music

Swallowed up by the sound: current spins

/ Tony / 4 Comments

As the last few posts have had a somewhat singular artist / track focus and while I’m still in a posting stage of mind, I figured it was fitting to share what’s been on heavy rotation of late.

Pearl Jam – Waiting For Stevie

I haven’t talked about Dark Matter here in any real way yet. I probably will. I’ve played the arse off it since securing a copy on RSD. Yeah, Andrew Watt is still shit at capturing drums and loves compression just that little too much but, without wanting to come across like a pretentious audiophile, it really comes alive on vinyl. ‘Waiting For Stevie’ was much-hyped by those who’d attended the listening parties and it’s a fantastic centrepiece complete with that early ’90s vibe and extended outro.

Buffalo Tom – Come Closer

A new Buffalo Tom album announcement has long been another of those that gets me to the pre-order button pronto. Their 10th album Jump Rope is another late-career gem that leans more to the acoustic but still smoulders in all the right place, their sound perfectly suiting the more mature tinges to their songs as they age like a fine wine.

Arrested Development – Mr Wendal

More of that great early ’90s hip hop that I’ve been enjoying with my son: Arrested Development’s 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life Of… has been a regular in the walkman since we caught this one randomly on the radio a while back.

Drop Nineteens – Winona

Finding out that Drop Nineteens’ 1992 album Delaware had been reissued meant it was another no-brainer of a purchase. Often pigeonholed as shoegaze, while that genre’s influence on the guitars is clear, there’s something unique about the way they merged it with the alt/college rock bite that was on the upswing.

The Mysterines – Sink Ya Teeth

Not sure why the new album from The Mysterines has been pushed back but current single ‘Sink Ya Teeth’ has been getting a good bit of traction on the airwaves and hits the right spots for me.

Tracks: Telegraph Road

/ Tony / 3 Comments

YouTube and its algorithm are pretty confident that I want to see seemingly every ‘The Late Show’ guest’s answers to that show’s Colbert Questionert. While puzzling over why an audience seems to whoop and applaud someone’s take on the ‘best sandwich’ is one way to pass the minutes that make up a dull day, the one that makes me wonder is “you only get one song to listen to for the rest of your life: what is it?” The idea that if you could only listen to one song – not all the time, mind, just that if you go to listen to music it will only be this song – is tougher for some than others.

In a way this occasionally picked up, more often forgotten series ‘Tracks’ is my way of highlighting those songs that mean enough to me to probably wind up on a short list. I suppose that I’d want it to be a good long song with lots of parts and yet manages to sustain your ear and pleasure throughout. One that hits both an emotional collection as well as being just a bloody good song. Something, perhaps, like Dire Straits’ ‘Telegraph Road’. I’m not saying that if I were to ever be asked ‘apples or oranges?’ this would be my answer but it’s certainly on the list.

I can’t remember the very first time I heard ‘Telegraph Road’ but I would’ve been young. It would have been on the cassette of Dire Straits song that my dad had in his car which, in turn, had been put together by his friend from the LPs. Telegraph Road had a tiny scratch on it. I know this to be the case rather than a blip in the tape because when that family friend was killed and the LPs became my dad’s – the scuff at “I’ve seen desperation” meant it forever jumped to “see it again.” A tiny detail but one that’s etched as clear in my memory as it is on the wax.

That means that – basing this on the passing of the aforementioned family friend – I’ve been hooked on this song for nearly four decades. It could explain where my love of a slow-burn, building song comes from. Hell you could even extrapolate further to whether that, in turn, was where my lean toward post-rock and its structures of multifaceted songs that rise and fall and span nearly quarter of an hour comes from. Either way, ‘Telegraph Road’ and I go way back.

Nearly quarter of an hour… 14 minutes and 18 seconds to be precise. Cosied up with ‘Private Investigations’ on side one of Dire Straits’ finest record Love Over Gold. This epic came to Knopfler (and is also his second song in this series) while sat in the front of a tour bus driving down the actual Telegraph Road – a 70 mile route in Michigan – and happened to be reading Growth of the Soil, Knut Hamsun’s novel about a man who finds a patch of soil in rural Norway, settles down and sets up his home. Mark Knopfler put the two together has he travelled down the road that “just went on and on and on forever, it’s like what they call linear development … I wondered how that road must have been when it started, what it must have first been like … I just put that book together and the place where I was. I was actually sitting in the front of the tour bus at the time.”

Across the song, Knopfler narrates the rise, fall, consumption by modernity – as that track becomes a six-lane monster – and collapse of Telegraph Road (a proxy for Detroit) but it’s the way in which his story is so beautifully synched to the arrangement that makes ‘Telegraph Road’ so magical for me. It starts of with a simple, single note before gradually building up in terms of both instrumentation (it’s nearly a minute before Knopfler’s resonator guitar arrives) and melody. The main theme starts close to two minutes in. There are thunder claps in there, brilliant drumming from Pick Withers (this song would be his last recording for the band) particularly with the explosive hit after ‘then there was a war.’ Knopfler’s guitar work builds apace and lets go in two terrific solos.

There is no realistic way for me to put an estimate on the number of times I’ve heard ‘Telegraph Road’. Much like Dark Side of the Moon it’s one of those musical marks in my life that seems to have been ever present. What I do know is that no matter what that number is, whenever it comes on shuffle in the car I still listen transfixed throughout and that my copy of Love Over Gold (which doesn’t jump the ‘..explode into flames, and I..’ part) has had many a spin. I can also say that their recent remastering campaign means listening to it again on a good pair of headphones is pretty amazing. Whether that means that this song is the one I’d choose to be the only song I can listen to again… well, that’s still undecided but it’s definitely a contender.

Love Over Gold, Dire Strait’s fourth (and best) album was their last to feature original drummer Pick Withers who felt the band was becoming too loud and wanted to get off the treadmill. Rhythm guitarist David Knopfler had already left under less pleasant circumstances. As such Love Over Gold serves as a transitional record for the band as the last of the original members were augmented by new players including Alan Clark on keyboards as Knopfler’s compositions grew in scope and the band evolved into that which would go on to record Brothers In Arms, trot around stadiums around the world, taking a break, coming back to do it all again one more time with On Every Street before Knopfler decided that maybe Pick Withers was right – it was all getting a bit loud and time to get off. Dire Straits have sold an estimated 120 million records, been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (whatever that really means) but are exceedingly unlikely to reunite.

I fear that I’m ordinary, just like everyone – Five From The Smashing Pumpkins

/ Tony / 24 Comments

I’ve been spending a lot of time with The Smashing Pumpkins’ music recently. To be more specific, that of their first ‘run’. You know, that glorious period captured on Rotten Apples from 1991 thru 2000. My wife – in true enabler fashion – got a bit trigger happy in Rough Trade last year when she saw the Melon Collie And The Infinite Sadness box and, with a couple of purchases since their albums to that point now sit in my record collection and indulged in a plenty.

Never knowingly non-grandiose, there was always something different about Smashing Pumpkins that stood them apart from the pack in that golden era of alt. rock in the early nineties. There’s wasn’t the raw angst of those bands hailing from the Pacific North West, instead they proffered a more richly layered and often, well, fucking gorgeous sound propelled by the distinctive voice and brilliant guitar work of Billy Corgan. The rest of the band – James Iha, Jimmy Chamberlain and D’arcy Wretzky – always looked cool as hell while Corgan maintained the look of someone apart. I was chatting about the band this weekend with the owner of my record store of choice and he maintains that Billy, while alway a bit weird, went full-on knobhead when he shaved off his hair. I think he has a point.

So, harkening back to a time when he was just a bit of a pretentious control-freak rather than full-on David Icke supporting lunatic, I thought I’d drop five examples of tunes from that period they could do no wrong while steering clear of the obvious, but still great, choices of ‘Today’, ‘Tonight, Tonight’, ‘Disarm’ etc. It’s also worth pointing out first that ‘Mayonaise’ remains the single best thing they’ve put to tape but having already blogged about that, I won’t do so again here.

Bury Me

First album Gish is full of absolute belters of which ‘Bury Me’ is a great example of the band’s harder side – delivering pummelling riffs that would be at home on a Soundgarden album underpinned with Corgan’s innate ability to unleash a guitar solo and drop down to a nagging melody and expansiveness of sound inside of four and a half minutes.

Drown

Eight and a bit minutes of brilliance complete with feedback and an E-Bow solo, on an already unimpeachable collection, ‘Drown’ felt like an outlier then on the Seattle-focused Singles soundtrack and still feels like one today in the same way as Paul Westerberg’s cuts. It is, however, a massive early highlight. It was written after Gish and serves as a bridge between that album and their next. Due to label politics – Alice In Chains etc were on Epic as was the soundtrack – it was never released as a single despite radio love. Second only to Mayoinaise for me.

Soma

A rare Corgan / Iha co-write, ‘Soma’ is the centrepiece of Siamese Dream – a six and a half minute song that manages to encapsulate every characteristic of the band’s sound, managing to move from the tender to ferocious with a dynamic few could muster.

Starla

They’d only released two studio album when Pisces Iscariot arrived in 1994 as a collection of B-sides and previously unreleased songs to demonstrate that The Smashing Pumpkins had tunes to spare before we even knew what 1995 would bring. With songs that are almost as strong as those released as many already released, Pisces Iscariot is that rarest of things – an ‘odds and sods’ album that’s nearly essential. ‘Starla’ is an 11-minute epic that should be entered as evidence that Corgan was one of the era’s greatest rock guitarists.

Muzzle

How to choose a song from the behemoth that is Melon Collie And The Infinite Sadness? A 28 song double album with very little filler… One of the most ambitious and indulgent albums out there, a slab of great music that’s stocked to folds with tunes songs including ‘Tonight, Tonight’, ‘1979’, ‘Zero’, ‘Bullet with Butterfly Wings’, ‘Thirty Three’, ‘Porcelina Of The Vast Oceans’….. well, I really like ‘Muzzle’ so let’s go with that.

We watch the world from the padded cell: Dead Man’s Pop and The Replacements’ revision of history

/ Tony / 2 Comments

You know I get the feeling that Paul Westerberg has quietly retired from music. It would be a real shame if that’s the case, he’s a massively over-looked songwriter of particular skill both across his extensive solo catalogue and, most famously, with The Replacements.

Despite Westerberg’s songwriting chops and the band’s impact on their fans, many of whom would go on to form their own bands and achieve the level of success that eluded The Replacements during their initial run from 1979-1991. Many a pontification has already been made about why that break-through success always seemed, if you will, within their reach never occurred. Was it bad timing? Was it their own self-destructive tendencies?

It could be all of those things but more likely, as Westerberg would surmise in an interview to promote their temporary 2015 reunion and string of shows: “It was reprehensible some of the things they wanted us to do that were supposed to make our career bigger and ultimately make them the money. I swear to God we tried several times to get in line with that and we just couldn’t do it. Our personalities would not allow us to do that thing.”

That’s not to say that, toward the end, they didn’t try after all. Signed to Sire in 1985, their third record for the label Don’t Tell A Soul was a clear attempt at making The Replacments ‘hit’ – presumably at this point the execs were shouting louder than the fans. I’ve always had a lot of time for Don’t Tell A Soul – it contains some of their finest songs and is another clear jump in Westerberg’s songwriting evolution. For the first time they played it ‘straight’ across a whole album and there’s a notable shift toward more a mature take on subject matter.

The problem with Don’t Tell A Soul, though, wasn’t the songs. It lay in the sound. As per seemingly all their releases to date, The Replacements had…. issues with finding the right producer. In this case it was original producer Tony Berg being swapped out for Matt Wallace. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, the record company decided to give the tapes to a chap called Chris Lord-Alge to mix. Chris, in his wisdom, decided to give The Replacements a cavernous, overly lacquered mix that swamped the songs in FM wash and robbed made them sound dated almost as soon as the album hit shelves.

If there were a prison for musical crimes, Chris Lord-Alge would still be serving time for his massacre of Don’t Tell A Soul‘s songs. While I’ve always had a soft spot for this album it’s always been hard to get past the poor mixing of great songs like, say, ‘Inherit The Earth’ (from which the album’s title is taken).

Thankfully, though, we no longer have to. The critical and, relative, commercial success of the Rhino release of For Sale: Live at Maxwell’s made that label release that there was still a love and hunger for archival Replacements material – Dead Man’s Pop arrived in 2019 and is a vital piece of the puzzle.

Yes, there’s the usual live recording and outtakes discs (pretty much everything recording during the Don’t Tell a Soul sessions including tracks with a visiting – and drunk – Tom Waits) that typically accompany such a release but what makes Dead Man’s Pop such a regular play for me is that it features the Matt Wallace mix of the album, restored as intended at the time and original sequencing.

With Lord-Alge’s studio bodging stripped from its songs, Don’t Tell a Soul becomes nothing short of a revelation for Replacements fans. It feels rawer and moodier than Pleased To Meet Me but its force places it close to Tim while the subject matter and streamlined songwriting clearly mark it as the work of a more mature band that are clearly pushing forward.

It still retains the ragged beauty that you’d associate with the band, if anything the removal of the studio glitter has revealed more that that. ‘Talent Show’ now begins with behind-the-scenes noise and the band chatting and laughing as they tune their equipment.

This human element, an earthier quality to the mix and sound, is on show throughout the album. The effect is that these songs suddenly sound more natural and organic compared to their previous incarnations, even to the point that the overtly FM-sounding songs like ‘Back to Back’ suddenly feel like they come from the same band that made ‘Bastards of Young’, just one that’s reaching for a higher place musically.

For me the version of Don’t Tell A Soul revealed as part of this box set has been highly addictive – even if it’s taken me so long to write about it. I’d never felt the songs got the attention or credit they deserved but thanks to this recasting the album has been removed from the mists of the late ’80s swamp and given a sound that no longer kneecaps some of their best songs. As bassist Tommy Stinson puts it: “maybe we’ll now sound like a band that stood the test of time.”

If you haven’t heard Don’t Tell A Soul in a while, or at all, do yourself a favour and wrap your lugholes around Dead Man’s Pop.

Twelve Things for Twelve Years

/ Tony / 3 Comments

I receive a notification here a few days back (not quite a dozen) that I registered this blog twelve years ago. That’s quite a while ago though my current lapsed-blogger status means that there isn’t quite the multitude of posts that duration would normally indicate.

With both these facts in mind and that I didn’t get around to adding to the plethora of ‘Best of 2023’ lists that hurtled around December and early Jan, I thought I’d use this as an occasion to mix things up a little and share a dozen things within this blog’s wheelhouse that stood out in those twelve months of last year.

I’ll kick off with live music as the first point. Catching My Morning Jacket live, on the first show of their European tour and first in the UK for something like a decade, was an absolutely joyous experience. Live albums and their reputation as a great live act built the expectations and they thoroughly delivered. A belter of a Z-heavy set that kicked off with ‘Gideon’ and circled favourites like ‘Anytime’ and ‘Holdin’ on to Black Metal’ as well as ‘Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Pt.2’ made it magical on many levels but chief amongst them was that it was a rare date night with my wife and it’s a song that has a lot of personal connections (If you’re interested I chatted to the wonderful Geoff Stephen about just that).

If I think of films across 2023 my thoughts turn to those that I’ve added to the ‘to watch’ list but haven’t gotten round to. It’s safe to say that it’s more down to finding time – ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ looks like the mutt’s nuts but finding time for that or ‘Oppenheimer’, for example. I did start ‘The Poor Things’ but that didn’t sit well with me and I’ve yet to return to it a month on. The same, sadly, can be said for ‘Asteroid City’. Then again, of the couple I caught at the cinema rather than the couch, a real stand out was ‘The Boy and the Heron’. I fucking love a Studio Ghibli film and while it’s just over two hours long it’s just gorgeous in so many ways. I adore ‘The Wind Rises’ and thought that a beautiful ‘farewell’ from Hayao Miyazaki but if this is a thing to behold even if it isn’t his final film afterall.

We also caught Seth Rogen’s take on those heroes in a half shell ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem’ – a cool visual style and a great slab of nostalgia but the really cool stand out point for me was the soundtrack and how it leaned into that great ’90s hip hop era of De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest and its efforts to introduce these to a younger generation of ears meant my son has been requesting them so the turntable will often be occupied by just that.

It’ll come as no surprise that I listened to a good chunk of post-rock in 2023 and it was also the year of much-anticipated new music from two acts within that genre so, counting for two of these twelve points were the new albums from Explosions In The Sky and Sigur Rós, both of which followed lengthy gaps between studio efforts. While very different to each other, both End (for which the preceding announcement of End Tour caused many a concern that they EITS were calling it quits) and Átta (it’s Icelandic for ‘8’ as this is Sigur Rós’ eighth album) were well worth the weight and delivered what makes each of them great in spades.

I’ve slowed my reading of late, tackling heavier and heftier books that take a bit longer to chew through so I’m averaging maybe 25 in a year. On the fiction front a couple of stand out points were both books I was drawn to at random. Natsuo Krino’s Out is a slab of Japanese crime fiction that’s both familiar and yet like nothing I’ve read before. It’s the story of four women with hard lives that work the graveyard shift at a bento factory and how a random act of violence – one of them kills her husband – and the subsequent involvement of the others to dispose of the body and hide the crime. It’s an absolutely brilliant contemporary novel and I’m keen to find more of her work.

2023 was a year of more travel then in previous years, all of it aided by boat. I took (and take) as much advantage of the ease and cheapness (a return crossing in the car costing less than a return for three to London) of getting over in the ferry and where you can be within an hour or so of driving. However, while on a cruise in the Med and having finished the books I’d taken with me I found myself staring at the cover of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in the ship’s library. How this hadn’t cropped up in my reading to date or at uni all those years (ok, decades now) ago I will never know but holy-fuck what a book. As the blurb says “one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century.” I hadn’t finished it when we arrive back in the UK so drove into town the next day and picked up a new copy from the bookshop so I could do so asap.

Sticking with books(ish) for point 8 of these 12… I found myself with an itch to find out more about the Vietnam War last year. After finding they’d been removed from Netflix I located episodes of Ken Burns’ ‘The Vietnam War’ elsewhere and proceeded to reabsorb. But that wasn’t enough to scratch that itch. In a couple of bookshops in Oxford I picked up a few books I’d been on the hunt for. As with the WW2 books in my library’s history section, I’ve found it’s the personal accounts that make the most enlightening and gripping of reads but I really can’t abide those ‘guts and glory’ takes. So, along with the brilliant If I Die In A Combat Zone by Tim O’Brien, I picked up and hungrily devoured Robert Mason’s Chickenhawk and it’s that which is the standout point for me in the year’s non-fiction reading. More than ‘just’ a helicopter pilot’s diary this is an eye-opening account of what it’s like to fly over 1,000 assault missions in what was a clusterfuck-after-clusterfuck of a war and the devastating impact it can have told by a man that’s got a gift for detail and narrative. I know he’s got a follow-up out there and if I can get my hands on it at a decent price I’ll do just that.

Thanks to those aforementioned ‘Best of 2023’ lists there were a couple of late-year discoveries in what I guess was once the ‘Americana’ bucket that I’m oft inclined to look in, both from the same magazine’s CD of the year’s highlights and both from artists that have been around a while but never in my ears to that point. However, both Israel Nash and Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit’s 2023 albums got plenty a listen to as a result. Nash’s Ozarker and Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit’s Weathervanes combine what I like about that genre – great storytelling and a certain kind of heartland, big-sky vibe and, in both cases here, underpinned by some fucking tasty guitar work.

While I’ve mentioned a couple of stand out post-rock albums it’s worth giving a shout to some of those other albums of 2023 that got plenty a spin and stood out from the flock – there were quite a few great albums last year.

Slowdive’s Everything Is Alive was a real heavy-rotation holder. The second album of their comeback and while 2017’s self-titled album felt like a real victory-lap and celebration, Everything Is Alive pushes further into the electronic vibe that they’d left off with on 1995’s Pygmalion but with a warmer, lush sound aided by Shawn Everett (who’s engineered the likes of The War On Drugs) though it sounds like a key part of his job was in convincing Neil Halstead when to stop tinkering.

Blondshell – the musical project of Sabrina Teitelbaum – dropped her self-titled debut in the early part of the year and it got a lot of spins here even if its first-quarter release meant it got left off some of those end of year lists. Brisk and to the point (frustratingly she’d issue an expanded version later in the year with four new songs), Blondshell‘s nine tunes harken back to that ’90s angst and bite of Hole and PJ Harvey yet feel more like a contemporary reinvention of the vibe rather than an outright lifting of it.

The final point that I’ll make is perhaps surprising but then it was also that it was a surprise in itself that one of the albums I listened to most in 2023 was a new Foo Fighters record. I remember upon hearing of Taylor Hawkins’ passing that I figured the only way the band could go on would be with Dave sitting on the drums for albums and with a fucking good session player joining for live. Actually ‘replacing’ Taylor would’ve been unthinkable.

What I couldn’t have predicted would be just how fucking good But Here We Are turned out to be and how addictive I’ve found it. It’s not an occasion anyone would want to step up to but the Foos did just that and then some – Grohl lyrically wrestling with questions of grief, mortality and the big ‘what now?’ in the face of losing two people close to him against some of the most compelling and, frankly, brilliant tunes of their career. I’ve prattled enough about this album in a rare (for here) review so won’t do so again but having recently added both The Colour and the Shape and Wasting Light to my vinyl collection I’d say that this sits with those as one of the best they’ve made.

New things from old friends

/ Tony / 2 Comments

In the interest of fairness, after my recent clump of new music from new bands, it’s probably about time to highlight such offerings from acts more familiar to the collective ear.

Pearl Jam – Dark Matter

I couldn’t be considered a Pearl Jam fan if I a) hadn’t listened to this a good few times since it appeared last week and b) didn’t pop it up the top of this list. Oddly, while it seems to be going down well enough (one headline review: ‘Song of the Week: “Dark Matter” – Put Some Fucking Respect on Pearl Jam’s Name’) I’m not quite beside myself about this. It’s pretty good and promises some heft but I’m wary about Andrew Watt’s involvement. Sonically everything he touches sounds like over-produced shlock. While the notion of Pearl Jam working at speed and not over-labouring can be good, their best records are those that lean into the depths in terms of arrangement and sound and I don’t think Watt is the man for the job. Don’t get me wrong – I’ll be spinning it as soon as possible and hope to be proven wrong.

J Mascis – What Do We Do Now

Whether it’s Dinosaur Jr or J Mascis solo, J’s album’s are amongst those I’ll hit pre-order on without hearing a thing and I’m never disappointed. Of his recent solo offerings What Do We Do Now – also highlighted by Christian – feels the closest to ‘band’ than others, with more gorgeous guitar solos than we deserve and a lovely rich sound, it’s already had many a play through and will no doubt have more before the year is out.

Sunny Day Real Estate – Novum Vetus

It’s hard to know what’s more addictive right now, this fucking brilliant video or this fucking brilliant new song from Sunny Day Real Estate. I say ‘new’ – it’s a song that they’d been kicking around since 1998 but was only recently bought back into play and expanded into this seven minute epic as they set down a live rack-by-track re-recording of their debut Diary.

Billy Joel – Turn The Lights Back On

Shall I give what’ll probably be the 265th blog take on the first Billy Joel song in nearly two decades? Nah. It’s surprising, it’s pretty damn good and whether there’ll be more is anyone’s guess (I reckon not).

The Mysterines – Stray

A new Mysterines album is due this year – their 2022 album Reeling was a real promising start – and I get the feeling we’re up for darker and heavier.

Talking Tracks – I’m going to scream….

/ Tony / 2 Comments

Believe it or not, I love talking about music. I recently had the genuine pleasure of sitting down with Geoff to do just that for his The 1002nd Album podcast to talk about a track that’s very close to my heart. I follow only a few podcasts but I’ve been enjoying Geoff’s for some time now so I was delighted to have a chat with the man himself.

You can check it out here, should you so wish, and be sure follow the1002ndalbum podcast wherever you usually get such thing for some great takes.

Tracks: Beaux Dimanches

/ Tony / 1 Comment

Blowing the dust off the cartridge to plug the ‘Tracks‘ format wherein I spotlight a particular song that stands out in my mental jukebox and sits amongst my favourites back into action. Are these favourite songs? I suppose so. If one of those folks in Hollywood could finally settle on a suitable compensation package for me, these tunes would no doubt occupy at least a side or two of the soundtrack to my life’s movie.

Why ‘Beaux Dimanches’ by Amadou & Mariam? It’s hard to to recall now exactly when this song floated into the mix but I know that it’s probably post 2008. Even before I started rebuilding and improving on my French enough to get to grips with the lyrics I was hooked – the slinky Mali-blues guitar lines, the beat, the sheer joy of it: there’s no way for me to hear this and not feel uplifted.

Amadou & Mariam are a musical duo from Mali. The couple, born in the country’s capital Bamako, began playing together in the 1980s, working their way up from more minimal arrangements of guitar and voice before perfecting their blend of rock guitar, Mali blues and about every kind of world-music vibe you could throw a hat at to form their own take on Afro-Blues as they moved from Mali to Paris via the Ivory Coast building up wider and wider audiences and fans like Stevie Wonder and Manu Chao. It’s a heady, delicious mix that vibes just right with me.

Both Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia are blind. Amadou lost his sight when he was 16, Mariam having lost hers at age 5 thanks to an untreated case of the measles. They met at Mali’s Institute for the Young Blind and, along with going on to form their musical partnership, would go on to marry and have three children.

It was Chao that produced their 2004 album Dimanche à Bamako (Sunday in Bamako) from which this track is taken. ‘Beaux Dimanches’ (Beautiful Sundays) is a joyous song about weddings in the capital -‘Les dimanches à Bamako c’est le jour de mariage’ – suitably upbeat and coloured with references to Malain traditions.

Dimanche à Bamako was the record that bought the duo to the attention of the world. From here they’d record the anthem for the 2006 World Cup, play major festivals like Coachella, Latitude and Lollapalooza and play with folks like David Gilmour, that knob from Blur (who’d also have a hand in producing their next record) and Beth Orton while touring with the likes of Coldplay and U2. They have continued to put out a wonderful album every few years. 2012’s Folia in particular gets many a spin in the motor and improves every drive when it does. When Matt Groening curated the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in 2010 he chose Amadou & Mariam to close it.

A New Music Fix

/ Tony / 3 Comments

“Why do you need new bands? Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974.”

In my determination, as I march toward the middle of my fourth decade, not to become stuck in any kind of rut, especially musical, I try and keep my ear out for good new music as much as I can.

As much as there’s plenty of dross out there these days there’s still plenty of great stuff too. Though I guess that’s always been the case – as great as the ’90s were for music, Celine Dion still bought a few houses off the back of ‘My Heart Will Go On.’

Anyway, here’s a few from some new artists – as opposed to new stuff from known artists – that’s been keeping my fingers tapping on the Ferrari’s steering wheel.

The Last Dinner Party – Nothing Matters

Apparently Queen, The Sparks, Bowie and Kate Bush sit high in their influence list. All good and clear but these five young ladies from London bring something unique to the mix too and their new album Prelude To Ecstasy is bloody strong.

Whitelands – The Prophet & I

If this group of Ghana-born, London-raised chaps weren’t opening for Slowdive this year with their glorious take on shoegaze and dreampop then there would’ve been something wrong with the world. Each track I’ve heard so far has felt like a warm bath for my ears and I’m looking forward to finding their album on my doorstep next week.

Divorce – Eat My Words

Divorce describe themselves as an ‘alt-country/grunge(ish) band from Nottingham’ – I’d heard a few tracks over the last year but this is the one that sticks.

Sheer Mag – Moonstruck

Maybe not brand-spanking, still got that fresh new-band smell new as it turns out Sheer Mag have been around a couple of years but they haven’t got all that many miles on the clock. There’s a lot of different things going on in this track – some funk, boogie, great guitar, Prince, Kravitz even Jackson 5 (though I doubt the kiddie fiddler ever sang ‘son of a bitch’), but I love it all.

Softcult – Haunt You Still

My wife came home from her commute recently and said ‘I heard this band I think you might like.’ She was very much spot on. Canada’s Softcult are twin siblings Phoenix and Mercedes Arn-Horn and put out tunes with a sort of grunge meets shoegaze vibe. Not only do I dig the music but I love their DIY approach and the fact that you can only get their EPs on cassette (well, physical copies at least).

Post-rock Mondays: Post-rock français avec samples

/ Tony / 8 Comments

Bonjour mes amis et bon retour! As I stumble blindly forward with posting here I find myself once again starting off the week working from home and enjoying a post-rock soundtrack thinking “hey, it’s time for another one of those Post-rock Monday’ posts I used to try and do frequently”.

Given my affinity for our friends over the channel and the amount of time I’ve spent / spend there, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that I love exploring their additions to the genre either. While I’m not as immersed in their output as I am of that of, say, Spain, I’ve found plenty to love.

Oh, and, as per, here’s another ‘handy’ definition of that most beard-strokingy type of music: “Post-rock incorporates contamination that covers the entirety of the music spectrum, from Krautrock to heavy metal, to contemporary classical and free jazz, often blended together in unique ways that bring new sounds to life; in fact, one of the most crucial features of post-rock is its ability to embrace a wide range of musical influences and combine them all into a coherent soundscape.” If that doesn’t put you off…

Post-rock bands love a good sample and poached dialogue, film quotes or specifically written interludes have popped up in tracks way back to the genre’s earlier days – whether we’re talking Iggy Pop’s interview snatch on Mogwai’s CODY or Godspeed You Black Emperor’s immense ‘Blaise Bailey Finnegan III’. Aside from the intended message or reason form the band’s point of view, from a listener’s perspective it can provide a little anchoring in a genre in which actual vocals are predominantly absent as well as lend a cinematic element to the tuneage. And sometimes they’re just there to make you fucking laugh (Romanian band Am Fost La Munte Și Mi-a Plăcut do a bang up job of this). The French are no exception to employing a good sample so here, in a few smatterings, a some of my favourite from the rich post-rock scene in France.

Lost In Kiev – Mirrors

Parisan band Lost In Kiev’s Nuit Noire is one of the first international post-rock albums I added to my collection. Its dark, looming epic post-rock intertwined with a spoken word narrative continues to hit every one of my tingle buttons some seven years on. Rather than lift from anything existing they write their own spoken-word pieces that are then used to give their work a massive, cinematic effect.

GrimLake – Everything Everywhere

GrimLake is Paris-based Mathieu Legros’s solo project. I’ve featured on of his tracks before in these pages and will no doubt again at some point as I’m a big fan of both his albums. JFK’s manner of speaking and the substance of his speeches make for a rich vein in terms of sampling and his address on Civil Rights is a pretty heady one to tackle but I reckon Mathieu pull’s it off.

Féroces – Qu’est-ce qu’on va devenir nous deux

(What will become of the two of us?)… Féroces are another one that use the odd slab of written dialogue to drive their thumping brand of post-rock forward. They’ve released a handful of EPs over the years, each named after, presumably, a character – but seem to have vanished of late, sadly.

As The Stars Fall – No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

I think there’s a rule, probably written down somewhere in Impact font, that sampling Christopher Walken automatically elevates your song to a higher level.

Have the Moskovic – L’inflexion des voix cheres

As part of one of the precious few New Year’s resolutions I’ve ever stuck with I’ve thrown myself into improving my French this year with daily lessons. Perhaps because of that but probably also down to the fact that it’s a bloody fine album, I’ve really been enjoying Have the Moskovic’s 2018 album Papier Vinyle.