A change of pace today and some frenetic mid-80s goth synthpunk from New Jersey's Screaming For Emily, an alternative dancefloor classic by all accounts. I heard this on an internet radio show last week and thought 'that sounds good'. Pretty unfestive too.
I haven't finished my 2014 list yet- apologies for the tardiness, I know you're all waiting eagerly for my annual run down. As a sort of pre-list, a bowl of soup before the main course, here's a list of Andrew Weatherall's best remixes of 2014. A top nine (to the best of my knowledge there have only been nine remixes this year, which makes 2014 a bit of a quiet year for Lord Sabre). The links will take you to either Youtube or Soundcloud. I can't give away nine downloads in one post. Disappointingly to date only two of these have had a vinyl release, another two are available on cds. The internet only remix trailer is a sign of the times.
9. Primal Scream 'Goodbye Johnny' Andrew Weatherall's Nyabinghi Noir Mix
Dark and unsettling, stripped back with a sax and guitar stabs.
8. Noel Gallagher 'In The Heat Of The Moment' Andrew Weatherall Remix
Big and with bells. Noel arrives briefly at four minutes in.
7. Blue Rondo a la Turk 'Klactofilthedstein' Andrew Weatherall's Mixling
Techno remodelling of 80s jazz-funk. Better than that sounds.
I'm going to see A Certain Ratio tonight, Manchester's perennial nearly men and women. I've seen them several times live and they're always good. I thought I'd post up some live clips to see me on my way out.
This one is ACR live on Granada TV, New Year's Eve 1991, playing 27 Forever and Mello. Personally I love the house music ACR (Good Together, the whole MCR album, The Big E, Won't Stop Loving You, 27 Forever and Mello) as much if not more than the early 80s Factory Records punk-funk incarnation. I imagine Tony Wilson made this appearance happen.
From a year earlier, live at London's Town and Country Club. I don't know where Denise is- tied up with Primal Scream maybe.
And this is an unplugged version of Won't Stop Loving You, done much more recently.
I'll try to squeeze one more drop of rockabilly out for your Friday night. Derrell Felts and The Confederates, extolling the value of having a playmate (thinly veiled sexual metaphor perhaps). In under rocking three minutes. Released on Dixie records. Southern boys.
This song is the third in a row of this type of thing- I hope you're getting a good mixtape out of this. Sean Johnston's Hardway Bros released an ep in November called Sleaze. All four songs are good, two are superb. Thoughts On Modern Living is a full on slow-mo techno thing with that sampled speech that I've heard before somewhere 'You don't have to tell me things are bad, everybody knows things are bad...', taken I think from the Great Depression in 1930s, building as the voice's rage increases. It's too good to post, you should seek it out yourself. The other stunner is this chilly remix of Legato by Kasper Bjorke. Sleaze is still available on vinyl, on Throne Of Blood. You should buy a copy as an advent present to yourself -it's worth six quid of anyone's money.
This is a gorgeous, brooding piece of electronic music from Paresse. Throbbing bass, icy atmospherics, slow tempo. Driving to and from work in the dark this kind of thing makes the miles disappear (frighteningly sometimes I cannot remember parts of the journey at all, even major stuff like joining the motorway).
Some hard-edged funky techno from the mysterious Man Power- if you haven't heard any of his stuff you should seek some of his stuff out. The west coast of Britain, according to the news today, is about to be hit by a weatherbomb- not a storm, not some wintry bad weather, a weatherbomb. Run, hide, panic buy!
I've been caught in a B.A.D. trap recently which means you get snared too. This was a 12" B-side (not on my copy of the 12" though, a U.S. release maybe), a dub/beatbox version of E=MC2.
This song- a long forgotten end-of-the-night, scouse house classic- would be more suited to being posted on Saturday night but I've saved it for a Monday morning in December. Maybe that journey to work will be improved slightly. People Get Ready were a Liverpool group (collective, few people, one man and a drum machine operator plus some dancers- lines got a bit blurred in the early 90s). I knew someone who was mates with someone and was given a copy of the 12" not long before I left Liverpool University in 1991. I'd forgotten about it until recently when I randomly heard the main vocal line on my head. It's got a crunchy drum sample, one of those great early 90s piano parts and a big, positivity-vibe female vocal- 'Be my friend, treat me well, take my hand, be my friend'. It used to get played at Cream, in the early days. It puts a smile on my face. Maybe it'll put one on yours.
This one below was the pick of the remixes for me although many swore by the Sure Is Pure Golden Dub. All the versions are at this Soundcloud page, some to download for free . The breakdown and drum rolls in this one provoke massive hands-in-the-air moments.
This 1990 Aztec Camera single is a real favourite of mine. Roddy wrote this state of the union address and realised it sounded so much like a Big Audio Dynamite tune that it would be rude not to ask Mick Jones to join him. This mix from the single isn't too different from the original version, adding some strings.
Norman Cook did a mix which reconstructed it a little and added a touch of 808. It could be described as polite acid (but could have gone so much further).
The main message of the chorus, after four verses dissecting each of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, seems just as relevant today as it did twenty four years ago...
'The past is steeped in shame
But tomorrow's fair game
For a life that's fit for living
Good morning Britain'
Say no to Farage and the small minded Little Englanders. Vote Frame and Jones.
By the late 1990s Joe Strummer was emerging from of his wilderness years and able to look back at fucking things up so badly with The Clash and the commercial failure of Earthquake Weather. His 1999 album Rock, Art And The X Ray Style, the first with The Mescaleros, is much underrated but contains a bunch of good songs. This one was written for Johnny Cash and has some basic clattering drum machine percussion, a low key guitar part and Joe looking back at his early years. One of his gifts was being able to take a simple lyrical idea, something honest and sincere, and make something moving out of it, turning a little piece of personal hard-earned wisdom into something universal.
I was going to post this on Monday but got carried away with Jane Weaver so it's coming up today- plus, as I scraped the ice off the windscreen yesterday morning and tried to unfold my frozen solid gloves, and the car's temperature gauge read 1 degree last night, it would seem we are well and truly into winter. Some media scaremongers are saying there could be eight inches of snow this weekend. And this Teenage Fanclub song, off 1991's Bandwagonesque, is gorgeous.
I had some of my monthly download subscription at emusic to use up and found a bunch of Hardway Bros remixes of different people. This one is ticking all my boxes at the minute- a super sleek, upwardly mobile space-house remix of Italian duo Alien Alien.
I was in the record shop in town on Saturday looking at the 45th anniversary boxed set of the third velvet Underground album (my favourite of theirs, a record I can come back to umpteen times). I didn't buy it. I haven't bought it. Yet. But I came home and played VU while cooking tea, the 1985 album that rounded up some unreleased songs (some found in a bin at the record company). The opening song is I Can't Stand It, which is unsurpassed, an absolute template, a song beyond compare. The rhythm guitars are tinny and choppy, Sterling Morrison's guitar solo is unhinged and Lou's drawled delivery is superb- as are the nonsense of the lyrics with those thirteen dead cats, a purple dog wearing spats, the mop assault and Shirley or Shelley (who won't come back).
The boxed set has cleaned up the songs. The 80s version of I Can't Stand It is the one we're all familiar with but the 2014 mix might just be even better.
Meanwhile I am still reeling from reading in a review that it was Doug Yule who sang Candy Says, not Lou Reed. Should I have known this?
Jane Weaver's album The Silver Globe is the Piccadilly Records album of the year and they don't often get it wrong. Jane is a Liverpudlian folk musician who has moved up and beyond to produce a properly cosmic album, with silvery white flashes shot all the way through it. There are still some traces of the folkiness in the vocals and on some of the quieter moments. And there is space rock, motorik drumming, glorious synths and drones, and a lovely warm retro-futuristic romance. I think it's got a post-apocalyptic theme running through the lyrics too. Worth a punt if you're looking for something to ease you through the long dark nights of December.
Drew's post on Friday of David Holmes' My Mate Paul put me in mind of his epic debut single (Holmes' not Drew's), Johnny Favourite, a fifteen minute progressive house stomp (done with Sabresmen Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns).
Johnny Favourite is named after a missing singer in the 1987 film Angel Heart. In the film Mickey Rourke plays Harry Angel, a private detective hired by Louis Cypher (geddit), to find the singer. In the Deep South he runs into all kinds of trouble- Robert de Niro peeling hard-boiled eggs, southern horror, the beautiful Lisa Bonet and some very messy voodoo...
I haven't seen Angel Heart for years. I remember it as having atmosphere and tension. I'd like to see if it still stands up. Holmes' track does.
Something new on the net from Frank Ocean- everyone's saying it's his first work for two years but they seem to be forgetting Hero with Diplo, Paul Simonon and Mick Jones from earlier this year. The song (fragment might be more accurate) is pretty low key and under two minutes long. It opens with distorted, phased backing, sounding like someone's playing it on a laptop next door. Frank's staccato vocals add to the disorientation. Then there's some Stevie Wonder electric piano and singing, smoothing things out. Intriguing.
A charming MTV feature from the 80s on the then rockabilly revival with interviews from The Stray Cats, The Blasters and The Rockats and a not-at-all-basic guise to rockabilly. For added 80s-ness it's been uploaded from VHS, complete with tracking lines and squiggles. And MTV was a music channel back then- imagine that!
It has been a very long week, more like a fortnight really, and quite intense. Get a round in someone- I'll get the next one.
This limited edition single from The Charlatans came out at the end of September. It doesn't scream single at you but it's very good, a lovely tune that sticks in the memory, touched with melancholy. It's good to see a band as long in the tooth as they are, who could just give in to the heritage circuit, still doing something new and quite different from the sound of their glory days. The band have a new album out in January, their first since the death of drummer Jon Brookes.
Greg Wilson is a dj legend and famously the Hacienda's first dance music dj. He is also said to be the first British man to mix live on TV (on The Tube). He took a long sabbatical in 1983 but has been back since 2003 playing disco, electro funk, house, dance music generally, around the world.
This Greg Wilson edit of 808 State's Pacific State contains that Jesse Jackson sample that Weatherall used for his Come Together remix. Some wag said that Pacific State is just Stranger On The Shore for the E generation but it's easy to be sniffily reductionist about things. This record is a club classic and still has the ability to make the hairs on the back of the neck stand up.
Greg Wilson's Soundcloud page, with edits, mash ups and dj mixes, is here. You could pick your way through it for days and still not play it all. His blog Being A DJ is here.
Medicine Show was/is one of Big Audio Dynamite's best songs- one of the best singles of the 1980s if you ask me- and a show of post-Clash songwriting and production strength from Mick. Six minutes of choppy guitar riffs, drum machines, spaghetti Western samples triggered from Don Letts' keyboards and proper funny lyrics. It sounds like good fun and was innovative too. The United States got a different version, or at least a remix. I don't know why- it doesn't sound especially American or FM radio, the guitar riff is chopped up a bit and song has less of a flow than the original. Of interest to the completists among you (and thanks to Dubrobots).
This is good, discovered and shared via two internet friends a few days ago. A lovely bass-led dubby deep house track (with a great acid bleep and whooshes), from Leftside Wobble. Nice vocal too. Listening to it makes me feel young again, despite physical evidence to the contrary.
I'm posting this for no reason other than I chanced upon it on Youtube over the weekend and it follows on from yesterday's post. Technique is my favourite New Order album. Maybe because it was released in 1989 and that year was just right time, right place for me. Power, Corruption And Lies has innovation and Lowlife has brilliance but there's something about Technique that is spot on- every note is in exactly the right place, it has the perfect mix of late 80s Ibiza, Mancunian dance and rock, Bernard's most personal lyrics and that superb acid cherub cover. This song is as good as any of the other eight and this TV performance on Big World Cafe shows how good they could be, back when they pretended to like each other (cheers PBH for that line). The show also promises Belgian New Beat and Mariella Frostrup.
At 7.37 am sixteen years ago today our first child, Isaac, was born. He had breathing difficulties from the start and spent the first two weeks of his life in hospital, two hospitals actually, in the special care baby unit and then maternity. He ended up spending a lot more time in hospital over the following years. At eight months he was diagnosed with a serious genetic disease, Hurler's disease, following a series of problems- deafness, hernias and then hydrocephalus. Before the age of two he had several operations and two bone marrow transplants, one of which nearly did for him. He has lived with many serious health issues and some severe special needs. In 2008, due a very weakened immune system, he contracted meningitis and survived. A very long operation to straighten his back was delayed by the meningitis and then some months later done successfully. Three years ago he had a cochlear implant which has changed his life, opening up a new world of sound to him. Funnily, a lot of this stuff I'm describing here seems like a long time ago- chronologically and in other ways too.
This list of medical issues and procedures only partly defines him and us. There's no denying it is and has been very difficult at times and that more troubles probably lie ahead. But almost everyone who meets him and gets pinned down for a chat leaves feeling happier. He knows far more people than I do. He makes friends wherever he goes. He has endless reserves and goes on where many others would just take to their beds and stay there.
So, turning sixteen today is a big deal in lots of ways.
Run Wild was a late addition to New Order's 2001 comeback album Get Ready. The tune is lovely, acoustic guitars and melodica and a sweet tune. Unusually the lyrics were written by Stephen (not Bernard), written for his and Gillian's seriously ill daughter. It's always struck a chord with me.
Here's a remix us Weatherall heads may not have seen coming- an eight minute reworking (with Balearic bells on) of Noel Gallagher and his High Flying Birds. Noel's vocal contribution is restricted to one line through a megaphone four minutes in after a long build up- the rest is in pure Weatherall remix territory with a massive bassline (looped from the original track presumably), some lovely hi-hats and arpeggio action, and those bells clanging out. I'd imagine Noel might approve of this, having mispent some of his youth in the Hacienda. Noel often comes across as a witty interviewee, good fun over a few pints. But I think he mislaid all his decent tunes somewhere in the mid 90s and hasn't managed to relocate them since. If you want to see the bewilderment of some of the more conservative end of Noel's fanbase, look at the comments on the Youtube post. For the rest of us, a bit of a treat.
The Jesus And Mary Chain came on stage last night and announced they would play the encore first, then go off for a few minutes and return to play Psychocandy. They then launched into April Skies, Head On and Some Candy Talking, all crystal clear and fine, William's guitar twice as loud as everything else put together, the occasional missed note or out of tune string not mattering a jot. Two more songs later they ramped up the noise with an massive version of Reverence. Two minutes and a bit after that they were off- having played Upside Down, loud and drenched in squealing feedback.
A brief public information film from the early 60s projected onto the stage wall advertised the pleasures of moving to East Kilbride and they reappeared with Just Like Honey. Then we got the rest of Psychocandy. The projections (biker gangs, Super 8 home video footage), strobes and dry ice splashed all over the stage, added some visual drama. There isn't much to look at with The Mary Chain- five middle aged men dressed in black not moving much, apart from Jim occasionally lifting the mic stand up. At some reunion gigs you get a communion between band and audience, a mass singalong, arms around shoulders, joy at hearing songs you thought you'd never hear live again, beery good times, nostalgia. The Screamadelica shows were a joyous celebration. Not here. Psychocandy is an album about alienation and while the audience weren't alienated, we stood and watched, apart from some sporadic moshing down the front. This was noise, feedback, earsplittingly loud, with Jim's vocals and the melodies sneaking through the distortion, like in You Trip Me Up. The Living End and The Hardest Walk, garage riffs with a wall of ringing noise. As the band left the stage, William's guitar bleeding loudly against his amp, Game Over, in 80s video game graphics, flashed up and down the back wall. Still alive, still kicking. Game Over.
This Madonna song caused a bit of a stir in the school yards of the mid-80s when it was released- use of the word 'virgin' (snigger snigger). Teenage Fanclub covered it in 1991, quite fantastically, smothered in acres of beautiful distortion with sleepy vocals. When JC posted it a good while back at The Vinyl Villain it gained a takedown notice from the DMCA. When he re-posted it much later, he would not even name the song for fear of attracting the attention of the internet police. Sneaky, unnamed and hush hush. You ain't seen me right.
Tonight, six months after paying for the tickets, I'm going to see the Jesus And Mary Chain play live, Psychocandy and related songs, at Manchester Academy. It's twenty-nine years since Jim and William Reid released the album, one of the key albums of underground British 'rock' (rock seems like the wrong word somehow- this isn't rock, it's shattering glass or something similar). I've been looking forward to this and while it can't replicate mid-80s JAMC and I'm not sure I'm that much in favour of bands playing albums in their entirety (just play what you want, or play all the hits)- I love 'em.
The daddy of all the 'Like A ...' songs is Bob Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone, one of those songs that tops lists and thoroughly deserves to,a man moving ahead of the art form, faster than all the others. A six minute long 7" single, with a whip crack start, amphetamine energy, wired organ and some of the best lyrics ever- crazy poetic verses and sneering, questioning choruses. Dylan's version is the original and definitive. 1960s mods The Creation had a go, a little polite with the backing but a decent stab I suppose.
I was not knocked out completely by Ride, Creation's floppy haired and long sleeved t-shirt shoegazers. The guitars usually sounded good- although they never got anywhere near My Bloody Valentine's fx swirl but they got compared to them by the NME often enough. I bought their first ep, the one with the red roses on the cover and then dipped in and out, often via other people. It was the vocals that put me off, too self-consicously fey and flimsy, and their lyrics seemed like an afterthought as well. But this song, happily for this run of posts, is a good one. Clanging guitars, manic drumming, youthful excitement captured.
From the late 90s through to the mid 2000s I listened to a lot of Neil Young. I'd got Harvest and After The Goldrush around 1987/88 and then went through most of his albums a few years later. I still love some of them but don't play him that often anymore. Trans, from 1982, is one of his more bizarre records (from a man who it is fair to say, had a bad 80s). Trans was mainly recorded using synthesizers and keyboards and most of the album uses a vocoder on the vocals too. Young was exploring electronic music at the time, especially Kraftwerk. The thing is, many of the songs sound like guitar songs but played on synths- rather than songs written specifically on and for synths. Young later said he was putting into place a therapy programme with his son Ben (born with cerebral palsy and unable to speak). The vocoder was an attempt to find a new way to communicate with him. Apparently Crazy Horse had recorded some of the album using their usual guitar, bass and drums and turned up for a session to find Neil had stripped all their parts off and replaced them with the new electronic sounds. Crazy Horse scratched their long haired heads. Critics and fans couldn't get their heads around it and neither could Geffen who later sued him for making work that was 'deliberately uncommercial and unrepresentative work'. This isn't my favourite Neil Young song, it isn't even in my top 50 Neil Young songs, but it' probably the best off Trans.
Yes, Like A Hurricane is a million times better and should be here instead- I saw him and Crazy Horse do it at Sheffield Arena and the amps may still be feeding back for all I know- but I thought it was a tad too predictable to post.
On Friday Drew posted the sublime, Balearic remix of Saint Etienne's Speedwell, which got me thinking of other first rate Saint Etienne remixes. I started with the Andrew Weatherall dubiness of Only Love Can Break Your Heart, pretty much as good as anything either party have been involved in. And then thought of this one, which used to get played to death in the flat I shared near Altrincham circa 1993. David Holmes takes Like A Motorway and presses all the acid-techno buttons. Like the best techno it is an intense, exhilarating, machine-led ride, dancefloor hedonism tinged with happy-sad. Sarah Cracknell surfaces once, at around eight minutes, to sing 'he's gone' but then the track shoots off again, spiralling upwards. Dancing music.
Neneh Cherry's album from this year is being re-released as a deluxe version and if you haven't got it, you should give it some thought. Produced by Four Tet, with tons of skittering drum machines, sparse arrangements and loud, fuzzy bass, all riding underneath Neneh's voice, it's not a boring or safe record.
This jazzy break led, street poetry collaboration with Afrika Baby Bam is just too good- 'My life is like an island'...
Interlude was a Morrissey and Siouxsie Sioux two-for-the-price-of-one special, released in 1994, and a cover of a 1968 Timi Yuro song. They've both got distinctive voices that work well together and complement each other nicely, Siouxsie rich and deep, Morrissey wobbling and higher, but somehow, somewhere along the way, it doesn't quite catch fire. In his autobiography Morrissey gives Siouxsie a proper slagging off. But then, he gives almost everyone who appears in the book a proper slagging off so it's difficult to know how much to read into it. I've a vague recollection that Siouxsie was uncomplimentary about the whole experience in an interview as well. Morrissey's guitarist and producer of this single Boz Boorer said Siouxsie was 'a complete joy' to work with and according to a well known online encyclopedia the falling out happened after the recording when Morrissey and Siouxsie disagreed about the content of the video- a video which was never shot. One of Morrissey's most recent Best Of compilations has a version of this with only him singing it- a slight at Siouxsie if ever there was one. Despite all of this playground drama, bitchiness and a bit of an air of let down, I quite like the song, every once in a while.
I was planning to post this anyway and happily reader Gentle Ben pointed it out in the comment box on Monday's Sugarcubes remix post. Jim and William Reid also remixed Birthday, three times in fact (labelled Christmas Eve Mix, Christmas day Mix and Christmas Present Mix). They kept Bjork's vocal and added buzzing guitars, dropping in and out in bursts, some 'hey-hey-hey-hey' backing vocals and a spoken word part. And some feedback. The Justin Robertson remix and these Jesus And Mary Chain ones show what good remixing should do- get the source material and take it somewhere else. All three versions are good.
On the original 1988 vinyl release these Mary Chain mixes were double grooved so depending on whether you hit one groove or the other you got one version or another. The third was on the B-side with a live song. The eight track ep, released in 1992, plays conventionally and has the Robertson mixes, Tony D remixes and The Sugarcubes demo version. Just so you know.
One of my favourite singles from 2014 is this one from The Amazing Snakeheads. There's nothing here that's new strictly speaking, it doesn't break any new ground- it's got tattoos and quiffs and big boots. But the overdriven guitar, driving Joy Division-esque rhythm section and snarling vocals will make you feel like you're alive.
Remembrance Day was Sunday but today is the actual anniversary of the armistice that ended the First World War, eleven o'clock, the eleventh of November. I was at The Somme and Ypres at the start of October. The cemeteries are full of gravestones like this one- the body of a man who was not identified.
This is a picture I took at Ljissenhoek cemetery, near Ypres. There are 10, 775 graves here. The cemetery was next to a field hospital, so unusually almost all the graves here have names, as the wounded were tagged or identified. It is also an incredibly diverse cemetery containing the graves of British, French, American and German soldiers, men from the Chinese Labour Corps, one of only two women buried in the military cemeteries (nurse Nellie Spindler) and the highest ranking casualty, a Canadian General, within it.
The numbers of the dead, wounded and missing can become too big to fully comprehend. It becomes much closer to home when you dig a little into the records and find the name of a man who has a local interest, your street or town or workplace. Many of these men were either volunteers or conscripts (willing or unwilling) who found themselves caught up in something much bigger than themselves and way outside what they knew. We found the grave of a nineteen year old, Joseph Smithies Entwistle of Darwen, a gunner in the Tank Corps. He died of wounds in 1917, aged just 19. His home address is a three minute walk from the school where I work. Students from the school are his near neighbours, a hundred years apart.
The Sugarcubes single Birthday was a record so unlike any other that it assured them some kind of instant hit status almost as soon as John Peel had taken it out of it's sleeve. The album that followed- Life's Too Good- was a massive indie hit. I saw them play live at some point, I think around '89-' 90 (by which point they were promoting their second album, which wasn't nearly as good). They were a good live band, Bjork doing her skippitty-boppity thing and co-vocalist Einar entertaining and annoying everyone.
Birthday got remixed by various people on an eight track e.p. Justin Robertson's remix is the best. He avoids the easy route of just sticking a kick drum underneath and looping a little bit of Bjork's vocal and concentrates on isolating the bass, adding some horns and a dub-dance feel (in keeping with his Lionrock project).
It's a funny feeling- to know you lived through and watched something genuinely historic happen (on TV admittedly) and for it then to be celebrated a quarter of a century later. I suppose there were/are millions of people born at any time between 1885 and one hundred years later who could say they lived through and watched genuinely historic events. The fall of the Berlin Wall was twenty five years ago today. Kind of. November 9th was the day that the East German authorities realised they couldn't hold the tide back and that the Soviets weren't going to send support. And the Wall came down.
There have been loads of interesting articles recently, about the events and processes that led up to it, about the myths of the fall of the Wall (Reagan, Bowie, Hasselhoff), some of those ace photomontages showing the same place then and now. 1989 is a key year for me- living away from home, 19 years old, new music and new influences, new clothes. I visited Berlin in July and just seeing those places was startling, seeing the few remaining sections of Wall.
If the end of the Berlin Wall shows anything I think it is that nothing is permanent, that change is always possible and often just around the corner, even with situations that look utterly deadlocked and set in stone. This too shall pass.
Two new tracks for your Saturday enjoyment. This new ep, Confluence Of Torrents, from Justin Robertson's Deadstock 33s is a deep and dark delight, full of acidic squiggles, throbbing bass and the smell of dry ice.
Acid Ted posted this the other day and I love it- a new one from Radioactive Man (former Swordsman Keith Tenniswood). Simple drum machine rhythm, a driving bassline, some bleeps and bloops, a mournful synth line and an air that sounds like it was recorded live.
This is voodoo priest Louis Romain, from Haiti, photographed in the 1930s. He is the cover star of The Gun Club's debut album the Fire Of Love and also turned up on the sleeve of Sabres Of Paradise's Wilmot single. The Fire Of Love's grooves are shot through with rockabilly, as well as punk, blues, and country.
I came across this earlier this week, a new band and from Manchester too. The New Southern Electrikk and a dark, sultry cover version of Mother Of Earth by The Gun Club. The band say it's only a demo but it sounds pretty done to me. Singer Monica Ward has got one of those voices and the band, former Paris Angels amongst them, cook up a reverb laden stew. Southern gothic via east Manchester. More please.
No astronaut picture today but the space theme continues in the song- and I thought a picture of Warpaint's foxy bassist Jenny Lee Lindbergh might make a good start to Thursday. Ashes To Ashes was David Bowie's 1980 smash, complete with those lines harking back to Space Oddity and Major Tom floating off in his tincan/opiate haze. Warpaint covered it for a compilation album and did a magnificent, dreamy job.
Today's song is from the three members of Bauhaus who weren't Pete Murphy, the shiny mid 80s post-goth band Love And Rockets. Daniel J sings about wanting a holiday on the moon on this 1986 b-side but complains about not being able to get a suntan there. Like getting a suntan was ever top of the list of holiday priorities for a goth rockstar. While he does this, and sings about meeting the president too with some cracking call-and-response backing vocals, the band set up a slow, primitive groove with some squally feedback guitars going into the stratosphere at the end. Good stuff.
After that lovely Spiritualized song yesterday I sifted through their songs on the hard drive and on the shelves. I've got a lot more Spiritualized than I thought I had. Come Together was released as a shot at having a hit single from the Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space album. It got re-recorded at Abbey Road and lost some swear words (and lost a bit of it's power as a result) and there were two remixes- a long, paranoid and freaked out Two Lone Swordsmen remix and a long, less paranoid and still pretty freaked out Richard Fearless one.
This beautiful and melancholic song came from Jason Pierce's Spiritualized on a space themed compilation for Record Shop Day earlier this year. All the songs used sounds found by the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes. Actually, they're not really sounds at all but 'electromagnetic radiation fluctuations in the magnetosphere of the planets, moons and large asteroids the Voyager probes traveled near. Each celestial body is composed of different elements, has its own size and mass, and therefore sounds unique.'
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