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.