or make a part shorter. I had my dream set up, and it was a bit like being a kid, really.You know, when you’re little and you want a tree house or something, and you imagine what you’d put in there? It was like that. Originally it was all a pipedream but then I ordered it and realised that I’m actually going to get all this shit! [laughs]. I made a synced-up light show out of four lamps that were in my room, which was quite homely. I wanted that part to look a little bit shit, not too overproduced, a little bit DIY. RY: I presume getting all the right gear helped make creating the album a little easier. JG: There’s always that difference between the dream and the reality. I have all these dreams about songs, and it’s going to have these elements, and it’s going to have this and this, then you actually do it, and it doesn’t. I don’t think anyone makes exactly what they intended to, and I’m very happy with the result, it’s just that I had to learn all of that. I set out with very clear ideas in my head and ended up getting really frustrated. So I just went with it and enjoyed the process of
ending up with some things that aren’t worse or better than I thought, just different. As long as I like it, and it scratches the itch of finishing something, that’s the way I see it. With live, it was more of a process, more of a job translating stuff, programming things, and working out the best way of doing it without it sounding too mechanical. RY:You’ve done a fair bit of work as a sound engineer for the likes of Daniel Avery and Richard Fearless. Was it difficult separating those more technical tendencies from your own creativity? JG: I’ve always wanted to make my own music, and always have done, but I’ve never had the focus to finish it. I deliberately limited myself with equipment for my stuff because I didn’t want to think about it in that way where I’m technically minded. Being an engineer isn’t sexy so I just wanted to focus more on the writing and the production rather than how to record it. With Dan’s [Avery] stuff, I co-wrote and co-produced it, so it’s similar in some ways but this time I was just doing it for myself; it was all my taste and my decision on finishing things. RY: So having that creative control and freedom to let things develop as you wanted was different but important. JG: Exactly. Playing around in your own time is something to be savoured and if you’re doing something with someone else, it’s very much on their time and it’s a very different dynamic. I did the same with Richard [Fearless] and helped him in the same way to make an album. That’s when I started making my stuff, because I wanted to. I’d done the engineering thing, and it’s cool, and I like it, but when I started getting creative with him, I started getting creative on my own. He had all these amazing synths, and I just wanted to get one, so instead of sitting on a computer trying to make digital stuff sound good, I got a synth, and it was the one that was used on ‘Drone
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‘I’d go on blogs and think, if I make something like James Blake I’d be really popular’
Logic’ and with my stuff. RY: That’s that vintage Korg one. JG: Yeah, it’s called the KORG Mono/ Poly. It’s mono but you can do oldschool style chord memory stuff as well. I think Richard told me about it, and I think he wanted it, but I just went and got it the next day. Sorry Richard! He’s already got a great collection so I don’t feel too bad. [laughs]. RY: So the Korg became the focal point of the album? JG:Yeah, absolutely. I think when people ask ‘What influenced you?’ I’d say it was more trying to get sounds out of that that scratched the itch, over a certain era of music or a certain band. I had that and a sequencer and was just playing with it going ‘that’s nice’ and recording the bits I had that reaction to. RY: Didn’t you feel like you were limiting yourself, approaching your
first album that way? JG: There was definitely a few times I was trying to get to the sound I had in my head, and I settled for the next best thing, which I still liked. So I might have settled for a sound that spoiled another one but then I’d change that or change the snare to bring it together. It was kind of like a jigsaw puzzle where there’s a part that’s a bit wonky but it still fits… or you just end up cutting your own pieces [laughs]. RY: The record is kind of dark, snaking, withdrawn and moody. JG: I restricted myself to three albums when I was writing it: one of them was ‘Construction Time Again’ by Depeche Mode, ‘Fear of Music’ by Talking Heads, and ‘Ziggy Stardust’ by David Bowie. That’s what I stuck with and avoided everything else because I didn’t want to be in competition with modern stuff.
It was a conscious decision for this album because when I’d written stuff before, I was all too aware of what was going on in music or I’d go on blogs and think, if I make something like James Blake I’d be really popular. Really, more than anything, I wanted to have fun, entertain myself, and make something for myself. RY: In terms of the album dynamic, then, did you have an experience in mind? Is it an album intended for headphones, the club, live…? JG: It’s a little bit of everything but I’d say a lot of it was made with headphones so that would play a part in it, especially mood-wise, but I was always thinking about the arrangements coming to the live show. I wanted to make a distinction between my album and club-sounding stuff, and that’s why I did the B-sides as club tracks, and none of those are on the
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album. It’s a way of saying ‘this is for the club’, but obviously it’s influenced by club sounds, and they echo in the background somewhere. But I neither mixed nor mastered it as a pumpy thing; I just wanted to use that as an anchor underneath the music. I like that thing Burial said where he always made music for walking home from a club, the idea that the atmosphere’s still in your head but you’re moving through a dark city. RY:With the live show, the DJing, the mix between club, headphones and sound engineering, how do you see yourself? JG: I’m a musician. I never set out to DJ; that just happened. I always wanted to perform and DJing is great fun, but I never grew up wanting to be a DJ. As a kid, I always wanted to be a producer without quite knowing what it meant, but when you go and do music, and meet people, you just don’t know how it’s going to end up. I’m really happy it’s ended up this way. I’m very fortunate. RY: And signing to Phantasy Sound worked out pretty well. JG: It kind of just happened. I was working with Richard for Death in Vegas, and I’ve worked with Dan since he was StopMakingMe, where we just made stuff in our bedrooms, really badly. Then Dan started putting stuff out on Phantasy and he played my Ghost Culture demos to Erol [Alkan] and it went from there. It seemed to make sense with all the connections and it seems a good place for the music to fit. RY: 2015 already looks like a busy year for you. JG: Yeah. The most exciting thing for me is to see how good it can become. If I can entertain myself, people like the music, and I can tour, that’d be amazing. I toured with Death in Vegas and it was one of the best experiences of my life. Bands going on the road should always get better as they play in different places. If you make music, that’s everyone’s dream, right?
‘L
ike P-Funk, MinuteFlag, Ciccone Youth, Loutallica and Red House Chili Painters (bet you didn’t know about that one), PCPC is what happens when two legendary rock juggernauts join forces. In this instance, members of PC Worship and Parquet Courts have merged into a NY noise-rock confederacy, each band bringing their own sonic distinctions. Spawning from a long history of playing shows together as separate entities, PCPC is born out of an aesthetic solidarity, and a will to create something new.’ So goes the tongue-in-cheek bio to this latest collaborative project from PC Worship and the currently renamed Parkay Quarts.The project takes all four members of PC Worship – a group that has flowered from the one-man project of Justin Frye – along with Andrew Savage and Austin Brown from Parkay Quarts/Parquet Courts. Live they are a rambunctious, unpredictable six-piece melding chugging acid rock, doom drone and high-energy garagepop. A pretty close marriage to how you may think the two groups merged would sound, yet a challenging fusion to witness, all the same. I sit on the steps of a canal in Utrecht after PCPC’s show at the city’s Le Guess Who? festival with Savage and Frye to discuss the birth and intentions of the new project, although both are far more concerned with sucking down the joint that they pass back and forth between them (without offering a single measly puff my way) than they are discussing much beyond jokes and
goofing around. They formed a bond from playing shows and touring together, or at least so I had understood. “We’ve never actually toured together,” says Frye, with Savage countering, “Kind of, we drove across Mexico. We took a tour of the desert of Mexico on horses and ate peyote with Mexican cowboys.” It was a trip that, according to Savage, “was like no other experience I’ve ever had, for sure.” “I think that’s where this began, because my horse and his horse really liked each other,” says Frye. “Next thing you know we’re on this 200 foot cliff, just chomping along, just wondering why the universe works the way it does.” Parquet Courts have talked of midnight peyote trips into the Mexican desert before in previous interviews, so such a trip isn’t inconceivable, but I can’t help but think Frye may be taking liberties with the story surrounding the foundations of this group, or at least what comes later during our interview leads me to think so. PCPC have only played a handful of shows so far, their first ever being a tour support for Thurston Moore, after Steve Shelley, someone supposedly very hard-wired into the Brooklyn music scene, tipped Moore off about them. “We wanted to do something different, especially because Parquet Courts is in a weird situation right now, where our rhythm section is MIA,” Savage tells me, referring to Sean Yeaton and Max Savage, who are otherwise preoccupied with school and fatherhood. While they’re gone,
this new project is already picking up speed, despite its infancy. “I’m really proud of PCPC and what we’ve been able to accomplish,” says Savage. “We’ve only been practising two months now. It’s not just about music too, Justin and I just released this book of our artwork,” he says, referring to a limited edition book that can be found on their merch table. It’s the same book thatSavage picked up and read from only hours earlier on stage, reciting a rapid-fire spoken word piece on top of a duo of screeching guitars, slow-pound tribal drums and a wailing saxophone. Savage says of the sound they create: “I guess it’s a marriage of the two bands. Sonically, we’re both kind of noisy bands who like to improvise a lot, but maybe with Parquet Courts it’s a bit like more stop-start, more punctuated – I guess another way of saying slightly tighter – PCPC is a marriage of the two aesthetics.” “For me, music has always been about being a conceptual idea and PC Worship is pretty malleable in terms of its membership and anyone is welcome at any time,” says Frye. “There’s been about twenty members of that band over time, so collaboration is pretty key….” “You guys like to call yourself the New York Polyphonic Spree, right?” says Savage. “I think you just like to call us that,” says Frye. Humour, it seems, is key to PCPC. “We all like goofing around, razzing each other, lollygagging,” says Savage,
although they’re not always that keen to admit it when they are, it would seem. I mention the fake quotes that adorn the back of their book from RZA and footballer Robin Van Persie. “I didn’t realise those Wu Tang Clan quotes were fake.” Frye says, rather humourlessly. “Yeah, they’re real,” reaffirms Savage, again without a smile. I bring up the fake nod to the aforementioned Red House Chili Painters outfit, jokingly querying whether the group have considered pitching it to Mark Kozeleck, 2014’s Grumpy Bastard of The Year. “I’m sorry… what?” says Frye, with a mixture of incredulity and being extremely stoned, perhaps forgetting being involved with the group’s own bio himself. Savage steps in: “The Red House Chilli Painters, yeah? When Mark Kozeleck and Flea had that Phish-style jam band back in 2002, yeah?” “Yeah,” Frye says. At this stage responses slow to a stoned halt and it’s clear they’re not all that interested in discussing anything all that seriously. It’s difficult to work out if they’re attempting to joke with me or at me, but whatever the intention the end result is, well, no fun, so I call the interview to a close before we continue to bore one another any longer. Thankfully, what the duo are capable of creating on stage through the esoteric channel of PCPC – and their own separate groups – is far more engaging, authentic and entertaining than watching them smoke weed and make in-jokes with one another.
Two Guys Get Stoned Daniel Dylan Wray tried to interview PCPC – a collaboration between Parquet Courts and PC Worship – so you don’t have to Photogra phy: Tash Bright / writer: Daniel d ylan wray
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Happy in Canadian post-punk band Viet Cong are realistic about what their debut album is capable of achieving Photography: phil sharp / writer: James F. Thompson
It’s a scene almost worthy of Spinal Tap. A band takes the stage for a headline show dressed in Halloween costumes and a fight breaks out between them almost immediately. The four musicians retreat backstage to work out their differences then eventually re-emerge, declaring that the show will be their last. A handful of songs are played absolutely awfully before everybody starts bickering again, a scuffle gets underway, guitars are smashed and the drummer announces that his career is over. Unfortunately for everybody involved, this is no mockumentary setup but in fact the very real, very ignominious implosion of Women, once one of Canada’s most promising art rock outfits. After two critically lauded albums and nearly 200 live performances, a combination of pentup frustration and tour-induced fatigue brought the curtains down on a band who were just hitting their stride. Having gotten together in 2007, the Lucky Bar in Victoria, BC, would bear witness to the group’s tragicomic denouement just three years later. “I was dressed as Mr. T – very offensively, too,” recalls erstwhile Women bassist and current Viet Cong front man Matt Flegel, his lanky frame hunched over a rickety table in the upstairs lounge of King’s Cross Travelodge. “At the end of the night I was trying to deal with the promoter, all the while still dressed as Mr. T. I saw myself from the fly-on-the-wall perspective and just… laughed.” At the time, the music press made the whole affair out to be quite a dustup but apparently this wasn’t the case. “It wasn’t a big fight,” Flegel protests. “You know, it wasn’t Ultimate Fighting Championship; everyone covered in blood and sweat. I don’t know. My brother [ex-Women guitarist and vocalist Patrick Flegel] just tends to self-destruct with things sometimes. It’s just what he does.” After Women broke up, everybody went their separate ways. Flegel’s younger sibling moved out to
Vancouver and now spends most of his time working on his experimental rock project Cindy Lee, in which – ironically enough – he performs on stage dressed up, albeit this time in drag. “I think that’s where he’s happiest. I don’t think he ever wants to be touring around in a van for weeks at a time again, so he kind of just likes to write songs,” says the older Flegel. Christopher Reimer, Women’s innovative, virtuoso guitarist, embarked on a brief solo career before joining indie rock three-piece the Dodos, first in a touring capacity then as a bona fide member. On 21 February 2012, less than two years after leaving Women, tragedy struck as Reimer died in his sleep of a congenital heart condition. At the time of his passing he was just 26 years old. Chastened by the experience of their old band’s public break-up and deeply saddened by Reimer’s untimely death, Flegel and ex-Women drummer Mike Wallace took their time to return to music. The former eventually hooked up with Scott “Monty” Munro, live guitarist for Canadian indie rocker Chad VanGaalen, and the pair began bouncing ideas off one another. The pair recruited Wallace along with guitarist Danny Christiansen and Viet Cong was born. Before we go any further, it’s probably worth making it clear that the Viet Cong name is barely connected to the controversial former Vietnamese political group of the same name. Apparently Wallace suggested it simply because “the Viet Cong were always the bad asses in the movies,” along with the fact that it sounded cool. As far as I can tell, nobody in the band has ever even been close to Saigon either. The Calgary-based foursome do, however, live under constant threat of being harassed by army veteran immigration officers every time they leave and re-enter the United States and have already “taken a lot of shit,” according to Flegel. In any case, the band needed a pretty distinctive moniker if they were ever to escape the
seemingly omnipresent spectre of Women. I wonder, is there an element of frustration in all this attention being drawn towards the past? “Oh it’s a great thing,” Flegel says, without skipping a beat. “We’ve put our time in with all sorts of different bands – I mean that was one of them of course – and if people are going to come and check out Viet Cong because of those other bands then that’s definitely something I’ll take advantage of. I don’t imagine anyone who liked [Women] wouldn’t like this band. There are a lot of similar elements. I know it’s a totally different vehicle but it’s similar, too.” Given that touring fatigue was reputedly such a bit factor in the cataclysmic collapse of Women, I’m also interested to hear whether Viet Cong have taken any especially elaborate precautionary steps on the road this time around, especially since two out of the four original band members are still around. Anger management courses, perhaps? Group meditation sessions? “No, but I think I know the warning signs if someone’s about to completely lose it now,” grins Flegel. “It helps that we’re all pretty stable, too,” says Munro as he finally enters the fray, bleary-eyed and still jetlagged from the band’s transatlantic flight a few days ago. “I think we know if things are getting a little too crazy and we need to take a break, you know?” adds Flegel. “Take a couple of weeks and chill out. We don’t need to run ourselves into the ground.” It’s a good thing there are some more calm and collected personalities around nowadays, too. On the band’s first major American tour last year, Munro didn’t even have a space in the van to sleep. He was forced to slum it outside every night instead, in what could have surely been a one-way ticket to an ill-tempered disaster. “I kind of liked sleeping out there though, honestly!” he insists. “I had some really good sleeps on that tour. I usually put a sleeping bag on some
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grass and it was warm out since it was Texas in September. It was nice!” I suggest the rain-soaked pavements of Northern Europe in winter might make for slightly less accommodating camping spots, but it turns out Viet Cong are prepared. “Since that tour we’ve bought a giant van and it’s got like bedding and a TV with a VCR in there with Predator on. We’re driving it out to Europe, it’s fully amphibious,” Munro announces triumphantly. “It’s our hobo mansion,” says Flegel. An amphibious hobo mansion is certainly a major sign of progression for a band who until recently struggled to find themselves an audience, with crowds of fewer than 10 people not uncommon on previous tours. “Nowadays it’s completely different, though. Last time in America there were some shows actually with no people,” Munro recalls with a degree of incredulity as we all collapse into fits of laughter. “I mean, in Philadelphia there were literally no people, just the other band!” Sounds like that thought experiment about the tree falling in a forest. “I mean, they’re keeping the bar open just so you can play,” Flegel says. “So it ends up being just like practicing. We played, though, yeah.”
H
aving released a seven-track EP earlier in the year, Viet Cong are gearing up for the release of their first, self-titled album on Jagjaguwar in January. At a push, stylistic parallels could be drawn with the fuzzier, more dissonant moments of Women’s final LP, 2010’s ‘Public Strain’; songs like ‘China Steps’ with its single-chord refrain along with the sculpted atonality of ‘Drag Open’. But Viet Cong’s new record more accurately represents both a big step into the future of guitar-orientated
the Trenches
rock and a lingering glance at the distant past of British post-punk, New York no wave and the avant-garde. New single ‘Continental Shelf’ is a hulking, crunching mass of gnarled guitars and thunderous drums that channels the likes of Bauhaus and Joy Division but manages to retain the pop sensibility of Interpol; Flegel’s vocals having more than a hint of Paul Banks about them. Album closer ‘Death’ is a sprawling 11-minute epic that, while
ostensibly more accessible than the single from the outset, soon launches into a fierce, Sonic Youthinspired orgy of guitar and noise before climaxing with a relentless series of rhythmic stabs and yelps. The record can be quietly beautiful too, as on the meditative synth coda to ‘Newspaper Spoons’. The progression even from this year’s ‘Cassette’ EP is startling, with the new LP sounding a good deal fuller,
moodier and also hinting at some sort of epiphany of darkness having recently taken hold of the band, yet Flegel isn’t so sure there was any overarching thematic vision involved. “It’s just kind of where we ended up as a band, with the four of us,” he says. “When it was just the two of us – Me and Monty together – we were still trying to figure out how we wanted to sound.” “Then once we started jamming…” says Munro.
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“Right!” says Flegel. “With the four of us it kind of just went in that darker direction and it has a lot to do with just what we listen to generally I think.” I’m particularly interested in hearing what Viet Cong spend their days listening to, given that on the aforementioned EP, the band took to playing some of their instruments with sex toys. “Oh yeah, one of our favourite tricks, the old vibrating dildo,” Flegel laughs as he scratches his chin.
‘I was trying to deal with the promoter, all the while still dressed as Mr. T.’ “You put it over the guitar pickup and it just goes, ‘Waaaargh’,” Munro adds, flailing his arms in what’s hopefully an inaccurate approximation of a vibrating dildo. Lamentably, the dildo didn’t manage to make it onto the new record. “Although I think eventually for the live setup, the plan is that we’re all going to be playing vibrating dildos,” Munro reassures me. Viet Cong have invested a good deal of time in listening to British post-punk (“This Heat were hugely influential on us,” Munro says animatedly). In previous interviews the four have also been categorical in stating that they feel more of a kinship with bands from these shores than anybody from North America. “I don’t know why really. Most of the best music comes from here though,” Flegel opines. “If people think we sound British I take that as a compliment.” Munro is even more convinced: “All of our favourite bands are British!” Throughout our time together, Flegel and Munro are also at pains to fill me in on the incongruously genial Canadian post-punk scene. “We recently played with this band Fountain, from Victoria, BC,” Flegel remembers. “They’re super nice and wholesome though,” says Munro. “Two of them are cousins, or siblings maybe. Anyway, they had to leave the show we played super early because they had to get up
early the next morning to go home and have lunch with their grandma.” It sounds like people aren’t quite grasping the punk thing back home, I say. “Well there are super aggressive punk bands too but nobody wants to listen to their shitty music,” Flegel deadpans as Munro chuckles away in the background. Lyrically, Viet Cong owe much to the industrial obliteration of Thatcherism being played out under the rainy grey skies of Manchester and a clutch of other equally disaffected towns and cities in the North during the mid-eighties. Bands like the Chameleons, Joy Division, the Sound and Gang of Four; bands borne out of an environment where music was the only remotely viable salvation from a lifetime of drudgery, or worse. “Just the general bleakness of being alive,” as Flegel succinctly puts it. In some ways, sifting through the wreckage of 2014’s post-crash economy, it seems like little has changed. Presumably Flegel has taken notice? “Yeah but it’s funny with the songwriting, though, because I don’t know how intentional a lot of it is,” he admits. “It’s kind of stream-ofconsciousness sometimes and we end up somewhere with it but I don’t know whether I know where we’re going to end up when we start writing
the songs. I mean as bleak as some of the lyrics are, they’re still meant to be taken with some sort of humour, I think. I’m not that dark a person.” Just as his English post-punk forebears channelled their anguish into their music, Flegel’s verses concern themselves with tangible adversities, having emanated from some pretty miserable personal circumstances. “Writing the record, I was working at a really terrible job for a flooring company, where I’d just be at a carpet cutting machine for nine hours a day,” he says, grimacing at the recollection. “I just do a lot of writing in my head before I put pen to paper and in my mind I was just, ‘Fuck this, everything sucks!’ I wasn’t thinking super sunny thoughts, you know?” With the exception of Flegel, everybody else in the band is still just about managing to hold down a job. Christiansen is an architectural technologist, designing things like flooring trusses. “He’s the head designer at some place but somehow still has less money than the rest of us,” Munro marvels. Wallace earns his crust painting houses while Munro delivers cupcakes, which he tells me with what seems to be genuine pride. Flegel quit his job a few months ago. “Yeah, man I’m so poor,” he says, shaking his head before drooping it towards the table in mock defeat. “But just scraping by, you know? Trying to
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just work on music, trying to write the next record... Trying to save my hands too; it was really doing terrible things to them and I was getting, like, cysts in my fingers and on my wrist and stuff.” All of which begs the question: how does a concertedly independent band like Viet Cong ever make a decent fist of it in the music industry, at least without selling out in spectacular style? Even then, global pop juggernaut Taylor Swift recently hauled her songs off Spotify because she wasn’t getting paid enough. Is there not a risk that some artistic concessions will eventually need to be made in the name of commerciality? Flegel and Munro seem relatively sanguine about their financial prospects, even if they don’t profess to have all the answers. “I think we would have picked something different to do,” laughs Munro. “Plus, I don’t know how ambitious we actually are in terms of being money makers in the music industry,” Flegel says. “I mean, I’m as bad as anyone else for ripping things off the Internet. Usually if it’s a record I like though, I’ll stream it then if I really like it I’ll go out and buy it.” Munro cuts back in: “You can go to a show, too. You know, at least pay a band to see them play or buy a t-shirt or something too – like, there are other ways.” Hopefully the new LP will at least go some distance towards bringing Viet Cong their just desserts. In the meantime, today the Canucks seem cheerful enough, in rather sharp contrast to their music. Wallace bounds into the room as we’re wrapping the interview up, complimenting me on my NWA ‘Straight Outta Compton’ t-shirt before saying that he might steal it. “Where is that little squirrel fucker?” he asks of guitarist Christiansen, who’s apparently still fast asleep as we approach midday. Wallace seems like good fun. In any case, I say before waving Flegel and Munro off to their photo shoot, given the choice between staring at spreadsheets day after day or playing in a touring rock band, most people would probably plump for this, right? Even despite the hardships, the onstage altercations and the endless nights watching Predator on VHS in an amphibious hobo mansion (actually, that last one is probably an incentive). “Yeah, our office is the lounge of the King’s Cross Travelodge,” Flegel jokes. “We have a new record which is the statement as far as our lives go. Like, we’re all living well below the poverty line so you kind of wonder why you’re in a band sometimes but it’s a good way to be poor yet still get to travel around, meet people, have fun and play music.” Or as Munro rather eloquently puts it: “We’ve managed to live way better lives than we’ve deserved.”
Bew th Hunt Bored of being defined by her sharp tongue and public tirades, Azealia Banks talks to David Zammitt about her new, more effective weapon against a music industry she remains at war with. After three long years, debut album ‘Broke With Expensive Taste’ has given us much more to talk about, besides the 23-year-old rapper’s latest online feud
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ware he tress “Y’all love that shit!” Azealia Amanda Banks bristles at the very mention of the Twitter rows for which, like it or not, she has grown infamous. However, since throwing ‘212,’ that hand grenade of a debut single, into an otherwise flat pop landscape nearly three years ago, her work has become all but forgotten in the cloud of her 140 character run-ins. As the tug of war to release her first album, ‘Broke With Expensive Taste’, played out over the course of two long years, she seemed determined to pass the time by sinking her teeth into a range of music industry targets. Iggy Azalea (more than once), Angel Haze, Pharrell Williams, and Nicki Minaj (another recurring focus) have all felt the wrath of her keyboard, while a dispute with ‘Harlem Shake’ producer Baauer over an unofficial remix grew into a wider controversy when LGBT publication The Advocate reacted angrily to her tweet
Photography: Guy Eppel Writer: David Zammitt
wishing for him to, “drown in faggotry.” Last year, MTV published an article entitled, ‘Azealia Banks’ Beefs: A Timeline.’ It barely skims the surface. But while there’s no smoke, etc., etc., etc. – and Banks has racked up the fireworks and lit the touchpaper all by herself – she does, to be fair, have a point. The press most definitely do love that shit. The Guardian recently pushed an interview with the 23-year-old with the title,‘Azealia Banks on feuding with the Stone Roses, Disclosure and Perez Hilton.’ Predictably, little space was afforded to music writing, save for a hackneyed line about its eclectic mix of, “rave and trap, electronica and R&B”. Now, I’ve been through the album with my fine tooth genre-comb, and I can find a maximum of one track that might be described as anything approaching trap. But, it being the style du jour, Azealia Banks is lazily lumped into it before we move on to
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‘I know that sounds really fucked up but depression is something that you should really take advantage of’
the real substance: the goss. In short, while she has too often made a rod for her own back, and continues to do so from time to time (she dragged Iggy Azalea into a row about US racial issues only this month), the story is getting a bit old. And to her credit, there does seem to be a sincere desire to move on now that that debut album is finally out in the ether. As we talk she refuses, for example, to talk about Disclosure, apart from to say that she loves their work and that, while she may have had a bad experience, they’re probably very nice people. Similarly, she makes it clear that she does not want to go raking up old ground when I mention ‘ATM Jam’ – a Pharrell collaboration which she dropped from the final album – apart from to state that the decision, “wasn’t that brave.” For context, she announced over a year ago that the single wouldn’t make the final cut of the album, accusing Williams of not wanting to be associated with her following, “his lite skin comeback.” But that, she seems determined to prove, is in the past and it doesn’t have a place in the narrative she’s attempting to forge for her future. So what about the music? Ironically, Banks took to Twitter, that love-hate window to the rest of her world, to finally announce the arrival of her debut full-length. “Voila!!!!,” she wrote on November 6th, out of nowhere, “Here it is.” And after we’re done wading through all of the extramusical topics, she brightens up when asked about the moment when she hit ‘send’. “It felt really good! It was just kind of like, ‘Now I’m gonna start poppin’ my shit again. Now I’ve got my crazy licence back. I’m gonna wear some more crazy shit and do more crazy things to my hair.’“ Her enthusiasm is a reminder of just how fresh everything seemed back at the tail end of 2011 when ‘212’ first surfaced. As she bounced around its monochrome video, singing in the ears of collaborators Lunice and Lazy
Jay, and the camera zoomed in on those bright, white teeth, she seemed emphatically carefree. It felt as though a disruptive new talent had emerged; brash and aggressive, it was a disorientating punch in the face courtesy of Lunice’s forceful, up front production and the relentless flow of Banks’ incendiary tongue. Aside from anything else, though, ‘212’ was exasperatingly catchy and it’s testament to her knack for a hook that the track’s central refrain, “I guess that cunt gettin’ eaten,” became the year’s most singable line, infiltrating even the most po-faced of heads. Indeed, many listeners didn’t even know what they were singing. But they were singing. In fact, such was the track’s breakout success that there was even talk of it garnering Samantha Cameron’s approval, although it should be pointed out that Banks did start that rumour (guess where), so take from that what you will. But after the excellent ‘1991’ EP, released only a few months later, things started to go quiet. At least, that is, on the musical front.‘Broke with Expensive Taste’ was originally earmarked by her former label Interscope for a September 2012 release, but after a string of pushbacks, Banks found herself publicly ‘begging’ the label to drop her by the start of 2014. She has since said that she felt like those years were spent in a constant state of auditioning, handing tracks in to the label like pieces of homework, only to be told that they didn’t fit the spec they had in mind for the assault on the charts that they were hoping for. By July of this year, however, things were looking up. Interscope agreed to set Banks free, paving the way for the album to be released on Prospect Park, her manager Jeff Kwatinetz’s own label, and the rest is minor pop history. As well as a collective sigh of relief amongst her followers, its creator is just happy to have it out there. “I’m really excited,” she beams. “Of course I’m ready for the next chapter but I’m
just kind of excited to, you know, put this out.” As she talks about the situation, she displays a self-awareness that seems absent from the woman conjured up in the other interviews I’ve read. She’s acutely conscious of the fact that it may have seemed like she was all talk but very little substance. “I feel like for this really long time I’ve been this super-polarising figure and there was no way for me to justify it,” she says. “I feel like for a long time I was really misunderstood because I didn’t have a way to justify myself. And also I think I really needed to do more on-camera interviews because, regardless of whether I’m a musician, a rapper or a Twitter personality or whatever, my personality is definitely a big part of my brand and what I think is a huge part of my brand.” It’s an insight into the contradictions that are bound up in Azealia Banks, and a hint that we might not have seen the last of those feuds. Though now, at least, there’s something to back it up. “I feel like now that the album’s out the end has justified the means. I feel like you can hear that this is a person who creates art to make sense of all the craziness that’s happening in her head.” This chaos, she believes, is borne out in the LP’s undoubted eclecticism. Its 16 tracks move through bruising industrial hip hop, house, and garage – it even touches on latin and surf pop. “It’s shown by how crazy the album is. Like, I’m here, I’m there, I’m this, I’m that. I’m not sure if I want to be in love, I’m not sure if I want to be a party girl.” She pauses and revels in embracing the ambiguity. “I’m. Not. Sure,” she says, savouring every word. “But it’s just something about celebrating that uncertainty that I tried to bring through with this album.” And with the studio release out of her system at last, she’s itching to get on the road. “I was sneaking songs into my set over the years,” she says with mock coyness, “because I had this itch that I needed to scratch. I would probably say that I prefer
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A
performing live to recording, because recording gets a little bit monotonous. Sometimes you’ll leave the studio saying, ‘Aw, that sucked,’ and everyone else will say it’s amazing but when you’re listening to yourself back you have time to suspend your own disbelief, whereas when you’re on the stage it’s in the moment and it’s go, go, go, go, go. You don’t have time for that shit when you’re on stage.” But there’s more to Banks’ yearning to get out there than simply playing the songs live. A lot of artists like to tell you how awful touring is or, conversely, how it’s great to be able to ‘give something back’ to the fans. Getting on to the road, however, allows for a very different form of expression for Azealia Banks. “I love touring, especially during the festival season. Just because…” She trails off, making extra sure to organise her thoughts perfectly before continuing. She takes a more serious tone that suggests she’s laying her cards on the table. “OK,” she sights, “for me I’m always in the house writing. Obviously, because my shit is so cerebral.” The line doesn’t cause her to break stride. “I’m always writing. And obviously I have friends, and I love my friends and I love my family, but I don’t get to date as much as I would like. And when I’m on tour I feel like I’m able to meet people, and,
like, talk to men. I have a moment to stop and talk to them and see their faces. I find that when I’m on the road my love life is more exciting.” It’s punctuated with a girlish giggle. “When you’re here in New York you have time to overthink people. You’ve got your lists out and you’re like, ‘Does he have this and does he have that and blah blah blah.’” It points to a tenderness in Banks that is usually kept out of sight. A lot of the hype surrounding her has focused on the image of a strongly – even aggressively – independent female, and yet a lot of that strength comes from her candour and an ability to hold her hands up and openly, often publicly, address her weaknesses and her fears. She has spoken of a fractious relationship with her own mother, while she says that a lot of the bitterness that manifested itself on Twitter was tied to difficult relationships with the opposite sex. In fact, the heartache she experienced at that time informed the LP’s closer, ‘Miss Camaraderie’, a song she cites as her proudest work and one which she isn’t sure she can ever top. “It came to me from a place of deep heartbreak and deep loneliness and I was imagining what my next lover would be like, and that’s how I wrote it.” Though he hasn’t come along just yet, she seems to be in a much happier
s well as the familial and romantic dysfunction she has faced head on, Banks has talked freely about her battle with depression. Another of the album’s standout tracks, the ostensibly upbeat ‘Soda,’ carries a deeper meaning, functioning as a metaphor for anti-depressants and self medication. “I’m tired of trying to try not to cry,” she sings before hinting at the desperation she felt when she first reached for a chemical remedy, “and I say soda, soda.” Depression, she says, is part and parcel of the creative mind. “I feel like at some point or another every true artist gets hit with depression. And sometimes it’s self-inflicted, sometimes it’s circumstantial, but whatever the source is it’s something that’s very, very essential to your artistry and your creativity and it’s something that you should embrace.” I sense that she’s trying to be careful with her words, conscious that she may now be viewed as a role model whether or not she chooses to be. “I know that sounds really fucked up but it’s something that you should really take advantage of. You gotta use that shit and really purge it. Take advantage of it and fucking go overboard. Be sad. Be fucking sad, sad, sad. Go deep. Go, go, go, go deep.” She repeats it like a mantra, suggesting it’s a chant she’s already inculcated internally. “The beauty of being an artist is that you can go through all these emotions and be able to express them via music or paint or whatever the fuck it is. Not everyone can express their shit in that way. Bask in that shit and take everything you can from it because… all feelings pass and one day you’re going to be happy again and then you’re not going to have shit to write about!” Cue another attack of the giggles. Much of what drives Banks is the energy and sheer enjoyment she derives from wilfully existing in opposition to the zeitgeist. It’s part of the reason why writers struggle to describe her sound, and it certainly didn’t help her relationship with Interscope. She has often used the word ‘anti-pop’ to define where she sits in the current musical landscape, but with the release of the album, is she worried that her outsider sound will be laid open to mimicry? “Of course they will [copy me] and they already are but that’s what I do,” she says. “I’m always on to the next one. You get what I mean? Like, I’ll come up with a video and some
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other artist will be releasing her album and it’ll be held back, if you get what I’m saying. I don’t know – that’s what I do. I’m here to scare you. I’m here to be abstract. I’m the risk taker. I’m the one who’s going to put my stuff on the line. I’m the one who’s going to say the things that everybody’s thinking, that no one wants to get in trouble for.” Before I know it, we’re in dangerously Kanye-esque territory. “I’m a Jesus in that way. I’m sacrificing myself for… you get what I mean? I’ll try it first. Like if we get a bag of drugs, I’m going to try it first before you have to try it.” She convulses with laughter but it goes a long way to explaining the spiky interactions she’s had with her musical counterparts. “That’s what my relationship with the art world feels like. I’m this huntress and I have to go out into all these spaces and find all this shit and bring it back to the people. This is what I meant when I said I was anti-pop. The pop music machine, it has no love for the huntress or for the hunter. They just take the meat and run with it.” As she speaks her eyes grow wider and she becomes more and more passionate as she lets loose on the growing canon of artists who, she feels at least, rely on her for half-baked inspiration. “You have no respect for the fact that I’m suffering here. You have no respect for the fact that I’m really, really fighting for what I have. And the main reason I’m anti-pop is not because it’s popular but it’s because the art gets so watered down and diluted by the time it gets out that you… you know that there’s a trickledown theory of economics? I feel like there’s a fucked-up theory of music, you know? These artists just suck shit up,” she says as she mimics the action of hoovering up coke into her nasal cavity. “They suck your blood,” she rasps. “They try to take your image and your essence and everything and the next thing you know, the bitch is painting her eyes so that her face can be shaped like yours.” Banks’ detest for imitation extends beyond her own work, as she lays into what she sees as a homogenous, leechfilled industry. “It’s like ‘Yeezus’ and the Death Grips. You have the Death Grips, who are phenomenal, phenomenal – avant garde, that’s the real energy. And then you have ‘Yeezus’, which is good, but it’s a knock-off of the Death Grips. I am anti-pop because I don’t think it’s conducive to cultural progression.” In fact, Banks’ take on the current state of culture is more than gloomy. “I feel like since blue jeans and Coca Cola, we’ve just been kind of going down,” she says. “Like, after jazz, after the 60s. Once disco hit, that’s when I feel like it really started getting bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. Even politicians back in the day, the words they would use and everything. Culture was so more interesting then because the people were more interested. Now everybody’s blocked out by fast food
Ha ir: Il ly / ma keup : F elis h a b ro wn
place. “I’m still searching but I’m having fun. I’m doing my thing, being young. I’m 23. But that song, I sort of wrote it to my husband, whenever he shows up.” It’s a disarmingly honest admission, and a reminder that this figure who people already love to hate is barely out of her teens.
‘I’m here to scare you. I’m here to be abstract. I’m the risk taker... I’m a Jesus in that way’
and fucking Twitter. All these vlogs trying to tell you who’s dating who and who has all this money. You’re worried about how much money this person has? They’re never gonna give you any of it, you know?” She seems to have forgotten where the conversation started as she turns her temper on the record industry at large. “It’s just a really dry, stupid way to live. You make all these personal sacrifices for what? To sit at a table with a bunch of other niggas who don’t fucking like you and that you don’t fucking like. That’s how it is, but whatever.” Amidst all of the background noise, Azealia Banks is trying, she says, to stay on her own path. “I think success for me is just making sure I’m enjoying everything that I’m doing. I feel like there are things that seem really nice to me, but I don’t know if I’m really ready to – not kiss asses or anything like that.” She pauses. “But I dunno, I feel like, especially in today’s industry and its musical accolades, there’s this whole holding your tongue, this shtick that you do, like,‘Oh my god I love my fans,’ and this fakeness that people run off.” This preoccupation with authenticity leads us on to another facet of Banks’ life, which has been less than simple; her relationship with the press. The mere mention of music journalism as a practice is enough to set her off (“Journalism is an art form
in itself; I don’t need you to report what has happened.”), and when we touch on how the Disclosure argument was portrayed in the press, she is firm in her assertion that she has been labelled wholly incorrectly by a prejudiced press who are keen to exploit her position as a black female to construct a fictionalised figure that relies on lazy stereotypes. “I know this is really fucked up to keep making it about race but look, I’m telling you,” she says. “The only reason they’re trying to paint me like that is because I’m a black woman. They always try to paint you to be some angry black woman when I know that I’m not. I’m just passionate. I speak at a certain volume because that’s the way I’m genetically made. I’m not angry, I promise you. I’m just speaking my mind. And then there’ll be another white female celebrity and she’ll say what she has to say about something and they’ll report it very matter of fact, but whenever it’s me they’ll try to hype it up like I’m some angry black bitch. It just makes me want to play into it. Y’all want angry black bitch, I’m gonna give you angry black bitch. But it’s got to the point where I can’t defend myself anymore. I don’t have time to explain myself; I have my life to live.” She breathes in and repeats another mantra-like declaration. “I have my life to live.”
And so she does. Putting the spats with the UK’s most-loved dance duo aside, forgetting the (fairly constant) Iggy Azalea-bating and the record company bust-ups, the big topic for the final Loud And Quiet of the year is how Azealia Banks plans to spend her Christmas. For all the controversy around her, the answer, it should be said, is sadly prosaic. “I’m probably going to stay in my apartment. I’ll put up a Christmas tree but it’s really for my nieces and nephews. We’ll just put up a Christmas tree and we’ll probably make something fun to eat and watch movies and open gifts. I’ll probably be in bed by 5pm on Christmas.” The thought doesn’t last long before a mischievous twinkle flashes in her eyes. “Or maybe there’ll be a party to go to!” For now, it’s back to her apartment and the menagerie of animals she keeps there. Aside from her two cats, a guinea pig, a rabbit and a snake, she has two dogs – a Schnoodle and a Papillon – who pee when they get excited. “I got them from the shelter so they have mad
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emotional issues and won’t stop pissing all over my house. When they get happy they squirt a little.” Her days, she says aren’t as glamorous as you might think. “My life involves a lot of cleaning up piss and shit. And vomit because the dog ate the cat food or the cat ate the dog food. I’m a freak about animals. I’m always cleaning my animal cages. That’s why I’m always at home because I’m always with my animals and my plants.” This, I tell her, is the really juicy stuff. And as far as I can tell it’s a Loud And Quiet exclusive. “I even have exotic pet insurance for my snake,” she says. “I have pet insurance on my rabbit and my guinea pig. I am a responsible pet owner.” And that’s the side of this 23-yearold phenomenon we just don’t get to hear about: Azealia Banks, responsible pet owner. “That’s what I’m saying! What more do people want? I pay my rent and I pay my fucking taxes. Can I please express myself?” She says in mock remonstration. “As long as I don’t fucking kill anyone or steal from anyone I should be able to do what I want.”
Reviews / Albums
0 7/ 1 0
Belle & Sebastian Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance Ma ta d or By S am Wal ton . In sto re s Ja nua ry 19
With the release of ‘Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance’, Belle & Sebastian now have more albums that don’t sound like Belle & Sebastian than they have that do – and, accordingly, are prolonging the identity crisis they’ve now endured for more than a decade. The received indie wisdom remains that Belle & Sebastian are fey, shambling and publicity shy. Like a grown-up child protégé constantly reminded of his own precociousness, here’s a band that’s now spent more than half its career fighting its own past. And with that in mind, ‘… Peacetime…’ continues that narrative: the puppyish kook and self-aware genre dilettantism of the band’s last three albums returns, as does the wildly varying quality of songwriting, thanks to Stuart Murdoch’s ongoing policy of letRingo-have-a-go that sees a quarter
of the album’s space given over to other band members’ writing. However, where ‘…Peacetime…’ breaks the recent mould is that for the first time since their heyday, Belle & Sebastian appear to have written an album without trying too hard to please, and the effect is as charming as it ever was. The tinge of rudderless desperation and the resulting forced bonhomie and blunt appropriation is replaced here with playfulness and a lightness of touch: the melodies of ‘Nobody’s Empire’ and ‘Play For Today’ are as sweetly poignant as any Murdoch has ever written, and backed with an airily confident and unapologetically highfidelity chamber pop arrangement that captures the band’s modern incarnation just as perfectly as the quietly strummed church-hall recordings did for its early days. Equally, the B&S-goes-disco double-
header of ‘The Party Line’ and ‘Enter Sylvia Plath’ has the filigree slink the genre demands, and closing track ‘Today’, too, makes for a wonderfully dreamy epilogue, its depthless reverb and effortless, serpentine vocal leaving a longing, honeyed aftertaste. That said, splashes of the band’s more recent missteps also linger: as if trying to tick every box on a survey of the world’s most irritating musical genres, ‘The Everlasting Muse’ veers frantically from kitsch lounge verses to a klezmer chorus and culminates in a bawdy bierkeller oom-pah singalong, while the likeable pep of Stevie Jackson’s ‘Perfect Couples’ is crushed by his excruciatingly humourless lyrics. At over an hour, too, and with most songs stretching beyond five minutes, it frequently feels bloated: while undeniably a sign of a band having fun, several
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songs could lose their final slew of repeated choruses-to-fade – others could disappear altogether – and that editorial wooliness quickly becomes confusing. What is clear, though, is that somewhere within ‘…Peacetime…’ is Belle & Sebastian’s best album this century. While the dialup-era fans who perennially pine for a return to the aesthetic of ‘Tigermilk’ et al won’t buy this record’s sheeny presentation and stylistic dabbling, there’s simultaneously a sense that, for the first time in a while, the band are at peace with that. The result might be flawed, but it’s also frequently as charismatic as their earliest work: after so long spent failing to convince people of their new skins, ‘Girls In Peacetime Want To Dance’ suggests Belle & Sebastian might finally have found a way to simply stop caring, again.
Reviews 0 4/ 1 0
Travis Bretzer Waxing Romantic Mex i c an summe r By joe goggi n s. I n sto res d e ce mbe r 15
In case you’re not already familiar with Travis Bretzer, allow me to reel off some quickfire facts about the man behind ‘Waxing Romantic’. He’s just about reached his mid-twenties – he’s twenty four, to be precise. He’s from Canada – Edmonton, Alberta, specifically. He makes easy-going guitar pop – the phrases ‘freewheeling sensibility’ and ‘casual delivery’ are two he’s keen to be associated with. If you feel like you’ve heard all of this before, it’s because you have. There’s another Canadian guy in his early-to-midtwenties who makes lackadaisical, melodic pop music like this, and a lot better, too. For all Bretzer’s virtues, it’s hard to feel that this release
doesn’t totally smack of opportunism during a year that’s seen DeMarco cement cult hero status within the alternative music world. ‘Waxing Romantic’’s opener, ‘Giving Up’, is replete with precisely the same type of hazy guitar that runs all the way through DeMarco’s critically-acclaimed ‘Salad Days’, which dropped earlier in 2014. Elsewhere, the vocal affectations and deliberate slackness of pace contribute to the overwhelming impression that Bretzer is to DeMarco what Adele and Duffy once were to Amy Winehouse. The problem, for Bretzer, is quite simple; DeMarco’s appeal lies largely in his frankly irrepressible charisma – it’s
something that drips out of his songs in a manner that’s unavoidable to the listener, and if his stage antics down the years have done something to accentuate that, then that’s fair enough. Bretzer, meanwhile, sounds consistently disengaged here, as if he’s skirting over the top of instrumental arrangements he’s not quite sure about (which in itself would be strange, because a clutch of the songs here are quite lovely in their construction). What Bretzer needs is more moments of unbridled individuality; the noodling guitar solo on ‘Lonely Heart’ feels triumphant, because you finally realise that you’re listening to a guy with his own ideas, who isn’t
totally indebted to the creativity of others. There’s a similar atmosphere on the almost-tropical sway of ‘Lady Red’, and it’s moments of inspiration like that that make you wonder why, for example, Bretzer saw the need to include appallingly naff touches like the rain effects on unfortunatelytitled closer ‘Good Times’. ‘Slacker pop’ is by no stretch of the imagination a sector of the industry that’s currently going through any kind of fallow period; the records that currently define that movement might sound as if they require no real effort, but that certainly doesn’t mean that you can phone it in as blatantly as Travis Bretzer has on ‘Waxing Romantic’.
To look at Liam Hayes is to get a profound sense of manic Dr. Wholike energy. From the frizzed hair to the bold fashion sense, the Chicagobased multi instrumentalist is a perfectionist steeped in a healthy sense of retro eccentricity, and his music for much of the last 20 years has echoed that fevered charisma, even if this is only his forth album. From scoring films for Roman Coppola (2013’s A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III) to appearing in them (he made a cameo
in Stephen Frears’ enduring High Fidelity), ‘Slurrup’ captures the breadth and depth of Hayes’ eclecticism in what feels like delineated album split. Opener ‘Intro/Slurrup’ is a nifty little number that’s part fidgety pots and pans racket, part drawling BPM that wriggles and squirms until its premature end before the slick psychedelics of ‘One Way Out’ morph into a bluesy garage rock bopper to take you back to the relatively simpler times when the
Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and The Von Bondies were adorning music press pages. It helps the first-half fly by at a scattergun pace of sub 3-minute snapshots before the second half of the album slows things down with equally short but languid guitar ditties more reminiscent of 2009’s ‘Bright Penny’. By the time the TV noise interlude of ‘Channel 44’ crackles into life, ‘Slurrup’’s immediate earworm appeal has already firmly burrowed its way in.
06/10
Liam Hayes Slurrup F at po ss um By R eef y oun is . In sto re s Ja nua ry 12
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Albums 06/10
0 6/10
08 /10
07/ 10
Silk Rhodes Silk Rhodes
Menace Beach Ratworld
The Amazing Picture You
Jack Name Weird Moons
S t on e s t h row
Me m phi s Ind u s tr i e s
pa r ti s an
C a s t le f a c e
By t om f en wi c k. I n stor es Ja nuary 5
B y J ame s w es t. I n s to r e s j anua r y 1 2
By J ames W e s t. I n s to r es f ebru a r y 1 7
B y J a m es F . T h o m ps o n . I n s t o r es J a n u a r y 1 9
Since its inception in 1996, if you see a Stones Throw sticker adorning the cellophane wrapper of an LP sleeve, it’s generally an indicator of high quality music. But Silk Rhodes – while not quite the exception to this rule – aren’t yet up to the same calibre as some of their esteemed labelmates (J Dilla, Madlib, Jonwayne). The Baltimore duo’s debut is caught somewhere between vintage Philly soul – replete with sweet falsetto harmonies – and subtly distorted psychedelia. When that works – on songs such as ‘The System’ or ‘Pains’ – their sound shimmers with slick, minimalist R&B. But it’s an insubstantial affair. Few tracks even broach three minutes, leaving much of the album to feel half-sketched, and while there’s undoubtedly promise, it’s handled with such haste that songs barely find the space to develop. Maybe next time it would pay Silk Rhodes to slow down and remember that, when you’re dealing in sexy and soulful tunes, taking your time on the journey matters more than racing to the destination. In fact, the journey is the whole thing.
Suckers for gnarly rock anthems with choruses that lollop into view like great dopey St. Bernard’s, rejoice! Leeds supergroup Menace Beach are the latest union of motley slackers to unleash a record that’s brimming with belch-along refrains and hi-octane thrills. The project’s stellar line-up (a revolving cast, including members of Hookworms, Sky Larkin and Pulled Apart By Horses) infuses influences from both sides of the Atlantic, from Blur’s early, scuzzy Britpop hedonism to Pavement, Pixies and the usual crowd. ‘Tastes Like Medicine’ is their giddy racket at its most memorable; a looming whir and hooks, hooks, hooks, trashily canoodle during its sub three minutes, making it a tough one to shake. Elsewhere, however, their singular vision and peer similarity veers only just shy of irksome. The title track steps a little awkwardly on the toes of B-town’s Superfood, while ‘Fortune Teller’ sounds like LA garage punks FIDLAR gone flaccid. Still, for the most part, you’ll be too busy bouncing around your bedroom to give a shit about that.
The moniker of these Swedish folkies may suggest brash selfassurance, but bullies of humility they are not. Their third album floats gracefully with a hushed and courteous jangle for the most part, only occasionally baring its proggy, psych underbelly – an edge that nods to MBV, but ends up sounding like a Jools/Metallica collaboration that never should never have been (‘Fryshusfunk’). When they shoot for pacifying rather than mind obliterating, however, The Amazing warrant such billing. The record’s title track is a dreamy Fleet Foxesish highlight, featuring hypnotically tinny strums at its climax that lick at the lobes like the waves of a gentle incoming tide (as opposed to roaring across the sand to decimate the beach huts à la Kevin Shields). This penchant for the light and airy continues almost seamlessly through to ‘Tell Them You Can’t Leave’, the standout which sounds how a Stuart Murdoch-fronted Real Estate might – glorious pastoral pop that sits snugly in the ears. Mostly majestic, ‘Picture You’ is as immersive as it is devotion worthy.
Such is the vastness of the shadow cast by Ariel Pink across today’s lo-fi weird pop landscape that it’s tempting to drop his name at the merest hint of a muffled snare hit. In the case of John Webster Adams, though, what might otherwise make for a hackneyed reference is in fact a legitimate talking point, since Adams – performing this time as Jack Name but previously under the guises of Muzz and Fictional Boys – used to record with one Ariel Marcus Rosenberg. Certainly Adams seems to share his fellow Los Angelino’s penchant for effects-laden vocal obfuscation and whimsical selfindulgence, the latter of which manifests itself most obviously on ‘Waiting for Another Moon’ with its silly oom-pah rhythm and squelchy synth lines. That being said, the vibe of the pair’s output otherwise sharply diverges thanks to the drug-induced dystopian paranoia that pervades much else of ‘Weird Moons’. In contrast to Rosenberg’s skittishness, here Adams concertedly invokes flashbacks to a space-age acid trip that’s as wondrous as it is absolutely terrifying.
‘Country Music’ has as much in common with country music as Dolly Parton has with Can, but it’s clear from the sound of Vision Fortune’s second album the intent of their titling: this is music presented in opposition to the city, cut off from external influence and distraction, existing in the middle of musical nowhere and deliberately selfisolating in its pursuit of atmosphere, solitariness and a sort of bloodyminded purity. Unsurprisingly, that kind of manifesto doesn’t make for
the easiest of listens, and tracks like ‘Habitat’ and ‘Drunk Ghost’, which come across more as jam sessions snippets than anything more thought through, don’t help. However, when Vision Fortune bother to coalesce those snippets into finished pieces of music, the results hint more at the magnificent than the meandering: album opener ‘Blossom’ pairs claustrophobic electronics with treated bells and airless drum machines to create an oppressive and impressive cloud of
doomy fuzz, while finale ‘Back Crawl II’’s interlacing of field recordings with fractured washes and a middle section that recalls Neu making a grime record demonstrates precisely the sort of sonic adventurousness lacking elsewhere. Unfortunately, however, the 30 minutes of drone, chant and rhythmic experimentation that separates those two highlights rarely rewards the challenge set by the music, making ‘Country Music’ a somewhat frustrating, unloveable and detached listening experience.
05/10
Vision Fortune Country Music ATP By S am Wal ton . In store s Fe brua ry 9
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Reviews 0 4/ 1 0
0 8/10
08 /10
05/ 10
Tennis Ritual In Repeat
Ghost Culture Ghost Culture
Flug 8 Trans-Atlantik
Chandos Rats In Your Bed
Is l an d
P ha nta s y S o un d
d i sk o b
C a r pa r k
By davi d zamm i tt. In sto re s februa ry 2
B y S a m C o rnfo rth. I n s to re s J anuary 1 9
By T o m F e n wi c h. I n s to re s J a n u a r y 5
B y d a n iel d y la n w r a y . I n s t o r es J a n u a r y 2 6
“After two albums of gorgeous, breezily lissom beach pop,” starts the press release that accompanies Tennis’s third LP. Let me suggest an accurate ending to that sentence: “… Tennis return with an album of breezily lissom beach pop.” Bands with distinctive styles can find it tough to grow, and you don’t get many who are more deeply anchored in their sound than Tennis. Legend goes that after selling their possessions, husband-wife duo Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley embarked upon a sailing trip that gave birth to their 2011 debut LP. With its elegant, nautical pop, the pair seemed to arrive with a sound that was as well-rounded as any band could hope for. But this can be a curse and ultimately they have found themselves repeating the trick since. This album is no exception and while ‘Ritual In Repeat’ is pleasant, so are comfortable shoes, well-manicured lawns and sparkling water. Though Moore’s dazzling vocals save this record to an extent, Tennis must inject something new to avoid disappearing into indie pop’s Bermuda Triangle.
There are so many mysterious knobtwiddlers operating in their bedrooms in London that it’s a surprise the whole city isn’t drowning in the foggy ambience they emit. Ghost Culture is different from the crowd though, not least because he has signed to Erol Alkan’s revered Phantasy Sound label and played a pivotal role in the writing of Daniel Avery’s 2013 standout album, ‘Drone Logic’. Instead of trying to maintain a shadowy identity, James Greenwood has let eerie sounds manifest themselves into the corners of his album, rather than his image. Carrying on from the success and momentum of his early singles, he has been able to create a gloriously varied album that still manages to sound completely cohesive. ‘Ghost Culture’ has its feet grooving away on the dance floor (‘Answer’, ‘Lucky’ and ‘Glass’), while its heart and head are longing for the isolation of the bedroom it was created in (‘Glaciers’ and ‘The Fog’), and it’s the way the euphoria and emotive moodiness seamlessly co-exist that makes this such an accomplished debut album.
After a three year break to pursue his day job in music photography, Frankfurt native Daniel Herrmann has returned to bring us another dose of techno inspired motorik. ‘Trans Atlantik’ follows Herrmann’s 2009 debut ‘Lösch dein Profil’ and – as on that album – continues to plough a furrow of classic ‘Deutsche Elektronische’. His music – which is heavily indebted to Krautrock – interpolates the undulating synths and electronic shudders of his forebears across a broad canvas flecked with modern dancefloor beats; crafting a disorienting landscape that feels concurrently familiar and yet otherworldly. ‘Trans Atlantik’’s twelve tracks range from somniferously industrial dirges (‘Höhenkammer’, ‘Musik aus Metall’) and driving polyrhythmic synth odysseys (‘Android’, ‘Zeitraffer’) to hypnotic charmers (‘Watch Me Grow’ and ‘Maler’). And while its monolithic run-time of 77 minutes makes it no album for the feint of heart, take the journey and you’ll discover an epic love letter to the sound that has shaped postwar Germany.
Chandos’ shtick is a fairly familiar one these days: taking the DIY essence of playing house shows (Boston in this case), bringing that energy, spunk and spirit with them to the studio and then funnelling it through a tidied up, popleaning record. The result is a record that sits bang in the middle between pop and punk (whilst of course always giving giant nods to ’90s alt. rock and grunge). However, the trouble with ‘Rats in Your Bed’ (the band’s first properly produced release, following a string of obligatory cassette tape EPs) is that it sits too comfortably in the middle of this crossroads; it lacks the hellfor-leather abandon and feverish intensity of an explosive guitar record and yet it neither really fully embraces the pop sensibilities that it so clearly relies on in these songs. So, what’s left is a fairly routine and forgettable churn. It’s not without its moments: sparks of taut considered material such as ‘CREEPWOLF’ surge and lift the record but the overwhelming feeling when leaving the album is that of uninspired repetition and familiarity.
If you think about it, Malcolm Middleton and visual artist David Shrigley are quite natural bedfellows, for both men seem to look at life with a darkly twisted humour. While you’ll likely be familiar with Middleton’s music, Shrigley is probably best known for his mordantly humorous cartoons released in postcard packs, although he does have a history of collaborating with musicians, having directed videos for the likes of Blur and Will Oldham. The opening track of this
particular collaboration, which sees the Falkirk indie veteran provide the musical backdrop to Shrigley’s spoken word lyrics, is the hilariously misanthropic ‘AToast’. It begins with the frankly unforgettable opening line “Greetings. And good fucking wishes to you and your fuckhead arsehole family”, and continues in a similarly black-hearted vein. Elsewhere ‘Dear Brain’ is a poignant piano-accompanied prayer to the narrator’s own grey matter, bemoaning the pointless things we
as humans say and do. Lyrically, each and every track is pretty compelling; either amusing, or thought provoking, or entertainingly surreal. The problem is that the musical accompaniment to all this interesting lyricism is generally fairly pedestrian, being (aside from one or two tracks) mostly generic beats strung together, or unremarkable guitar laments. ‘Music and Words’ is probably unique in that it’s absolutely compulsive listening, but for one listen only.
05/10
Malcolm Middleton & David Shrigley Words and Music M e lo d ic By Ch r is Watkey s. In sto res D e cemb e r 15
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Albums 02/10
0 7/10
09/10
08/ 10
Jib Kidder Teaspoon To The Ocean
Noveller Fantastic Planet
Viet Cong Viet Cong
Francisco The Man Loose Ends
Wei rd Wo rld
Fi re
J a gj a g u war
Fat Possum
By C h ri s Wa tkeys. I n stor e s ja nua ry 26
B y J am e s F. Tho mp s o n. I n s t o r e s J anuar y 2 6
By m an dy drake . I n s t or e s J a n u a r y 1 9
B y H en r y W ilk in s o n . I n s t o r es J a n u a r y 1 9
By all accounts Louisville-born musician Sean Schuster-Craig is also an artist in many and various fields, from collage to sculpture to murals. Musically active as Jib Kidder for over a decade, his latest album is forty-five minutes of dreamlike, sub-Beatles psychedelia, and that, in a nutshell, is about all you can say for ‘Teaspoon To The World’, an album which – even if you were listening to it higher than you’ve ever been – you’d still find it duller than repeatedly counting the same ten paperclips from your left hand to your right hand for several hours. It’s a stunningly boring, thoroughly tedious collection of songs, musically plodding, lyrically predictable, and instantly disposable. The meandering, casually listenable vibes of the single ‘Dozens’ provide a brief respite from the thinness and monotony on show here, but that’s a desperate straw at which to grasp. To the ears of a deeply conservative listener in the mid 1960s this album might possibly have sounded far out; to modern ears, it’s about as psychedelic as a bank statement.
Listening to ‘Fantastic Planet’ it comes as no surprise to learn that Noveller is the nom de musique of Sarah Lipstate, a Brooklynite former short filmmaker. Lipstate’s eighth release is the soundtrack to her own imaginary movie; one perhaps set in the Alaskan wilderness or amidst the fjords and mountains of Scandinavia. The album is more a series of glacially-paced movements than it is a simple bunch of songs, its icy instrumental soundscapes recalling things like David Julyan’s work on the Insomnia score. Where Lipstate distinguishes herself is in the prominence she affords her own feedback-drenched guitar play, no doubt emboldened from recent stints performing with New York no wave luminaries Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham and Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo. For every lush reverie like ‘No Unholy Mountain’, there’s an abrasive counterpart lurking around the corner; the serrated edges of ‘Pulse Point’ shredding through any hitherto induced daydreams. To be sure, this is no pop record, though for the cinematically-inclined it is a truly widescreen experience.
As a band that seems so down on life, Viet Cong’s debut album could easily be a dragging bore, but it’s not. There’s no point to anything, and the Canadian four-piece appear borderline obsessed with futility – a mood matched by their mix of piercing guitars, industrial thunder drums, metallic sound collages and overall cold, cold sound. There are black gags to be had also, though, and the cry of “If we’re lucky we’ll get old and die”, on the tightly wound, joyously doom ‘Pointless Experience’, single handedly rebukes the idea that we should all just kill ourselves now. In such a moment, Viet Cong come across more like Interpol or Cold Cave (on the other ‘pop’ moment, ‘Silhouettes’, too) – a band toying with the macabre for effect, rather than one of real life depressives. Similarly, they wait for the danceable close of ‘March of Progress’ to remind us, “we build the buildings and they’re built to break”, far beyond the celestial/machanical verses reminicent of The Beatles’ ‘Because’. It’s a trick (of restrain and abandonment) repeated on the final track, called ‘Death’, of course.
Francisco The Man sure like to drag things out. After a turbulent seven years of lineup changes, hiatuses and an apparent near death experience, the Californian four piece finally release their debut mission statement ‘Loose Ends’, and luckily it’s worth the wait. A garage rock band only out of necessity, their melodies stretch far beyond the genre’s reverb and fuzz and are put together sweat-free and with precision. Whether turning their guitars to Apples In Stereo pop-punk (‘It’s Not Your Fault’) or Surfer Blood beach-rock (‘In The Corners’), the songs flow with ease, and occasionally extend calmly to over 8 minutes. The album also benefits from Scotty Cantino’s slurred, semiandrogynous vocals; think Jana Hunter meets Kurt Vile. On ‘Loaded’ his voice floats blissfully along on subdued shoegaze tones while on ‘In My Dreams’ it bends and twangs over a sonic hinterland of lush guitar interplay. With tracks like this, Francisco The Man have their sights set firmly on indie heavyweight status. Get em another 10 years though, aye?
It’s hard to believe that this is Noah Lennox’s fifth solo LP. Breathlessly prolific, his own music, as well as the work he produces with the rest of his Animal Collective menagerie, remains of such an astoundingly consistent quality that despite being amongst today’s most innovative artists, his releases now arrive with an air of good, old-fashioned reliability. It’s no mean feat, and this effort, thankfully, doesn’t buck the trend. In fact, it may well be his best yet. It’s certainly his most interesting.
Spacemen 3’s Peter Kember takes over at the mixing desk, lending ‘Panda Bear MeetsThe Grim Reaper’ a toughness and a more defined shape that was absent on previous albums, and while the swirling, Brian Wilson vocal-led psychedelia with which Lennox has made his moniker is present (trippy lead single ‘Mr Noah’ and the mesmerising ‘Butcher Baker Candlestick Maker’, for example), the real standouts are found in fresher sounds. ‘Crosswords’ takes Lennox’s
characteristically hypnotic sound and pairs it with up-front synths that throb with Moroder-esque sci-fi menace, seemingly drawing direct influence from his mates Daft Punk. ‘Boys Latin’ and ‘Selfish Gene’ also touch on the alluring, synthesised disco that Moroder first breathed life into in the late ’70s, and while the ‘headphone album’ tag has always seemed a bit reductive to me, this collection of meticulously constructed songs simply must be enjoyed in the highest of fidelity.
09/10
Panda Bear ... Meets The Grim Reaper Do m i n o By Davi d Zamm i tt. In st o re s Ja nuar y 12
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Reviews 06/10
0 8/10
07 /10
07/ 10
BC Camplight How To Die in The North
The Charlatans Modern Nature
Curtis Harding Soul Power
Alex Calder Strange Dreams
Bel l a U n i on
B M G C rys al i s
An it
c a ptu r e d t r a c k s
By J oe goggi ns . In sto re s janu a ry 19
B y Hayl e y sc o tt . In s t o re s j anu ary 2 6
By Sa m c o rn fo r th. In st o r es j a nua r y 1 9
B y d a n iel d y la n w r a y . In s t o r es j a nua r y 1 9
“I’m the guy who blew it.” Full marks to Brian Christinzio for honesty, even if it’s not immediately clear what it is he’s telling us the truth about. What is clear, at least, is that he had a tumultuous time after releasing two full-length albums under his own name near enough a decade ago – ‘Run, Hide Away’ was his debut in 2005, and ‘Blink of a Nihilist’ followed it up in 2007. Apparently considering himself to be on “one last chance” a few years later, he left his native Philadelphia for what I, having been born and raised there, would consider to be the altogether less forgiving surroundings of Manchester – selfpity doesn’t tend to go over all that well in my hometown. Just as well, then, that, as BC Camplight, Christinzio largely let his music do the talking. Clever pop songs flecked with eccentricity are the order of the day, with ‘Atom Bomb’ and ‘Grim Cinema’ serving as sharp examples of the album’s emotionally intense undertow. It’s an awkward listen much of the time, occasionally to a fault but frequently endearing in the process.
Despite being initially consigned to also-ran status during the apex of early ’90s Madchester, The Charlatans’ dogged persistence over the years has served them well. What’s more, the band have made a giant leap forward stylistically with ‘Modern Nature’. Opener ‘Talking In Tones’ melds past and present triumphantly: while representing a new trajectory for The Charlatans, the distinctive organ sound and baggy rhythm, however subtle, affirms that they’ve not strayed too far from their hedonistic tendencies, while its cyclical guitar riff and Burgess’ hushed and stoic vocal harmonies introduce a more languid, haunting aesthetic. Elsewhere, delightful tricks are aplenty, and especially the strings on the infallible, soul-inspirited ‘Keep It Up’ add introspective warmth. It’s not without its relative flaws (‘Let The Good Times Be Never-ending’’s effusive disco cheese is a little out of place here, and consequently sounds dated), but, essentially, ‘Modern Nature’ is fragile, danceable and never void of idiosyncrasies. Jon Brookes would be proud.
Curtis Harding isn’t your standard throwback musician. Although ‘Soul Power’, his debut solo album, is unsurprisingly built upon a foundation of ’70s soul and R&B (predictably creating a fan in Jack White), it is given an exciting twist to the usual nostalgic fare. As a child, the Michigan-born, Atlanta-based artist sang gospel music alongside his mum and more recently featured in CeeLo Green’s backing band, so, as you’d expect, his vocals are sublime throughout ‘Soul Power’. His warm singing interlinks perfectly with the classic instrumentation on ‘Next Time’ and disco funk of ‘Heaven’s On The Other Side’, his voice also adds smoke fire to the stomping rock that features on ‘The Drive’ and ‘Drive My Car’, whilst it is apparent that his garage rock collaborations with the Black Lip’s Cole Alexander have rubbed off on ‘Surf’ and ‘I Don’t WantTo Go Home’. It is this swagger and dousing of garage rock that differentiates Harding’s refreshing and modern take on soul music from a dusty, battered old record lurking in a bargain bin.
There is a submerged, gloopy wonk to much of the tone found on ‘Strange Dreams’; the kind not at all dissimilar to that of Calder’s buddy Mac DeMarco (the pair played in Makeout Videotape together) or the idiosyncratic pop charm of Connan Mockasin. Muddy vocals hide behind echo and guitar fog as drums propel much of the songs, propping them up from disappearing into a quicksand of fuzzy atmosphere. Deerhunter man Lockett Pundt and his own project, Lotus Plaza, is another resemblance it feels impossible to ignore throughout the record. Whilst Calder isn’t breaking through any barriers here or even really approaching un-trodden terrain, he has succeeded in capturing a playful and often absorbing record that toys with the constraints of pop music, primarily by burying hooks and vocal melodies so deeply under a mountain of ambience and watery guitar shimmer that they become barely audible. The results are a sort of druggy grog pop, fun and at times irresistible, although now feeling like a pretty well worn-out formula as we enter 2015.
Crummy rhymes with the word “grace” notwithstanding, Pond’s opening gambit nearly had me dancing around in my Summertime Clothes. (Or, to take a reference both slightly more apposite and probably too obscure, havin’ a riot For Reverend Green.) Next, I’m asked to get Close To Me by a bassline chockfull of a funk that Robert Smith would never have allowed but probably secretly desired all along. And this quick one-two is at least semiconvincing: both ‘Waiting Around
For Grace’ and lead-single ‘Elvis’ Flaming Star’ compensate for what they lack in melodic gainliness with the colour and energy of the best extroverted psych rock. For, on their eighth studio album, the Australian group’s psychedelia finds its ecstasy via movement rather than meditation. Or it does at first. See, from here on it all comes over a bit middle-period Flaming Lips, but without the strange simplicity that kept ‘The Soft Bulletin’ (and ‘Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots’, at a push)
from excessive sluggishness. And in the absence of the uncanny aura of those records, ‘Man, It Feels Like Space Again’ too often strays into a barely-updated late-Beatles pastiche, not least during the lumbering title track which recalls ‘Abbey Road’’s closing medley both in its meandering weightlessness and misguided ambition. Pond’s space rock is all ‘Sun King’ with no ‘Her Majesty’ to bring us back down to earth.
06/10
Pond Man It Feels Like Space Again Ca ro li n e By T HOM AS M AY . In sto re s ja nua ry 26
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Albums 0 7/ 1 0
Charli XCX Sucker As y l u m By H enry wil k inso n. In store s ja nuar y 26
Azealia Banks recently offered this assessment of her position in the music industry (amongst other NSFW anecdotes): “I exist in like cool, artful, hipster world; I’m in this hipster snob world where people don’t listen to Lady Gaga”. Although a self-serving simplification, it’s still one that few artists manage to disprove. Nevertheless, with her second album ‘Sucker’, Charli XCX seems to be giving it a pretty good go. Having previously collaborated with Icona Pop and Iggy Azealea and giving them monster hits to tag along on, it may have surprised a few when she announced she was working with Weezer and Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij. The result is an
album that is unashamedly pop but with a refreshing amount of selfawareness and craft to back it up. Opening and title track ‘Sucker’ is a delightful piece of sugar coated electro pop, delivered like Marina and The Diamonds in her pomp and determined to prove a point. The repetition of “fuck you, sucker” is a pretty bold way to begin an album for an 22 year old who has already achieved massive commercial success. You’d be forgiven for thinking it a little misguided, too, but that’s the beauty of it: Charli seems to appreciate and critique her precarious position in pop while also acknowledging the rewards that she has reaped from it. “Sucker”, it
seems, refers as much to her own burgeoning stardom as it does to those people who doubted her in the first place. The album chugs away relentlessly like a grinding hit machine, spewing out the catchy loops and strangely sorrowful lyrics of ‘Gold Coins’. Ironically the tone is far more euphoric when she sings of crashing parties pre-fame in ‘Famous’, and while other artists might come across disingenuous, Charli XCX gets away with it. On top of this, throw in a track the standard of ‘Boom Clap’ and you already have as much content as most modern pop records. It’s a modern ballad of the post dubstep persuasion, as if
Jai Paul had snuck in to Madonna’s studio post-production and started playing around with the knobs. Throughout ‘Sucker’ Charli XCX shows, in case there was ever any doubt, that she can make it on her own, and quite literally in the weirdly masturbatory anthem ‘Body of My Own’. Impressively she manages to deliver bubble-gum pop with substance, part shout-a-long riot grrrl empowerment, part charming teeny pop (just listen to those lyrics in ‘Breaking Up’). To lift a line from the retro sounding ‘Doing It’, though, as long as she’s “doing it like we’re doing it now”, then she might just manage mainstream success while avoiding the hipster scorn.
In 2011, Chris Ward aka Tropics was creating the ambient soundtracks to a thousand brokenhearted summers. Back then he was a final year digital student signed to Planet Mu with grand ambitions for his debut album and an impending move to London. But where his debut, ‘Parodia Flare’, paid off on the complex, ambient sound of his early EPs, ‘Rapture’ now sees Tropics emerge in a very different form. Where the tentative vocals of his first album seemed like an
embellishment to Ward’s beautiful soundscapes, here they’re the focal point, soon to be compared to James Blake, presumably if all goes to plan. At their fragile best, the vocals swim from the depths and delightfully bleed into focus as they do on opener ‘Blame’; at their worst, they ooze a Live Lounge smugness, as if Fearne Cotton invited Will Young to overlay the Air back catalogue. Soothing, soulful, and testament to a young artist’s undoubted ambition, this isn’t about criticising
Ward’s voice, it’s more wondering why his intoxicating sound has been relegated to that of a supporting role. Strip back the vocals and there’s no denying his ability to craft incredibly beautiful music – as the gorgeously mournful ‘House of Leaves’ testifies – but in the company of ‘Not Enough’’s altered R&B pop, ‘Rapture’ feels less of a soundtrack to moments of heartbreaking poignancy, and more of the standard playlist to a lazy, rainy Sunday.
06/10
Tropics Rapture I n n ova ti ve l e isu re By R eef y ou nis . In sto re s Februar y 16
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Reviews / Live
Dean Blunt Electrowerkz Angel, London
13 / 11/ 20 14 wr i ter : S tu ar t stu bbs Ph otogr aph er : Ari anna P o wer
The curious thing about Hackney samplist Dean Blunt is that while he’s been busy creating a myth of himself (first as one half of the cagey and flippant Hype Williams and now as a solo artist on his second album), you get the feeling that he’d loathe to be considered an enigma. He shuns interviews and doesn’t do the Internet, but that’s not how he wants to be defined. All signs point to him wanting to be left the hell alone, in fact, and his rare live shows have become another way for him to test (and upset) the fans you suspect he might hold in contempt. This evening is, at times, a sadistic bootcamp of Blunt’s – an initiation of sonic and sensory warfare, where the game it seems he’s playing with himself is, ‘how can I clear this room at least of the chaff, if not every single person?’ A good 30 minutes of noise passes as Electrowerkz’s boiler
room chamber is filled with so much dry ice you can taste the rust sticking to it. It’s suffocating and claustrophobic, and no one knows if this is in fact the show. Press your face against the mist and you can see that there are two figures up there, backlit in red light, but they’re doing nothing. It turns out that neither are Blunt, who enters in total darkness, to the sound of rain, which continues to fall for a further ten minutes. Maybe this is the show? After 45 minutes spent shuffling awkwardly in the fog, breathing in the damp, reduced to silhouettes ourselves, the stage lights fire up to reveal Blunt (who, in black trousers, a white office worker’s shirt, a Nike cap and a North Face mac, has made no effort whatsoever), a live saxophonist (who’ll come and go over the next hour) and the two
figures who’ve been up there all along (Blunt’s ‘security’, in black suits and red ties, who look like they’ve made too much effort, all things considered). Blunt seems anxious as he begins to deliver tracks from last year’s ‘The Redeemer’ LP and the more recent ‘Black Metal’. He grabs his cuffs and looks to the side. Once he does settle down he’s pretty fucked off, shouting his lyrics and staring down the audience, daring them to clap as each backing track fades to nothing, but only for a split second before the next starts up. For some reason he then decides to play a sequence of songs of total darkness. It’s contrary enough to cause some to finally leave, but not many, which leads to Blunt’s final attempt of self-sabotage – 20 unforgiving (and unexpected) minutes of shit-your-pant deep bass,
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lit only by a continual strobe. Initially, it seems manageable, if not totally enjoyable, but Blunt seems to revel in pushing things too far. There are a number of times when – due to our previous experiences of listening to loud electronic music – we can hear the drop coming. But it never does. It’s now a matter of endurance, and I’d like to think that Blunt was impressed by how few walked against such a barrage of noise and sickening light, although that would suggest that Dean Blunt is impressed by anything, which is currently in doubt. The songs tonight play a secondary role to the theatrics, and it’s a shame that Blunt is at risk of becoming considered an lawless excentric more than the talented producer and musician he is. And yet a vast majority stay. Perhaps they couldn’t find the exit.
Reviews
Zola Jesus Koko, Camden, London
Banks Brixton Academy, London 2 3 / 1 1 / 2 01 4
18/ 11/ 14
w r i t er : T o m F en w ick
wr it er : J ames F. Tho m pso n
P h o t og r aph er : C a t i e L a f f o o n
Things get off to a rocky start for Banks tonight. But it does little to dampen the mood amongst Brixton’s capacity crowd, whose adoration for the 26 year old Californian transcends technical hitches. A confident set follows; her vocals holding a majesty that – on tracks like ‘Warm Water’ – bring distinct intimacy to such a large auditorium, itself one that Banks’ flawed debut album, ‘Goddess’, at first appeared incapable of filling. Indeed, the night is somewhat marred by a rather static onstage presence and visually stark backdrop, which leave the show feeling uninspired. It makes no difference to ardent fans, but if Banks truly is ready for venues of this size, then she needs to put in a performance that delivers on all levels, doing justice to both her growing, faithful audience and her own vocal ability.
Try as she might, Nika Danilova just can’t get this party started. The Russian American songstress does her best to bring some bombast to KOKO’s cavernous old auditorium, bolstering her arsenal with banks of synths, a standing drummer and a not insignificant brass section. Danilova, draped all in black, also spends plenty of the show marauding around the stage on all fours like a cat on heat, or perhaps an overexcited chimpanzee. For all her elaborate instrumentation and frenzied animalism though, the diminutive 25 year-old can’t atone for a seemingly insentient middle-aged crowd. By the time Danilova wades into the assemblage of geriatrics it’s hard to tell whether she’s there to lead a sing-a-long or slap a few of them out of their torpor. Regardless, this is festival-style music for an out-ofstyle audience and it doesn’t work.
Perfume Genius Islingto Assembly Hall
Joey Bada$$ Concorde 2, Brighton
Black Bananas 100 Club, London
Ought The Scala, King’s Cross
27/ 11/ 20 14
22/1 1 / 2 0 1 4
11/11/2014
1 9/ 1 1 / 2 01 4
wr it er : C hr is watke ys
wri te r: to m fe nw ick
wr ite r: e d ga r s mi th
w r i t er : Th o ma s m a y
Taken on his music alone, Mike Hadreas is a heartbroken young man – a man whose fragility is so exposed in his songs that watching him up on stage, sometimes you fear that the emotional currents of life and love might finally overwhelm him. So it comes as a mild surprise that between songs tonight, the man who calls himself Perfume Genius appears to be having a little fun. His recent, third album (‘Too Bright’) is musically punchier (if no less heartbroken), and tonight that plays its part, but it’s in the saddest moments that one feels really touched. Hadreas’ poise and grace is remarkable, and he’s in possession of the kind of voice that is capable of reaching in and touching the soul. This reaches its peak in the swelling waves of ‘All Waters’, which for those of a melancholy disposition is almost transcendental.
Brighton’s crowd seems hyped before Joey Bada$$ even appears tonight, but once he does, they lose their minds. What follows is a stunning performance from the prodigious Brooklyn rapper, drawn from elements of his existing mixtapes, his forthcoming LP (which is beginning to feel as prolonged as Azealia Banks’) and a few hip-hop classics. Pro Era alumni Kirk Knight joins him onstage in the latter half of the show and the duo masterfully steer the crowd from raucous calland-response bangers to a poignant moment of silence in memory of Pro Era co-founder Capital Steez, and back again. By the end of the night, everyone is exhausted and elated at what they’ve seen: a lesson in delivery and technique that belies Bada$$’ youth, but is delivered with a sincerity and fervour that only his youth can provide.
It’s not sold out but tonight’s seductive chaos has a strong pull: Bobby Gillespie and Douglas Hart are bounding in and out of the Oxford Street basement, indulging in school night fun with their friend, the brilliant and debauched Jennifer Herrema.The Black Bananas founder (and former half of Royal Trux) is someone who looks like they’re swinging a bottle of JD even when they’re not. Her band is an equally unholy mess, flat caps on long, matted hair. “What’s errp? Is it loud enough?!” she screams. “Y’all drinking enough?” We’d better be: a snakeskin left-handed guitar played Hendrix side-up emits an outrageous, Isley Brothers-meets-George Clinton funk underneath autotune vocals and iPod-extracted beats. These sludge party tracks sound like the deformed idiom of ’60s postmodernists applied to the music of Drake.
Despite having been effectively told to just stop worrying and enjoy the music during our earlier interview, I still found this a tough ask when it came to Ought’s set later that evening. For even if irony really isn’t part of “[their] world”, as was claimed, then it surely flows through their music in abundance, a sense only accentuated by frontman Tim Beeler’s tightly controlled, if fleeting, theatricalism: his acknowledgement that “the Lord is in attendance” followed by a smirking sideways glance. But this knowingness is not left unchecked. Instead, Ought’s seductive ambiguity lies in their irony’s counterpoint with a deeply felt hopefulness: when they speak of the “beautiful fucking blue sky” at the set’s close, they mean every word. So if, as Beeler told me earlier, Ought’s music is about the meeting of opposites, then here it is.
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Live
Le Guess Who? Utrecht, The Netherlands 20 - 23 / 11/ 20 14 wr iter s : dani el d ylan wra y Ph oto gr aph er : ta sh b right
Utrecht is a historic and picturesque – but notably hip – city a mere 30 minutes away from the more notorious Amsterdam. Le Guess Who is its covered festival, with its primary base in a brand new huge, sprawling indoor venue complex called Tivoli that has several floors, each one loaded with bars, pop-up shops, coffee places and guest food outlets. It then stretches much further and wider throughout the city, taking in numerous other venues, ranging from pre-existing gig venues to makeshift ones in churches and the like, allowing one to walk the canals and streets of this rather beautiful city. Einstürzende Neubauten (pictured) open the festival, bringing their WWI epic ‘Lament’ to the stage with magnificent force. It’s an intensely powerful and profoundly moving experience that even sees the group’s own guitarist Jochen Arbeit wipe tears from his own eyes. The group have created something utterly unique in this project and the opportunity to see it live should be pounced upon. Ben Frost then triggers a series of strobes so fierce and pummelling that they literally instil hallucinatory flashbacks, the sharp bursts of white meld into greens that weave and melt in the air. It creates a wonderfully trippy accompaniment to a set that shakes the building’s foundations. Perfume Genius meanwhile puts in a riveting performance that switches between moments of stripped piano beauty and raunchy blasts of full band noise. He’s followed by Iceage who play a delightfully scrappy set that takes the wired energy of their early material and filters it through their latest, and greatest, LP ‘Plowing Into the Field of Love’. Singer Elias Bender Rønnenfelt is as forceful and intense as ever, firing spit into the front row and constantly wrapping the microphone lead around his neck, squeezing hard as he sneers and slurs words, forcing them out of his mouth as though he has utter contempt for them. Often the danger with these indoor festivals is that they don’t feel remotely like festivals at all. Void of atmosphere, movement and life, they can shun the liberating sense of abandon and freedom that makes
outdoor festivals such an appealing escape. Indoor festivals can feel like you’re trapped in one darkened room after the next.Too much time spent in Tivoli can occasionally feel like this, the serene and tranquil building becoming a little sterile and comatose. (It’s an amazing space, but you wouldn’t want to spend an entire weekend in the Southbank Centre either). LGW counters this not only by spreading the festival out across the city and utilising it to give you options, but, most successfully, by running Le Mini Who, a fringe event that runs over the weekend and is entirely free to non-ticket holders. Throughout this strand you will find multiple bars, cafes, clothes shops and any other conceivable space teeming with people as a variety of the best and most interesting music from the Dutch underground play in them. Crowds gather and gawp through windows whilst others dance out in the streets, if they are unable to squeeze into the tight spaces. The city really comes alive here and the atmosphere bubbles with excitement, with the streets lined with drinkers and gig-goers, all avoiding a deadly blow from the unrelenting stream of hurtling cyclists tearing down the roads. During this I see The Homesick, a band comprised of some very young Dutch teenagers who play a joyous racket of Orange Juice-meets-Mac
DeMarco wonky pop, charged with youthful spunk and careless abandon and it proves to be one of the greatest finds of the weekend. Back inside, Wire sound as progressive and challenging as ever, still pushing new boundaries and still playing songs they have never performed live before. Similarly, Swans continue to display why they are the greatest live band on the planet, not only through sheer force and seismic musical impact but because of their constant strive for momentum and evolution. They’re already playing new material and tonight’s closing ‘Black Hole Man’ sounds like their next album could still be their greatest. Tim Hecker kicks off the fantastically unique 24 Hour Drone Fest component of the festival wonderfully in pitch black before Autechre (also in pitch black, with the doors closed and nobody being allowed to enter or leave during their performance) bring a scattered yet enticing set that almost offers something in the way of collective movement and unison but frequently snatches it back. Their gloriously fluttering and twitching mess is almost a unified front against dance music while of course redefining its very perimeters at the same time. On the final day Sleaford Mods sound as intensified as ever – the bark and bite of Jason Williamson
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feels particularly venomous today. Countered with the groove-riddled Turkish psych of Baba Zula (pictured), followed by Selda, this is a wonderful contrast that highlights the festival’s varied line-up. Some hours later and the 24 Hour Drone Fest has got weird. William Basinski looks like he’s landed in from a Phillip K. Dick novel, wearing a long leather jacket and mirrored sunglasses as he stares malevolently across the audience, his ambient hum hitting a wonderfully mid range pitch. Mid range is not what Stephen O’Malley has on offer, however, as he sends an earthquake through the building, sustaining a beautiful wall of growl that builds, breaths and intensifies. Strange scenes unfold around me: one man lays shirtless on the ground completely motionless either dead or in heaven (when someone tramples on his head and he moves I realise he’s alive) whilst someone next to him sits cradling their head in their hands, rocking back and forth like someone on a ward. At my feet another man lays on all fours with his forehead pressed firmly against the floor, either attempting to expel bad acid demons that may be running amuck in his brain, or twenty-four hours of nonstop drone and O’Malley’s vibrations have sent him west. It’s one of the oddest and most brilliant ends to a festival I’ve ever encountered.
Cinema
Films of The Year by Daniel Dylan Wray, Ian Roebuck, Stuart Stubbs, Tom Fenwick
01. Boyhood It’s impossible to ignore the context in which Richard Linklater made Boyhood – a coming-of-age movie shot over 11 years, as it followed 6-year-old Mason through childhood and adolescence, up to the point of leaving home for college. For all involved (and especially the boy in question (Ellar Coltrane) and his onscreen sister Samantha – played by Linklaker’s own daughter Lorelei) the commitment to the project was like no other in cinematic history, and yet Boyhood far surpassed its revolutionary production schedule. Life isn’t like the movies, except in Linklaker’s case, who managed to expertly champion the small stuff with Boyhood’s meticulous and understated script. There’s a drama here and there (the break up of the
children’s parents (Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette); the following abusive second marriage of mother Olivia), but these moments are not heightened to defining melodrama – they are far from the crux of the film. Instead, it’s the realism of childhood and weekends spent with dad that made Boyhood so universal and compelling – the reality that an absent father can still make an effort; that much of growing up is spent bored, staring out of the window; that a broken home doesn’t naturally lead to a life of crime and drugs; and that your older sister will always piss you off once she’s convinced she’s the next Britney Spears. Growing up is plenty interesting enough without all the bombast of how Hollywood usually sees it. SS
02. Under the Skin
03. The Guest
04. The Wind Rises
05. Interstellar
The merging of actual reality with the intensely unreal in Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin is one of many components that led it to being such an original and immersive cinematic encounter. Mica Levi’s score is perhaps one of the greatest in contemporary cinema, alone, but when merged with the bleak isolation and confused alienation of Scarlett Johansson’s nameless character in an often unscripted trip across Scotland, they culminated to take on a strange presence and tone that is equally as unnerving as it is engulfing. A visually stunning, metaphorically rich an intensely innovative piece of cinema. DDW
With a brooding atmosphere, hyper stylised violence, note-perfect soundtrack and twisted plot, Adam Winegard’s The Guest was 2014’s paean to ’80s B-movies; a hybrid of a film that – much like Winegard’s previous movie, You’re Next – managed to straddle horror, thriller and black comedy, but allowed each of them to carry equal weight in the film. The Guest showcased Winegard’s skills in the same way Slither and Super showcased James Gunn’s (who went on to make Guardians Of The Galaxy) and marked the arrival of a filmmaker to follow closely, while Dan Stevens – exDownton Abbey alumni – stole the show playing David, the ambiguous anti-hero whose intentions, despite his all-American veneer, remain mischievously unclear right to end. TF
Hayao Miyazaki had a knack for a good ending. So it was inevitable his back catalogue of poetic animated features for Studio Ghibli would climax with a flourish. The Wind Rises was the revered director’s farewell masterpiece, as touching and surprising as some of his finest works, like Spirited Away and My Neighbour Totoro. This story, though, was somewhat braver than others – a sweeping look at the life of Jiro Horikoshi, a passionate aviation designer whose Japanese fighter planes played such a significant role in World War II. Visually stunning, moving and artistically daring, it was a faultless way to say goodbye. IR
Whatever your feelings toward Christopher Nolan, it’s hard to be too down on Interstellar; a sci-fi epic that seemed to be about the fate of mankind but is really about a simple promise between a father and his daughter. And while it undoubtedly had its flaws, it was beautifully shot, with stellar central performances (McConaughey and Chastain) and a fine score. So while people get bogged down in how it’s no 2001: A Space Odyssey, they should remember that Nolan is no Kubrick – if anything he’s closer to Spielberg; mixing mega budgets with intelligence and an emotional core, which transcends the popcorn trappings of the multiplex. TF
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FOR PAST ISSUES & MORe 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 Mac DeMarco
Karen O They Don’t Love You Like I Love You
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Party wolf
XMAS DAY SPOILER A LERT!
Photo casebook “Ian Beale’s Ghost of Christmas Past”
Ere, ain’t these doors stiff? You ‘av to give ‘em a... proper... yank!
I’m you’re biggest fan, Ian! My mum says you’re going to be rich and famous one day!
... You can tell her I said that after I win this big fight
Well, your mum sounds like a very smart lady...
{ !
Ding
That’s my boy! Kill him, Ian!!
Ian Beale, in the flesh!!!
Arrghh!!! IAAANNNN!!!!!!
Now there’s a young man I respect!
Total legend! What at dreamboat!
You went down like an actual sack of shit then, Ian. Are you OK?
I wish you were my son, Ian! Not really
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Disclaimer: The representations of the persons herein are purely fictitious
... And in the red corner, the man you’ve all come to see, and who can blame you, Iaaannn Beeeaallle!