Monthly Archives: September 2007

Ultravox: Three Into One

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Before the Midge Ure version of Ultravox, which briefly shone with the moody, European sound of the Vienna album before descending into bombast and cliché, there was another Ultravox. This incarnation of the band, fronted by John Foxx, delivered three albums for Island between 1977 and 1979. They were an unfashionably glamorous bunch, taking elements from punk but defying the Zeitgeist by mixing in other musics from the 70s – glam, prog, even reggae.

When Foxx left the band and the Ure-led version signed to Chrysalis, Island understandably tried to cash in on the new version’s popularity with Three Into One, a compilation of the best of the Island years. There is a story that the remaining members of the band met the compilation’s cover artist, who asked them for their views as to which of various options should be used; wishing to sabotage the success of the release, they chose the worst. In fact, the cover (three ghostly figures merging into a fourth) is not a bad visualisation of the album; in any case, it can’t detract from the quality of the music within.

Chronologically arranged, the songs would describe an arc from the first, self-titled album’s stinging glam-punk, through the growing maturity and artistry of Ha! Ha! Ha!, to the clean, industrial modernism of Systems of Romance. Instead, the album is sequenced by flow, opening with the cleansing blast of “Young Savage” and moving through a range of moods from the aerated groove of “Dangerous Rhythm” to the confident swagger of “The Wild, The Beautiful And The Damned”.

Even in their earliest days, Ultravox! (their name carried an exclamation mark for the first and second albums, losing it for the last) evidenced a mastery of songform that was way ahead of the rest of the class of 1977. This compilation’s highlights include the simply gorgeous “My Sex”, a tremulous ballad delivered by Foxx in a stark, unearthly monotone; the choppy futurism of “Slow Motion” and “Quiet Men”; and the blissful, eerie quietude of their greatest song, “Hiroshima Mon Amour”.

Released only on vinyl and on the bizarre, short-lived ‘1+1’ cassette format (a side of music and a side of blank tape), the album is well worth tracking down as a summary of one of British rock’s most distinctive and underrated outfits.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector: Vinyl Viands, 2006)

Bruce Springsteen: Live 1975-1985

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Bruce Springsteen was, and remains, an artist whose sympathy and compassion for his subjects are compounded by an unerring instinct for the dramatic and, often, an irresistible sense of fun. This gargantuan box set is an epic and exhaustive trawl through the best of his awe-inspiring live shows, which in the 70s and 80s regularly hit the four-hour mark, simultaneously taking on the qualities of the party, the confessional and the gospel revivalist meeting.

Never content with giving an indifferent live performance, Springsteen approached each individual concert with a simple yet shattering aim: to give every audience the night of their lives. For Springsteen, it was unacceptable to have good and bad nights onstage, since each night would, for most of the audience, be their only chance to see him. The resulting fire, exuberance and muscle-shredding energy are in ample evidence throughout these recordings, in Springsteen’s scorched-earth vocals and in the swelling, magical orchestrations of the E Street Band.

Appropriately, the collection begins with “Thunder Road” – a song that, even more than the canonical “Born To Run”, represents the essence of Springsteen. Rarely absent from his live sets over the years, it’s a long, wordy and utterly heartfelt meditation on the ineluctable pull of the car, the girl and the open road. Far from being a cliché, this trope is so vivid, and so resonant in American popular culture, that it approaches the status of myth. And it is as myth that Springsteen treats it in this and many other of his songs.

The take of ‘Thunder Road’ here is from 1975, but most of the songs on the album are from the early 80s, after The River had cemented Springsteen’s position as a peerless chronicler of blue-collar American hopes and dreams, and Born In The USA had propelled him to superstar status. For my money, the songs from The River resonate as powerfully as any here, from barnstorming rockers like “You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)” to the slow burn of “Hungry Heart” and, especially, the heightened recollection that weighs down “Independence Day” and “The River” itself. In the lyric of the former, and the extended monologue that precedes the latter, Springsteen explores the pain and regret of his relationship with his father in terms that evoke the sacred. The E Street Band play a beatific, languorous accompaniment to the monologue, and the way that Springsteen slices through its final, lingering notes with the first, keening note of his harmonica is one of the great, jaw-dropping moments in all of popular music.

Elsewhere, Springsteen dismisses all anticipated charges of sentimentality with a blazing rendition of Edwin Starr’s “War” and with the snarling aggression of “Born In The USA”. Famously, this defiant anti-war anthem was misappropriated by the Reagan election campaign in 1984. Not one of Springsteen’s subtlest songs, its tub-thumping chorus makes the misappropriation perfectly understandable.

The final track of this life-affirming collection sees Springsteen connecting with his audience at an emotional level few performers ever come close to emulating. “Jersey Girl” is an album track by Tom Waits, but it so perfectly encapsulates Springsteen’s emotional concerns that it’s hard to believe he didn’t write it himself. It’s a safe bet that most of the audience at the 1981 concert at which this recording was made were unfamiliar with the song. And so it proves as the song unfolds; they listen in reverent silence as Springsteen sings the first lines, and when he follows up with “tonight I’m gonna take that ride, cross the river to the Jersey side”, they erupt in a moment of ecstatic sympathy. The audience responds with equal fervour to lines like “I’m in love with a Jersey girl”, as though in recognition that Springsteen, for all his superstar status, is a man who speaks, directly and profoundly, to their own lived experience. Inscribed in the sounds and signs of “Jersey Girl” is a notion of music and performance as the most precious and generous of gifts.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector: Vinyl Viands, 2006)

Attacco Decente: The Baby Within Us Marches On

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Attacco Decente were a band who slipped under the cultural radar, receiving a modest amount of critical and popular acclaim in their lifetime, but nowhere near as much as they deserved. Sporadically active between 1984 and 1996, they were birthed in the tumult of anti-Thatcher populism and gained a reputation as bolshie left-wing activists, far removed from the cosying up to Neil Kinnock of Billy Bragg and the Red Wedge crowd. Yet, as this début album shows, Attacco Decente were a far more complex and interesting proposition than shouty agitators like the Redskins. Their impassioned rhetoric, intricate harmony vocals and innovative use of unusual acoustic instruments make their slim recorded legacy a precious repository of urgent, beautiful music.

The band’s founder member and sole constant was Geoff Smith, a virtuoso player of the hammered dulcimer. Smith formed the group in Brighton with bassist Graham Barlow, releasing an initial 7”, “Trojan Horse”. Guitarist Mark Allen joined and the trio released a 12” EP, “U.K.A. (United Kingdom of America)”. Most of the songs on “U.K.A.” were brittle and callow, but “The Law Above The Law” stood out as a perfect piece of taut, socially committed songwriting. By the time of their first album, Smith had matured as a lyricist and the trio were musically at the height of their powers.

The record begins with the surging, clattering rush of “The Will Of One”. Smith’s sharp, hectoring lead vocals swell against Allen and Barlow’s sighing harmonies, the glistening timbre of the hammered dulcimer and the pounding beat of the tongue drums. This blueprint is strengthened and deepened throughout the album. The band’s razor-sharp vocal harmonies bring a hint of sinister menace and affronted outrage to “The Rose Grower”, a song inspired by the mysterious death of the gardener and anti-nuclear campaigner Hilda Murrell. On the slower songs, “Dad Was God” and the title track, Allen’s striking acoustic guitar catches a note of wounded beauty that is the perfect foil for Smith’s yearning voice. Elsewhere, side one of the album ends with the stunning “Natural Anger”, a song that culminates in a long solo for dulcimer and tongue drums that takes the breath away with its sheer vitality and virtuosity.

Smith’s lyrics articulate a philosophy in which personal will and political commitment fuse to form an overwhelming sensation of justice. It takes some nerve to write and sing a line like “public school and formal sex gave birth to their economic policy”, but Smith carries it off with consummate ease as he rails against institutions and power structures in “Fear Of Freedom”. The words on this album are inspired by romantic notions of collectivism and struggle, yet their ravishing imagery, and the passion with which the three vocalists deliver them, invest them with a power that is as persuasive as it is idealistic.

Attacco Decente released one more single with this line-up, “I Don’t Care How Long It Takes”, and then waited six years to release the follow-up, Crystal Night. Barlow having left by this time, this second and last album was a more subdued affair, replete with gorgeous love songs and foregrounding Allen’s virtuoso guitar and the silvery throb of the dulcimer. The Baby Within Us Marches On, though, remains the band’s definitive statement: ambitious, tumultuous and (to quote from an unreleased song) an attack from the heart.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector: Vinyl Viands, 2006)

Marissa Nadler: Songs III – Bird on the Water

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Marissa Nadler follows her earlier Ballads of Living & Dying and The Saga of Mayflower May with this remarkable third album. Bird on the Water amplifies and extends Nadler’s emotional concerns while retaining every ounce of the haunted Gothic spirituality that was the defining characteristic of those albums. Its songs resonate with a deeply unsettling power and grace; supernaturally preoccupied with love, death and loneliness, they avoid morbidity and sentimentality by the richness and variety of their arrangements, by the rapturous imagery of Nadler’s texts and by the bewitching beauty of her voice.

The great Canadian songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen is a looming presence throughout the record. The formality of its title acknowledges the many Cohen album titles that contain the word ‘Songs’; the subtitle alludes to one of his most famous songs, “Bird on the Wire”; there’s a reverent cover of another Cohen classic, “Famous Blue Raincoat”; and Nadler’s acoustic guitar playing is glowingly reminiscent of Cohen’s own before he traded guitars for cheap synthesisers. And just as Cohen’s voice has weathered and deepened over the years, so Nadler’s vocals are richer and stranger than on previous outings. Angelically pure, double-tracked and reverb-heavy, the voice sounds as though it emanates from a centuries-old courtly love tradition, a 1960s acid-folk magic spell and a post-apocalyptic future, all at once.

The other thing that sets Bird on the Water apart from its predecessors is the fullness and variety of its instrumentation. Co-produced by Nadler and Greg Weeks of US psych-folk outfit Espers, the album features hard, unflinching electric guitar from Weeks himself as well as dark cello from his Espers colleague Helena Espvall. The confidence of the arrangements is nowhere more apparent than on the album’s extraordinary centrepiece “Bird on Your Grave,” which begins with spacey synthesised effects over plaintive strummed acoustic guitar, before opening out into a helter-skelter folk rock drama that recalls Fairport Convention at their most lysergic. The electric and percussive agitation subsides, but the landscape of the song has altered. Blasted where it once was delicate, Weeks continues his angsty riffing over Nadler’s pealing acoustic cycles; and the song ends with a further dose of electronic strangeness.

The next track, “Silvia,” adds Dylanesque organ to Nadler’s strong, resonant finger-picking style. The song’s gorgeous melody and lilting chorus hint at a pop sensibility that sits comfortably alongside the record’s more overtly folkish moments. These include the devastatingly sad “Mexican Summer,” on which Nadler’s plangent guitar resounds beautifully around her seductive voice; the blissful, sparkling arpeggios of “My Love and I”; and the delicate mandolin that courses playfully alongside the burrowing guitar patterns of “Diamond Heart”.

Lyrically, Bird on the Water is shot through with startlingly vivid imagery. Nadler has the gift of both familiarising the strange and making the strange familiar; in the world of her songs, the elements of earth, air, fire and water mingle with skin, bones, hair and colours. It’s also an intensely feminine world, in which “I thought of you each time I tore off my gown” (“Diamond Heart”), “I’m going to buy you a red dress and put feathers in your hair” (“Silvia”) and “she died all alone with her feathers and bows” (“Leather Made Shoes”). Stripping away the outward manifestations of modesty and decorum, Nadler’s texts conflate love, sex and death in a swooning current of feverish eroticism.

Nadler sings on “Rachel”: “Oh what a day to dance with you, oh what a day to die.” It’s a line that encapsulates the album’s unshakeable conviction that passion exists and is to be grasped through the infernal workings of tragedy. Songs III: Bird on the Water is a work of radical, deathly sensuality; to hear it is to be changed by it.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 15, 2007)

Mary Hampton: Book One

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At a time when it sometimes seems that one cannot move for new folk, free folk, freak folk, weird folk, outsider folk and goodness knows what else, it’s an unqualified joy to discover a collection of songs that sit proudly and uncomplicatedly within the folk tradition. And yet, while Mary Hampton’s début CD (a mini-album, really, with six tracks clocking in at 30 minutes) derives much of its appeal from its appropriation of centuries-old folk idioms, it is certainly no museum piece. Its unearthly radiance and undercurrents of desolate modernity transform it into a vital and contemporary living document.

Hampton’s musical and spiritual antecedents are the spectral English voices of Anne Briggs, Shirley Collins and Sandy Denny, although one also hears echoes of recent work by Marissa Nadler and that staple of otherworldly folk moves, the Wicker Man soundtrack. The album is subtitled “six songs of refusal”; refusal of what? Characteristically, Hampton doesn’t answer the question directly, relying instead on the latent imagery of her chosen texts and the icy chill of her voice to reinforce her message of hope and defiance against the iron grip of history.

Hampton is no prissy English waif; two of the six songs are flinty American ballads, and a third is a setting of a text by that most debauched and feverish of poets, Baudelaire. The two American songs, both narrated by female protagonists, bookend the album on similar notes of imprisonment and yearning: the woman in the opening ‘Silver Dagger’ “wish[es] I was a little sparrow…one of those that flies so high”, and the closing ‘Fare Thee Well’ laments: “If I had wings like Noah’s dove, I’d fly across the river to the one I love.” Yet while the narrator of ‘Silver Dagger’ withdraws into bold, self-willed solipsism (“I’ve decided to sleep alone all of my life”), the woman in “Fare Thee Well” feels her sense of self dissolving in rapturous erotic surrender:

“But I’ve got a man, he’s long and tall
He moves his body like a cannonball…
One of these mornings and it won’t be long
You’ll hear my name but I’ll be gone”

All the while, Hampton’s bewitching voice and luminous acoustic guitar envelop these visions of escape in clouds of radiant beauty.

The Baudelaire adaptation, ‘Eros’, is one of the album’s two highpoints, an epic seven-minute drama that recounts in chilling detail a dreamed encounter with a fiery-eyed lover. On this, the only one of the six tracks to be recorded with overdubs, piano, violin and sparse percussion thread their way ominously through the lyric’s dark tracery of seduction and vulnerability. Hampton’s voice is double-tracked for the words of the lover, creating a sense of unease that is compounded by the eerie stillness of the arrangement. At the song’s end, a woozy harmonium drone floats by, starkly dramatising the evanescence of the vision:

“And when I woke in the light of day
I recalled the line of my lover’s back
I would not drink, and he took his leave
But come back, love, come back.”

The album’s other stand-out track, “The Gardener”, also proceeds for seven long minutes on waves of sinister violin and brushed percussion. The song’s rapt imagery of colours, elements and flowers is framed by gorgeously languorous sonic increments and the barest hint of a rhythmic pulse. Her voice steeped in mythopoeic richness, Hampton sings like a prophesying angel: “the mirk-black rain shall be your coat, with a wind-gale at your breast.”

Rounding out the set are two shorter, sunnier pieces, the traditional ballads “Love Me Little” and “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme” (the latter previously recorded by Anne Briggs, Shelagh McDonald, Sandy Denny and Pentangle). On these tracks Hampton turns to the tenor guitar, a four-stringed acoustic with a bright and bell-like timbre. With their gentle wordplay and attention to plants and flowers, these songs represent the folk lyric at its most idyllic and pastoral. In reclaiming them as songs of refusal, Mary Hampton declares her fidelity to the folk tradition while asserting a committed and self-assured engagement with the hopes and fears of the modern age.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 15, 2007)

Immense: Evil Ones and Zeros

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The ones and zeros of the title are the binary digits which are all that computers can understand. The title may therefore bespeak some kind of scepticism about the desirability of making music electronically. Whatever, this is a fine album of guitar-bass-and-drums rock music, its eleven instrumental pieces fizzing with inventive ideas and sparkling musicianship.

Most of the tracks are mid-paced. Typically, a relaxed bass line is bolstered by busy, intricate percussion and confident electric or acoustic guitar. “Don’t You Know How To Use Flippers?” (Immense have a winning way with titles; how about “Neil Young In Sportswear”?) adds smoky saxophone to the mix, while “Antro-Lateral Approach” features insistent, quietly ominous piano. But the other tracks don’t suffer from the absence of such enhancements, so varied and striking are the guitar sounds employed.

Occasional snatches of voices taken from the radio attest to the intelligence at work. The opening “Football Chant” has blasts of hard-hitting rock guitar broken up by a voice describing the use of antidepressants. On the impressive “Really Optimistic”, advocates of conservation are gradually overtaken by vigorous drumming and some fairly spectacular lead guitar.

The strengths of the album are its diversity and concision. None of the tracks outstay their welcome; they are sharp, focused and structured; they make a strong impression, then retreat. “Really Optimistic” is followed by a melodic interlude of delicate acoustic picking and strumming, then by the excellent “Spontaneous Combustion”‚ wherein guitar, bass and drums build to a powerful climax. At the end, the heavy and urgent “E Flat Sonic Boom” melts into the closing “Valley Of The Mummies”, in which serene piano and organ curl around sinuous percussion before ebbing sadly away.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 7, April 2000)

Peter Hammill: The Fall of the House of Usher, The Appointed Hour

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The ever prolific Peter Hammill returns with two albums of quite staggering dissimilarity. It’s galling how little attention he gets, this eccentric fifty-year-old who has been responsible for over forty albums, every one of them a Gordian tangle of weighty propositions and speculations. That some of his projects are more successful than others is due less to inconsistency than to the exacting, far-reaching nature of his enquiry, as these two releases demonstrate.

The Fall of the House of Usher is an opera (not a ‘rock opera’) based on Edgar Allan Poe’s tale of the same name. When originally released by Some Bizzare in 1991, after some eighteen years’ on-and-off work by Hammill and his librettist Chris Judge Smith (the co-founders of Van der Graaf Generator), it disappeared without trace. When the rights reverted to Hammill he began a process of revision, using advances in studio technology and rethinking certain key aspects of the piece. He re-recorded his own vocal parts, removed all drums and percussion and added lots of electric guitars.

The result is a revelation. The original version suffered from the limitations of the recording techniques available to Hammill at the time, and sounded dry and colourless. In contrast, the depth and clarity of the new version throw into sharp relief the awesome power and terror of this work.

The unlikely cast of singers includes, besides Hammill, Andy Bell of Erasure, Lene Lovich and Sarah Jane Morris. Together they act out a morbidly fascinating tale of love, friendship, madness and betrayal. The vocal performances are uniformly excellent, particularly that of Hammill himself, who in the role of the increasingly demented Usher reaches jaw-dropping heights of declamatory fervour. When read on the printed page, Smith’s libretto seems rambling and prolix; interpreted by these singers, it becomes lucid and elegant.

The rhetorical richness of the words means that the music is inevitably low on melody. Hammill has never been much of a tunesmith. Instead the guitars and keyboards surge and retreat, pulsing with grandeur and taking on a macabre chill as the drama unfolds.

The collaboration with Roger Eno is an intriguing experiment in aleatory composition which doesn’t really come off. Hammill and Eno improvised in their respective studios for exactly an hour at 1pm on 1 April 1999. The Appointed Hour combines these recordings, with no overdubs. Conceptually, the idea is impeccable; listening to the outcome, however, is less than enthralling. The pair tinkle away pleasantly on guitar and keyboard, and the parallel strands occasionally coalesce to produce moments of stimulation. But for the most part this is inoffensive background music, devoid of the vitality which Hammill normally brings to his work.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 7, 2000)

Breathless: Blue Moon

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Breathless are surely one of the most cruelly ignored groups of the 80s and 90s. Blue Moon arrives a full eight years after their last album, Between Happiness and Heartache, and is likely to be greeted with the same indifferent response. That would be a monumental injustice, for the record is a masterpiece – its deeply passionate romanticism flows with immense power through every one of its sixty minutes.

The group’s singer and keyboardist, Dominic Appleton, achieved a measure of notice with his vocals for the 4AD studio-based project This Mortal Coil. His lisping, forlorn voice is a crucial component of the Breathless sound. On this album it’s surrounded by an abundance of mesmeric instrumentation – strident guitars, eerie keyboards and harsh, clattering percussion.

The opening “Walk Down To The Water” is seven minutes of dramatic, windswept melancholy. In wistful, languorous cadences Appleton describes a condition of pure loss and regret, made tangible by restrained beats and gentle washes of sound. The song’s overwhelming sense of desolation is communicated not by sullen posturing but through a perfect alignment of emotion and gesture.

From here on, Breathless never put a foot wrong. “Magic Lamp” is a desperate invocation of sexual jealousy, its choppy rhythms erupting frantically into ecstatic currents of guitar. Moments such as this, and tracks like “Come Reassure Me” and the thunderous “No Answered Prayers”, recall the tragic luminosity of Joy Division or My Bloody Valentine; but Breathless’ epic vision is wholly their own, manifested in dense harmonic structures and Appleton’s harrowing meditations on desire, pain and confusion.

As if this weren’t enough, a limited edition bonus CD extends the album even further into abstraction and dissonance. “Moonstone” is fifty minutes of sinister rumbles and scrapings, with spare treated guitar and percussion underlining the sense of threat. Perfectly complementing the first CD’s rapt engagement with songform, “Moonstone” completes an emotionally devastating release.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 7, 2000)

Tlon Uqbar: La Bola Perdida

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A fruitful collaboration between two French bands, Internal Fusion and Désaccord Majeur, this is Ambient music with an edge. The CD’s five long pieces convey an impressive range of rhythms and atmospheres, reminiscent of Zoviet France in their layered accretion of organic detail.

All of the tracks, except the closing “Mylodon”, are similarly structured. Ominous ambient sounds – distorted drones, watery splashes, radio interference – frame hypnotic looped rhythms and vivid instrumental strokes. Traces of ethnic-sounding percussion and harsher metallic collisions mingle with diverse human voices (European speech, middle Eastern chant) to form a complex, involving soundscape. Eventually the intricate rhythms come to predominate, forming sharp contours inside the listener’s head.

More ambient than the other pieces, but no less absorbing, Mylodon ends the album on a reflective note. Its restrained beats, disembodied voices and gently vibrant drone are soothing and delightful.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 7, 2000)

SQE: The Abyss Stares Back

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SQE, who in real life goes by the name of J Greco, has produced an album of longish, folky variations on an ambient theme. Amber Asylum’s Kris Force contributes guest vocals on “Jorinda X” and “The Wondrous Boat Ride,” emoting like a dark angel around Greco’s dreamlike soundscapes. Light touches of dulcimer and tubular bells add to the crepuscular atmosphere, evoking the more liturgical moments of Dead Can Dance.

Clocking in at around six minutes each, both songs derive considerable power from their unhurried stillness and quiet, gradual accumulation of detail. Greco draws out similarly extended moods in the instrumental tracks “Epitaph 1” and “Diamond,” but these are largely shorn of the ritualistic elements that make the songs so bewitching. As a result, they lack focus and direction. Things pick up somewhat on “Epitaph 2,” whose clammy drones are disrupted by slashing electric guitar.

Given Greco’s careful attention to detail on these pieces, it’s both surprising and unfortunate that he also chooses to include a song like “Cat” on the album. Here Danielle Hlatky’s breathy alto delivers a clunky lyric including such gems as “your heart regulates the flow of oxygen to the brain,” while the melody is sullied by a lumpen tuba accompaniment. The following “1974,” however, is excellent – propelled by bubbling organ and a racy synth groove, it brings a vertiginous, dubby edge to proceedings. In sum, the disc thankfully doesn’t attempt to live up to the grandiose promise of its title, and is an alluring if uneven collection of nocturnal moments.

(Originally published in The Sound Projector 13, 2005)