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.
No comments:
Post a Comment