Top 10 - 2008!

I am decidedly average when it comes to writing, and my musical skills are zero. Even my triangle playing is out of tune, so I am hardly qualified to do album reviews. Way back in 1997 when I first had internet access and found that you could get free webspace at Geocities, I grabbed a bit of webspace and since I couldn't think what else to use it for, I started reviewing my album collection. Trouble is a few weeks and several reviews later the local Geocities leader (which they seemed to have) started emailing me demanding to know why I wasn't updating my site regularly (gee! I hadn't updated it for a whole week! Sorry Herr Kommandant, I wasn't glued to my computer.). I eventually told him to stick something somewhere and closed my Geocities account.
In 2001 having finally got a computer at home (my inner Luddite screamed) I resurrected my little review site and added smiley and growly faces and other "let's play around with HTML" things. I never got very far and eventually found George Starostin's great review site which made me think, what's the point in trying to compete with that!
So bang went my site again.

However having this blog has fired up my "I've just heard this album and want to say something about it" juices. Hence the odd album review that has appeared. So I am rather pleased that Susan Matthew liked my wee review of Hope-Bound enough to stick it in her review section. Encouragement! So even though I agree with that quote, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture", I will continue to endeavour to convert my strange blobby non-wordy thoughts about the music I hear into words, even if they do end up in a strange order and have little to do with the actual music.

Anyway, here is my top ten list of favourite albums that I heard for the first time in 2008. (As opposed to albums actually released in 2008 - I can't be arsed to check the year of release and anyway, this is my list). In no particular order . . .

Susan Matthews - Hope-Bound
Also enjoyed Axis Vein and bruiser a lot, plus the 40 minute radio mix
"Dreamscapes", but this remains my favourite. See review here.

Julian Cope - Black Sheep
His best so far this century. See what I said about it in September.

Camel - Mirage
An oldie but goodie.

Caravan - If I Could Do It All Over Again I'd Do It All Over You
Another oldie and more good stuff.

The Pineapple Thief - Tightly Unwound
Bang up to date, and a really great hook-laden album. A bit
early-Radiohead-lite, but in a good way.

Ayreon - 01011001
Let's take a bunch of music critics who hate Prog Rock and get them to
list all that is bad about it.
Now make an album based on that list and stick a flake in it. This is
the result. Consistently entertaining.

The Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam
The best album inspired by fruit preserve ever.

Sunn O))) - White 2
The sound of that earthquake we had earlier in the year.

M83 - Saturdays = Youth
The joyous sound of being young, carefree and gazing at your shoes.

Espers - II
The gloomy sound of being young, carefree and gazing at your impending doom.


Bought to late to be included but it might have been:
Sigur Rós : Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust

Best album that I already have but updated to CD this year:
Jethro Tull : Thick As A Brick

Track I think should be next years Eurovision Song Contest entry, but won't be:
Susan Matthews : Splinters

That's all for now.
Time to avoid that annoying time of year.

Julian Cope - Black Sheep

Julian Cope - Black Sheep

Disc 1 : Return Of The Native

1 Come The Revolution
2 It's Too Late To Turn Back Now
3 These Things I Know
4 Psychedelic Odin
5 Blood Sacrifice
6 The Shipwreck Of St. Paul

Disc 2 : Return Of The Alternative

1 All The Blowing-Themselves-Up Motherfuckers (Will Realise The Minute They Die That They Were Suckers)
2 Feed My Rock 'n' Roll
3 Dhimmi Is Blue
4 The Black Sheep's Song
5 I Can Remember This Song

When I saw Cope perform live in 2000 he was on top form, presenting both his ideas and music in an entertaining style. Easily one of my top gigs ever. However Cope's recent offerings have not been very friendly. For someone who really wants to get his message across and educate the masses (back in 2000 he was aping Blair's "Education Education Education" soundbite), presenting it dosed in dense heavy rock and using lo-fi recordings of a rather ugly vocal style was hardly going to win any new converts.

However closer examination of 2005's Citizen Cain'd and follow up album Heavy Orgasm showed that Cope's ability to craft a pop hook was still intact, albeit hard to spot amidst the swirling mass of noise. Last year's You Gotta Problem With Me showed a move towards more accessible material and now we have Black Sheep, an album bursting with pop hooks, folky chants and generally less scary music. It sounds a bit like a stripped down 20 Mothers, with nods to Peggy Suicide and Fried thrown in. The gloom and anger of previous albums has been replaced with an almost joyous uplifting energy, Cope is back to entertaining and educating at the same time.

Like its predecessors the album is well packaged with a booklet stuffed with Cope's writing and poems with several photos of the leather clad Cope and co. looking like some 80s heavy metal band on holiday. The album is again split over 2 disks (just over half an hour each), just to give you that "get up to change the record over" feeling of yesteryear and a pee break. Or is Cope trying to give us all more exercise ?

It starts rather densely, perhaps showing a link back to the prior albums, and the ugly straining vocals are still in place. However under the rather sombre sound Come The Revolution is similar to 1990s Cope and slowly builds into a chanting singalong. A good start if somewhat average-Copewise. It's Too Late To Turn Back Now rocks a tad more, still with an over excited vocal style and still offering rather middling Cope excitement. Thing pick up with the next tracks. After a fake synth-pop start These Things I Know becomes a more folky sing-along similar to the excellent Woden from You Gotta Problem With Me and Psychedelic Odin is a great 5 minute song albeit with a 2 minute spoken coda with a damp squib of an ending. The first 5 minutes are still one of the highlights of the album however. Blood Sacrifice is one of those odd songs that Cope does so well, and The Shipwreck Of St. Paul sounds like Cope did his vocals while out on one of his travels, but the low-fi slightly distorted vocal suits the mood perfectly.

So far so good.

The second disk gets off to a cracking start. All The Blowing-Themselves-Up Motherfuckers (Will Realise The Minute They Die That They Were Suckers) with its long baiting title is basically a great little pop song. OK, it is a Cope pop song and won't ever see any radio play, but it is darn catchy, even if that chorus is hard to get your gob around. Feed My Rock 'n' Roll starts off like a Misty's Big Adventure song before slowly cranking up the energy into ear-splitting territory. It's both hypnotic and fantastic! Dhimmi Is Blue is a slow number of remarkably simple construction, sounding like it escaped from Fried. Despite its 8 minute length it is rather gripping, almost moving in parts, and proves that Cope's material doesn't need layers of noise to work. The Black Sheep's Song is another odd song and rather charming, although it had to work hard to appeal to me over many listens. Things are finally wrapped up with the mellotron drenched I Can Remember This Song, sounding a bit like it escaped from the final section of 20 Mothers.

I have to admit it does take a few listens to get into this material, but it is a damn good Cope album, and currently my most played even with the CD juggling that entails.

Buy it now from Head Heritage.

If you haven't heard Julian Cope before then buy Peggy Suicide.

The Latest 5 Albums Passing My Way

One More Grain : Isle Of Grain



You walk into a party and everyone in the room has a herring on their heads, except you. You feel out of place for a while, but because everyone is friendly and having a good time, the lack of fishy headwear is soon forgotten. That is a bit what listening to this album is like. It just doesn't sound right to begin with, the musical part of your brain is confused listening to this Krautrock-like music played by a jazz fusion band lead by a Mark E Smith-esque Lancastrian. However by the time the second track is under way, you are busy searching the web for piscean milliners.

Mmmmh, nice.

In some ways this album just shouldn't work and in one way it doesn't. It doesn't throw up catchy tunes or amazing slabs of sound and there isn't that much variation within any one track, so it could be said to be somewhat ignorable. Which doesn't explain why it is rather stuck in my CD player at the moment. Each track becomes its own little world in handy capsule form. The lyrics, delivered more as monologues rather than songs, are somewhat oddball with an interesting use of words and seem to float on the rich musical backing. The music is rather hard to place. I've already mentioned Krautrock and jazz, but folk and funk come to mind as well. If you want something along the lines of The Fall in ambient free-fall jazzy swirly joy then it does the trick.


Espers : Espers II



There is a problem with albums that start so well. The first two tracks on this album (Dead Queen, Widow's Weed) make the following ones seem rather under par, even though those tracks considered on their own are perfectly decent songs. There are a couple of tracks towards the end of the album (Mansfield And Cyclops, Dead King) that lift you back up to the same heights again, but the overall effect is still a dip in the middle. Shame, as it is a rather splendid album, if you like early 70s goth-folk-rock with nice female vocals (a bit Sandy Denny) with a bit of modern post-rock thrown in (like I do). Loads of different instruments create a dense sound, though some may find it too dirge-like to enjoy. The track titles are enough to get you down! But it is often the gloomiest music that makes you feel human and alive.

HTRK : Nostalgia



If you lurk around eBay or Amazon, you can snap up CDs cheaply. So having stuck this on my Amazon wish-list over a year ago, I was pleased to see it pop up cheaply on eBay. Plop! Snaffled it. I had no idea why I stuck it on the wish-list, I must have read something that made me go "wanna wanna". Anyway, this is apparently not an album, but a 7 track "let's release something to show we exist while we get around to releasing a album" type thingy. But hey, 7 tracks and over 36 minutes makes it pretty much an album by vinyl standards. Recorded live and crudely it sounds very raw and somewhat akin My Bloody Valentine or Garland era Cocteau Twins. Now if you want your vocals to sound like they are being sung by a female who has just been dragged out of bed with a mother of all hangovers and dumped in a cave then this is definitely for you.
Forget about any lyrics, the vocals are just another noise in the mix, along with the thump and grind of parent/neighbour/granny/partner/dog annoying music. It is almost unpleasant at times, but just about sneaks the right side of that knife-edge of fascination that makes you want to plunge deeper into the grime. I did find the relentless gloom rather hard to swallow the first time I heard it, and the sound pallette rather limited, but further listens have revealed an inventiveness making each track stand on its own. Whether they can expand on this on their first album proper remains to be heard.

Ashra : New Age Of Earth



After Ash Ra Temple collapsed, guitarist Manuel Gottsching tried his hand at Berlin School electronics, probably inspired by former band member Klaus Schulze. This album released in 1977 under a solo name of Ashra has warm synthesizers and occasional guitar creating the typical hypnotic grooves and ambient soundscapes that you'd expect from this era. It is a more tuneful and relaxing affair compared to similar releases by Tangerine Dream or Klaus Schulze, however I don't find it as interesting a listen as either of those two artists at their peak. If you find 70s Schulze too dark or slow and 70s T.Dream too experimental, then this may be the synth album for you. The two shorter but bouncier tracks Sunrain and Deep Distance sound to me like the sort of music that dolphins would happily dance to and Ocean of Tenderness could be the sort of thing that dolphins would listen to having knackered themselves dancing. The lengthy final track Nightdust starts out exploring similar territory to Klaus Schulze, i.e. a lengthy slow unfurling 10 minute intro, before ticking over into that knackered dolphin sound again.

Susan Matthews : Hope-Bound



It is always nice to have a little bit of connection with the artist when you purchase one of their albums. Whether buying a Jane Siberry album and finding in the package that she's written a postcard thanking you for supporting her, or buying a Julian Cope album and getting his wife calling you because that CD is out of stock, it all kind of makes the whole experience a bit more personal. Susan Matthews cuts her own CD-Rs, prints out her own artwork and then goes to the post office to send it to you herself, and that's enough to make me feel happy about it. (Yes I am quite easily pleased.) And it is only £3.98, including postage, so being cashless as I am, this seemed like a good buy. Oh, and the fact that musically it sounded like my cup of tea did come into the equation somewhere.

The more experimental type of music can often disappoint: for every album that sounds amazing, there is usually another that is tedious or annoyingly inpenitrable. Thankfully Susan stays the right side of the big sign saying "Failed - please try again". On the odd occasion during this album when I think that the stretchy monster is off to visit Mr. Point, the track ends and another begins. Horrah! Overall the music sort of lurks between Laurie Anderson and Nurse With Wound without actually treading on either of their toes. It is an odd mixture of the uplifting and harsh. Take A Decoy Performance with a dialogue suggesting domestic violence juxtaposed with audience cheering and what sounds like a conversation between grandfather clocks. Or the rather lovely near ambient Missing with a gloopy blobby backdrop of noise trying to bring chaos into beauty. The whole album remains fascinating right up to the lengthy Suffusion with its Nurse With Wound like sound loops collapsing into deep internal organ threatening drones, somewhat akin to Sunn o))). Susan's almost wordless vocals compliment most of the tracks like sweet kisses from that slightly weird Aunt that most of the family shun.

This is definately my favourite album of the moment, so I'm off to spend another £3.98, and so should you.