The Good Stuff - 2017

Last year Cultureberg proposed some records of the year, wrote in some length and possibly even some depth about them.  This year will be less structured, less certain.  There are always good records being made - let no-one pretend otherwise - sometimes it's hard to pick them out of the morass.  The technology has always shaped the art in popular music, and now it is the technology of its propagation and consumption which shapes its appreciation - streaming, everything ever recorded available. How do you find the Good Stuff?  I'm not going to rehash this discussion, just noting that buying up piles of vinyl and cherry-picking tracks whilst listening through piles of cdr s can make it difficult to focus on what was inescapably the Really Good Stuff.  But it's there...

Thinking about this it seems the memorable stuff is linked to seeing the band/artist live or investing in the vinyl, money-wise and time-wise..You're more likely to replay a vinyl record than a dodgy download, but maybe there is an aesthetic judgement being made when you commit to twelve inches of plastic or an evening out.

Best record of the year has to be Aldous Harding's Party.  I don't yet own a physical copy of this, and this paradox should only underline the judgement, though in keeping with my argument I  saw her live at the Sea Change festival in Totnes.  As a performer. Aldous is inhabited by her songs, nay squatted in by their deranged subjects,  Her eyes roll, she sits oddly, the audience respond in trepidation and respect.  There is a constrained theatricality in her performance - how much is artifice, how much possession is difficult to tell - but what is undeniable is that there is a focus on the moment and the songs' delivery which is rare.  In Totnes, in a room above the pub, the audience hushed the noisy, Aldous snarked at someone asking for windows to be opened (it was humid, at least) and the air crackled. She essayed the already classics - Imaging my Man, Living The Classics and Party (a song open to many interpretations, but surely talking about thoughts most would not admit to).  John Parrish produced the album, and the lazy comparison is PJ Harvey with Kate Bush's vocals (less the stage school histrionics). I prefer Ms Harding to Polly and Kate by a New Zealand mile. The last song was Horizon - a song that resists interpretation whilst sucking in your identification, but I will link to the song which began the show and ends the album at the end of this post, Swell does the skull.  It is possibly the most folk derived on the album and closest to her eponymous debut, but this video, I would suggest, is probably the best song performance ever recorded in a bathroom....unless anyone knows better.

Was this the best live show?  Well, maybe, but I will plump for the show we saw in a velvet draped tent in Halifax's Piece Hall just before Christmas, where the Unthanks sang the songs of Molly Drake.  Up until recently, this would be qualified with a comment of,  "You know, Nick's Mum."  This is now rendered inappropriate as Molly's songs, private and unperformed in a public arena in her lifetime, share (and probably pro-generated) a winsome regret and pantheistic appreciation of life's cycles and it's agonising inevitabilities that her son's more well known folk songs also encompassed..  She was every-woman and yet unique. There were girls in the crowd fighting back sobs of recognition, and not all of them were female.  Chateau Cultureberg are big fans of The Unthank's interpretations of Antony and The Johnsons, but this venture surpasses that diversion.  Molly's originals have a particular aura - Josephine Foster at The City Varieties maybe - but the Unthank's layer on the contemporary relevance, layer on the fragility.  They encored with a cover of River Man (for what it's worth, my favourite Nick Drake song) they first recorded 12 years ago.  Like Molly's songs, it is timeless and universal.

The other recommendation is forward looking, in that the Cultureberg Dyad and the Tangerine Dream will be heading down the M1 in February to see Circuit Des Yeux in London.  The album, Reaching For Indigo, was a Day of Release (thereabouts) purchase, and whilst it cannot replicate the First Buzz thrill of In Plain Speech it has, perhaps, a depth and accessibilty all its own which may eclipse its predecessor.  The songs hover and thrum with a confidence and poise that is backed up by a robust self-belief which seems born out of a significant Brainshift, and perhaps the esteem of innumerable peers. The balance of experimentation, structure, muezzin wail and Armatrading folkiness is perfectly poised on waves of oscillation.  It's a great record.

I've written earlier about Destroyer's album Ken, and this continues to unfold and grow in estimation. They were brilliant at the Brudenell a few weeks ago - proof positive that they are a killer band not merely a frame for Dan Bejar's idiosyncracy.   Mention should also be made of the Fleet Foxes show I saw at the Manchester Apollo, having resisted listening to The Crack Up for a complex of unsatisfactory reasons - time passed, begrudging reviews...Suffice to say the show was a unsurpassable summation of a certain strain of Cosmic American Music. Gene Clark goes Prog, Van Dyke Parks puts his finger in his ear to whistle the Cabinessence; the whole place, I swear, levitated. As I write tonight, albums acquired, bought, downloaded, continue to give up their riches, seem better than last time.  Hiss Golden Messenger's Hallelujah Anyhow may be the best record Ronnie Lane made with the Caledonia Soul Orchestra, Colter Wall's album seems both more heartfelt and more metamodern.  There is always good music being made.  Don't let anyone tell you different.  Here's Aldous...

Dear ken, Destroyer have a new record out

Dan Bejar is a man who acts upon impulse, often a seemingly contrarian one,and has named his band Destroyer's new album Ken after the original title of Suede's The Wild Ones...who knew?  I have read a lot of interviews with the man and usually end them considerably less the wiser, though a few more rabbit holes and blind alleys are signposted.

  Mr Bejar has always been an anglophile, and says that much of the album could be seen as him singing to his teenage self, listening to British indie bands of the late eighties, and that's a way in if you want it.  The first song, Grey Skies, finds him "working on the new Oliver Twist", which could be about the last gasps of Thatcher-ism and its legacy, or America today or...who knows?

The first time I listened to ken - maybe I didn't ken it - I thought, this is the first Destroyer album that sounds like Destroyer.  Like Bowie, each subsequent album since I started listening to them around the time of Rubies has sounded like Destroyer sounding a bit like someone else.  This one is more direct, less shrouded in someone else's cape, but that doesn't make it obvious, even if it is full of lifts from popular song and trademark offhand profanity. Destroyer's drummer Josh Wells produces.  I have not doubted his commitment to the Destroyer cause since I saw him smash his snare drum live with the band a couple of years ago. Mr Bejar talks of the album's musical similarity to The Cure, but having a drummer in the producer's chair has not upped the rhythmic component significantly.  Maybe it is trying to answer the question " How could a decrepit-sounding voice sing in a New Romantic world?" Maybe its more like New Order circa Low Life.  There are a couple of tracks with Hooky melodic bass-lines, and the lyrics have that albrechtian tossed-off profundity.  Who can tell?

I am tending to think that maybe Mr Bejar has pulled off his most audacious  trick here, and by abandoning some of the seeming artifice - the annexing of Avalon era Roxy and eighties Van Morrison for Kaputt or the blending of Springsteen in his Wild, Innocent, E St Shuffle phase and loaded era Lou Reed with Stephen Sondheim and still avoiding sounding like Street Hassle for Poison Season - he has ostensibly produced his most straightforward collection, but one that beguiles and deludes as much as it seems to offer straight-ahead enjoyment accessible to the casual listener.  The very directness of it is a deception.

Early adopters who bought the custard yellow vinyl album were gifted a single of two Ken tracks in acoustic form.  The songs shine in that format too.  There is , somewhere, an Alternate Ken, as good as but singularly different to the creature out in the world. As Mr Bejar says, he is just in the corner doing poet's work.

The album ends with La Regle Du Jeu, which is as catchy as they come.  I'll let the author explain it. "I thought if I did sing   to America, I wanted to do it in a language that they didn't understand - or that they possibly actively hated.  I thought French would be good for that."  I am at the point of being entranced by the mystery of Ken, and I dinnae ken it.  There's much mileage yet in it's attractive surface.

JAZZ; THE FINAL FRONTIER

Even as swashbuckling a sonic adventurer as Cultureberg will admit under minimal pressure and few drinks that the many facetedjewelthat is jazz music can remain A Challenge. This is part of its attraction. I'm not partial to Jazz that tastes of creme de menthe and buttermilk, or Jazz that smells of pipe tobacco and Werther Originals, the faint wiff of patchouli oil and the tinkle of cymbals and exotic percussion will find favour on the Cultureberg Plinth.  Those Classic Albums of Stature which smell of the sweat of effort and fear, though, are the most welcome of all.

The listener loves The Challenge.  Even a recent benchmark like Kamasi Washington's The Epic, approachable as it is, is clothed in the waxed jacket and walking boots of its triple album format.  With all due respect, people listen Because it is there.  It has weight.

Recently I was leafing through the Jazz shelves of The Wall of Sound in the Disc-o-vault.  I took out Cecil Taylor's Live in Bologna, bought maybe a decade ago and never listened to (not a unique state of affairs, sadly), and took it through to The Jungle Room for a spin.  I have yet to have been in the right frame of mind.  Bulding up to it.  Does this ring any cymbals?

So, the well balanced reader may ask, what is a good entry into this sphere of challenge and trepidation, of stature and hipness?  Cultureberg', when as open as the early morn dew and as green as the grass on which it glistened, discovered Keith Jarrett, and this week read his biography, by former Nucleus fusioneer Ian Carr, published in 1989.  It is a good read and recomended to those somewhat jaded by mid atlantic rockbiogery.  Mr Carr is particularly readable describing the recorded legacy, avoiding both the technical disassemblies of many sleevenotes and the hyperbole of aforementioned hackery.  It will, and did (cliche alert!) send you back to the music.

As a callow youth Little Ant lent me a copy of Jarrett's mid 70's album Arbour Zena, where Jan Gabarek's saxophone burst through the clouds like sun, like rain, and Charlie Haden's bass anchored the orchestra somewhere between the dive and the conservatoire.  Above all this, Jarretts piano strode between the accessible and the sublime, neither elitist nor diluted.  Bought and sold, mate.  I listened to it again a few weeks ago for the first time in maybe three decades and every twist and turn was still locked in the synapses.  It is such a marvelous and Proustian work I resist recomending it lest memory and sentiment are tainting my judgement, thoug really, who gives a flying ostinato as long as it hits the spot?

Mr Carr correctly identifies that Mr Jarrett appeals to both goatee strokers and sun-dried tomato and porcini mushroom spotify users.  He seems to have been both denied a place in The Pantheon and achieved significant market penetration; the Koln Concert, the halfway point between the aforementioned Mr Taylor and Windham Hill, had sold a million and a half copies by the time of the books publication, which is quite some going for a double album of solo piano improvisations.  What he has in common with The Downtown Canon (Thank you, Mr Becker) is a dgree of Challenge residing in the variety, breadth and garrolousness of his work.  There are solo improvisations and solo classical recitals, trios, quartets, original compositions and investigations of the standards, pieces for orchestra, organ and drum duets, niaive flute pieces, some cymbals and some exotic percussion.  He not only covers the waterfront, he pulls on his boots and is off up the mountain, because it is there.

This immense variety and productivity contributes to The Challenge, but is leavened by the aformentioned, somewhat unique, ability to straddle abrasive awkwardness and benign spirituality; particular favourites like Mysteries and Death and the Flower (both on Impulse with his american quarted featuring Paul Motian, Dewey Redman and Charlie Haden) are both challenging and inclusive in a way some Jazz just isn't.  (Mr Carr's biography describes Mr Jarrett's parents' separation at aged eleven and his absorption in piano at that point, and one could get all psychodynamic here; rest assured, this won't happen).

I will leave the final word to Mr Jarrett who in the manner of 70's jazzers loves the gnomic non-sequiter.  "I believe that a truly valuable artist must be an artist who realises the impossibility of his task - and then continues to do it."  If you dig that quote, it seems to me you are prepared to take on The Challenge.  If you think the quote is hokey, you are happy to settle for fuctionality.  The Classics of The Downtown Canon have a confrontational edge.  One may opine that Kind of Blue, for all its unimpeachable quality, can also function as vinyl vymura, but one cannot say that for Bitches Brew or A Love Supreme, or anything by Monk, Mingus or Dolphy.  All these giants are taking on The Challenge - you can hear it - and Mr Jarrett is amongst their number.  He says that nearly all his compositions could be called Hymn or Prayer, and cocking an ear to any of his records will make you recognise the accuracy of this comment, so cock an ear to this track, Prayer, from Death and the Flower...

WALTER BECKER - FIRE IN THE HOLE

         


I never heard a Steely Dan song I didn't like.  Even their off-cuts are stellar - Here at the Western World, FM, Dallas, American Lovers (a cover by Thomas Jefferson Kaye).  Young Cultureberg's Mount Rushmore would have featured Walter Becker's  profile, all grizzled beard and stringy hair, alongside those of Mr Dylan, Mr Morrison (the Belfast Cowboy or, as my Dad referred to him, The Singing Dustman)  and of course Mr Fagen.  More than other great songwriting duo Fagen and Becker were joined at the hip, and a very hip hip at that.

 As time past, Mr McCartney and Mr Lennon became very different entities.  Mr Forster and Mr McLennan's individual traits were visible to the cognoscenti long before The Go-Betweens split for the first time.  Fagen and Becker, though, were an intimidating two-headed hipster, party to secret knowledge, inhabiting and observing a nocturnal boho-zone of midnite cruisers and pearls of the quarter.  Even on most of their solo ventures Fagen would produce and play keyboards, Becker produce and play guitar (though neither appeared ontheir last solo ventures Sunken Condos or Circus Money .).  The run of 7 albums from Can't Buy A Thrill to Gaucho maintains a level of quality and consistency to be found in no-one else's catalogue, and though the two "comeback" albums are not quite up there there are moments - let's say West of Hollywood - that are sheer class and breathtaking brio.  And you still could not see the join between Fagen and Becker.

The Dan receded after Gaucho.  Did they split up?  Were they not really a group anyway?  A foggy mist surrounded their doings as if an inevitable by-product of their clever-dickery.  They seemed to spend so long in the studio finessing and equivocating, it seemed impossible to know what was going on, especially in the eighties, before total information overload and the fetish-isation of classic rock.  Mr Fagen broke the silence first with The Nightfly, then Kamakiriad, both in their way statements of retro futurism, imagining a science fiction future set to warped jazz and r and b.  It is often customary for vocalists to be credited with being the voice of their bands, and Fagen's solo albums seemed to inadverdantly claim authorship of the ouevre.  Mr Fagen's singing voice, which has the highest visible co-relation to the word sardonic in all music journalism, is central to The Dan. Indeed, it seemed he and Mr Becker collaborated by hip-osmosis and his vocalising is undoubtedly the perfect channel for their wry and cryptic lyrics.  However, consideration of Mr Becker's two solo albums - even without a spin through his literate and hilarious pieces over many years on the band's internet home page - makes the case that whilst both Mr Fagen and Mr Becker contribute more than 50% each, maybe Mr Becker has been terribly underappreciated.

If pressed Cultureberg would say that the best two Dan solo albums are Mr Fagen's Sunken Condos and Mr Becker's Eleven Tracks of Whack.  The latter shades it for me.  The wispy, cracking voice that Mr Becker unveiled here  is the perfect instrument for these songs of wobbly romanticism and snarky hedonism, as the songs exhibit a more open and (it seems to me -  you can never really know) autobiographical dimension without losing the capacity for trenchant observation.  Take this from opener, Down in the Bottom

Saw your old lady in the park today
The legendary smile is wearing thin
Behind that guessing game you make her play
Now that she knows that she could never win
I guess you're never gonna take her down
Down to the bottom of your little black heart


and this from the even more downbeat, shoulders stooped with resignation, of Junkie Girl.

In the good old bad part of this college town
Men in grey limousines will drive you down
You take their money just like you take mine
Where does it get you on that thin blue line
Now I can hardly hear you anymore
Your eyes are empty and your voice is hollow
I see you waving from a distant shore
And where you're going I don't dare to follow


No foolin'.  And that's just the first two tracks.  Unlike with The Dan, the narrator is more involved  and not the distant observer of, say, Charlie Freak.  Mr Becker also abandoned the machine tooled burnish of The Dan's music and, indeed, of Mr Fagen's albums for a looser, funkier vibe.  You can't hear tape hiss but you can hear the absence of over-polishing.

One can safely surmise that the self explanatory This Moody Bastard is a tacit, however tongue in cheek, recognition of the authors truculence, just as you do not doubt the sincerity of his song about his son Little Kawai, a chip off the old block serenaded in a far better song about fatherhood than, say, Mr Dylan's mawkish Forever Young.  The songs Book of Liars and Hard up Case are bleak and unforgiving and quite likely directed into a mirror.  I know little about Mr Becker's domestic arrangements, though his problems with intoxicants are no secret, but the key point for me is that Mr Becker is writing and singing songs that are honest, direct and enlightening.  They have their own truth and the biographical backdrop is somewhat secondary to this.  The concision, economy and delineation of a demi-monde is all there intact as in The Dan, but Mr Becker adds a doomed directness not previously seen.

Around this time (1993)  The Dan reconvened for live dates - early dates had up to 5 Whack tracks, 7 solo Fagen tracks.  This number reduced quickly and precipitously, replaced by The Dan Canon.  This was what the people wanted no doubt,  though the band stretched out and performed with invention, wit and, as they say, chops.  The tours and shows continued until the man in The Bright Nightshirt  appeared after Mr Becker underwent "a procedure."  Opaque until the end.  Quite right, too.

It was a long wait until Mr Becker's second album in 2008, Circus Money, a beguiling confection which vacillates in Cultureberg's affection.  Apparently Mr Becker had intended to set lyrics to vintage jamaican reggae rhythm tracks, as he is a huge lover of 70s and 80s reggae.  Who knew?  In the end Larry Klein (former Mr Joni Mitchell, producer of Madeline Peyroux and others) was drafted in for an album almost entirely of white reggae played by LA session men, including alumni of The Dan's touring band.  It is to their credit that the album feels natural and the loping and, yes!, skanking  tunes indicates Mr Dylan (on Infidels), Mr Gainsbourg (on Aux Armes et Cetera) and Miss Jones (on most of her stuff)  did not need to have phoned up Sly and Robbie when Mr Becker (on bass) and Keith Carlock (on drums) can essay an authentic jamaican jam of churning bass and echoed rimshots.

Circus Money is more refined than Whack, less gristle, more sparkle.  At times the mix of rhthmic and laconic is unimpeachable.  Take Bob's not Your Uncle Anymore - there aren't many songs that sum up that sobering realisation better, the descending bass shadowing the dawning awareness.  The Cultureberg pick is Downtown Canon, where two hipsters move in together, unpack their totems, try and live for the moment before it all goes wrong in a hurry.  As previously Mr Becker's engagement goes beyond the observational, he knows whereof he speaks, and if he doesn't he convinces the listener he does.

Circus Money isn't as varied or as undisciplined as Whack, and that is a pity, because Mr Becker has a range of voices and is more of a sonic adventurer than The Dan's image as epitome of jazz-impregnated rock would suggest.  Circus Money is a great record at certain times and feels an authentic hybrid.  The Walter Becker of Steely Dan remains an object of admiration and affection, but though he is at least half of that story, if you don't cock an ear to his two solo records you are certainly not getting half the picture.When, in Downtown Canon, he advises " Don't trade today for tomorrow, tomorrow for tomorrow night," he knows that that is only the superficial tip of the ice berg.  There's a name for the winners in the world.  He wants a name when he loses.  In the solo albums he gives a voice to those who lose, often through their own actions and their own fallibities.  He doesn't shrink from the obvious; people will think he's writing about himself..  In doing this he finds his voice, not sardonic, not cynical and worldly wise, but faltering and real, apologetic yet true.

GANG OF FOUR AND THE MEKONS AT THE PENTHOUSE CLUB SHEFFIELD 21st FEBRUARY 1978

I found this ticket in a cache of similar billets in the Cultureberg Archive and felt it warranted writing about.  The Gang of Four's gig-list doesn't mention it, and only one date is listed there as occurring prior to it, their first in May 1977.  I can't imagine there were no concerts in the eight months in between.  This appearance almost seems like equivalent to the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall of Post Punk, but in reverse.  No-one claims to have been there or formed a band because of it, or even is aware of it happening, but it does, in my view, have significance.

In September 1976 Young Cultureberg had left the ancestral pile for the Glittering Spires of Sheffield Polytechnic (now rebranded as Hallam University).  At my interview the preceding January I had waxed lyrical about the MC5 and The Stooges, whose import only albums I had sampled in lieu of lunch in the local Virgin Records. Such off-piste rambling was encouraged at the time, the same centrally funded free mindedness that had funded  Meatwhistle, cradling many figures from the Sheffield music scene. In the eighties, homogeny drew everyone back to conformity, but the mid seventies now seem a wide-open era, contrary to how the era is cartooned these days. Such exotica as Iggy and the 5 elpees did not get down our way, but the signals of change had oozed up to the Black Country and I had sought these seminal texts out.  Year Zero was approaching.  Just before I got to Sheffield, in July of 1976  The Sex Pistols and The Clash had played The Black Swan on Snig Hill (since rebranded as The Compleat Angler).  Something was in the air.

Now, if Culture is a system of feeling,  then the air was pungent with politics and heady theories.  Semiology, the Frankfurt School, Situationism, Marxist theory....all were circulating in the rarefied air over Pond Street Bus Station as well as in the Fine Art department of Leeds University, where the Gang of Four and The Mekons were studying.  My fellow students were a dogs breakfast of Trots, no-direction-home bourgeois dilettantes and Comprehensive kids with an appetite for intellectualizing and proselytizing their Trash Aesthetic.  I didn't know my Barthes from my Elbow (who would not form for nearly three decades) but Sheffield at that time was bursting with bands, both indigenous and visiting, and Young Cultureberg was Up For It.

By the time I go see The Mekons and Gang of Four, punk and the new wave were ousting many of the solipsistic favourites from select stereos.  Elsewhere, proper music ruled.  I'd taken a copy of Patti Smith's Gloria along to some college music club, and her live version of My Generation lasted less than a minute before the hairies snatched it off and put some Little River Band on. The night of the Penthouse gig Stuart and I had started at The Wapentake, where blue-denim-ed Grebo's drank Newky Brown from the bottle and egged each other on to put their hairy heads in the speaker bins.  Heavy Metal, of course, continues oblivious to trends, like the Titanic. The Penthouse was also a heavy metal establishment, hence, I venture, the Headbangin' promise on the ticket. Although I'd been to see The Stranglers, The Damned and The Adverts, the cultural palate cleanser that was punk was a bolus of paradoxes; it remained both an embryonic movement and full of unachieved potential as well as an all-pervasive cultural presence.

If you stood on the front steps of The Black Swan and craned your neck a bit, you could see the concrete edifice of Sheaf Market and precinct, where the Penthouse was located, up an endless stairwell.  Its name was not wholly fanciful, it was at the top of the block, but any connotations of modular bachelor flats is totally misleading.  It was a pretty basic dive, which was how the rockers liked it, the better to headbang, booze and loon.  Sheffield City Centre was full of what is now termed Brutalist architecture, such as the Park Hill Flats.  The Penthouse was in an unwelcoming area where the bouncers were employed to throw reluctant punters in rather than to eject them.

I consulted my diary of the time, and though a bit perfunctory, it fills in the picture.  It confirms that I was probably there following the recommendation of Steve, Jess and the Two Sarah's, who were on my course and were friends of the Mekons.  All groups of young people have their cliques, and these were older, wore clothes that had holes in em out of choice not necessity, and if I recall, a couple of em had been at school with the artistes.  Two other guys off the course were there stoned out of their minds (it says), and the contemporary record confirms my memory that the gig was pretty sparsely attended.

Memories change and decay over forty years and though Cultureberg would love to provide a crisp , rollicking account, the truthful recollection will be somewhat slimmer.  For a long time I have believed there were three bands on, but that may have been confusion caused by The Mekons rotating members.  I remember thinking the Mekons were great...the diary says they weren't very good really.  It does, however, back up my memory that the Gang of Four were excellent, though I only found out who they were later...I'd gone to see the Mekons, whose Never Been In A Riot single had been out a few weeks.   Looking at the set list from the preceding May songs like Armalite Rifle were there back then, so one must assume a lot of the classics from Entertainment! were played.  I can remember no titles.  The show was months before the Damaged Goods EP was recorded, and it would not be released until December.

What I'd extrapolate from all this is that although the Mekons were further along the path to public awareness they remained faithful to an anti-showbiz punk ideal , with members coming and going and their lesser known friends being the headliners, or last on at least.  Maybe we can even surmise that at this early stage the Gang of Four were more willing to conform to a more established notion of a band who had a considered identity and wished to acquire an audience (for whatever purpose).  The Mekons seemed more an art project.

Cultureberg is not, I beleive, being fanciful in imagining the concert as probably having brought together key figures related to Fast Records, Bob Last's iconic label, which  had released The Mekon's debut in January.  Fast 2 was All Time Low by Sheffield band 2.3, also released early 1978, (possibly before this show.)  I had interviewed their lead singer Paul Bower twice for a Radio Sheffield piece which never appeared although I don't recall him being there.  Paul passed the Human League's tape to Bob Last around this time, leading to the release of Being Boiled in June 1978; it's possible the League were there, so among the thin crowd of disparate punters who knows what was coalescing around the sticky dance-floor. It is hindsight that confers significance, which is as it should be.  Sometimes to know that something will be regarded as important at the time only detracts.  It is enough to be young and up for it.

I'd see the Gang of Four again, in 1981 with Pere Ubu and Delta 5 as support.  I can recall Andy Gill darting about wrenching scree from his guitar and Jon King in his pomp on songs we knew by heart by then.  But some combination of truthful memory, wishful thinking and being present at something you didn't fully understand at the time combine to make the Penthouse Club show more memorable.

COMPARISONS ARE ODIOUS - Ralegh Long and Jessica Pratt

When John Lydgate opined that comparisons are odious in about 1540 it is unlikely he could have foreseen the ubiquitous comparisons of any troubadour with a guitar to Mr Nick Drake, formerly of Tamworth in Arden and gone now some 40 years ago.  Mr Drake himself would doubtless have not foreseen his own position as the very acme of poetic  songcraft, convenient shorthand for gimlet eyed  creations  tinged with melancholy.  A scan through the review sections cannot fail to come across  such comparisons and two recent stalwarts of the Cultureberg playlist have received this well-meant but not wholly accurate comparison.

The comparison to Mr Drake levied at Raleigh Long is understandable; both share a wide eyed glory writing about nature, and his breathy vocals also, particularly on his debut Hovering, have some commonality.  Hovering was wind-tossed and embraced animism, with ten strong songs imbued with wistfulness.   His new album Upwards of Summer, however, is bolstered by upbeat arrangements and heralded by loud guitars.  It has received comparisons, odious or not only Mr Long can say, to R.E.M. and Mr Lloyd Cole, formerly of Buxton.  There is a sunny strut reminiscent of The Dream Academy and The Lilac Time (Mr Drake homaged there, for sure), but to these ears the closest approximation would be The Go-Betweens circa, 16 Lovers Lane.  The afore mentioned opener Take Your Mind Back, for example, shares a sun-striped positivity with, particularly, Grant McLennan's songs.  As the title trumpets, the album is a perfect summer listen, evidenced as it soundtracked a drive to the cattery through the country with Cultureberg's moggy.  With its evocations of choruses of insects and bells filling the air it is as effective at conjuring up the hum of endless summer as Sir Ivan Morrison, formerly of Belfast.

Cultureberg was pleased that within the post-postcard jangling Jack Hayter's steel guitar continues to snake through many of the songs like a river accompanying a good walk.  The steel accents the countryside rather than c and w, an integral part of the pastoralism of this and the previous album.  I might venture a comparison to the work of Red Rhodes on Mike Nesmith's albums, or indeed on Bert Jansch's 1974 classic LA Turnaround, whereby I am acknowledging it's sympathetic accompaniment rather than comparing styles.

Between Hoverance and Summer Mr Long released an EP, We Are In The Fields, which hymns a day's passing with suitable rapture.  He revisits The Combine from that release on the new record, conjuring up Terence Malick's  Days of Heaven rather than Mr A Cutler, formerly of Somerset.  If the listener favours the outdoors folkiness of this and Hoverance,  Cultureberg would opinethat we  have enjoyed them all and finds the added heft and brio of the new album a tonic.  Mr Long went into the creation of Upwards of Summer wondering if it was his last stab.  He says he attempted to recreate the euphoric lift he got from listening to 10 000 Maniacs Hey Jack Kerouac, and repeated listens can only produce the conclusion that he succeeded in creating a record that fuses dreamy languor and uplifting, ringing jangle.

Mr Drake's romanticism and observational lyrics have led critics to compare female singers to him as well, one being Jessica Pratt, whose On Your Own Love Again from a couple of years ago has been the most frequent choice at Cultureberg Mansions over recent weeks.  The albums brevity and creative focus, not to mention a seeming sparseness, have garnered comparisons to Pink Moon, but Cultureberg ventures that this album unveils subtleties and delights with every listen and does not have the Island albums seductive despair, rather has a steeliness at its core.  Tim Presley, formerly (and probably currently) of California, formed a label to release her debut, feeling the songs needed to be heard.  The follow up shares this imperative.

Based around Jessica's folky fingerpicking the songs all have strong melodies and slight but detailed arrangements, sometimes with surprising elements.  Jacqueline In The Background is stretched and slightly distorted, I've Got A Feeling pulses and oscillates.  To continue with comparisons, odious or apposite only Ms Pratt can know, I am put in mind of Bryan MacLean's songs, both with Love and thereafter.  Strange Melody has the portent of Aloneagainor complete with dada badum dada badum, Ms Pratt lost in the songs' melody, singing along wordlessly as the guitar notes rise and fall.  She has a unique voice, avoiding the twee and mannered as her phrasing alters from line to line as necessary, almost scatting.  Cultureberg might also compare this to Tom Jobim's bossa novas, which seem to surrender to the songs' internal rhythmic logic.  The persona portrayed is robust and uplifting, and further listening reveal little details which frame the songs with elaborate little cabershons.

Comparisons can be odious, but if they persuade the potential listener to sample new artists they are more benign than the 16th century saying may suggest.  Both Ralegh Long and Jessica Pratt's second outings show them to be unique voices and stylists and one hopes this garners them recognition in the present and not as belatedly as for the unfortunate Mr Drake.

FATHER JOHN MISTY'S WISE BLOOD

Cultureberg has heard it said that all cynics are fallen idealists.  Maybe so.  Whatever their position on the continuum, artists continue to cling to a belief , however compromised, of the power of their work to bring about change.  Or they shut up.

Josh Tillman, the possibly real person behind FJM, had split from a religious college and was doing dead end jobs when he landed the drum stool with Fleet Foxes.  "Hoŵ could you not think, like, 'I'm saved'," he says.  "When I joined that band I dreamt that if I could just play music for a living I could be happy.   But I really have to watch my miraculous thinking because I was so disillusioned that it didn't end up being this version of it that I had in my head.  I didn't feel enlarged by that experience, I felt diminished."

Those who have cocked an ear to Mr Misty will be unsurprised by this admission, or be surprised that his third album, Pure Comedy, is both more grandiloquent and more jaundiced than its predecessors.  It seems to be an extension of the social commentary of Bored in the USA and the stateside conversations he has treated festival crowds to.

Through a seeming random confluence of factors Pure Comedy dropped (in modern parlance) whilst I was reading Flannery O Connor's Wise Blood.  It occured to me that there were a number of similarities between the two works which went deeper than the black suits and the self-appointed mendicant preacher role.



Whilst Wise Blood seems a less prevalent set text for the cognoscenti than in my youth, its atmosphere haunts many modern films and tv series, with the now de-rigeur demented preacher and retinue of gawking hayseeds a shortcut to The Banality of Evil.  We notet that there is a spoken word track on Kevin Morby's new album taken from The Violent Bear It Away  Perhaps Ms O Connor is due a revival.  John Huston nailed the books atmosphere in his 1979 film, with Brad Dourif's defining role as protagonist Hazel Motes, alongside an array of sweaty character actors.  The hermetic world of cracker Pentecostal mysticism also infuses early Nick Cave (especially his first novel, And The Ass Saw The Angel), and is visible in the music of 16 Horsepower, Lift To Experience, The Gun Club and many others.  The defining characteristic of these bands is a purist embrace of the transcendence which Hazel Motes is seeking in a world of sideshow shucksters and predatory hustlers.  Wise Blood World is all around.

Wise Blood is a fable, almost a parable.  Hazel Motes returns to the South from the army and begins to proselytise for his own Church Without Christ, a secular religion which attempts to deny the need to accept that Jesus died for anyone's sins.  Hazel is single-minded, contrary and retains a a skeptical intensity in his dealing with the misfit diaspora he encounters, descending into a grotesque world of mock prophets and pecuniary landladies.  Dear Reader, I do not need to write Spoiler Alert as you will have doubtless guessed that all does not end well.

One could draw a parallel between, on the one hand, Hazel Motes' preaching falling on deaf ears as he stands on a car roof or addresses a meagre cinema queue with, on the other, FJM hunkering at the lip of festival stages addressing the emptiness of corporate entertainment and the ills of artisan sculpted existence.  They spring from a similar pool.

Mr Misty recognises this.  "My spiritual gift is my skepticism and my cynicism and my sense of humour and my penchant for stirring shit up.  That's what I have to offer the world."

His newest offering to the world is his most considered and expansive yet.  It is 13 songs stretched over 75 minutes; the longest, the most autobiographical (probably) Leaving LA, is 13 minutes long.
It's a Big Statement.  FJM characterises his past oeuvre as "four in the morning, drunk in bed with pizza hanging out of my mouth" songs, as compared to the new album, a culmination of ideas he has been refining all his life.  There are ideas about God, human venality, the temporary nature of existence, politics, stupidity, philosophy, modern frivolity and more.  There is even an essay outling some of the songs' underpnnings.  Ye Gods!  It's a concept album.

Indeed, the first couple of listens left Cultureberg awash in wordiness, willful irony and grandiose locquacity.  Thankfully subsequent listens reveal more humour, less archness, more self-deprecation and the melodic heft of the rather slow paced songs hoves into view.  For someone who admits he always "preferred the speaking parts" to learning the G chord, it's a huge bonus that the songs settings are engaging and hook-filled.  The more one listens, the more little details of musicality appear from behind the monoliths of the lyrics.  It can still be a tiring and demanding listen to take in on one sitting, mind.  The lyrics address big topics - the internet on Total Entertainment Forever, political chicanery on Two Wildly Different Perspectives, solipsism and hyper-critical hipsters on Ballad of the Dying Man - and whilst Cultureberg still prefers the pizza stained canyon noir of Fear Fun, it would be churlish not to tip the hat to the ambition, craft and application on display.  Whilst not as didactic as being addressed by an emissary of the Church Without Christ, Pure Comedy at times skirts close to preachiness.  It reminded Cultureberg a bit of Roy Harper, a favourite of FJMs producer, Jonathon Wilson.

Mr Misty is a big personality, and has perhaps eclipsed the influence of Mr Wilson, but one can note the wide thematic sweep of the producers 2011 debut Gentle Spirit and the Floydian glide which informed its 2013 successor Fanfare.  (As a footnote, Mr Wilson has been recruited to play guitar in Roger Water's touring band)  The sharp dissection of human folly echoes (geddit?) The Wall or Animals.  Also drafted in is Gavin Bryars for striking string arrangements, so whilst the dyspeptic, dystopian lyrics are the immediate focus, the more contemplative musical settings also linger in the mind.

Whether this will play well in the even larger venues Mr Misty is guesting at later in the year wll be worth watching.  Cultureberg has seen the FJM Show 5 times now and he is adept at projecting a complex personality/creation into the crowd and back to row WW.  Pure Comedy is almost a Greatcoat Album for terminal adolescents to pore over, to rank with staples of slope shouldered sixth form shufflers.  Whether it is Dark Side Of The Moon or Crime Of The Century remains to be seen.  Regardless, FJM has alchemised his skepticism and Cynicism into art and somewhere Hazel Motes is tipping his hat.