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.

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO IS FIFTY - LORD HAVE MERSEY!

Once upon a time, in a world very different from today, the Velvet Underground were not iconic totems of would-be outsider-dom.  The Rolling Stone Record Guide for 1980, recently bought by Cultureberg, only lists records available and in print at that juncture.  It is gushing about The Velvet Underground and Nico and Loaded (which were available) but only mentions White Light White Heat and the eponymous Third in passing, as they were only available in second hand stores or the record collections of older, wiser compatriots.  This state of affairs is as inconceivable to todays young hipster as the telly switching off after Watch with Mother for two hours of the testcard transmission.  Wot, no Sister Ray! No Pale Blue Eyes!

Like many, my introduction to the VU, was via a compilation - with a somewhat random track selection, a single album which did include Sister Ray as most of side 2 - but enough to pique interest.  It was word of mouth, a whisper to the wise.  Though I didn't go off and form a band, as Eno imagined everyone did, like many of the droves who attended the 50th anniversary show of The Velvet Underground and Nico at Liverpool Sound City, I formed one in my head.  The congregation, drawn across the age span from greying groovers to the young and desperate, seemed to share a common pleasure, and an unspoken connection.  The defining characteristic of adolescence, and terminal extended adolescence, is a belief that you are different and trailblazing while acting exactly like everyone else.

The Cultureberg Dyad arrived about 7:30, aware that security after Manchester (4 days previous) might be tight, and were travelling light (no I-pad).  Sadly, the venue was a downer; no waterside stage gazing across the waves to New York, instead a rubble and gravel car-park, swirling dust bouffanting the hair and nestling in eye sockets.  Well, okay, the VU always appeared at unusual venues and their avant-garde beat group always ripped it up.  It'll be great. It had been the hottest day of the year, maybe nearly 30 degrees of heat. On stage was a guy with an acoustic guitar, gamely trying to engage the crowd flowing in.  He was virtually inaudible, mismatched.  Then followed nigh on two hours with nothing to do, nowhere to sit (not even a mound of grass), like an ante room to nowhere.  Luckily we managed to cop a couple of drinks and a plastic bottle of wine, as pretty soon the assembling hipsters formed serpentine queues which were taking maybe an hour to reach the bar.  I joined a queue and my neighbours weren't sure where the queue was leading to, so I quit it.   Okay, the first thing that you learn is that you always have to wait, I get that, yes we are all part of a piece of performance art, but I'm sure no-one would not have queued for an hour for a beer back in 1967.  (I recall on one bootleg, Lou Reed shouting out, "Oi! Malanga! Put down that whip an get em in...it's your round!")  In Liverpool the bovine caravan of resigned punters (might as well queue, nowt else to do) shuffled slowly and acquiescently without complaint.  O pardon me sir, it's farthest from my mind.

On with the show.  Straight into I'm Waiting for my Man, seguing into White Light White Heat, played straight-ahead rockanroll with Cale stage front pounding the ivories.  Excellent.  Big roar.  The rest of the show, dear reader, was a curates egg, and whilst some of the rearrangements seemed interesting (Cale is not one to fall back on the familiar for too long (he did Lady Godiva's Operation, so was clearly willing to test an audience)), the sound was a bit, well, quiet, subtlety whirling away in the dust and wind.  Half way through and attention was wavering - it needed to be indoors, or there to be some use of the big side-stage screens to draw the audience in instead of some by rote images and graphics.  But there was a good buzz where we were stood and banter a plenty.

And the Friends...hmmm...none got introduced when they shuffled on, and though Cultureberg would profess to surf the zeitgeist, like those stood around us, it was near impossible to tell The Guy from Super Furry Animals from The Guy from Wild Beasts from The Guy from Fat White Family (and I've seen two of their host bands a couple of times).  It was easy to spot The Guy From The Kills and The Girl from The Kills as they threw Stadium Rock Shapes and were rockanroll in a very American vein.  Favourite Friend was Nadine Shah, whose northern twang added a similar individuality to Femme Fatale as Nico's own particular regionalism had done to the original.

By the time of the endless finale of Sister Ray, one might have wondered if this was a Brechtian device employed to alienate the audience or merely an essay in Stadium Boogie.  The whole cast were frugging away like Sunday Night at the Liverpool Palladium, a lot of whoo-ooing was going on, but there was something lacking.  Madame Cultureberg  snuck into the VIP area in front of the stage (unlike the many unlucky VIPs for a night who couldn't get through), and after 20 or 30 minutes of Sister Ray someone decided to wrap it up and the Corporation carpark emptied as the last echoes resounded and souvenir plastic cups rattled on the dusty floor.

I think the French have a word  for it - defrissonment - and sadly a combination of the even handed distribution of anonymous and indistinct guest vocalists and the festival stage's underwhelming PA, seemingly constructed by Local Authority Committee (with a mixture of disdain, tight-wadded-ness and civic jollity), conspired to excise the frisson, the pleasurable shiver,  that tied the assembled groovers' together.  Maybe that's what was taken out during Lady Godiva's Operation.  The 50 year old Album, and maybe even more so the White Light White Heat LP, teeter between surly transgression and a frosty honesty. It may have been unreasonable to expect to be taken back to the moment of discovery and immersion of such feelings, so it is pleasing to report that, nevermind,  we all had ourselves a real good time, the folks were really nice , there was a good craic going on. We managed to sneak into the undersubscribed, probably VIP, bar, to keep the thirst slaked and after being reunited via a stewards loudhailer like infants at a carnival, we took three times longer to walk back to the top Travelodge on the Mersey's banks than it took to arrive, ending up somewhere near the city limits (a combination of alcohol and lack of ipad - Oh modern jeopardy! ) flagging down a taxi back to the room just before a very VU type of resigned despair set in.

THE FEELIES - ON A ROLL

The Feelies seem to be making up for lost time. New album In Between comes hard on the heels of 2011's Here Before and is their sixth album in thirty odd years. The inner sleeve photo updates of the impression made by the debut's cover, where the band looked like strange boys from the suburbs. Now they look like strange grownups from the suburbs. Modern lover's T-shirt and all.

 Here Before is one of Culturebergs top spins of the decade; In Between is likely to join it. The percussion is sparer - more claves, less full kit - with most songs built around a briskly strummed acoustic. A quick smattering of the song titles - Turn Back Time, Stay The Course, Pass The Time, When To Go, Been Replaced - and you're tuned in to the lyrical preoccupations,essayed with The Feelies' trademark deadpan fatalism.

 The band are often compared to The Velvet Underground, and if Here Before was reminiscent of Loaded, In Between puts Cultureberg in mind of the Velvet's Third. It takes an immense amount of ability to keep things as simple as this. The sparse instrumentation and after-hours, autumnal reflection builds up through killer track Gone, Gone, Gone to album highlight and closer the 10 minute pounder In Between (reprise).  Enrich your life and acquire this record.

GOIN' DOWN SOUTH, GONNA FIND MY SOUL.

MEMPHIS SELECTION FROM THE WALL OF SOUND

The recent book on the Cultureberg bedside table was Warren Zanes 33 and 1/3 study of Dusty in Memphis.  In it he goes a bit Greil Marcus about The South and Memphis in particular.  "It seemed that mythic place gave him something inestimable, something underpinning his very sense of self.  On some level I've come to believe that we all need such places, that we go to these places to act out the possibilities within us that might otherwise lie dormant, untapped."  This sliding down to Memphis may be understandable to the former lead singer of The Del-Fuegos (No, me neither), but the questions in the Cultureberg Cranium were about the others who made a similar pilgrimage, for that is what it was, at about the same time......

We'll come to Elvis later, but let's start with Dusty Springfield.  (I'd commend the book to you, though not as much as I'd commend the LP).  The book's thrust, reduced by a thousand percent in volume and persuasiveness, is that Dusty's love of black soul music, and her need to inhabit a persona which could contain her otherness, was fulfilled and emboldened by this record.  She had just signed to Atlantic . with the proviso that Jerry Wexler be involved to guide the transition, a role he was happy to take on. Dusty in Memphis one of those records which improve and deepen over time and with subsequent listens, its uniqueness becoming more apparent.  Why is this?,

Primarily I put this down to the choice of songs, which are not the obvious choice for a performer frozen by standing where Aretha and Wilson Picket once stood.  They are not covers of Atlantic

Is Todd the God of Weird?

At repose on the Cultureberg day-bed, idly flicking through Uncut magazines wide-ranging and provocative feature on the 101 Weirdest Albums, I was surprised (and it is axiomatic that such a list should surprise) and pleased to see Todd Rundgren's A Wizard, A True Star at the pinnacle in the Canon of Cacophony.  One might have expected Trout Mask Replica there, but of course that is to be paradoxical - it is the expected classic of inaccessibility and obsidian idiosyncrasy and that is likely why it is not there.  Trout Mask is the People's favorite avant-garde hurdle, where even the pluckiest explorer will admit that they are beginning to get it and will carry on trying.

 A Wizard,A True Star is a long time favourite, going back to Cultureberg's adolescent fealty to the Todd mystique, and its presence at Number 1 is roundly applauded.  It may well be the album where Mr Rundgren most successfully blends the sonic scattergun with the melodic marksman (like a Zen Archer?) of the preceding three classics.  Runt, Ballad and Something/Anything all have some outre moments, but AW,ATS springboards into another dimension.  Despite all this, Cultureberg would ask you, Dear Reader, to consider its follow up, the double album sans gatefold, Todd, as a more deserving recipient of the Powdered Wig Of Weird Wig-outs.

What is the evidence before the Court?  Firstly, its size.  Todd sprawls, or seems to, yet every minute earns its place, even the wonky ones.  It is the curious details that enhance its pleasing otherness, its delight in its own creativity.  Why else cover the hyperactive word rush of Gilbert and Sullivan's Lord Chancellor's Nightmare Song if not for the delight and hell of it?  The range and variety of styles apes, perhaps swings past, AW,ATS.  There are nursery rhyme intermissions - A man would simply have to be as mad as a hatter, to try and change the world with a plastic platter - grumbling heavy guitar work outs - No. 1 Lowest Common Denominator - and Utopian singalongs - Sons of 1984.

There are long, largely instrumental workouts that reflects Todd's increased use of keyboards and synthesisers, which have a delightful lo-fi and warm, organic feel which sounds utterly contemporary.  Of particular note are the undulating, proto-Flaming Lips of In and Out The Chakras We Go, and the queasy The Spark of Life.  The nearest Todd gets to the aural collage of AW,ATS side one is side threes segue of Sidewalk Cafe and Izzat Love which explodes into the Uber-Alice, Uber-Iggy Heavy Metal Kids, which like all the best stomping glam-metal satirises as it struts.

This is balanced with some of Todd's most glistening blue eyed soul ballads, any of which would have slipped effortlessly onto previous albums.  A Dream Goes on Forever and The Last Ride are poised and peerless, a sweeter memory alongside the fried explorations.

Is it weirder than A Wizard, A True Star?  Well, it's a certainly less feted album, and I play it more often.  It's gloriously bananas, and less concerned with meeting the listener's expectations and more concerned with recruiting to the massed choirs of Sons of 1984.  Where some of the albums on the list are unknowable at their heart, where madness and solipsism pull like whirlpools,  Todd invites the listener into a world where the seemingly unpredictable is embraced.  It paved the way for a series of career swerves which seldom again provided such a varied smorgasbord.  There would be note perfect recreations of 1965 classics, albums of Robert Johnson covers, a 69 minute prog album that sounded like Metropolis scored by Yes.  There would be a lush album where every instrument was the human voice.  A Treatise on Cosmic Fire.  Cardboard inserts to build your own pyramid.  What makes Todd Cultureberg's pick for Weird No 1 is that this magpie creativity was not isolated on their respective projects, the pressure of creativity at the time insisted that this all be thrown together and behold! the whole of Mr Rundgren's Insistent Muse is there on one Elpees Worth of Tunes.  

Suicide and their precursors, Leon Russell's Ballad of Hollis Brown

The sight of stars of the rock and roll firmament fizzling away has been frequent in 2016, and has been an intimation of mortality for all of a certain vintage. Were the Cultureberg gramophone to be taken over by sentiment streaked retrospectives there would be scant time for new favourites, but one record that has snuck in there, possibly because I had never played it whilst its creator was extant, has been Leon Russell's Stop All That Jazz. From 1974, and encased in a cover where Leon is about to get cooked up in a pot (no, me neither), it features at least two off beat classics. First, an instrumental version of Spanish Harlem that sounds like Sun Ra in a loosey goose mood.  The second is linked to below, and is probably the best of Leon's many excellent Dylan covers, The Ballad of Hollis Brown.

Far superior to the version Dylan scraped out at Live Aid, and which Ron Wood believed was the Ballad of Collis Brown, this features a monster groove led by Leon on Synth, and the field hollers which introduce and punctuate the song put me in mind of Suicide's similar tale of patricide and hysterical anomie, Frankie Teardrop.  Its intensity is a bit at odds with the rest of the record, for example the take of If I were a Carpenter which has a likeable, braggart lope, but a listen to his eponymous debut or, even better, Carney, is enough to evidence that here is a singular musician for whom routine is anathema and whilst there is a solid grounding in Gospel, Country, Jazz and all strains of American musics, Leon is, quite frankly, all over the shop and impossible to second guess.  I suspect that amongst the piles of unaddressed and half remembered vinyl in the Cultureberg vault are copies of Hank Wilson's Back and possibly Will O The Wisp and Americana as well.  Bring em on!


To close, I will list some of the classics Leon played on as a sidemen, information borrowed from Uncut magazine.  Be assured, one doesn't even have to name the artist on these platters for even the most callow child to recognise them....The Monster Mash, Be My Baby, Da Doo Ron Ron, Mr Tambourine Man, California Girls, River Deep Mountain High, Strangers in the Night, 59th Street Bridge Song, Gentle On MyMind, Delta Lady, After Midnight and Watching The River Flow.  And if that ain't a genius, I don't know what is.

twenty sixteen was my number part five; best reissue - BIG STAR'S THIRD

 The three CD examination and exhumation  of the sessions which became Big Star's Third album, also known as Sister Lover's and at the time (possibly) intended to be called Beale Street Green, both enhances the music's intrinsic value and enables a more varied and deeper understanding of this stone classic.  Intended originally as an Alex Chilton solo project 3rd is popularly seen as his paean to breakdown and dissolution, reflecting substance use and emotional chaos.  That 3rd is such a superb record indicates, consensus tells us, that only a supremely talented and driven artist could wrench such quality from such disorganisation and disintegration.  This is similar to the stance taken about Tonight's The Night, Exile On Main Street and Pink Moon, amongst others.  This set provides evidence to support the view that, as suggested in Robert Gordon's It Came From Memphis, for instance, that the sessions at times were bacchanalian and loose; I would contend that it is not at all paradoxical that the set also underlines the application and aforethought Mr Chilton and his collaborators put into their performances.

One of the knee-jerk tenets of rock criticism is that there is nothing as glorious as a wasted talent, whether that is wasted as in squandered or wasted as in dissipated and prone.  Received wisdom is that we can apply both categories in parallel to Mr Chilton and there are recordings and anecdotes that can be cited.  Take a listen to the November 1978 bootleg of Alex' appearance on KUT radio for an instance of this.  I have yet to read the Chilton biography, which I'm sure would round this piece out nicely, but its appropriation of the later album's title A Man Called Destruction neatly sums up a prevailing view which is very much only part of the picture.

The set begins with a dozen or so acoustic demos - guitar and piano- which immediately undercuts the seductive myth of narcotic 3a.m. ennui.  The majority of the songs which form the album's protean core are previewed as tight and focussed 2 or 3 minute sketches of acoustic perspicacity, melodic and glowing, much like side two of No 1 Record.  There is a darker undertow to some of the songs - the piano demo of Holocaust is a fully-formed shiver, and Number 37 should be advised not to take a look at the demo of Femme Fatale - but most find Mr Chilton a mischievous choirboy, a sweet angel of discord hymning songs of lovelorn melancholy.  If the sessions had ended at that point there was a great album that could have been compiled merely from the demo's and the performances of them, which as countless expanded editions of great albums have shown us is often, perhaps seldom, the case.

The set then runs through more filled out takes with Ardent's John Fry and some rough mixes with Jim Dickinson which do indeed echo with after hours excess, piano's tumbling downstairs, impromptu midnight choirs, guitar solos skidding off-piste.  Alex's girl at the time, Lesa Aldredge, sings some cuts - The Velvets After Hours among them.  The cousin of photographer William Eggleston and the subject of his famous pre-Raphaelite photograph, used on the cover of Lesa's Barbarian Women In Rock single. Lesa's untutored vocals will have appealed to Alex, though as their relationship deteriorated he is said to have erased some of them.  If 3rd had become the double album that Jim Dickinson indicates had been considered the Lesa vocals and numerous covers would complement the core of Chilton compositions on which the records reputation largely stands.  It is a considerable achievement that of the 70 cuts on the set there is nothing that is not enjoyable and eminently listenable.  (For all its thoroughness, one listens to, let's say, The Pet Sounds Box with a different agenda).

Very little on the finished album is unstructured or unfinished, and some is as finely and innovatively arranged as on the two preceding Big Star albums. Thank You Friends has an upbeat, classic Big Star setting which counterpoints Alex's irony.  The sparse apocalyptic setting of Holocaust is unerringly apt.  Jody Stephens, the only other original band member involved, said, " He was going through a pretty dark period in his life.  And I think he did a brilliant job of reflecting that on that album."  I think Mr Stephens is accurate in supporting the view that be it Beatlesy pop or doomy ballads, the takes and the production choices serve the songs and their subject matter; to see the album as lost or the sessions as inchoate is to under-appreciate the craft and ability on display.  Jim Dickinson said, " It's like a stage show.  The musicians see one thing and the audience something else.  I think Sister/Lovers is very definitely a case of that.  I think that what is perceived is way different from what was conceived."

It has become commonplace to apportion to Mr Chilton a contrarian streak as wide as the Mississippi.  He  followed his muse with little attention to career afterwards, veering from label to label, tour deal to tour deal, often subsisting, sometimes going below that level.  He had, of course, had success as the 16 year old vocalist with the Boxtops (and toured regularly with the Beach Boys, hence the inclusion here of Don't Worry Baby); the underbelly of the music business held no allure.  3rd is comparatively tight when considered against the follow up, also helmed by Jim Dickinson, Like Flies on Sherbert, which is the apotheosis of Chilton's primitive, Back to Basics  style, also seen on The Singer Not The song EP, and his production work for The Cramps and Panther Burns.  All these records are also towering achievements, with a continuing appeal to garage aficionados and all open eared cognoscenti.  His subsequent work, sometimes skimmed over, showed a fealty to a certain R and B ideal and reverence for a finely honed song.  It is said that Mr Chilton saw himself more in the mode of Chet Baker, covering classic songs, rather than the singer-songwriter-performer that is the common expectation of the modern music market.  Nonetheless the No Sex Ep , High Priest, Black Market all have superb originals alongside covers. Even the Clichés LP, ten acoustic covers of classic songs, evidences a care and focus that is to be found throughout his career.  We can see that attention to detail and quality in the six versions of Big Black Car on the set, a contender for the emotional heart of the album, a sleepwalking drive at below the minimum speed limit and as good a song about detachment as ever written.

My key exposure to the album, the 12 track Aura LP version released in 1978, did not include Big Black Car, though I bought the single of Jesus Christ of which it was the flipside (in all senses of the term).  Much of the debate about "What should the Running Order be?" is not answered by the set, and not attempted.  The question is as much a part of its mystique as that attached to the running order of Smile .  Every reissue (apparently there have been ten) have scooped up additional cover versions, and now with 70 tracks to consider, 3rd becomes almost an analogue of Naked Lunch, where one is invited to dig in at random or favourite points to consider what one finds on the end of ones fork.  I shall conclude with an attempt to suggest a track listing for an idealised 3rd/Sister-Lovers.  I have stuck to the suggested 7 tracks per side of the original Ardent test pressing, which the third cd here also does, though have altered the choices and order.  I've dropped Jesus Christ-always a bit Greg Lake for me- and all the covers bar Femme Fatale, which is part of the emotional undertow alongside Kangaroo and others.  There is no place for the cover of Nature Boy, not added until the 1992 CD reissue, even though it is a marvelous song and performance, and its depiction of a strange, enchanted boy surely applies as much to Alex as the songs author Eden Ahbez.  "The greatest thing you'll ever learn, Is just to love and be loved in return" may be the refrain which sums up the romantic yearning under Alex's songs on 3rd, but it is entirely in justifiable that this key song should be absent.   Big Star's 3rd remains a work of Genius with a part of it forever unknowable.

Side One:  Stroke It Noel, Downs, Holocaust, Femme Fatale, Blue Moon, Kanga Roo
Side Two:  You Can't Have Me, Kizza Me, O Dana, Nightime, Big Black Car, Thank You Friends,
 Take Care.

Twenty Sixteen Was My Number Part 4: Best Albums of the Year.

Cultureberg's Top 5 (In alphabetical Order)
1. Robert Coyne and Jaki Liebzeit - I still Have This Dream
2. Damien Jurado - Visions of Us on The Land
3. The Limanas - Malamore
4. Cian Nugent - Night Fiction
5. Ryley Walker - Golden Sings That Have Been Sung
Best Reissue - Big Star's Third

1:Robert Coyne and Jaki Liebzeit

The wholly speculative purchase which reveals itself as a rare treat is one of the many pleasures of shopping for records. Perhaps it merely plays into a bogus sense of critical infallibility, but a glance into the Carrier Bag of Doom prior to a trip to the Charity Shop should quickly scotch that conceit. Whatever, Robert Coyne and Jaki Liebzeit's third album together is just such a creature.

If I was expecting the metronomic funk of Can or the Warped English Blues of Kevin Coyne, Robert's father, it wasn't that that I found. In it's place are simple but precise drum patterns and tightly wrought guitar figures underpinning sparse, koan like lyrics.

The album works best in late evening, the hum of the songs intoxicating and transfixing. Best is the eleven minute Thank You,I've Got The Idea. The drumming has the regularity and repetition blended of prime Liebzeit with a loose limbed suppleness and warmth that no machine can emulate. The songs are coloured by cello and keyboards and some backing vocals hare and there. The video of the construction of the back cover illustration Days of Bookmongers by Wendy Coyne is below, and includes some of the music.
It's an album that has reappeared when its brasher brethren have been filed away, and its deceptive simplicity keeps rewarding. The opening track Cockney Mystic is a good example of the lyrics' terse sarcasm and undercurrent of cruelty, or perhaps an exposure of the offhand cruelty underlying peoples lack of commitment. It brought Cultureberg to remember a seventies throwback, R D Laings book Knots, where tangles, insecurities and haphazard indifference are laid out on the page. This is a sort of link to the mileu where Kevin Coyne and Can albums would have been as a backdrop to tea and spliffs, Mike Leigh plays, SWP fundraisers and unreliable plumbing. The uncomfortable echo in the nocturnal balm that raises I still Have This Dream above the mundane.

2: Damien Jurado

Cultureberg has been listening to Damien Jurado since his debut Rehearsals for Departure which fit comfortably into an emergent Americana, Carver-esque narratives, spoken word samples, strummed acoustics. Three or four albums ago his sound exploded. Like Tom Waits with Swordfishtrombones he overhauled his sound from sepia to technicolour. The four albums he has made with producer Richard Swift (himself a highly talented songwriter with a back catalogue of superb albums) have been a revelation. A reference point for the sound might be Danger Mouse's production on Beck's Modern Guilt or with Broken Bells - Mr Swift has performed with The Shins at times.
Widescreen, pummelling drums, massed choir of backing vocals and the feel of a parched drive through the desert, pulling out of Barstow when the bats hit., It's a big sound, like reveille in Monument Valley, an hallucinatory pinsharp production which nestles somewhere between the AOR psychedelia of A Horse With No Name nd the Studiomusodrifterama of Jim Sullivan's UFO.

Visions of Us on the land is in many ways the epitome of modern American music; adventurous, mystical and cavernous. Mr Jurado has wandered from the Troubadour path, but beneath the towering superstructures are the few notes and chords of the acoustic guitar on which they are likely to have been germinated. Prisms, for example, is just voice and guitar, sounding like it has escaped fromSimon and Garfunkel's Bookends.

It seems that many albums today are sold on the strength of a backstory, often a set of circumstances or a shaggy dog story as flimsy as the music.  Visions is the third part of the very loose Maroqopa trilogy, after Maroqopa itself and Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Son.  The trilogy is described as a story  in which a character has to disappear from society in order to discover some eternal truths., which is enough guidance for me.  The cover art - tidal waves, crashed cars, ufos, a walrus - resembles the cover of a science fiction paperback bought in a roadside store and thrown onto the back seat.  Interlocking stories?  Shared Themes?  You can make your own associations or delight in the individual tracks.  I suspect there is a structure there but the listener makes their own meaning.  It's a road trip off the beaten track, a series of mid-life epiphanies that are maybe mystical, maybe chemical, definitely musical.  There are seventeen tracks (it's a double on vinyl) and all I have is the cardboard promo sleeve as a guide, which is enough.  Visions of us on the Land is a deep, immersive experience and Cultureberg urges you to take the plunge.

3:  The Limanas

The Limanas are a husband and wife psychedelic band from near Perpignan in Southern France whose new album, Malamore, occupies a midpoint between the kitsch-psych of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood (I'm thinking particularly  of Some Velvet Morning and Sand here) and Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson.  The Limanas emulate the sound Serge achieved with the cream of London session musicians, and add touches of freakbeat, ye ye and Calexico on the side.  There's wah-wahs grinding, organs and drums spiralling.  Paradise Now steals the progression from You Only Live Twice (more Nancy), no doubt deliberately and meaningfully, over which the refrain of "It's like going into the sky"  is repeated breathlessly.  The titles will indicate the albums orientation - El Sordo, Dahlia Rouge, Zippo, El Beach, - music which throbs and shimmers in the sharp sunlight.

Some years ago Cultureberg drove from Calais to the South of France in late December.  Even then there is a point where the light changes and sunglasses are essential and not an affectation.  The Limanas pose (without posing) on the cover of the album dressed in black, shades on, leaning on an Airstream.  That's what this sounds like.  It is first and foremost pop music and avoids the garage of genre, the ghetto of categorisation and the nod out of niche to make a claim on the mainstream.  12 tracks in 41 minutes, it speaks English, French and the Lingua Franca of Rock and Roll.  Whenever I play it you can observe the tapping of toes like slow motion film of seeds germinating and people say "Who's this?  It's terrific" and they're right.

They've drafted in Peter Hook on Garden of Love to play an elegiac bass part, but this is integrated seamlessly into the soundworld The Limanas cook up, making it the most straight-out entertaining record I've heard all year.  Some have compared them to the Velvets (Okay, Mme Limana is the drummer), the Jesus and Mary Chain (Okay, I've seen a coupe of live things and I get that) but their mix of magpie classicism and sizzling hauteur is all their own.  "I'm Robert Mitchum, I'm Bob Duvall, Sit yourself down and Shut Your Mouth."  Bien sur!

4:  Cian Nugent - Night Fiction

To call an album likeable is to risk damning with faint praise, but, as with people, one must like an album to spend time with it.  We can admire an album' s ambition - the root cause of Joanna Newsome and Julia Holter's popularity, perhaps - or we can keep listening out of brand loyalty, but the mixture of comfort and novelty that adds up to pleasure should not be undervalued.  It is hard to manufacture likeability.

Cian is an Irish guitarist who is frequently bracketed with Steve Gunn, Ryley Walker, Chris Forsyth and a wide swathe of guitarists with feet in tradition, improvisation and extemporisation.  (I know that's three feet, but they keep moving 'em!)  Where he scores for me is in a relaxed spontaneity and a conversational quality in his songs, his singing and his playing which draws the listener in.  I've heard little of his earlier stuff, which I understand is largely instrumental (as is the lovely, melodic Lucy on this record) and though his vocals are not jaw-dropping they have the same approachability as Bert Jansch or Richard Thompson and will appeal to people of much classic guitar music.

Thompson is a guitarist Cian is often compared to, alongside comparisons to Tom Verlaine.  You can understand why on the closing, 12 minute track Year of the Snake, bringing to mind the long live version of Calvary Cross to me.  It's nearly 7 minutes before a vocal comes in and it's a stormer, but the quieter tracks do it for me, the aching Things Don't Change That Fast and particularly the 8 minute Shadows whose coda hums and pulses on a bed of horns, much in the manner of Van on Common One.  Its as catchy as The Band at times, the guitar playing often restrained and it is, let's return to the start, a supremely likeable and enjoyable record.

5:  Ryley Walker

Golden Sings That Have Been Sung - it's very title sums up Ryley's gushing awkward transcendence - has pulled him back from a precipice, from a cul de sac.  He could have become the Barron Knight of Folk Rock;.... and this is me, he might now be saying.

Cultureberg was very enamoured of his first album, all the borrowed Bert Jansch-isms were full of youthful ardour, trying on someones hat and coat whilst deciding who they were.  His second, Primrose Green, perhaps went too far down the road of sincere flattery.  The Happy Sad vibes, the John Martyn electric piano a straitjacket not a leaping off point.  Even the sleeves homage to Elektra Records seemed a tad forced, and Mr Walker seemed keen to see the album as a point in time he had moved on from.

When Cultureberg attended his show at The Brudenell in Leeds this spring, when Danny Thompson was unable to attend and partner him, he played many new songs, presumably many of them finding their way onto the third album.  He was the most enthusiastic of giddy kippers, the sort of artist who dives headlong into a genre or oeuvre, heady with exploratory zeal.  With this album he has successfully surfaced with 8 tracks that are individual to him.  A few listens in and even the occasional twinge of Jim O'Rourke has faded.  The lyrics are individual and idiosyncratic, half gnomic and half tossed off, and all the better for that.  Digressions about his credit being shit and his dad wanting a daughter are inconsequential but have the ring of truth, adding to the songs uniqueness.

The other musicians drawn from Chicago's improv and jazz scene, notably Health and Beauty, are empathetic to the songs' roll and eddy.  His desire to stretch out live is well documented (visit the nyc taper site for some live shows), but here he keeps to 5 minutes or so and they thus repay frequent revisiting.  The album captures the songs at that sweet point where spontaneity remains yet a working knowledge has allowed the musicians to add their individual contributions to the tracks.

Golden Sings is the album where Ryley Walker realises his potential and fully delivers on his promise.  At The Brudenell Cultureberg ran into a confrere who had been missing in action, The Great Watto, who declared Ryley to be a genius.  Cultureberg's self restraint would not stretch to such an epithet, but undoubtedly Mr Walker has alchemised his undoubted ability into an individual vision and has absorbed his influences to produce a record which will, on its own terms and with its own voice, stand the test of time.

Twenty Sixteen is the number, part two

Best Americana Album

What is Americana? For the purposes of this round-up I take it to be music where a Country element is significant, though not necessarily wholly defining.  I think it was Harlan Howard who said Country was three chords and the truth.  That's enough of a definition.
Close contenders included Kurt Blau's Introducing, see a previous post, whose Fallin Rain was, for me, the best track of the year.  Some of the cover choices were very apposite for 2016, some tasty versions of great songs.  Also up there was The Jayhawks' Paging Mr Proust, an immediately engaging set of melodic songs, brilliantly off-kilter guitar solos (move over Nels Kline) and harmonies honed over decades.  But the Cultureberg Imaginary gong goes to Elizabeth Cook.
Cultureberg first became aware of Ms Cook by traditional means, via the car radio, just outside Exeter, as I recall.  Her song Sometimes It Takes Balls to be a Woman leaps off from its arresting title and sassily sashays it's way through gender conflict, a theme that is an essential ingredient in the country pie.  At Elizabeth Cook's kitchen table that pie may well be upturned upon a big hat, dripping gravy down a cowboy's cheek.  Hooked, Cultureberg snapped up the mother album "Balls", wherein music manners and mores were lambasted and lampooned.  The cover of The Velvet Underground's Sunday Morning was so beguiling and perfect you could not imagine it not having been countrified before.  An artist to watch.
Like the best artists worth keeping an eye on, she disappeared from gaze for a bit, now returning
with a new album Exodus of Venus, something of a departure.  If country music is a bureaucracy wherein the toiler must position themselves, Ms Cook has decided to head for the margins.  More recalibration than total overhaul, nonetheless largely gone are the whip-smart Loretta Lynn meets Dolly Parton observations and acoustic instruments, in are grunge guitars a la Todd Snider's Hard Working Americans.  Gone are snarky digs at Britney Spears, in are songs called Slow Pain and Methadone Blues.
If country is indeed the truth plus three chords, the best country deals with the drinking, cheating and everyday frustrations that underlies both Soap Opera and High Art with disarming honesty and wry wit.  It is what elevates Porter Wagoner's The Cold Hard Facts of Life, George Jones' He Stopped Loving Her Today or Loretta Lynn's Fist City into the pantheon, and though there aren't any songs with such a salty tang on Exodus of Venus (candidate for least country album title ever), the album mines thee topics that have fuelled the genre since the Carter Family.
The album is produced by Ms Cook's new paramour Dexter Green, who is also on guitar.  Draftees included are seasoned professionals like Matt Chamberlain on drums, who has played with Pearl Jam,
The Wallflowers, Tori Amos and Fiona Apple.  That mix of grunge and oestrogen should give you a taste of where the album is coming from.  Willie Weeks, who has played with everyone from the Stones and Clapton on down is on the bass guitar, and the sound is more Drive-By Truckers than Dollywood.  Slow Pain is organ and swampy guitar topped off with slide and only the duet with Patty Loveless on Straightjacket Love and the white trash indignation of Tabitha Tudor's Mama show echoes of previous records.  The drumming on Orange Blossom Trail could almost be Richie Hayward of Little Feat and the guitars are sharp and cutting on the least country title on the album, Broke Down in London on the M25.
Like all new releases there is a coherent backstory that is repeated throughout media pieces, somewhat unavoidable in Country music.  It covers Miss Cook's marriage breakup to Tim Carrol, her record label insisting she go into rehab despite her lack of a substance problem (no, me neither), deaths in the family, houses burning down, the gamut.  What elevates the record is its commitment to a somewhat uneasy listen and songs that seem to have had to be written rather than placed by the company.  Matthew Arnold, just after he moved to Nashville from Oxford over a hundred years ago, said "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recalled in tranquility."  He did not comment about three chords and the truth, or indeed iambic pentameter and the truth.  Had he heard Exodus of Venus he may well have joined Cultureberg in toasting a country grunge hybrid which recalled life's little ups and downs in tranquility (or maybe in tumult,) producing a record which utilises Miss Cook's wit and pizzazz in a new way.