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
Thursday, September 20, 2007
[Bring the Noise deleted scene #18]
DINOSAUR JR, Bug
Melody Maker, October 8th 1988
I’ve no time for the fully-rounded character in rock, all those aspiring spokesmen like Bragg, That Petrol Emotion, Sting, Bono, Stuart Adamson, who try to straddle the personal and the political, and divide their energy equally between healthy desire and adult concern. No, the interesting things in rock are coming from one-dimensional characters at either extreme of the spectrum--either the selflessly militant or the dormant self-absorbed. On one side, the fanatic survivalists (Public Enemy, Front 242, Metallica), who are physically and musically stripped down, disciplined and on-the-one. On the other, the defeatists and drifters (Nick Cave, Morrissey, Vini Reilly) or the langorous absentees-from-reality (My Bloody Valentine, AR Kane).
No prizes for guessing which camp Dinosaur Jr flop into. J. Mascis’ lethargy is legendary, verging on cliché, and something he no doubt plays up slightly for the microphone. If Morrissey is “half a person”, Mascis consists of some even smaller fraction of a whole and healthy human. And Bug, basically a slightly more emphatic and vivid replay of last year’s You’re Livin’ All Over Me, is another document of a “life” that seems to be drained and devoid of all the zestful crackle that word usually suggests.
In many ways Dinosaur Jr’s “concerns” are the eternal preoccupations and stumbling blocks of parochial US youth: how to kickstart your life; feelings of claustrophobia; the chasm between Amercan dreams and American reality; vacillation in the face of your obligation to yourself to wrench free in search of something better. These impasses have been “dealt” with (that’s to say, not resolved, just suspended in glorious mid-air between hope and despair), many times before, most superlatively by Husker Du and The Replacements. What’s different about Dinosaur Jr is the extremity of their apathy (for Mascist, the struggle isn’t to get away but to get out of bed) and a particular iridescence that veins their grey gusting guitars, little rainbow refractions in the glum, hurtling stormclouds.
Like most great miserabilists, the limits of Mascis’ voice shape his melodies--which are all chips off the same block, all unmistakeably Dinosaur Jr, all just a little bit déjà vu. The effect is rather comforting, but the samey-ness adds to the feeling that with Dinosaur Jr we never really “go” anywhere.
“No Bones” could almost be a “manifesto’ for the group. When I interviewed them, I remarked on Mascis’ boneless, rag doll sheepishness, on how it was the appropriate demeanour for someone whose life lacked any kind of spiritual spine. But in another sense, Dinosaur Jr are dissolving rock’s vertebrae, as the riff, powerchord and bassline are almost lost in a blizzard of violently serrated haze.
“Don’t”, the last track, is where the caustic dreaminess of their sound is at its most sulphuric and psychedelic. It’s a gorgeous cataract of opalescent Hendrix guitar, through which is blasted the soiling, scorching hurt of the repeated plaint--“WHY? WHY DON’T YOU LIKE ME?”--bellowed by what sounds like a voice put through a fuzzbox.
In their strange combination of urgency and ennui, bang and whimper, Dinosaur Jr are the latest angle on one of the oldest rock themes: “I don’t live today.” But understand that this lifeless life, this fogginess of the depths of torpor, this blurry indistinctness of the edges between yourself and the world that comes with inaction--all this is the necessary grey shrinkage of consciousness you must go through before you get to dream up the kind of visionary new colours that Dinosaur Jr drizzle down on us almost absentmindedly.
SIMON REYNOLDS
DINOSAUR JR, Bug
Melody Maker, October 8th 1988
I’ve no time for the fully-rounded character in rock, all those aspiring spokesmen like Bragg, That Petrol Emotion, Sting, Bono, Stuart Adamson, who try to straddle the personal and the political, and divide their energy equally between healthy desire and adult concern. No, the interesting things in rock are coming from one-dimensional characters at either extreme of the spectrum--either the selflessly militant or the dormant self-absorbed. On one side, the fanatic survivalists (Public Enemy, Front 242, Metallica), who are physically and musically stripped down, disciplined and on-the-one. On the other, the defeatists and drifters (Nick Cave, Morrissey, Vini Reilly) or the langorous absentees-from-reality (My Bloody Valentine, AR Kane).
No prizes for guessing which camp Dinosaur Jr flop into. J. Mascis’ lethargy is legendary, verging on cliché, and something he no doubt plays up slightly for the microphone. If Morrissey is “half a person”, Mascis consists of some even smaller fraction of a whole and healthy human. And Bug, basically a slightly more emphatic and vivid replay of last year’s You’re Livin’ All Over Me, is another document of a “life” that seems to be drained and devoid of all the zestful crackle that word usually suggests.
In many ways Dinosaur Jr’s “concerns” are the eternal preoccupations and stumbling blocks of parochial US youth: how to kickstart your life; feelings of claustrophobia; the chasm between Amercan dreams and American reality; vacillation in the face of your obligation to yourself to wrench free in search of something better. These impasses have been “dealt” with (that’s to say, not resolved, just suspended in glorious mid-air between hope and despair), many times before, most superlatively by Husker Du and The Replacements. What’s different about Dinosaur Jr is the extremity of their apathy (for Mascist, the struggle isn’t to get away but to get out of bed) and a particular iridescence that veins their grey gusting guitars, little rainbow refractions in the glum, hurtling stormclouds.
Like most great miserabilists, the limits of Mascis’ voice shape his melodies--which are all chips off the same block, all unmistakeably Dinosaur Jr, all just a little bit déjà vu. The effect is rather comforting, but the samey-ness adds to the feeling that with Dinosaur Jr we never really “go” anywhere.
“No Bones” could almost be a “manifesto’ for the group. When I interviewed them, I remarked on Mascis’ boneless, rag doll sheepishness, on how it was the appropriate demeanour for someone whose life lacked any kind of spiritual spine. But in another sense, Dinosaur Jr are dissolving rock’s vertebrae, as the riff, powerchord and bassline are almost lost in a blizzard of violently serrated haze.
“Don’t”, the last track, is where the caustic dreaminess of their sound is at its most sulphuric and psychedelic. It’s a gorgeous cataract of opalescent Hendrix guitar, through which is blasted the soiling, scorching hurt of the repeated plaint--“WHY? WHY DON’T YOU LIKE ME?”--bellowed by what sounds like a voice put through a fuzzbox.
In their strange combination of urgency and ennui, bang and whimper, Dinosaur Jr are the latest angle on one of the oldest rock themes: “I don’t live today.” But understand that this lifeless life, this fogginess of the depths of torpor, this blurry indistinctness of the edges between yourself and the world that comes with inaction--all this is the necessary grey shrinkage of consciousness you must go through before you get to dream up the kind of visionary new colours that Dinosaur Jr drizzle down on us almost absentmindedly.
SIMON REYNOLDS
[Bring the Noise deleted scene #17]
MY BLOODY VALENTINE / THE HOUSE OF LOVE / FELT / PRIMAL SCREAM / THE JAZZ BUTCHER / NIKKI SUDDEN / JASMINE MINKS / HEIDI BERRY
“Doing it For The Kids” Creation Records Alldayer, Town and Country, London August 7th 1988
Melody Maker, August 1988
As rock grows long in the tooth, as the possibility of it exceeding itself seems to dwindle further each day, so the temptation is to look back wistfully to the high points. For some the definitive Lost Moment is (still) punk’s Pyrhric rage and convulsive passage through the mass media. Others can’t see their way past the immaculate personal/political anguish of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On. And the truly perverse can currently be heard “cheekily” espousing the likes of Wendy (James) and Patsy (Kensit), in homage to that Lost Moment when Paul Morley got Kim Wilde onto the cover of the NME (as if there were still “hippies” to be baited, as if we hadn’t all been through New Pop). In every case, though, the past pinnacles are venerated so utterly, the result can only be a neurotic endeavour to recapture the lost glory of those moments and extend it into eternity.
For Creation and its constituency--the sea of floppy fringes, black leather, suede and paisley gathered here today--rock is over, something that’s been and gone. Creation isn’t fixated on a particular Lost Moment, or a golden age with clearly defined boundaries, but it does have a canon of visionary outsiders, honoured tonight on the tapes played between acts. Tim Rose’s “Morning Dew”, Alex Chilton, The Seeds, Gram Parsons’ “Grievous Angel”, the Stones’ “Have You Seen Your Mother Baby”, Lee Hazelwood, all pretty incontestable, really, and close to my own ideas about the past, not least in the implicit rejection of punk’s long-term effects (New Wave and New Pop). It’s a canon that should be remembered, privileged even. The trouble is that the sense of upholding a legacy through the dark ages of plastic pop has bred a servile and lily-livered deference to the sources. Rewriting is unavoidable at this late hour, sure, but what’s needed is an approach that can inflame these traces rather than preserve them in aspic. Otherwise you become a living, breathing archive of rock gesture. A mere footnote. The fate that’s befallen too many of the bands at this event.
HEIDI BERRY is an admirably eccentric gesture for Creation. She harks back to the islet of troubled AOR occupied in the early Seventies by Sandy Denny and John Martyn, and indeed looks gloriously unfashionable in this context--her thigh-length suede boots, puce velvet jacket and boob tube jarring conspicuously with the (admittedly ravishing) ideals of female indie-style visible all around…
The reputedly “quite good” JASMINE MINKS get people jigging from one foot to the other with their moderately radiant guitar interplay, but the singer sounds like he’s gargling a sock, and ultimately theirs is a thin-lipped and ill-fitting appropriation of “the Sixties”. I never saw a band leave the stage so lackadaisical and unemphatic a manner.
Then the gaunt, scarecrow figure of NIKKI SUDDEN shuffles on for a couple of rather scrappy blues numbers. “Death is Hanging Over Me” would be affecting in its abjection if not for the camp effect of Sudden’s weak R’s. “Crossroads” is introduced as a song about Robert Johnson: “And he’s ultimately the reason why we’re all here today… even though you probably don’t know his name.” Well, yeah, no doubt that’s true, in the strict archeological sense: but a hell of lot has happened in the interim. For a lot of the kids here, the Mary Chain’s riot gig is almost prehistory.
THE JAZZ BUTCHER gains a point for sounding comparatively robust, but loses several for his Jennings-and-Darbyshire/Robyn Hitchcock Englishness, and for his session-standard saxophonist. Unclassifiable, clever-clever indie-bop, somewhere between Monochrome Set, The Woodentops and Jimmy the Hooever. Packed, bustling and void.
PRIMAL SCREAM’s moment has long passed. The talk of feyness and innocence has evidently riled them into aping the Stones. They’ve abandoned the gossamer fragility of “Crystal Crescent” and “Gentle Tuesday” for a blues that sags but never approaches the ponderousness and tumescent turgidity attained by various visionary white bastardizations of R&B. Bobby Gillespie and the drummer are the main culprits, the dragging vestigial limbs. Gillespie’s voice just doesn’t have the grain for raunch, can only sing ba-ba-ba Bay City Rollers tunes. “Fire of Love” is rendered impossibly lukewarm and lackluster. Gillespie crouches low, wigs out in that boneless, rag-doll manner of his, a flailing cod-dementia, willing it to be as good as the old days.
I’ll venerate FELT until the end of time for “Primitive Painters” alone. Like Durutti Column’s “Missing Boy”, it’s a classic defeatist anthem, a shamefaced confession of an inability to cope with life’s most rudimentary demands (like eating vegetables). Live, even without the stratospheric powerhouse of Liz Frazer’s vocal, it’s an irresistible, cascading surge, a contradiction of the vocal and its morose words. Laurence’s listless whisp must be the ultimate voice of deficiency and unrealized selfhood: a one note range, and even then he doesn’t sound in full command of that note. And there’s plenty more of Felt’s halcyon dappled sunlight and gilded ripple tonight, a sound perfectly complemented by the trippy back projections, including one that looks like rays of light convering on a retina and its burnt-out pupil.
What else to say about THE HOUSE OF LOVE? Nobody has a bad word for them. In the nicest possible way they are the Consensus Band of 1988, unimpeachably wondrous. Tonight, an incredible piece, like a whale song reverberating through the recesses of the galaxy, turns out to be Terry Bickers messing about while the others tune up. There’s the godlike glow and gazelle grace of “Destroy the Heart”, the vast cathedral resonance of “Christine”, the luminous aftermath of a personal apocalypse that is “Man to Child”. “Shine On” is all baleful gravitas and cold smouldering ascent, while “Nothing To Me” is one of these great Guy Chadwick lyrical inversions, like “Blind”: the title’s a monstrous fib as the sound tells you the singer’s minds eye is ablaze with the memory of her. Burgeoning axe hero Terry introduces sounds and effects that just don’t belong in this kind of pop. “Real Animal” leads into “I Wanna Be Your Dog” from the first Stooges album, which--impossibly--manages to be both bestial and celestial. Drowned, I tell you.
MY BLOODY VALENTINE are about to release a fabulous and quite extraordinary five-track EP [You Made Me Realise]. But live, the delicate melodies and the fine-tuning of chaos get crushed in the melee. “Cigarette In your Bed”, a most peculiar, unplaceable song on record (a Sonic Youth lullaby?) is a shambles live, Belinda Jayne Butcher’s bloodless vocal almost completely lost. The stop-start paroxysms of “Drive It All Over Me” and “You Made Me Realise” thrive better under the thrash approach, churning up foaming noise in the Husker Du/Dinosaur style. But they disappoint me by not playing “Slow”, the sex song of the year (along with “Gigantic” by the Pixies). With its colossal “Sidewalking” bass, disorientating drones, and langorous, enervated vocals, it conjures up a honeyed, horny lassitude of desire to rival AR Kane. This raven-haired thrash-pop has a sight more edges and secrets to it than any of its “rivals.”
The event peters out with a bit of malarkey involving a cut-out Alan McGee and Joe Foster attempting to lead a singalong of “We Are the World”. The “no encore” rule (to ensure each act doesn’t over-run) is observed even at the end, leaving the crowd restive and frustrated. Overall impression: a sense of “now” being eclipsed, drained vampirically by the past and its stature; the loss of the present moment through being made to seem impoverished next to the history it was umbilically bound to. Only The House of Love and My Bloody Valentine know that you have to torch the whole heap of pop signs and totems, rather than shuffle them about a bit. Only those two bands brought back the sudden quickening of “NOW” that eluded us most of the time today.
SIMON REYNOLDS
MY BLOODY VALENTINE / THE HOUSE OF LOVE / FELT / PRIMAL SCREAM / THE JAZZ BUTCHER / NIKKI SUDDEN / JASMINE MINKS / HEIDI BERRY
“Doing it For The Kids” Creation Records Alldayer, Town and Country, London August 7th 1988
Melody Maker, August 1988
As rock grows long in the tooth, as the possibility of it exceeding itself seems to dwindle further each day, so the temptation is to look back wistfully to the high points. For some the definitive Lost Moment is (still) punk’s Pyrhric rage and convulsive passage through the mass media. Others can’t see their way past the immaculate personal/political anguish of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On. And the truly perverse can currently be heard “cheekily” espousing the likes of Wendy (James) and Patsy (Kensit), in homage to that Lost Moment when Paul Morley got Kim Wilde onto the cover of the NME (as if there were still “hippies” to be baited, as if we hadn’t all been through New Pop). In every case, though, the past pinnacles are venerated so utterly, the result can only be a neurotic endeavour to recapture the lost glory of those moments and extend it into eternity.
For Creation and its constituency--the sea of floppy fringes, black leather, suede and paisley gathered here today--rock is over, something that’s been and gone. Creation isn’t fixated on a particular Lost Moment, or a golden age with clearly defined boundaries, but it does have a canon of visionary outsiders, honoured tonight on the tapes played between acts. Tim Rose’s “Morning Dew”, Alex Chilton, The Seeds, Gram Parsons’ “Grievous Angel”, the Stones’ “Have You Seen Your Mother Baby”, Lee Hazelwood, all pretty incontestable, really, and close to my own ideas about the past, not least in the implicit rejection of punk’s long-term effects (New Wave and New Pop). It’s a canon that should be remembered, privileged even. The trouble is that the sense of upholding a legacy through the dark ages of plastic pop has bred a servile and lily-livered deference to the sources. Rewriting is unavoidable at this late hour, sure, but what’s needed is an approach that can inflame these traces rather than preserve them in aspic. Otherwise you become a living, breathing archive of rock gesture. A mere footnote. The fate that’s befallen too many of the bands at this event.
HEIDI BERRY is an admirably eccentric gesture for Creation. She harks back to the islet of troubled AOR occupied in the early Seventies by Sandy Denny and John Martyn, and indeed looks gloriously unfashionable in this context--her thigh-length suede boots, puce velvet jacket and boob tube jarring conspicuously with the (admittedly ravishing) ideals of female indie-style visible all around…
The reputedly “quite good” JASMINE MINKS get people jigging from one foot to the other with their moderately radiant guitar interplay, but the singer sounds like he’s gargling a sock, and ultimately theirs is a thin-lipped and ill-fitting appropriation of “the Sixties”. I never saw a band leave the stage so lackadaisical and unemphatic a manner.
Then the gaunt, scarecrow figure of NIKKI SUDDEN shuffles on for a couple of rather scrappy blues numbers. “Death is Hanging Over Me” would be affecting in its abjection if not for the camp effect of Sudden’s weak R’s. “Crossroads” is introduced as a song about Robert Johnson: “And he’s ultimately the reason why we’re all here today… even though you probably don’t know his name.” Well, yeah, no doubt that’s true, in the strict archeological sense: but a hell of lot has happened in the interim. For a lot of the kids here, the Mary Chain’s riot gig is almost prehistory.
THE JAZZ BUTCHER gains a point for sounding comparatively robust, but loses several for his Jennings-and-Darbyshire/Robyn Hitchcock Englishness, and for his session-standard saxophonist. Unclassifiable, clever-clever indie-bop, somewhere between Monochrome Set, The Woodentops and Jimmy the Hooever. Packed, bustling and void.
PRIMAL SCREAM’s moment has long passed. The talk of feyness and innocence has evidently riled them into aping the Stones. They’ve abandoned the gossamer fragility of “Crystal Crescent” and “Gentle Tuesday” for a blues that sags but never approaches the ponderousness and tumescent turgidity attained by various visionary white bastardizations of R&B. Bobby Gillespie and the drummer are the main culprits, the dragging vestigial limbs. Gillespie’s voice just doesn’t have the grain for raunch, can only sing ba-ba-ba Bay City Rollers tunes. “Fire of Love” is rendered impossibly lukewarm and lackluster. Gillespie crouches low, wigs out in that boneless, rag-doll manner of his, a flailing cod-dementia, willing it to be as good as the old days.
I’ll venerate FELT until the end of time for “Primitive Painters” alone. Like Durutti Column’s “Missing Boy”, it’s a classic defeatist anthem, a shamefaced confession of an inability to cope with life’s most rudimentary demands (like eating vegetables). Live, even without the stratospheric powerhouse of Liz Frazer’s vocal, it’s an irresistible, cascading surge, a contradiction of the vocal and its morose words. Laurence’s listless whisp must be the ultimate voice of deficiency and unrealized selfhood: a one note range, and even then he doesn’t sound in full command of that note. And there’s plenty more of Felt’s halcyon dappled sunlight and gilded ripple tonight, a sound perfectly complemented by the trippy back projections, including one that looks like rays of light convering on a retina and its burnt-out pupil.
What else to say about THE HOUSE OF LOVE? Nobody has a bad word for them. In the nicest possible way they are the Consensus Band of 1988, unimpeachably wondrous. Tonight, an incredible piece, like a whale song reverberating through the recesses of the galaxy, turns out to be Terry Bickers messing about while the others tune up. There’s the godlike glow and gazelle grace of “Destroy the Heart”, the vast cathedral resonance of “Christine”, the luminous aftermath of a personal apocalypse that is “Man to Child”. “Shine On” is all baleful gravitas and cold smouldering ascent, while “Nothing To Me” is one of these great Guy Chadwick lyrical inversions, like “Blind”: the title’s a monstrous fib as the sound tells you the singer’s minds eye is ablaze with the memory of her. Burgeoning axe hero Terry introduces sounds and effects that just don’t belong in this kind of pop. “Real Animal” leads into “I Wanna Be Your Dog” from the first Stooges album, which--impossibly--manages to be both bestial and celestial. Drowned, I tell you.
MY BLOODY VALENTINE are about to release a fabulous and quite extraordinary five-track EP [You Made Me Realise]. But live, the delicate melodies and the fine-tuning of chaos get crushed in the melee. “Cigarette In your Bed”, a most peculiar, unplaceable song on record (a Sonic Youth lullaby?) is a shambles live, Belinda Jayne Butcher’s bloodless vocal almost completely lost. The stop-start paroxysms of “Drive It All Over Me” and “You Made Me Realise” thrive better under the thrash approach, churning up foaming noise in the Husker Du/Dinosaur style. But they disappoint me by not playing “Slow”, the sex song of the year (along with “Gigantic” by the Pixies). With its colossal “Sidewalking” bass, disorientating drones, and langorous, enervated vocals, it conjures up a honeyed, horny lassitude of desire to rival AR Kane. This raven-haired thrash-pop has a sight more edges and secrets to it than any of its “rivals.”
The event peters out with a bit of malarkey involving a cut-out Alan McGee and Joe Foster attempting to lead a singalong of “We Are the World”. The “no encore” rule (to ensure each act doesn’t over-run) is observed even at the end, leaving the crowd restive and frustrated. Overall impression: a sense of “now” being eclipsed, drained vampirically by the past and its stature; the loss of the present moment through being made to seem impoverished next to the history it was umbilically bound to. Only The House of Love and My Bloody Valentine know that you have to torch the whole heap of pop signs and totems, rather than shuffle them about a bit. Only those two bands brought back the sudden quickening of “NOW” that eluded us most of the time today.
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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