Causeway are an Idaho duo, Marshall Watson and Allison Rae, who have an album out on Friday on Manchester's Sprechen label- Anywhere. Appropriately enough, Friday is Valentine's Day, and for much of the album Allison sings of the pain that that particular emotion can bring. 'My heart is an empty well', she sings on last year's single Dancing With Shadows, a single that came with multiple remixes, all worth hearing, remixes by label boss Chris Massey, Hardway Bros and Kiaki and one by Marshall himself. 'Tragedy I'm here for you/ This loneliness is meant for two'.
The album is built on the foundations of the 80s indie disco classics- New Order, The Cure, Depeche Mode, OMD- with cavernous drums, a wall of synths and pulsating sequencers, a dreamwave reawakening of being lost in dry ice on the floor. It's not totally retro- the production is sleekly 2025, there's the chug of 21st century cosmic disco hitched to the cinematic feel of club music. Opener Love Me Like Your Last Time turns all the buttons up to eleven, a sheen of synths and vocals caught under the neon and laser lights. The pain and melodrama of love is shot through the songs like writing in a stick of rock- It's Never Enough should soundtrack the final scenes of a lost 80s film, a figure in a trench coat walking away from the camera, perfect 80s noir. Criminal opens with bursts of synth noise and distant vocals, 'I'll always be a criminal baby'. The title track, Anywhere, rattles along rapidly, the drum machine firing underneath the chord changes and a squealing topline. 'Here we are/ One last time', she sings, another song, another break up, another ending. The penultimate song is Ruin Me, a crunching, industrial rhythm and hissing snare underpinning Allison's dual vocals, with a chorus begging for more pain- 'Ruin me gently/ Again and again'. Anywhere finishes with a cover of Nobody's Diary, from Yazoo's second album, 1983's You And Me Both, a single written by Alison Moyet when she was sixteen. Causeway's version updates Yazoo's synth duo pop, the multi- tracked synths and surging sequencers pumping away as Allison songs Alison, more heartbreak, more hyper- melancholy.
Anywhere is out on Valentine's Day, an album for lovers and for those who want to wallow in the pain of lost love while dancing under the neon lights. Get it on vinyl and digitally at Bandcamp.
Back in the early days of The Bad Seeds Anita Lane was for a short time a member of the band along with Nick Cave, Mick Harvey, Rowland S Howard and Blixa Bargeld. She painted, wrote and contributed to lyrics- she co- wrote From Her To Eternity, a key early Bad Seeds song- and wrote one Bad Seeds song in its entirety, Stranger Than Kindness, from 1986's Your Funeral... My Trial.
Stranger Than Kindness is a key Bad Seeds song, the lyric a list of the problematic issues of being in a close personal relationship with an addict with some vivid imagery- 'bottled light from hotels', 'soft cold bones', no home and no bread, passion dying in the light and being a stranger to kindness. Musically its wired and tense, Cave's voice deep and flat over detuned strings and guitars. It's a powerful and moving song, one that seems to retain its mystery no matter how many times you hear it (although Nick says that it has revealed more of itself to him over time).
The Bad Seeds have performed it live since the mid- 80s, In 2013 they played it at KCRW, a Santa Monica radio station set that became a full live album release. Over the decades and line up changes it's changed a little, slightly less of the edge of chaos feel of the original version.
Anita was from Melbourne and went to college with Rowland S. Howard. When she first met Nick in 1977 they began a relationship. She was in The Birthday Party and moved to London with Cave and the band, leaving The Bad Seeds after the release of their first album and the group's relocation to West Berlin. Her impact on Nick was profound and even after their personal (and intermittent) relationship hit the rocks she remained a presence in his life- and the lives of various related bands. She released two solo albums, played and recorded with Mick Harvey and returned to The Bad Seeds with vocals on two songs on Murder Ballads in 1996. Mick's song from last year, When We Were Beautiful And Young, a moving lament for the power of youth and reflection on aging and mortality, is at least partly about her.
Anita died in 2021. She appears on last year's Bad Seeds album Wild God, on the song O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is), a celebration of her with her voice (taken from an answerphone message) speaking for the final minute of the song about a flat she and Nick shared next to Brixton Prison and how they attempted to write a contract of love but never got beyond drawing the border on the piece of paper. The song also contains an opening line that jars somewhat, each time I hear it- apparently I'm not the only one who was a bit thrown by the line. Nick recently wrote about it at The Red Hand Files.
Something else from the Eclectics label to kick start the week- see yesterday's edits mix that included No- Thing, a tribute to David Lynch by Resident Rockers, Eclectics in house DJ/ edit producers. Grant Williams relaunched Eclectics a few weeks ago and one of the first fruits was a track he recorded while on the turntables. In his own words an 'experimental fun track' with the emphasis on experimental and the fun of the mind melting variety. Voices is eight and a half minutes of wiggy, tripped out electronic psychedelia, 'a slowed down tech track, the vocals grabbed [from elsewhere] matched the bpm and I played the two simultaneously in sync and then messed about with the vocals in real time'. Grant then added more delay and echo and recorded it live in one take. Titled Voices, its free to download at Bandcamp under the Resident Rockers name.
Also out now and slightly more direct but equally good fun is Blavatsky And Tolley's latest release, four tracks for Berlin label Nein. Falling (What Time Is Love?) is ten minutes of slow mo intensity, electronic disco- punk featuring Gene Serene, a certain KLF keyboard riff contained within, and remixes by Tronik Youth, Ian Vale and Ed Tomlinson. The original mix is slowed down and souped up, the stuttering, robotic vocal intoning 'deeper and deeper', a ghost in the machine. Falling comes out in early March- find it and pre- order at Bandcamp.
In recent weeks I've done two Sunday mixes made up of edits. Part One is here and Part Two is here. Today is Part Three, another forty five minutes of edits, this one largely dancefloor oriented and with an 80s feel.
Can't Cope is from Jezebell's Jezebellaeric Beats Vol. 1, a dubbed out and spaced out way to enter into the mix, our friend the Archdrude Julian H. Cope sent spinning even further out into the cosmos than he was previously. Safesurfer is from 1991's epic Peggy Suicide, the start of Julian's imperial period. Swamp Shuffle is also from Jezebellaeric Beats Vol. 1, the closing track, this time David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Jerry Harrison and Chris Frantz given the treatment by Jesse and Darren.
No- Thing is from Resident Rockers, the in- house edit team at Eclectics. Heroes. Twin Peaks. Moby. Acid. No- thing will keep us together.
The M&M Hardway Bros edit takes Sleaford Mods Mork and Mindy, a song from 2020's Spare Ribs, with Billy Nomates on guest vocals, a tale of a childhood spent in colourless suburban council estates, Action Man and Cindy and mum and dad being out, long afternoons with nothing to do. Sean monkeyed about with it and turned it into an ALFOS at The Golden Lion moment.
Hunterbrau's edit of Depeche Mode's 1987 classic Never Let Me Down came out on Paisley Dark, dark disco/ slowed down sleek goth.
Rich Lane's Cotton Dubs are second to none. His edit of Sinead O'Connor's Jackie (from her debut, the Lion And Then Cobra) repurposes Sinead with an 808 while losing none of her power.
Longed is an edit of All Day Long from New Order's 1986 album Brotherhood. The chopped, looped and edited version here, largely instrumental, is from an intriguing project I was tipped off about on Bandcamp, a highly unofficial edit service by Follytechnic Music Library. Longed is from a collection of New Order edits called Ordered 86- 93 but there's waaaay more there than just one album of nine New Order edits. Have a dig around, see what you can unearth.
Back in 1987 Joe Strummer was somewhat adrift. The Clash had broken up, his former songwriting partner Mick Jones had moved on and was enjoying his time with his new band Big Audio Dynamite who had captured the new thing- sampling, dance music, a rock/ rap/ reggae/ pop fusion that The Clash had pioneered at the start of the 80s before Joe and Paul attempted to reverse back to three chord punk rock. Joe was given the opportunity to find some direction when he met Alex Cox, a filmmaker whose guerrilla approach to making movies matched Strummer's approach to life. Cox signed Strummer up for his Spaghetti Western film Straight To Hell, a film with a soundtrack that featured The Pogues, Zander Schloss (who would become guitarist in Joe's Latino Rockabilly War and who worked with Joe on his next soundtrack), San Francisco band Pray For Rain and a couple of Strummer originals. These songs broke Joe's writer's block. He acted in the film too, immersing himself into the character (a bank robber called Simms).
Cox asked Joe to stay on board for his next film, a clumsy satire about US imperialism in South America and American exceptionalism with Ed Harris in the title role as Walker. The film is bizarre, a bit of a mess. Even Strummer wasn't sure about the finished version. But the soundtrack is a minor Strummer gem, a fourteen track album with eleven Latin instrumentals, from salsa to Afro- Cuban bebop, all recorded acoustically on Strummer's insistence- 'I thought let's be 1850, nothing plugged in', he said. On three of the songs, Joe sings, a trio of lost Strummer solo songs (recently re- found via the 2018 solo compilation 001), songs that bridge his work in The Clash and his late 90s re- emergence and renaissance with his Mescaleros.
Tennessee Rain is a ballad, Joe with acoustic guitar and banjo, a sad- eyed song with an upbeat tempo, Joe singing, 'well I wish I was drunk in Havana, I wish I was at the Mardi Gras'. Tropic Of No Return is a lilting choral song, backed by tropical birdsong and some lightly picked and strummed acoustic guitars, gradually gathering a little steam. The third song is The Unknown Immortal, a song sung from the point of view of a soldier in Walker's gringo army, a man away from home and his love for seven years, a man who 'was once an immortal'. It's difficult though not to hear it as at least partly autobiographical, Joe's post- Clash malaise compounded by the death of his mother a few weeks before Walker started filming, him ruefully accepting that his previous life as frontman for the greatest band in the world, the punk rock war lord, now trying to carve out a new role as singer/ songwriter/ soundtrack musician with some of the musical styles that informed Sandinista! and Combat Rock.
Sometimes a band come around who create an album that is a perfect encapsulation of a sound, of those people in that room making those songs at that exact point in time. They may go on to make further records and albums, some of them very fine, but nothing they do will ever come close to that one off capturing of the moment. In November 1988 the Canadian band Cowboy Junkies did that with their album The Trinity Session. The album was mostly recorded in one night, 27th November 1987 live in Toronto, at the Church of The Holy Trinity, with the band all sitting round one microphone. They played a hushed, spooky but beautiful set of songs, originals, traditional songs and covers, with the voice of Margo Timmins a ghostly presence on top. The covers famously included perhaps the definitive version of The Velvet Underground's Sweet Jane (Lou Reed was of that opinion). But apart from Margo's voice, the brushed drums, the stripped back electric guitar, and the other instruments- fiddle, pedal steel, harmonica, accordion- the biggest presence on the album is the natural reverb of the church, the echo that surrounds the group as they move around, towards and away from the sole microphone.
Their previous album, Whites Off Earth Now!, saw them tour the south of the USA and the music they heard down in the Deep South states, country and western, informed the song writing and selection for The Trinity Session. Their own song, 200 More Miles, is a song about life on the road...
The 1990 follow up to The Trinity Session, The Caution Horses, was a good album. Their cover of Neil Young's Powderfinger, the opening song and single Sun Comes Up, It's Tuesday Morning and a few other songs were good and it had the same slowed down style and hushed approach but it was more polished and as a result lost a little of what made The Trinity Session so special.
These two clips came my way recently and I don't believe I've ever seen them before. First is Cowboy Junkies in London at MTV's studios playing live and being interviewed for 120 Minutes, a ten minute clip with Margo talking and a stripped down version of the band playing.
But there's also this if you've got the time and inclination, a full live performance by the band from 1990 in Koln, Germany, filmed for German TV. Slow music and slow TV in front of a fairly subdued audience. If you're in a rush and want the sweet hit of Sweet Jane, it's starts at 53.01.
There's lots of new music around as we head into February. I have a list in my notebook that's a page long, all of which I intend to write about here. Today's new music is a pair of releases that came out at the end of January from opposite hemispheres. First up is Eduardo, my friend from Sao Paulo, Brazil, who records as Pandit Pam Pam. His latest is a six track mini- album titled Dot. Pandit Pam Pam's previous EP, Ar, was a musical response to the poor quality of air in Sao Paulo. Dot was originally lined up to be on that EP but Eduardo was persuaded to leave it off and make something new with Dot as the starting point. Eduardo has a young baby and his recording is to some extent built around the baby's needs as the second track- Recorded With Diogo In My Arms- makes clear.
Dot, the title track, doesn't appear until five tracks into the EP. Shuffling drums, echo, a rippling melody on top, bags of atmosphere, and then at nearly two minutes in a female voice drifts in and out again. It's a gorgeous piece of music, calling to mind a fractured version of One Dove or Death In Vegas gone ambient.
The rest of the EP is equally beautiful, from ambient opener Samba De Longe to the eight minute modular synth/ sleeping babe track mentioned above, the skittery ambience of Fot and even more hazy Interludio. The EP ends with Guitar 2- background buzz of static, wash of FX and picked guitar notes creating a very blissed out, blurred out track that stretches time. You can listen and buy at Bandcamp. Highly recommended for small hours and headphones listening.
Back in the UK comes an EP from Velvett called Lay Down. Velvett are Jo Sims and Natali Williams. Lay Down starts out ambient but drums kick in and then Natali's vocal, both suggesting mid- 90s trip hop is in the ether again (Kruder and Dorfmeister were featured here only a few days ago). Slowed down late night sounds.
There are remixes, one from Warehouse Preservation Society which toughens up the rhythms and stretches it out into something darker, and one from Dicky Continental (Red Snapper's Rich Thair) which builds slowly, drums and strings, and snatches of the original mix flitting in and out, Rich cutting from one element to another. The trip hop vibe continues.
There's also a Velvett club mix, the Rubber Dub Club Mix which suddenly switches everything into gay disco mode, bouncing bassline, whooshes, and Hi NRG sequencers. You can find the whole EP at Bandcamp.
Seeing the recent Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown sent me spinning into Dylan's back catalogue again- Bringing it All Back Home mainly but also Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde On Blonde, bits and bobs from The Bootleg Series, songs from the 70s that maybe I've overlooked before, Another Side Of Bob Dylan from 1964. I haven't had a Dylan phase for a long time and I don't think Dylan is something one ever finishes or gets to the end of, there's always more, always another way in.
A Complete Unknown star Timothee Chalamet appeared on SNL (Saturday Night Live) last week playing three Dylan songs. In the film he is Bob Dylan. Apparently he signed up for the role in 2019 but then Covid delayed everything, giving him ample time to learn to play guitar and harmonica for the film and to sing like Dylan, Dylan's particular intonations and stresses. On SNL he plays two songs as a medley, Outlaw Blues (from Bringing It All Back Home) coupled with Three Angels (from 1970's New Morning, a deep cut). Outlaw Blues is an amazing song, Dylan giving it everything, charging out of the traps and amped up with the band, 'ain't it hard to stumble on the black side of the lagoon' and howling the lines at the end of each verse, 'when it's nine below zero and... three o 'clock in the afternoon'. In 1965 an album song like Outlaw Blues was better than many contemporary band's best singles (see also Love Minus Zero/ No Limit also from side 1 of Bringing It All Back Home). Chalamet doing Dylan but not in costume, doing Dylan as himself. I think it's pretty meta.
He also sang and played Tomorrow Is A Long Time, the beautiful acoustic song that first appeared on the Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II album, released in 1971, a fairly randomly sequenced double album of Dylan singles and album songs. Tomorrow Is A Long Time was originally recorded in 1962 live at New York's Town Hall. Chalamet nails it again, the band playing quietly behind him (including James Blake on keys).
M- Paths released two albums on Exeter's Mighty Force, a label reborn after a post- 1999 hiatus. Label boss Mark Darby released the first Aphex Twin 12" and pulled together an array of talent for the second life of the label, including M- Paths and Reverb Delay. Those two outfits are two different sides of producer and DJ Marcus Farley, M- Paths an optimistic ambient/ techno, electronic side (M- Paths by name, empaths by nature is the tagline) and Reverb Delay a heavier dub techno affair, inspired by Basic Channel and the techno sounds of Detroit. Marcus has set up a Bandcamp page called M- Paths Recordings to release new tracks and experimental sounds throughout 2025, a calendar of releases.
I posted January's Shapes And Patterns at the end of last year here. February's release, Love Is On Your Side, came out yesterday, an off kilter track with a naggingly superb topline and the ghost of backing vocals drifting by. It breaks down and the female voice sings 'let your heart be your guide', before the rhythm kicks back in, synths and spring noises joined by strings. Reverb Delay's February release, Super Being is Reverb Delay in Dub, an excursion in echo and space that sounds like it comes from offworld.
We started communicating via messenger and email, mainly musical tip offs and recommends and also our mutual despair at the current state of Manchester United Football Club, but also realised we'd both grown up in/ around Manchester, shopped in the same record shops and probably attended the same gigs and nights. Between us the idea for an interview came up and following a bit of back and forth and a lengthy email trail, this is the result...
Adam: What's your background?
Marcus: I really do believe that our environment moulds the music we like and
the music we make. I was born in Wandsworth in 1970. As a baby my
parents moved to the Peak District, near Macclesfield. Our
nearest city was Manchester and I spent my youth in Affleck’s Palace,
Piccadilly Records and Eastern Bloc and was a regular at the indie nights at the
Ritz and 42nd Street.
There was something about the North,
particularly Macclesfield, Manchester and Salford in the 1980s. These were not the thriving towns and cities we see now, they
were gloomy and gritty and had an edge. I agree with Tony
Wilson when he famously said of my favourite band, that Joy Division is the
sound of Manchester. It is also the sound of Macclesfield, with Ian
Curtis and Stephen Morris growing up there and attending King’s School like I did.
Adam: What's your sound? Where does it come from?
Marcus: As Victor Hugo said, 'Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.' It sounds like a contradiction in terms, but I think it’s the sound of
uplifting melancholia- music and lyrics that make you feel better,
despite being about heartache or malaise. Love will Tear
us Apart is a good example - heart wrenching lyrics, yet the music is
uplifting, and no matter how bad things may have been, Ian was in a far more terrible
place, and by default, that lifts you out of your own gloom. I took my daughter to see the mural of Ian on the main shopping street
in Macclesfield recently. She's a fan, too. It was a really good experience, as I
felt so proud of Ian, and the town I grew up in.
Which is a long way of saying that I think you can hear Joy Division's
influence in M-Paths. You can also hear 4AD bands like
Dead Can Dance, Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, and two of my musical heroes, Talk Talk (particularly for the
ambient parts of their last 3 studio Albums and Mark Hollis’ solo album), and
Susumu Yokota (particularly his Sakura, Boy and Tree and Grinning Cat
albums).
Adam: I'd never heard any of Susuma's music before and can now thoroughly recommend Sakura, an ambient album released a quarter of a century ago and filled with a certain kind of timeless beauty. Listen to Sakura here.
Adam: What came next?
Marcus: I have a Philosophy Degree. In my early 20s I went to
Birmingham to do social work training- and this is the essence of M-Paths by Name,
Empaths by nature, as I have been a social worker for 26 years.
Like a lot of people, it was The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays and Weatherall’s work
on Screamadelica that got me interested in electronic dance music. Then
the pastoral tones of Aphex Twin really drew me into that world. But
when I moved to Birmingham, I discovered the newly formed House Of God techno
night. Birmingham is similar in a
way to Detroit, a then dying and now dead car industry with large industrial
wastelands. The DJ and producer Surgeon, and the producers Regis and Female developed what we now call Birmingham techno on the Downwards record label. Uncompromising, hard techno that has both a funky swing in a Chicago House way, and a locked groove influence from Jeff Mills and Robert Hood, with an added ingredient of industrial music. But I had a real epiphany moment sometime in 1993 at the House Of God when I first heard Basic Channel’s Phylyps Trak and the Maurizio remix of Vainqueur’s Lyot. Everything came together for me. I had to make dub techno. Something that took almost 30 years, as Reverb Delay, for me to get round to doing. House of God still has the same core DJs over 30 years later - Surgeon, Sir Real, Terry Donovan and Paul Damage. Each is superb in their own right with their own style and selections.
Adam: How did you start releasing your music?
Marcus: My friend Spotter suggested that I try signing for Mark Darby’s Mighty
Force. Mighty Force famously released the first Aphex Twin 12" and the
first music by Tom Middleton (of Global Communication) and
Matthew Herbert. Mark Darby has become a good friend. He worked for Rough
Trade also, working with labels such as 4AD, so we have a shared history
musically of what we have liked.
Adam: I'm always interested in how people actually go about creating music, how it happens. What's your creative process? What comes first, rhythm or melody?
Marcus: I always start with
kick drum and hi hats for the Reverb Delay stuff as they're the basis for dub
techno that everything fits around so I like to get a groove going first. With M-Paths I always start with pure ambient pads and chords then add
the rhythm in sections.
Initially I set out to make really hard
dancefloor techno, but it's really hard to get right - it’s like punk - seems
simple enough, but that is often harder than something more grandiose to do as
there are less elements and they all need to be absolutely on point. Without
really thinking, it kind of happened by osmosis that I ended up making ambient and more home listening stuff as M-Paths, the pads and chords
just became really ambient naturally and I love breakbeats so I do a lot with
slow breakbeats. I loved dub and when I first heard Basic Channel I knew I wanted to make dub techno but didn't know how it was
done. As my skills developed I realised it was driven mostly by the
effects, done very subtly. Atmosphere can happen not by
adding stuff but by taking elements out, particularly drums, even just
removing the hi hat in sections, or removing claps and rides. I like most electronic music from house to techno to
jungle to ambient, and can listen to gabber at breakfast. I don’t think I create music due to my mood. I generally have
a few songs on the go at once for different projects. But I definitely
listen to music dependent on mood. Apart from Joy Division, Susumu
Yokota and Talk Talk- I can listen to in any mood, any time.
Adam: gabber?! Now there's a largely forgotten musical scene, Belgian and Dutch 90s hardcore techno.
Marcus: I'm a big
fan of Dutch techno, particularly the stuff from the Parkzicht club in
Rotterdam where Speedy J was a DJ with DJ Rob and others.
Adam: back in the early/ mid 90s I was a big fan of Speedy J. My then flatmate and I used to love Beam Me Up! and the album Ginger, proper space age ambient techno from The Netherlands. It seemed so futuristic. Speedy J was on Warp too and in 1994 everything Warp released was worth listening to.
Marcus: They play Speedy J at every Feyenoord home game! United have The Stone Roses, they have Speedy J!
Adam: a question for the kit and equipment nerds. What do you use in the studio?
Marcus: I have had some great synths and drum machines, but I would say that now my go to is Roland Cloud, where I can access all the Roland drum machines and synths that I need whilst taking up zero extra space. My studio is by default in the smallest room in the house and most of the space is already taken up with records, CDs and decks. Within Roland Cloud, my go to is the Space Echo effects unit, used a lot with my Reverb Delay stuff and also in M-Paths. I have always used echo units, as well as delay and reverb. The echo units in Ableton are decent, and so is Replika by Native Instruments. The Space Echo has been used by lots of bands over the years but I wanted it as that is what Basic Channel and Vainqueur use.
Adam: what are you into at the moment? What's the last album you bought?
Marcus:The new Sandwell District album, their
first music as Sandwell District in over 10 years and the first since
Juan Mendez (Silent Servant) sadly died. They have put up one song for
preview and it's absolutely immense. It was started by Karl O’Connor (who
records also as Regis also and runs Downwards), Peter Sutton (Female), Juan
Mendez and Dave Sumner (Function) and is named after Sandwell where Karl
O’Connor grew up. Brilliant name, brilliant label. Other than that, I mainly buy old vinyl stuff I stupidly got rid of on vinyl years ago!
Marianne Faithfull's death at the end of last week came after a run of poor health, yet another loss, the passing of another artist and star of the 60s generation (coming so soon after the recent deaths of Denis Law and David Lynch). Marianne's life has sometimes been framed by her proximity to The Rolling Stones, her youthful singles with Andrew Loog Oldham and then her dive into drug addiction, another Rolling Stones casualty. But Marianne had an artistic career of her own and a life lived to the fullest, a life well beyond being Mick Jagger's muse.
In 1979 after a decade lost to heroin addiction, homelessness and the loss of custody of her son, she cleaned up and in 1979, at a moment when the impact of punk and what became post- punk was being felt deeply and strongly, she released a solo album, Broken English, an album she described as her masterpiece.
Musically it took from the zeitgeist, late 70s New Wave/ post- punk synths and production. On top of that was the voice, Marianne after a lost decade, her voice an octave lower than her 60s singles, a world weary rasp but full of the emotions of a survivor. The title song was inspired by the terrorists of the late 60s and early 70s counter- culture, Ulrike Meinhof of the Baader Meinhof gang- 'what are you fighting for?', she asked.
Witches' Song is slower, acoustic guitar with drums and bass, and a song for outsider women.
'Shall I see you tonight, sister, bathed in magic greet? Shall we meet on the hilltop where the two roads meet? We will form the circle, hold our hands and chant Let the great one know what it is we want'
In a 1994 interview she spoke about an encounter with Bob Dylan and Broken English...
'Bob Dylan rolled back into my life again right after Broken English had come out. The album apparently stirred his interest and he began making inquiries about me. When he came to London for a tour, do you know what I did? I played him Broken English not once but several times. He was speechless – just like I had been when he'd played me Bringing It All Back Home. I turned the tables, I just did it all back to him. It was almost unconscious, like a playback. And he knew it. I played him Guilt – a self-explanatory song if there ever was one – and then I asked a little portentously: "Do you understand this?" I just sat there very grandly explicating my own songs. Out of nervousness, non stop. And he loved it! Over and over we played the album. At the end I was almost in tears for having gone through this album that had been so cathartic and autobiographical for me so many times. An evening of respect in my otherwise squalid life. Bob wanted to know how I'd got from my wall back into making records. Even to Dylan one doesn't just walk into a recording studio from living in a bomb site and start cutting a record. I just adore Bob Dylan. When mortals in Greek mythology encounter the Gods, they come away dazed and confused'
She went on to release many more solo albums and worked with other artists- Nick Cave, Beck, Emmylou Harris, Damon Albarn. She sings on Galleon Song on Nick Cave's Ghosteen, an album infused with the spirit of Nick's son Arthur Cave and his death in 2015. She acted too and appeared on stage, in film and on TV. She was very much a one off.
Kruder and Dorfmeister, a trip hop/ downtempo duo from Austria, first found acclaim in 1993 with their G- Stoned EP. Their late night hazy, blunted tunes and remixes are the stuff post- club nights are made of, head nodding, drawn out tunes that slip by in a beautiful fug. The got phone calls and remix requests came in throughout the 90s, from Depeche Mode, Madonna, Roni Size, Alex Reece, David Holmes, Bomb The Bass and Lamb. In 1998 they compiled many of their remixes with a selection of their own tracks as The Kruder And Dorfmeister Sessions two CDs, four pieces of vinyl), an album which last year got the full re- release treatment. The pair, Peter Kruder and Richard Dorfmeister, are touring in May to promote it. The mix below is a forty five minute selection of some of that album. Any of the tracks in the mix could have been substituted for any of the other twenty eight tracks from the album without any discernible dip in quality. They found a sound, refined it and brought it to bear on whoever's music they touched. Rattly, slowed down hip hop drum breaks, subsonic bass, snatches of vocals, one or two words max, found sounds, an aural smoke filled haze flecked with jazzy organ fills, DJ Shadow's Endtroducing... hovering close by. Sunday sounds for early February.
Bomb The Bass: Bug Powder Dust (Dub Remixed By Kruder and Dorfmeister)
Kruder And Dorfmeister: Lexicon
Strange Cargo: Million Town (K&D Session)
David Holmes: Gone (K&D Session)
Rockers Hi- Fi: Going Under (K&D Session)
Roni Size: Heroes (Kruder's Long Loose Bossa)
Lamb were/ are a duo from Manchester, producer Andy Barlow and singer/ songwriter Lou Rhodes, jazz/ hip hop/ trip hop/ drum and bass, best known for their single Gorecki. They split in 2004 to pursue solo projects but reformed a few years later and have performed intermittently ever since.
Bomb The Bass is the musical outfit for the legendary Tim Simenon, the man who made one of the first British acid house/ sample based records, Beat Dis. If you're looking for origin stories, Beat Dis is hard to beat. Bug Powder Dust came out in 1994, a powerful piece of mid 90s hip hop (from the third Bomb The Bass album Clear) with Justin Warfield on vocals. There were remixes aplenty- Dust Brothers, La Funk Mob, DJ Muggs (from Cypress Hill) and Kruder and Dorfmeister.
Lexicon is a short interlude piece of music, one minute of Kruder and Dorfmeister from the Sessions album.
Strange Cargo was one of William Orbit's solo aliases, resulting in four albums- Strange Cargo, II, III and Hinterland. Strange Cargo III is the pick for me, 1993 ambient/ downtempo/ global/ dub classic with Beth Orton on vocals on the superb water From A Vine Leaf. Million Town was on Strange Cargo Hinterland from 1995.
Gone was a single from David Holmes' 1995 debut album, This Film's Crap Let's Slash The Seats, with Saint Etienne's Sarah Cracknell on vocals. It's a gloriously low slung trip hop torch song and was remixed by Two Lone Swordsmen as well as Kruder and Dorfmeister. K&D strip it right down to the bones.
Rockers Hi- Fi are an electronic dub outfit from Birmingham, starting out as Original Rockers in 1991 and changing their name in 94. Going Under was from '97, deep and dubbed out.
Roni Size famously won the Mercury Prize in 1997 with his album New Forms, drum and bass entering the mainstream (a move first made by Goldie in 1994 with Inner City Life). Bristol had already cemented its reputation with Massive Attack and Portishead, and Roni Size had attended house parties run by The Wild Bunch Soundsystem so the torch was being well and truly passed on. New Forms and the single Brown Paper Bag especially became festival favourites. The Mercury Prize became a bit of millstone around Roni's neck I think and he continued to plough his furrow with further albums in 2002, 2004 and 2014.
Sofia Coppola's film Lost In Translation came out in 2003 and felt like an instant classic, a film in the lineage of late night, word of mouth movies that gain cult followings. In fact, Lost In Translation went way beyond cult and was a major commercial success as well as a critical one. The film's stars- Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson- are the atypical odd couple thrown together by circumstance, both disenchanted with their lot and adrift and at sea. Coppola wanted the film to depict the jetlagged, disconnected state people feel when they arrive in Japan, westerners who have flown half way round the world and are bewildered by Tokyo and deprived of sleep. Both are alienated form their partners, both lost and looking for a connection. There is little in the way of plot or narrative, Coppola wasn't sure Murray would actually turn up to film and it was largely shot in a less than a month on location using natural light as far as possible. Many of the street scenes were shot on the streets without extras-- Tokyo's citizens are the extras. It also has an ambiguous ending, something that adds rather than takes away. What did Bill Murray whisper to Scarlett Johansson?
The soundtrack was a success too. It was supervised by Brian Reitzell who was told by Coppola that rather than a score she wanted what sounded like a mixtape, similar to the ones Reitzell sent her while she was writing the film, tapes filled with dream pop and shoegaze bands. The soundtrack ended up being exactly that- after the opening thirty seconds of ambient Tokyo street sounds there are songs by Death In Vegas, Air, My Bloody Valentine, Phoenix, Sebastien Tellier and The Jesus And Mary Chain (since the release of Lost In Translation Just Like Honey has become by some distance their most streamed song). Squarepusher is there too, along with a couple of Brian Reitzell tracks. For many people, me included however, the real pull of the Lost In Translation soundtrack was the four new pieces of music from MBV main man Kevin Shields.
Shields hadn't been seen out much since Loveless in 1991 apart from his period providing extremely noisy guitar for Primal Scream (the Shields, Mani, Throb, Innes frontline of the band from around the same time is possibly the band's finest live incarnation). For Lost In Translation, he turned the noise down (although City Girl carries plenty of MBV's noisy disorientation). Goodbye is ambient guitar, the sound of a hotel room late at night, high rise, black sky through glass...
Coppola convinced Kevin to provide some sounds for the film- she was after melancholy and 'floating, jetlagged weirdness'. Reitzell wanted 'a droning, swaying, beautiful feeling'. Shields delivers on all counts.
For his last piece of music for the film Shields put down the guitar and plugged in the drum machine and synths, the arpeggios dancing across a hissy rhythm before coming to an abrupt end.
At the tail end of last year JC over at The Vinyl Villain posted a 1981 Lou Reed solo album, Walk On The Wild Side: The Best Of Lou Reed. I dug my vinyl copy out having not played it for years- I often go back to the Velvet Underground but rarely Lou's solo career.It's neither original nor revelatory to suggest that Lou's solo career is patchy, with a few gems, some albums that have some moments and some real clunkers. Trainspotting's Sick Boy held forth with what is a fairly commonly held view-
Mark (Renton/ Rent Boy): 'Lou Reed? Some of his solo stuff's nae bad'
Sick Boy: 'No, it's nae bad but it's nae good either. And in your heart you know that although it sounds alright, it's actually just shite'.
Trainspotting of course made a hit out of Lou's song Perfect Day, a song which is very much neither nae bad or nae good but fucking brilliant. Despite the Trainspotting view orthodoxy there are always Lou Reed fans who will make claims for albums that some of us had written off or passed over. Eventually you'll meet someone who'll claim that Mistrial is a lost gem. 1982's The Blue Mask is regularly acclaimed as a return to form (I think this view may hold water). The Vinyl Villain returned to Lou Reed's solo career earlier this week with a ten track compilation of Lou's solo stuff written by Walter, going up to and including 1989's New York- a genuine Lou Reed back to his solo best album.
Listening to Walk On the Wild Side: The Best Of Lou Reed after a considerable gap was a bit of a revelation to me. Some of the songs I hadn't heard for a very long time. Some of them transported me back to when I first heard them, in the late 80s. Some of them are songs that I have been playing frequently since JC's post last year, Lou's back catalogue re- entering my daily listening habits.
This one is from his solo debut, a self titled album from 1972. It was recorded in Willesden, London with a band of session musicians including Rick Wakeman. The twin guitars tone, basic drums and Lou's flat, spoken New York vocals are post- Velvets highlights. The album flopped but Wild Child is fantastic, a blur of words and imagery and white knuckle guitar playing.
Lou's 1970s saw him frequently re- visit songs he had from Velvets days, songs that he recycled and re- recorded. There were eight on the solo debut including Wild Child (which was never recorded by the band but was played live in 1970). His 1970s albums were all available cheaply in the 1980s and it was a lottery. The sleeves were often dreadful. There was precious little advice anywhere, no internet sites or magazine articles. But many of them have moments of Lou Reed brilliance. Transformer is obviously one, an album packed with great songs and elevated by Bowie and Mick Ronson, by their production, playing, arranging and sheer presence. But that album's follow up Berlin has a lot going for it too (although I recommend skipping The Kids). How Do You Think It Feels is one of his best, up there with any top ten Lou solo songs- piano, 70s sleaze and cabaret decadence and a guitar part that is vicious, a song for people who are 'speeding and lonely'.
I used to have cassette copies of both Sally Can't Dance (1974) and Coney Island Baby (1975) but they've long gone and I never replaced them in any other format (and may well do now even though both have truly dreadful sleeve art). After that we're into the minefield of solo Lou, albums I've never heard, albums I've swerved, albums I know via other people, albums with songs I know but haven't heard in full- all the way up to New York which like everyone else I bought and loved.
I own a copy of 1978's Street Hassle, a semi-legendary album if only for its impact on Spacemen 3 who borrowed from it heavily. The title track, a three song, eleven minute suite/ tone poem about New York street life, Lou Reed staple material but done so well with a line stolen from Brice Springsteen (who was recording downstairs at the same time, and who came up to sing the line- 'tramps like us, baby we born to pay'). It's a superb piece of music and there's no one else who could have made it.
Then there's The Bells, Growing Up In Public, The Blue Mask, Legendary Hearts, New Sensations, City Lights and Mistrial and frankly, in some of those cases your guess is as good as mine. But on the basis of my Lou Reed solo re- awakening and the spirit of rediscovery, I'm open to recommendations. I suspect The Blue Mask comes next.
In 1989 Lou released New York, an album that saw him back to his best and touring the songs to large and appreciative crowds I saw him at Wembley Arena, traveling down to London after my first year at university ended specifically to see the man play live. He made a comment on stage about all the music being played by 'real musicians, no samples or tapes', which many of us there sniggered at, our heads already turned by music made solely using samples, but hey it was Lou Reed. He played some of the hits too.
Last year Warp re- issued Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works II, a four discs of vinyl album originally released in 1994. It followed the hugely acclaimed Selected Ambient Works 85- 92, the album which cemented Richard D. James' reputation as an auteur, a genius, a maverick and a colossal talent (much of which was evident on his very first 12" Analogue Bubblebath). SAW II is a very different album to SAW 85- 92. It is almost entirely beatless, a lengthy set of ambient music, slow moving tracks built on waves of sound, noise, subtle drones and hum, the sound of continents shifting slightly, of ice ages coming and going- minimalist dark ambient.
The album seems built to confuse. The majority of the tracks have no name, all titled 'untitled' and on digital releases were numbered #1, #2 etc, apart from #13 which is named Blue Calx. Many gained unofficial fan names- radiator, white blur 1, tree, stone in focus, lichen. The sleeve wasn't much help either. The eight sides of vinyl and individual tracks are represented by symbols (all of which are very similar to each other). If you took the four discs out of the sleeve and mixed them up, you'd be lost fairly quickly. It's not user friendly at all. The re- issue has added two tracks, both with actual names- th1[evnslower] and Rhubarb Orc. 1953 Rev.
James compared the album to listening to the sound of a power station while on acid. There's no doubt that listening to it is an immersive experience that can alter the way you feel. It is very much an album that encourages one to reflect and to contemplate, a serene, discombobulating, almost out of body experience. It's melancholic, spooky but ultimately, I think, filled with an eerie sense of humanity- or of nature maybe. The vinyl re- issue, four discs housed in a big sleeve with a poster and stickers, is a monolithic feeling release and came with a £50 price tag. I got some Christmas money from a relative and after a little dithering spent the money on Selected Ambient Works II, a decision I don't regret at all. It's a magnificent piece of work. This is ten sublime minutes of it...
We went to see A Complete Unknown on Saturday night. When we came home I dived into No Direction Home, Martin Scorcese's 2005 documentary (currently on the iPlayer) and since then have set about cherry picking my way around Bob's mid- 60s back catalogue. A Complete Unknown was really good. Timothee Chalamet is totally convincing as Dylan, the young Dylan arriving in New York in 1961 and the Dylan we see by the film's end, 1965 Dylan, gone electric. The attention to detail in the film- the sets, clothes, New York- are superb, early 60s New York brought to life vividly. The rest of the cast are good too- Ed Norton as Pete Seeger, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez and Elle Fanning as Sylvie (as disguised Suze Rotolo) all stand out. There are some inaccuracies, the director taking a few artistic licences with what happened and where but it really doesn't matter (the famous shout of 'Judas' happened at Manchester's Free Trade Hall not the 1965 Newport Folk Festival). If 'print the legend' applies to anyone it's Bob Dylan.
A Complete Unknown is an exercise in velocity. Dylan is fast, in permanent motion, speeding his way through the city, through people and through scenes. He leaves people in his wake- the folk scene, Suze, Joan, the Newport folk purists, New York high society- living in a blur of forward momentum. When he becomes famous and is recognised in the street he retreats behind sunglasses, arming himself with barbs and sneers and protected by a few close to him (Bob Neuwirth). He rides a motorcycle- more speed (and we all know how that ends)- and though there's no drug taking seen in the film, his speed freak persona can't just fuelled by cigarettes (and everyone is smoking all the time). The only times he slows down slightly are when he's with Sylvie. Sylvie introduces him to the struggle for civil rights and CORE. He takes from that, writes songs, and then keeps moving.
His relationship with Joan Baez is spikey and combative- 'you're kind of an asshole', she tells him and later on kicks him out of her room in the Chelsea Hotel. The songwriting and performance scenes are totally convincing too, Chalamet more than able to portray the transition from 1961 folk Dylan and 1965. The scene in A Complete Unknown where he sings The Times They Are A- Changin' at Newport is genuinely moving. The furore around Dylan Goes Electric looks even more quaint now than it did in the past, the folk gatekeepers desperate to keep the future- rock 'n' roll, The Beatles, electricity, drummers- out of their world. The archive footage in Scorcese's film of British folk fans in Sheffield and Manchester complaining about Dylan's touring with his band as 'corny' and inauthentic is hilarious. Looking back at Dylan's songs in the 60s, it's clearly one perpetually moving body of work, from Song For Woody to Like A Rolling Stone.
Here's a folk era Dylan song (not actually in the film), One Too Many Mornings from 1964's The Times They Are A- Changin'.
I first encountered Bob Dylan in 1988, the autumn term in my first year at Liverpool university. We were hearing new music every day, every hour almost and much of it was revolutionary at the time. I heard Like A Rolling Stone on the radio and went out and bought three Dylan albums- all were available at CBS's Nice Price! promotion (less than a fiver). I bought Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits (a 1967 compilation with a cool cover photo and ten classics) and the pair of albums he made in 1965, released four months apart from each other- Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. Between them, those two albums are a pair of game changing records that re- wrote what music could be. Dylan's words are enough in themselves, a cast of characters, allusions, rhymes and imagery that are unequalled (in an end of year politics exam, a module on US politics, I quoted Dylan's line from It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) about the president of the United States sometimes having to stand naked. I was that kind of nineteen year old I'm afraid- I quoted Chuck D in the same essay. Pretentious, moi?! They let me progress onto the second year of the course too). He skewered culture, politics, society, consumerism, modern life. The music- some still based in acoustic guitar folk and some full electric mid 60s rock- is wild, alive and endlessly moving.
I'm not sure I can pick between Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. The former contains Maggie's Farm, a song Dylan nailed in a single take in the studio. At Newport it was the motherlode, the moment Dylan plugged in and pissed off the purists. Too loud. Too much. Mike Bloomfield's lead guitar. Pete Seeger and his supposed attempt to cut the power with an axe. It's the climax of A Complete Unknown. It's in Scorsese's documentary too. And it's here, introduced by Pete Seeger...
The Moonlandingz have returned with their first single in eight years. The Moonlandingz are a trio- Lias Saoudi (Fat White Family, Decius), Adrian Flanagan (Acid Klaus) and Dean Honer (All Seeing I, Add N To X)- and have cooked up The Sign Of A Man, with Lias in fine form on vocals over hyperactive Europop (not far musically from last year's Acid Klaus single on GLS). The video looks like New Order's True Faith crossed with Bauhaus (the design school not the goth band). It's all good fun and an album is promised later this year. There won't be many songs this year dissecting modern masculinity while containing the line 'if you take out the bins'.
Lias is busy with Decius as well. Birth Of A Smirk is the second single ahead of their second album out this Friday, a housed up song with with more 80s vibes, this time Visage but spliced with bleep techno. Everything Lias is involved with is gold- last year's Fat White Family album for a recent example, not mention last autumn's Decius single Walking In The Heat, in which Lias had fun cleaning the car.
Back in October I posted Tannis Root, a folky instrumental by Matt Deighton that appeared on a Moonboots Balearic compilation. Matt was in 90s Acid Jazzers Mother Earth, played with Paul Weller in his 90s bands and briefly filled in when Noel Gallagher walked out of Oasis. As well as all of that though, he's recorded several solo albums that I was aware of but hadn't heard. Someone said I should start with his 1995 album Villagers, handily re- released by Acid Jazz in 2021.
Villagers was Matt's debut solo album and in many ways an album out of time. Folk wasn't a big deal in the mid- 90s. Matt's influences on the album- Nick Drake, John Martyn, Bill Fay, Davy Graham- were largely unre- discovered. The album has a distinctive magic to it- folk guitars, low key, beautiful songs sung beautifully, some flute, all gentle and unassuming, and with the odd bit of Mod soul/ funk creeping in (you can hear why Weller employed him, especially on opening song Good For Us- but Weller was slightly folky too at this point too, not least on Wild Wood's title track). It's crossed the decades very nicely- thirty years since its release and the folk sound of Villager has come around, gone again and come back. This song, two songs really but played together as a medley, is as good as anything on it, ten minutes of bucolic English folk with a weariness to the tune and the words but with the hint of better days to come. You can listen to and buy the remastered Villager at Bandcamp.
Another Sunday mix of edits to follow the one from two weeks ago (here). The first one was quite thumpy. This one is more dubbed out, more blissed out and laid back, more drifty, featuring a similar and familiar cast of edit- creators. There's plenty of material unused sitting in my downloads folders too so volume three is only a matter of time.
The Los Lopez edit of The Jesus And Mary Chain's 9 Million Rainy Days first came my way well over a decade ago, 2013 I think, Jim and William's misanthropy/ existential despair set to an electronic throb. 'As far as I can tell/ I'm being dragged from here to hell/ All my time in hell is spent with you', Jim mutters (on 1987's Darklands originally). This is the diametric opposite of the feelings and sentiment expressed in the widescreen, gloriously romantic, panoramic love that propels the fourth track in this mix.
Jesse Fahnestock is 10:40. He recut a very early Verve song, One Way To Go (a B-side to the Wigan quartet's first release, the magnificent sky scraping northern psychedelia of All In The Mind). Jesse looped it up and set the controls for the heart of the dub. On hearing it I said to Jesse he should re- edit all of the early Verve's music as dub extravaganzas- A Dub In Heaven. I'm still waiting. His edit of The Beta Band's Inner Meet Me came out on Paisley Dark in 2021, a song from The Patty Patty Sound, one of those unearthly EPs The Beta Band released in 1997/ 1998 when they looked like the future of leftfield music, a completely new way of doing things.
Coyote's edit of Nocturn was one of my favourite records of 2022, a swooning, deep sea dive into the cosmos. Or something. Their Magic Wand edit releases, vinyl only, are always top drawer. I love the way it starts off with one beat and then switches tempo, like the speed selector being suddenly flipped from 33 to 45. Nocturn was on Kate's 2005 album Aerial. 'We stand in the Atlantic/ We become panoramic/ We tire of the city/ We tire of it all/ We long for that just something more'. Yep, I know that feeling.
Steppers Rock came out on the recently revived Eclectics label, based in Bournemouth and the start of what promises to be one to watch.
Totem Edits are the work of Leo Zero and Justin Deighton, a weekly treasure trove. Last week they dropped a Balearic/ cowboy stomp edit of Big Audio Dynamite's Medicine Show (an all timer of a song for me). Air (from a week earlier) is John Martyn's Solid Air recut beautifully. I've been in a John Martyn phase recently, Solid Air and One World. By all accounts a terrible and flawed person but the music...
Edit To The Siren performs the possibly sacrilegious feat of taking This Mortal Coil's Song To The Siren and turns it into a dubbed out/ late night Balearic treat. The work of In The Valley. Wobbly.
In Wim Wenders 1984 film Paris, Texas, Harry Dean Stanton wanders around the West Texas desert, disheveled and bewildered. He collapses in a convenience store and via his wallet he is identified as Travis Henderson. Travis' brother in Los Angeles is contacted and he comes and picks him up. He had not heard from Travis for four years and believed him to be dead. Gradually, the story unfolds. Travis is re- united with his son and then goes to Houston to look for Jane, Hunter's mother and Travis' ex (Nastassja Kinsky), who it turns out is working in a peep show club.
Paris, Texas is a very visual film. Harry Dean Stanton's face and baseball cap. The desert. Nastassja's blonde hair and bright pink jumper. The sunsets over L.A. Billboards and shop fronts. But it's also very much defined by its soundtrack, Ry Cooder's music, the Tex- Mex songs, the dialogue included in the soundtrack including the famous eight minute long 'I knew these people...' speech (and the point at which after Travis has talked to Jane on the phone at the peep show club for several minutes, Jane sighs, 'yep, I know that feeling', sampled by Andrew Weatherall on Screamadelica as the endnote of I''m Coming Down. I knew these people... was also sampled by The Orb and others).
As an album Ry Cooder's songs and score work on their own. Listening to it makes one want to watch the film again of course- never a bad thing. Ry Cooder's playing- slide guitar, Tex Mex blues, finger picking, reverb- is perfect, evoking Travis and Jane's loss and melancholy, and the vast emptiness of the desert. Wenders placed ambient microphones to pick up the sound of the desert and the wind. Cooder discovered the desert wind is in E- flat so he tuned all the instruments to that note, Cooder's guitar pitched to the key of the wind.
Cancion Mixteca is a Mexican folk song, written by Jose Lopez Alvarez between 1912 and 1915. It has become the song for many Mexicans who have left their homeland, a song of homesickness. In the film and on the soundtrack Harry Dean Stanton sings it, with Cooder on guitar and piano.
'So far am I from the land where I was born! Immense nostalgia invades my thoughts, and, to see myself, as lone and dismal as leaf on the wind, I would that I'd weep ‒ I would that I'd die ‒ out of sorrow!
O land of sunshine! I sigh for‐to see you. Now that, far from you, I live without light ‒ without love. And, to see myself, as lone and dismal as leaf on the wind, I would that I'd weep ‒ I would that I'd die ‒ out of sorrow!'
Massive Attack have re- circled into my musical orbit recently. 3D (Robert del Naja) turned sixty this week, as marked by Khayem at Dubhed, their music appeared on the TV the other night while watching the U.S.'s dystopian future become its present, and some friends saw them play live at the end of November (an experience described variously as 'dour as fuck', 'sensory overload' and 'amazing but a bit heavy in places'). When I go to Massive Attack I tend to reach for Blue Lines, Protection and No Protection but recently I've been revisiting some of the later parts of their back catalogue.
In 2010 Massive Attack released Heligoland, their fifth album, an album that saw the return of Daddy G to the band and a slew of guest vocalists and musicians- Damon Albarn, the almost ever present Horace Andy, Martina Topley- Bird, Guy Garvey, TV On The Radio's Tunde Adebimpe and Hope Sandoval. Hope sang on a song called Paradise Circus, one of the albums highlights, Hope's voice a sliver of light in Massive Attack's darkness. Not that the lyrics are remotely light- Paradise Circus is a song about sin and the devil. The shuffly trip hop drums and all pervading gloom are very slightly side lit by a piano and cinematic guitar line.
There was a follow remix package of remixes, extra tracks on the digital release with a very smart Gui Boratto remix of Paradise Circus, skippy beats, growly bass, guitars, strings and Hope's vocal.
Massive Attack waited six years before following Heligoland. In 2016 they put out a four track EP, Ritual Spirit, this time getting Tricky back on board along with Young Fathers, Roots Manuva and singer Azekel. The four tracks, out on 12" and all done and dusted in seventeen minutes, had them back at the peak of their 21st century powers. On the title track Azekel provides a gorgeous upper register vocal singing words that sound almost Shakespearean- 'Who'll mend this broke beat star? Whose strength do I speak of?'. The drums and strings simmer with the usual menace and disquiet.
Last week I wrote about Viva Hinds by Hinds, an album from 2024 that I got into at the start of this year following a tip off from a friend, JC (of The Vinyl Villain fame). This is the second album from 2024 that has sound tracked early 2025, another tip off, this time from Khayem at Dubhed. I've been a big fan of Seahawks for several years but their latest album had passed me by on release in early December. I bought it a month later, after hearing the title track Time Enough For Love.
In 2022 Seahawks (Pete Fowler and John Tye) arrived in L.A. to record with the intention of making 'an exploration of visionary California'. Both were struck down by illness, Fowler being hospitalised and bedridden. The album they made when they were better has the feel of a fever dream, a sense of drift and weightlessness that make the ten tracks feel very fluid- this liquid, post- sickness psychedelic ambience persists across the whole record, organs, synths and Fender Rhodes shimmering and bubbling. Everything feels like its just out of touch and slightly out of focus. The track above opens the album, washes of synth, the pitter patter of drums, a warm bass padding away and piano keys dappled on top.
A lot has happened in Los Angeles since Seahawks made this album. Some friends of this blog have been affected by the fires there this month. Today, after natural disaster, they wake up to day three of the Trump presidency part two. Good luck to all of you out there.
R.E.M.'s album Up is one I've developed a connection with recently. I found a copy on CD for £3 in a second hand shop early on in the new year (the one I bought years back I realised a while ago had gone missing somewhere along the line). It's an album I've often in the past found difficult to love but I know it also has its fans. This time around, playing it in the car while driving to and from work much of it struck a chord in a way it hasn't done before.
Up was released at the end of October 1998. This was a month before Isaac was born and he spent the first few weeks of his life in hospital so by the time I got my head back into music mode I think Up had passed me by. Other bands were doing for me what R.E.M. used to do- Grandaddy and Belle and Sebastian both spring to mind and I wasn't listening to that much guitar based music either. Also, R.E.M. weren't exactly selling Up. It was the first album without Bill Berry, got some mixed reviews and the making of it was problematic for the three existing members. Michael Stipe said in an interview that 'a dog with three legs is still a dog', which maybe wasn't the vote of confidence he thought it was.
Berry left the band after suffering an aneurysm on stage but told the other three that if it meant R.E.M. finishing, he'd stay- which put them in the position of having to carry on to allow Bill to leave. Not ideal. Peter Buck had been buying up synths and keyboards and was keen, as he often had been previously, to change the sound and do something different but the making of the album was fractious and they nearly split making it. The first song was written, recorded and mixed in a day (album opener Airportman) but after that they struggled. They couldn't rehearse without Berry and tried drum machines and session drummers (both on the songs on the album along with Buck drumming). Later on Stipe got a bad case of writer's block. Scott Litt, who produced their previous five albums, was gone too. Parts of Up feel and sound like they were written in the studio, clock ticking, the musicians having to come up with something, anything...
The previous album, New Adventures In Hi- Fi, had been written on the road at soundchecks and in hotel rooms. The writing process had been disrupted further by Berry's departure. He wasn't just the drummer but a key part of R.E.M.'s songwriting. Often Buck and Berry would play together, knocking ideas and arrangements around before Mike Mills would come in and add bass and organ. Now they were a three piece in the studio trying to make an album that embraced electronics. The sense of it being a bit incomplete or unfinished is added to by the inclusion on the album of several fairly non- descript songs that drift from start to finish. Quite a few of the songs end in a buzz of noise and feedback, as if they'd forgotten how to end a song. The last song, Falls To Climb, just sort of ends, an anti- climax of a song (and previous albums had had really strong closing songs- Electrolite, Find The River, Me In Honey- that felt like finales). Up also suffers from being fourteen songs and sixty six minutes long, a victim of the bloated 90s CD album, with extra time on the disc to fill. A ten track, two sided vinyl album could have been a much stronger album.
Despite all of this Up really has some moments and they struck me last week in the car. It was almost like hearing the album anew, it being so long since I'd heard it and not having any real emotional connection to it. Opener Airportman sets the tone, with ambient keys and noise,a Brian Eno like feel and Stipe singing of a man permanently in transit. Lotus is a strong song, Peter Buck's minimalist keys and live drums behind Stipe's surreal lyrics clicking together- a subtle groove, some hey heys, a gnarly guitar topline, and Michael singing in a deeper register, a step away from the rock star persona he'd had played with on Monster and New Adventures In Hi- Fi. No surprise it was the album's second single after the catchy and melodic pop- rock of Daysleeper.
Four songs in comes Hope, a distorted analogue keyboard sound repeating, the tip tap of a drum machine and Stipe at his most Stipe- like, a song about looking for something- meaning, friendship, something to do, a way to live and stay alive. There's some pre- millennial tension in there too. It's a song that catches fire, shifts the album forwards, shakes the bones a little.
Hope's rhythm and vocal were so close to Leonard Cohen's Suzanne they gave him a writing credit (although Suicide's organ sound is almost as much the basis of the song as Cohen). It has that melancholic hopefulness that R.E.M. were so good at. Cohen too.
Past Hope there's more songs that stood out for me- The Apologist (a song that could have been a Monster or New Adventures throwback to these ears), Sad Professor (acoustic guitars, echo, a character study) and the Patti Smith inspired Walk Unafraid, the only song on Up that actually sounds up, one that shows they really were looking for a new sound, to do something different and that despite all the difficulties they encountered recording Up the magic was still present.
Daysleeper sounds woozy, a slightly dislocated vocal that then swells with the music, Buck picking away at his guitar, a song for nightshift workers and their messed up rhythms. 'I cried the other night', Stipe sings at the breakdown, 'I can't even say why' and it sounds absolutely genuine.
Funny thing music isn't it. I've had a very ambivalent relationship with Up since 1998 and last week it really made some kind of sense to me- a flawed but interesting album with enough good songs to keep me letting it go back to the beginning when Falls To Climb ran out. It feels like maybe the last album they made where they really wanted to make art, to write songs that they cared about. After Up each album felt like they were making an album because that's what you do, because Warners wanted one, because they didn't know when or how to stop. Reveal, Around The Sun, Accelerate, Collapse Into Now- they have one or two songs each but are overworked or overproduced or a deliberate attempt to go back to basics. Each one seems like a case of diminishing returns and none of them feels right to me- but Up does.
