Dating Godot, Wind machines/Night porters (Delirious) both CD
There's a sub-clause in the zine-writers' contract, after the strict
conditions regarding the uncritical treatments of Heavenly and Belle
and Sebastian, naturally, which says that when reviewing a band from
New Zealand either or both of the Chills and the Tall Dwarfs must be
mentioned, referenced, recalled or at the bare minimum alluded
to. Obligations are fulfilled in this instance by noting that Andrew
Spittle---the man behind Dating Godot---records, like Tall Dwarfs main
man Chris Knox, as a preference at home on his portastudio. Musically,
he's something of an acquired taste, though. Despite lashing luxurious
amounts of Husker Du frill in the form of Bob Mould fuzz and
minimalist leads across his tunes, Spittle never seems to find a
chorus to match. Instead, he plugs the gaps with a variety of
slightly-skewed arrangements and unexpected right angles. "36 pounder
demi canon" involves half-spoken vocals reminiscent of Gerard
Langley's Blue Aeroplanes in their prime and even toes the pop line
but can't quite bring itself to take that final step. "What am I
into?" sounds like it could've been an out-take from "Zen arcade,"
mostly aggro-instrumental with occasional unfathomable words buried
deep in the maelstrom. On "Night porters" "Reunion" is a terse, tense
Nick Cave-ish drawl which ends with a strangely upbeat "Taxi" theme
deconstructed by anxious synths and "Impermanence" fuses some of
Daniel Johnston's wired paranoiac vocals with coconut clip-clop
percussion. 17 Pioneer Crescent, Helensburgh, Dunedin, New Zealand.
Lali Puna, The safe side (K-raa-k) 7"
Surfing the same Neu! wave as Printed Circuit, Lali Puna graft
simplistic uni-digit synth lines onto a rattling breakbeat, add a
fragment of song and leg it over the pop horizon. Pick of the three
here is "Everywhere and allover" which adds an almost timid edge to
the whole shebang and thus creates naivete appeal. Leliestraat 35,
8210 Zedelgen, Belgium www.come.to/kraak kraak@skynet.be
Teach me Tiger, Chad and Emma/How can I stop loving u? pt 2 (Fantastic/Motorway) both 7"
Boy:girl, clear:confused, stylish:scruffy; oppositions that minimally
describe the sleeves and with the addition of 50s:60s you've got the
music as well. "Chad and Emma" confuses first because the names on the
sleeve bear no resemblance to the tracks on the disc, there being two
of one and three of the other. "Remember me, remember u" is a nursery
rhyme Velvets scratching out various Western themes and "King of the
road" from drug-addled memory having only heard them on the radio once
5 years before and "Bedroom dub" is exactly what the title promises; a
spacious 4-track production that's a little Pablo and more than a
little "Giant steps"-era Boo Radleys.
"How can I stop loving u? pt 2" wraps the Righteous Brothers in a fug
of warm nostalgia and reverb, drops out into a bizarre shuffle break
that wouldn't be out of place on a dub remix of Eric B and Rakim's
"Paid in full" and then reprises the Brothers with country slide
guitar. On the other side, "Missed u at the zoo" pairs a jazz-riffing
double bass with bulging timpanic beats and buried melody to create a
metronomic Tank-like treat. There is truly some warped genius at work
on these records and fans of Pop Off Tuesday especially should check
them out ASAP. Fantastic, PO Box 5935, Kansas City, MO 64171, USA www.fantasticpop.com Motorway,
3-2-18 Shioyak Ichikawa Chiba 2720114, Japan motorway@col.hi-ho.ne.jp
My Legendary Girlfriend, Creosound EP (Short Fuse) 7"
My Legendary Girlfriend have got something of a multiple personality
thing going on here. In fact, there's so much crammed in that My
Legendary Harem might be closer to the mark. Lead, and justifiably so,
track, "A kidnapper's lament," starts off with a fragment of Orbital's
"The box" with squealing wheels then fast-cuts between sci-fi
theremin, speed ska and the crashing chords of some big rock music
sung like pasty indie boys. It dubs out in a shimmering Ozric haze for
a swift half in lieu of a middle-8 followed by chorus x2 and end. It's
a Frankenstein's monster and by all rights should sound abysmal but
the jolt of electricity needed to get the thing off the slab gets it
up and shaking like a good 'un. 42 Seymour Rd, West Bridgford,
Nottingham, NG2 5EF www.short-fuse.demon.co.uk
Lincoln, More than a saviour (Narwhal) 7"
The last resort of the morose is always country music. Despite all the
glitz and showbiz flim-flam that's currently glossing a superficial
veneer of happiness over the surface under the banner of New Country
or Country Crossover, the lifeblood of the music will always be
rejection and dejection. Lincoln know this well and emphasise it by
lavishing mournful violin and cello around these two beautiful
Palace-paced heartstring-tuggers that won't leave a dry eye in the
house. PO Box 16313, London, N16 0WG
The Mooseheart Faith Stellar Groove Band/Nimbus 2000, split (Oggum) 7"
Trippy psychedelia from Mooseheart Faith, but not so trippy that it
ever strays far from a completely pop blueprint. "The face on Mars"
could've been recorded in '67, laden as it is with echo, shimmer and
fuzz, cracking along as it does at a fair lick, shortening as we all
appreciate solos down to the bare carousel bones and ending as pop
songs should within 3 minutes and ready to be played again. Nimbus
2000, on the other hand, sound like a ripple of synthesizer falling
down a waterfall. On orange vinyl. PO Box 22, Lampeter, SA 48 8YD oggum@globalnet.co.uk
The Magic Carpathians/Nimbus 2000, split (Oggum) 7"
The Magic Carpathians appear to be the wild woman of Warsaw rattling
cutlery in the necks of several milk bottles, shaking a box of matches
and gruffly quiet-shouting while someone 3 doors down starts playing
guitar and walking towards the microphone. Halfway through he arrives
and picking joins the muffled drone as he accompanies the wild woman
in her chants for a while then steps aside to let an elephant trumpet
to the climax over coffee shop clatter. "Ethnocore deathfolk splurge
from Poland" it says here and I find it hard to dispute the claim
although if pushed I'd describe it as "Zappa's grandparents." Nimbus
2000 seem surprised to find themselves the straight man in this
pairing but support well by doing little more than bleeding a fairy
tale reading into Jarre-ing pulses that themselves give way to the
sound of a piano being played in a cavern. Purple vinyl. PO Box 22,
Lampeter, SA 48 8YD oggum@globalnet.co.uk
Guided By Voices, Do The Collapse (Creation) CD
He's still here. Yes, umpteen records in, Bob Pollard is still making
his rock and roll nursery rhymes set to some weird take on British
invasion pop. And this time someone let him spend some fairly serious
money producing a set of songs polished to an unusual shine. The
question you have to ask is, need he have bothered with the elbow
grease? Well, yes and no are the answers that spring immediately to
mind. What sticks in the teeth with this record is that these songs
are really not much different to those he was writing five years
ago. If anything, they've just become more insipid. With a pot of
cash, some time and the freedom to direct yet another new band, you
would hope that Pollard would realise some new grandiose visions, tell
some taller tales, and drag us to headier heights. Instead, being the
contrary Bob that he is, he comes up with his own take on the old rock
sound and just casts out the 'usual' kind of GBV songs in a different
odd light, with a few bells and whistles for good measure. Which
means, for the uninitiated, bizarre indie guitar pop cum rock and
roll, built on abstract lyrical tales and almost Beatles-esque simple
melodies. Anyway, the net result of the current approach is that Bob
does nothing new for the world of music. It starts with some promise,
as "Teenage FBI" lends some angularity and synth warbles to the usual
blueprint and a ditty about not being yourself when feeling
examined. After that it pretty much reverts to type, but sounding
cleaner and slightly tired song ideas. A lot of it sounds like he
might have written in it in his sleep, and the lyrics seem to be
aiming for some kind of po-faced youthful angst, when they're not
being just too wilfully oblique. The only truly different song is a
plaintive Britpop style ballad, "Hold On Hope" which is expertly done
but, with it's stuck on strings, pretty pointless except to say, "Hey,
I can write pop songs you know." It's not all bad though and, such is
the eminent listenability of a set of Pollard compositions, you can
still listen and get no small enjoyment. The sad thing is that I'd
rather listen to Bee Thousand, which is similar but five times more
vital i.e. great, not merely good. Unfortunately it's 6 years old and
I'm still waiting for Bob to stop being lazy and do something amazing
with his obvious talent, instead of writing merely competent records
while he's sleeping. (Drew)
Wheat, Hope and Adams (Sugar Free/City Slang) CD
This is a beautiful record. It's hard to pin down exactly what makes
you want to keep pushing play on the CD player, but Wheat have made a
set of songs that reaches out and strikes some weird chord on those
heart strings. It would be easy to use words like "artless", but it's
perhaps fairer to say that this sounds like a document of someone's
musical dream---the music being insanely familiar and fittingly
difficult to describe. The songs feel easy, but belie a careful
construction that succeeds in making melodic intricacies sound
simple. No small part of this soothing characteristic is a magnificent
sound, which brings forth the yearning and gentle tension underneath
the languid drifting of the easy guitars and plaintive vocals. On
tracks like "Don't I Hold You" the effect is utterly stunning, as the
vocal begs for love over a stumbling rhythm and gentle melody before
the sore-sounding lead guitar strikes straight for the heart. Other
highlights include "Who's The One", with a soaring questioning vocal
interplay interwoven to searching stop-start melodies, and "Off The
Pedestal" with its almost whispered vocal skating over a shimmering
melody that grows in volume and density through the song to an ending
that feels like a release. Having said that, it's perhaps unfair to
pick out highlights---the point really seems to be that it's a slice
of music that pretends to be just moving along past you but all the
while tugs at your attention as it runs its course. The sound of a
spacey summer feel that is inexplicably bound to soundtrack your long
winter nights, especially if they're spent alone. (Drew)
Unit, Glazed (TLM) CDS
"Glazed" itself gives a swift Australian industrial bludgeoning to
half a shrill Sparks pop song but better is "4 chords in 3 minutes"
which is so fast it actually only lasts for 150 seconds. It does seem
to consist of the advertised 4 chords, though, and about a million
assorted beats along with chattering monkey guitar squiggles that
recall the juvenile delights of Gaye Bykers on Acid although without
quite the bombastic over-enthusiasm. www.blackdog.com.au/unit
Cheap Kojak, Hip replacement CDR
My abiding memory of Blue Peter as a child is Janet Ellis breaking her
pelvis whilst training for a parachute jump and managing to shoehorn a
mention of the injury into every feature she did for months
afterwards: "..and here I am at the Lowestoft alligator sanctuary,
only 150 miles from the place where I broke my pelvis, blah blah
blah." I wouldn't be surprised to find that Cheap Kojak wrote her
scripts during that period given the colourful ("chocolate flavour")
pelvis on the sleeve and the band's boundless capacity for levering
together incompatibilities in thoroughly unsubtle ways. "Hip
replacement" is a varispeed zig-zag through the eclectic record
collection of an attention-deficient alcoholic punster ("Alcypops now"
anyone?) Coherency surfaces from the static, cut-ups and
non-sequiturs in the form of "Freudian slip," an in-the-cups piano and
regret meander, and "Hip hop hernia" which reveals tantalising
glimpses of a violated pop song through the nonsense Manc poetry and
dainty traces of tune. Cheap Kojak---I love ya, baby. marvinhires@hotmail.com
Roxy, 119 Church Rd, St Annes on Sea, Lancs, FY8 3TG
Astroboy, Generation why (Ennui) TAPE
He covers a lot of ground, this Astroboy. He's probably got a jetpack
or something to help him along. A battered one, old and no longer
shiny, that hisses quietly in the background and looks like
tinfoil-wrapped squeezy bottles with function-obscure leads and tubes
sprouting out of, and disappearing into, unlikely folds and
crevices. More tubes, with ribbing this time, coiling around, snaking
loosely over and down, make the whole ensemble look like a kind of
futuristic electro bagpipe kit gone wrong. Talking of futuristic
electro bagpipes gone wrong, such an instrument was probably used in
the making of this tape and could certainly conjure up the mighty
churning drone peppered with spits and spurts of compressed metallic
fizz that sounds like nothing less than a mutoid version of the Dr Who
theme and goes by the name of "Gnosis." Elsewhere the pipes buzz,
crackle, pop, recycle bland talk radio and redistribute fuzz with and
without beats across an admirable range of bedroom pedal and 4-track
manipulation. For this tape, and an Ennui catalogue, write to Ady, 12
Shafto Rd, Ipswich, Suffolk, 2PI 5HB members.xoom.com/ennui001.
Dakota Oak, Pastures of plenty (Twisted Nerve) 10"
These 15 tracks are audio sketches of events, places, jokes, moods and
memories of a trip David Tyack made to the United States last
year. Perhaps calling them sketches is a little unkind, it's not as if
this is a collection of incomplete, preliminary versions of some later
finished articles or hurried aide memoires bereft of depth and
detail. The songs are short, though, and relatively simplistic in
construction and execution but there's never a lack of content in the
grooves. It oozes out in the mini-kraut reiteration topped with
tinkling streams of piano, the lamenting wail of a morose theremin, a
wash of fuzz or a crackling breakbeat and the sound of a man
displaying his mind.
State River Widening, State River Widening (Rocket Girl) CD
Some records make you draw the curtains. Well, that's a side effect
really: some records make you throw such startling shapes as you
cavort around the living room that, our of the fear your neighbours
will mistake you for the chief speed taster for some local hoodlums,
you pull the curtains to. "State River Widening" will not have
this effect---unless you are the chief speed taster etc
etc. In fact, it'll have the opposite effect, put this record on and
you'll likely never open the curtains again and speed the rest of your
life spreadeagled across the floor thinking about making a cuppa but
deciding you can wait just a bit longer.
A three-piece, featuring one member of The Wisdom of Harry, SRW make
ambivalent instrumental music. That's not to say that they don't care,
rather that there's an underlying opposition, almost a contradiction,
between lethargy and energy: the effort the band put in to making
music so soporific yet vibrant and the listener's passive absorption
of the same. It sounds like a favourite pair of leather slippers,
comfortable and well-worn, but serving exactly the same purpose as the
new, hard, man-made plastic ones your gran will get you for Christmas
but you'll discard after a couple of days in favour of the
familar. Pretty quiet, mostly acoustic, gentle and evocative, the
curtains are shut and I haven't moved off the settee for a couple of
days.
Justin Mikulka, Sequels and opposites (OneMadSon) CD
It's not a combination you hear a lot, acoustic guitar and distorted
vocals, but Justin Mikulka, by adding a touch of artificial squareness
to his voice, creates an interesting variation on the
singer-songwriter thing. It's particularly effective when he
doubletracks one clean and one android vocal, sung and spoken
respectively, and just out of time making one a creepy prescient echo
of the other. PO Box 295, Franklin Park, NJ 08823, USA onemadson@earthlink.net
Kit Clayton, nek sanalet (Scape) CD
Dub, while underpinning the whole ethos of Kit Clayton's "nek sanalet"
("World of substance" as opposed to "World of spirits," a previous
release), is also only a dropping off point for it. All dub protocols
are observed on the record, but they are also stretched and twisted,
refracted through a prism of electronics and reassembled with
precision on the other side. Clayton's compositions are as crisp as
the frost on a winter dawn, so clean, fresh and spare that you could
almost slip through the gaps if you approached the speakers side-on,
gliding with ease between the trace reggae elements (glacial skank,
shimmering echoes and, obviously, the bass) and the assimilated
electro, minimal techno and ambient noise which on tracks like
"nia-ikala" grow into a sublime melange of Plastikman and a soothing
Lee Perry dream.
Anjali, Sheer witchery (Wiiija) CD
More proof, were it needed that the breakbeat is to the 90's what the
Buzzcocks riff was to the 80's. Where 10 years ago all was trebly
guitars on hyperdrive at your local indie rock dive, now it's more
likely to be a crate of vinyl and some snakebite-spilling
beats. Ex-Voodoo Queen Anjali has resisted the temptation to go
Breakbeat Cheeky (see Bentley Rhythm Ace, Jacknife Lee and, recently,
Morgan), instead hewing slices of instrumental hip hop from a rich
source, 9 of which----the singles (going steady) so far---are collected
on this CD.
Jeremy Boyle, Songs from the guitar solos (Southern) CD
310 did a similar thing when they recycled prog behemoths on their
"Prague rock ep" earlier in the year but where they scored over Boyle
was that there were recognisable snippets of the source material to be
spotted in the sample-heavy tracks. The deal is this---partly as a
piss-take, partly for the ironic hell of it, partly out of academic
interest and partly as a masochistic exercise, Jeremy Boyle decided to
take samples from the indulgent guitar solos that invariably ruined
otherwise (half) decent tracks in the 1970s and create new songs from
them. An excellent idea and already the irony-ometer is
rising. However, extracting only guitar from a track also
containing bass and drums sticks a few hundred points on the masochism
score and proceeding to turn the whole thing into a treated ambient
glide that could've been composed from samples of mating frogs and my
girlfriend's hairdryer rather makes you wonder quite what the point was
again. Still, it's not at all unpleasant listening and the thought of
Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley or Ace Frehley hearing what sort of
pansy-ass limpness has been conjured out of their testosterone-powered
lumberings makes for an interesting 6 minutes, 39 seconds of "Kiss."
Other artists featured: Van Halen, Sabbath, Hendrix, AC/DC and Led
Zep.
Muslimgauze, Fakir sind (Soleilmoon) CD
Who would've thought that a couple of seagulls and hyper tabla playing
would make one of the most uncompromising albums of the year? Bryn
Jones, Muslimgauze, that's who, and he stretches essentially these two
components to the limit of endurance and beyond on "Fakir sind," one
of his many tapes still in the Soleilmoon vaults awaiting posthumous
release. Enigmatic variations keep the emphasis shifting so that just
when you're thinking he can't possibly go anywhere, the loop changes
subtly, the timbre of the sampled calls shifts, the whole is
imperceptibly altered and we're off again. At times it breaks down to
skittering, hypnotic dub ("Let's have more dagga, beggum") while at
others the sound is full, but full of exactly the same. "Fakir sind"
is a study in shifting sonic texture and, unlike much of what passes
for that kind of thing (either intentionally or not), it's absorbingly
listenable too. www.soleilmoon.com
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