Sunday, September 30, 2007
Bring the Noise is being picked up for Italian translation by ISBN Edizioni. Publication date TBC--probably late 2008.
[Bring the Noise deleted scene #20]
AL GREEN, Love Ritual
Melody Maker June 3rd 1989
Dry details first: Love Ritual consists of rare and previously unreleased Al Green material from between 1968 to 1976 (his creative prime) including a “Love Ritual” remixed even swampier and glutinously funky than before, and tracks like “Up Above My Head,” “So Good To Be Here” and “Strong As Death (Sweet As Love)” which are right up there with more reknowned peaks like “How Do You Mend A Broken Heart” and “I’m Still In Love With You.”
Okay, now let’s get moist. Why is it still possible to melt for this man after a decade in which so much odious charlatanry has been promoted and prattled in the name of Soul? Al Green is the man who took all the things that usually make for MOR tedium in music--constancy, fidelity, permanence, trust, security--and made them seem like heaven-on-earth, a consummation devoutly to be wished. His voice--an androgynous purr, a svelte, silvered, sinuous swoon--is the sound of someone expiring for love. “Mimi” has the beautiful line “Hope that I die before you”, but if you twist the sense of that plea around you reach an important truth: die is just what Al Green does, slowly, right in front of our dazzled ears.
Hollering, exhibitionist feats of “prowess” weren’t his way. Instead his voice dances at close quarters, entwines and enfolds you in a blurry, slurred intimacy, a carnal cave of tenderness and devotion. He’s catfooted where other soul giants growl like a bear with heartburn. He woos where others breastbeat. The closest he gets to the hoarse histrionics of your Reddings or Browns are little voluptuous geysers of emotion that escape every so often. His ensemble of players---Howard Grimms and Al Jackson on drums, the Hodges brothers on guitar and bass--frame him in a chrysalis of sound as luscious and lambent as honeycomb.
They don’t make records like this anymore, the state-of-the-art won’t allow it. Black American pop now dubs itself euphemistically as “Urban Contemporary” (soul as the soundtrack to slick courtship) or “Quiet Storm” (soul as a soothing Radox bath). And this decade has seen the beige deluge of acts like Wet Wet Wet (who went to Memphis to try and learn Green’’s secrets from his producer Willie Mitchell), their clumsy veneration making soul an almost completely unviable proposition for the future. But that’s no reason to miss out on the unrepeatable treasure of Green’s music, the long-lost languor and sheer diabetic OD that he shared with contemporaties like The Temptations, Sly Stone and Marvin Gaye. Go get wrapped up in love.
SIMON REYNOLDS
AL GREEN, Love Ritual
Melody Maker June 3rd 1989
Dry details first: Love Ritual consists of rare and previously unreleased Al Green material from between 1968 to 1976 (his creative prime) including a “Love Ritual” remixed even swampier and glutinously funky than before, and tracks like “Up Above My Head,” “So Good To Be Here” and “Strong As Death (Sweet As Love)” which are right up there with more reknowned peaks like “How Do You Mend A Broken Heart” and “I’m Still In Love With You.”
Okay, now let’s get moist. Why is it still possible to melt for this man after a decade in which so much odious charlatanry has been promoted and prattled in the name of Soul? Al Green is the man who took all the things that usually make for MOR tedium in music--constancy, fidelity, permanence, trust, security--and made them seem like heaven-on-earth, a consummation devoutly to be wished. His voice--an androgynous purr, a svelte, silvered, sinuous swoon--is the sound of someone expiring for love. “Mimi” has the beautiful line “Hope that I die before you”, but if you twist the sense of that plea around you reach an important truth: die is just what Al Green does, slowly, right in front of our dazzled ears.
Hollering, exhibitionist feats of “prowess” weren’t his way. Instead his voice dances at close quarters, entwines and enfolds you in a blurry, slurred intimacy, a carnal cave of tenderness and devotion. He’s catfooted where other soul giants growl like a bear with heartburn. He woos where others breastbeat. The closest he gets to the hoarse histrionics of your Reddings or Browns are little voluptuous geysers of emotion that escape every so often. His ensemble of players---Howard Grimms and Al Jackson on drums, the Hodges brothers on guitar and bass--frame him in a chrysalis of sound as luscious and lambent as honeycomb.
They don’t make records like this anymore, the state-of-the-art won’t allow it. Black American pop now dubs itself euphemistically as “Urban Contemporary” (soul as the soundtrack to slick courtship) or “Quiet Storm” (soul as a soothing Radox bath). And this decade has seen the beige deluge of acts like Wet Wet Wet (who went to Memphis to try and learn Green’’s secrets from his producer Willie Mitchell), their clumsy veneration making soul an almost completely unviable proposition for the future. But that’s no reason to miss out on the unrepeatable treasure of Green’s music, the long-lost languor and sheer diabetic OD that he shared with contemporaties like The Temptations, Sly Stone and Marvin Gaye. Go get wrapped up in love.
SIMON REYNOLDS
Monday, September 24, 2007
[Bring the Noise deleted scene #19]
MUDHONEY, Fulham Greyhound, London
Melody Maker, April 8th 1989
Tonight, Mudhoney are a chastening experience for me. And, as our "emergent underground" hardens into homogeneity, as certain ideas congeal into a new orthodoxy, so I expect to have more and more encounters as schizoid as this one. See, Mudhoney tonight managed the singular feat of being utterly entertaining, and yet, at some deeper level, tedious beyond belief. I was bored, almost literally, to the brink of tears.
That a band can be this urgent, and yet so uninvolving, this frenzied, and yet so ultimately immobile, this charged, and yet so fundamentally lazy, is a testament to some kind of dire deadlock. The moment has passed, an impasse has been
reached. It would be more rewarding to watch someone struggle, uncomfortably and unsuccessfully, to get to some beyond, than to witness something as consummate as Mudhoney.
For Mudhoney are immaculate. Every thrust, rip, rent, howl, jut and jive is perfectly placed, and asserts, with a conviction that's utterly convinving, that punk's not dead. And I don't mean some privileged moment in '76, but punk as Lester Bangs invented it, the bad boy trash lineage that runs from rockabilly, through Sixties garage, Seventies gumbo metal to contemporary thrash. It's alive and burning still. Mudhoney have the riffs, the songs, the vehemence, the
attitude, the windmilling longhair, the witticisms ... "I'll give $50 to the first guy to come onstage and throw his guts up", "we're not playing another song until they erect a stage barrier", "we're tired of all you over-active young people,
let's have some old people up the front now" ... They've only just begun and already they're washed up, standing still at a point of perfection, giving the people what they want, fitting our talk without testing it, meeting our need without
stretching it.
"Mud Ride" tells the oldest story in hardcore, abduction and murder, froths at the mouth about "taking you any place/there's no place to hide", but no one here is remotely endangered. It's a scenario that's already becoming as cosy as the ritual narratives of heavy metal or Oi.
Maybe Mudhoney exhaust me because every word they incite in my mind feels tired and tame in the mouth. Maybe that's just my problem. But maybe - and it's worth considering - the teen sicko raving bloody mess-thetic is spent. Maybe trash is just trash. Sonic Youth have reinvented New York as a city of ghosts. Spacemen 3 have turned to ether. Pixies are now sculpted in five dimensions. So far, Mudhoney have set things up so that their only future is as the oldest teenagers in town. What they do, nobody does better. Do we need it anymore?
SIMON REYNOLDS
MUDHONEY, Fulham Greyhound, London
Melody Maker, April 8th 1989
Tonight, Mudhoney are a chastening experience for me. And, as our "emergent underground" hardens into homogeneity, as certain ideas congeal into a new orthodoxy, so I expect to have more and more encounters as schizoid as this one. See, Mudhoney tonight managed the singular feat of being utterly entertaining, and yet, at some deeper level, tedious beyond belief. I was bored, almost literally, to the brink of tears.
That a band can be this urgent, and yet so uninvolving, this frenzied, and yet so ultimately immobile, this charged, and yet so fundamentally lazy, is a testament to some kind of dire deadlock. The moment has passed, an impasse has been
reached. It would be more rewarding to watch someone struggle, uncomfortably and unsuccessfully, to get to some beyond, than to witness something as consummate as Mudhoney.
For Mudhoney are immaculate. Every thrust, rip, rent, howl, jut and jive is perfectly placed, and asserts, with a conviction that's utterly convinving, that punk's not dead. And I don't mean some privileged moment in '76, but punk as Lester Bangs invented it, the bad boy trash lineage that runs from rockabilly, through Sixties garage, Seventies gumbo metal to contemporary thrash. It's alive and burning still. Mudhoney have the riffs, the songs, the vehemence, the
attitude, the windmilling longhair, the witticisms ... "I'll give $50 to the first guy to come onstage and throw his guts up", "we're not playing another song until they erect a stage barrier", "we're tired of all you over-active young people,
let's have some old people up the front now" ... They've only just begun and already they're washed up, standing still at a point of perfection, giving the people what they want, fitting our talk without testing it, meeting our need without
stretching it.
"Mud Ride" tells the oldest story in hardcore, abduction and murder, froths at the mouth about "taking you any place/there's no place to hide", but no one here is remotely endangered. It's a scenario that's already becoming as cosy as the ritual narratives of heavy metal or Oi.
Maybe Mudhoney exhaust me because every word they incite in my mind feels tired and tame in the mouth. Maybe that's just my problem. But maybe - and it's worth considering - the teen sicko raving bloody mess-thetic is spent. Maybe trash is just trash. Sonic Youth have reinvented New York as a city of ghosts. Spacemen 3 have turned to ether. Pixies are now sculpted in five dimensions. So far, Mudhoney have set things up so that their only future is as the oldest teenagers in town. What they do, nobody does better. Do we need it anymore?
SIMON REYNOLDS
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
[Bring the Noise deleted scene #16]
HIP HOP / HOUSE / BLACK ROCK SINGLES REVIEWS
Melody Maker, April 23 1988
by Simon Reynolds
SINGLES OF THE YEAR
A.R. KANE
Up Home! (Rough Trade)
A.R. Kane return, with an impossibly total vindication of one’s hopes: not so much living up to the rhetoric as burning it up, leaving it exhausted and impoverished. “Baby Milk Snatcher” returns to the deep, deep dub-sway and heavy reverb reaches of “Anitina”, the hideously under-exposed B-side of the M.A.R.R.S. smash/scourge. But the other three tracks on this EP are the real deal.
I don’t know how Alex and Rudi get these sounds: they seem to be playing not guitars but stalagmites and stalactites. “WOGS” is a vortex of refractions, an overload of colours canceling each other to produce a dazzling white-out. You think of Arthur Russell, subaqua reef worlds or the dreamscapes uncovered by explorers of the underworld: the kind of grottos we haven’t encountered since Garlands, maybe even Bitches Brew.
Alex’s voice is the human heartbeat at the core of this miasma, listeless and withdrawn, carrying the melody as though nearly borne under by its heavy burden of wonder, then dissipating into whispers and cries through all the secret, silent spaces in this sound. “One Way Mirror” is almost dancey but for the near unbearable magnesium radiance of the sound. “Up” has an intolerably lovely melody that slowly, slowly paces an endless spiral “stairway to heaven”, while all around the ice cathedral resonates like a giant bell.
Up Home! is the slow supernova of rock: not its burn-up in velocity, rather the supercession of riffs and even chords by a shapeless radiance of sound seemingly without origin (certainly not in the human touch), conceivably without end.
This is rock’s Ice Age, its Antarctica, its final petrifying spell. The chiming of a million icicles.
ULTIMATUM
“The Real Beat” (Gee Records)
I’ve looked on in sadness as hip hop has reached a tedious consensus with the rare groove snobs, and has come to draw on a smaller and smaller repertoire of approved R&B samples, trading in its baleful rigour for a boisterous fluency. Maybe that’s why the slow and deadly stealth of this track is so appealing (although that’s an odd word to use for something so unsettling and disinclined to ingratiate).
Against a backdrop of ominous drones, distant detonations, and a shiftless electro pulse, a rapper examines, with murderous finesse, “how the world just goes today”. Cross-dressing, transsexualism. AIDS, the breakdown of borderlines and differences: this is an apocalyptic vision, but one that is fetishised, reveled in, even -- perhaps because the toughter things get, the more the rapper’s survivalist prowess is brought into relief.
The only sample here is a howl of female anguish, strangely suggestive of Diamanda Galas, that seems to issue from some dungeon languishing in the depths of the mix. The title ‘The Real Beat’ isn’t a claim to authenticity or unique dance-powers, but a claim to “realism”, a shedding of rose-tinted vision.
This is a different tkind of machismo, measured not in throwing your weight around, but in how hard and cynical a look you can take at the world, how much shit you can face.
ROYAL HOUSE
“Party People” (Idlers, import)
This track is like being possessed. It turns you into a marionette. It sucks away your will, the autonomy of your limbs, and invades your body, makes it thrall to a kind of disciplined epilepsy. It’s the closest House music has yet come to simulating the effect of a strobe. Incredibly brief snatches of reverb, long since severed from the musical events which birthed them (a deliberate piano chord? a string crescendo? a minute segment of party hubbub?) are mixed up with micro-consonants of vocoder gabble, and turned into a stuttering shudderquake. Dancing on hot coals.
SINGLES OF THE WEEK
RAW DOPE POSSE
“Listen to my Turbo” (Show Jazz, import)
DEREK B
“Bad Young Brother” (Tuff Audio)
More hip hop like they used to make it in the good old days. “Listen to my Turbo” is wound uptight, so superstressed you’re sure the mechanism must break any second. Its grid of beats is like some mad scientists’ lunatic creation left untended, warning signals bleeping, circuits about to combust: a B-movie master computer heading for a nervous breakdown. Hi-hat ticks like a cardiac monitor 10 seconds before a stroke, scratches that harass like mosquitoes on PCP, this will turn your sinews to cheesewire, pop every vein on your temples.It’s great, but it’s not the thing to help you unwind after a day’s wage-slavery. This is for the idle numb who need a dose of hypertension.
As for Derek B, “Britishness” is not an issue here. How tired I am of the lazy journalism that, unable to say anything about the music, needs to resort to knee-jerk attempts to rally us to some obsolete punk-derived patriotism. Why should we support initiatives just because they hail from our manor? “Bad Young Brother” is simply very good, and so confers upon young Derek the status of honorary American (I notice he doesn’t rap in a British accent, which is all to the good). This is a pugilistic, jabbing bout of Moog bass and disfigured, thankfully unrecognisable samples.
BOOGIE DOWN PRODUCTIONS
“My Philosophy” (Jive import)
ROB BASE & E.Z. ROCK
"It Takes Two” (Citybeat)
These two are more squarely in the swing of current rap trends, ripping off R&B’s more sanctioned sources. KRS1, the late Scott La Rock’s other half, is a bit of a pompous git, dramatizing himself here as a poet, savant, and all round positive role model, berating his more dissolute fellow B-boys from the pulpit about the need to shun the dissipatory lure of drugs and violence. But “My Philosophy” manages to be both groovy and grueling, which is quite a trick these days.
The Rob Base/EZ Rock track is another exercise in attrition through overbearing sensual soul power. They take a shriek of JB at his most histrionic, and turn what is on the original record a singular peak of ecstasy into a jackknifing rhythmic copula that just goes on and on and on, like a locked groove. Climax after climax after climax. The effect is akin to hyperventilation.
HIP HOP / HOUSE / BLACK ROCK SINGLES REVIEWS
Melody Maker, April 23 1988
by Simon Reynolds
SINGLES OF THE YEAR
A.R. KANE
Up Home! (Rough Trade)
A.R. Kane return, with an impossibly total vindication of one’s hopes: not so much living up to the rhetoric as burning it up, leaving it exhausted and impoverished. “Baby Milk Snatcher” returns to the deep, deep dub-sway and heavy reverb reaches of “Anitina”, the hideously under-exposed B-side of the M.A.R.R.S. smash/scourge. But the other three tracks on this EP are the real deal.
I don’t know how Alex and Rudi get these sounds: they seem to be playing not guitars but stalagmites and stalactites. “WOGS” is a vortex of refractions, an overload of colours canceling each other to produce a dazzling white-out. You think of Arthur Russell, subaqua reef worlds or the dreamscapes uncovered by explorers of the underworld: the kind of grottos we haven’t encountered since Garlands, maybe even Bitches Brew.
Alex’s voice is the human heartbeat at the core of this miasma, listeless and withdrawn, carrying the melody as though nearly borne under by its heavy burden of wonder, then dissipating into whispers and cries through all the secret, silent spaces in this sound. “One Way Mirror” is almost dancey but for the near unbearable magnesium radiance of the sound. “Up” has an intolerably lovely melody that slowly, slowly paces an endless spiral “stairway to heaven”, while all around the ice cathedral resonates like a giant bell.
Up Home! is the slow supernova of rock: not its burn-up in velocity, rather the supercession of riffs and even chords by a shapeless radiance of sound seemingly without origin (certainly not in the human touch), conceivably without end.
This is rock’s Ice Age, its Antarctica, its final petrifying spell. The chiming of a million icicles.
ULTIMATUM
“The Real Beat” (Gee Records)
I’ve looked on in sadness as hip hop has reached a tedious consensus with the rare groove snobs, and has come to draw on a smaller and smaller repertoire of approved R&B samples, trading in its baleful rigour for a boisterous fluency. Maybe that’s why the slow and deadly stealth of this track is so appealing (although that’s an odd word to use for something so unsettling and disinclined to ingratiate).
Against a backdrop of ominous drones, distant detonations, and a shiftless electro pulse, a rapper examines, with murderous finesse, “how the world just goes today”. Cross-dressing, transsexualism. AIDS, the breakdown of borderlines and differences: this is an apocalyptic vision, but one that is fetishised, reveled in, even -- perhaps because the toughter things get, the more the rapper’s survivalist prowess is brought into relief.
The only sample here is a howl of female anguish, strangely suggestive of Diamanda Galas, that seems to issue from some dungeon languishing in the depths of the mix. The title ‘The Real Beat’ isn’t a claim to authenticity or unique dance-powers, but a claim to “realism”, a shedding of rose-tinted vision.
This is a different tkind of machismo, measured not in throwing your weight around, but in how hard and cynical a look you can take at the world, how much shit you can face.
ROYAL HOUSE
“Party People” (Idlers, import)
This track is like being possessed. It turns you into a marionette. It sucks away your will, the autonomy of your limbs, and invades your body, makes it thrall to a kind of disciplined epilepsy. It’s the closest House music has yet come to simulating the effect of a strobe. Incredibly brief snatches of reverb, long since severed from the musical events which birthed them (a deliberate piano chord? a string crescendo? a minute segment of party hubbub?) are mixed up with micro-consonants of vocoder gabble, and turned into a stuttering shudderquake. Dancing on hot coals.
SINGLES OF THE WEEK
RAW DOPE POSSE
“Listen to my Turbo” (Show Jazz, import)
DEREK B
“Bad Young Brother” (Tuff Audio)
More hip hop like they used to make it in the good old days. “Listen to my Turbo” is wound uptight, so superstressed you’re sure the mechanism must break any second. Its grid of beats is like some mad scientists’ lunatic creation left untended, warning signals bleeping, circuits about to combust: a B-movie master computer heading for a nervous breakdown. Hi-hat ticks like a cardiac monitor 10 seconds before a stroke, scratches that harass like mosquitoes on PCP, this will turn your sinews to cheesewire, pop every vein on your temples.It’s great, but it’s not the thing to help you unwind after a day’s wage-slavery. This is for the idle numb who need a dose of hypertension.
As for Derek B, “Britishness” is not an issue here. How tired I am of the lazy journalism that, unable to say anything about the music, needs to resort to knee-jerk attempts to rally us to some obsolete punk-derived patriotism. Why should we support initiatives just because they hail from our manor? “Bad Young Brother” is simply very good, and so confers upon young Derek the status of honorary American (I notice he doesn’t rap in a British accent, which is all to the good). This is a pugilistic, jabbing bout of Moog bass and disfigured, thankfully unrecognisable samples.
BOOGIE DOWN PRODUCTIONS
“My Philosophy” (Jive import)
ROB BASE & E.Z. ROCK
"It Takes Two” (Citybeat)
These two are more squarely in the swing of current rap trends, ripping off R&B’s more sanctioned sources. KRS1, the late Scott La Rock’s other half, is a bit of a pompous git, dramatizing himself here as a poet, savant, and all round positive role model, berating his more dissolute fellow B-boys from the pulpit about the need to shun the dissipatory lure of drugs and violence. But “My Philosophy” manages to be both groovy and grueling, which is quite a trick these days.
The Rob Base/EZ Rock track is another exercise in attrition through overbearing sensual soul power. They take a shriek of JB at his most histrionic, and turn what is on the original record a singular peak of ecstasy into a jackknifing rhythmic copula that just goes on and on and on, like a locked groove. Climax after climax after climax. The effect is akin to hyperventilation.
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