Demob Happy

Scaling the dizzy heights ?

8/10

It’s impossible to write about Paul Auster’s ‘Mr Vertigo‘ and completely avoid the dreaded term ‘Magic Realism’ - even if it’s a genre the writer is not commonly associated with. The fact that the novel centres around a street urchin taught how to fly by a Hungarian showman named Master Yehudi should ensure all haters of that genre keep their distance. However, it’s all in the telling, and Auster infuses his novel with a page-turning, fairy-tale magic with none of the prissiness and pretention that often mars revisionistic approaches to the form. If, like Henry Perowne of Ian McEwan’s ‘Saturday‘, you find the focus on “the supernatural” as “the recourse of an insufficient imagination … an evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real”, then you might not want to touch this novel. “When anything can happen, nothing much matters,” Perowne grumbles, and I can see his point - it’s a whinge I often direct at CGI-saturated modern cinema. Obviously we don’t read novels or watch films solely to see reality reflected back at us, but I agree that it is immensely disengaging to feel, when reading a novel, that anything at all can happen. The rules governing a novel or film’s imaginative universe - however fantastical - must be respected. Events should be at least believable within the logic of the make-beleive world in which they occur.

Clearly, to suggest that ‘Mr Vertigo’’s author has “insufficient imagination” is patently ridiculous. If “learning to fly became a metaphor for bold aspiration” (Perowne again), then Auster doesn’t labour over the point. ‘Mr Vertigo’’s beauty is that - while epic in scope and with all the vivid expansiveness of a Pinocchio or Gulliver’s Travels - he pulls it off with trademark lightness of touch, with humour and irony, but without sacrificing the emotional gravity that makes such yarns so affecting. Written in the hilarious vernacular of a wise-cracking street kid from St. Louis, Mr Vertigo finds its protagonist suffering (but by turns also rather enjoying) the slings and arrows of American fortune: from The Depression and The Klu Klux Klan, from Baseball to the Prohibition and the Chicago mob.

Labelling such a fable a journey into the heart the American Dream is a lazy critical cliche - but if the novel is really a fable about the ”bold aspiration” of The Dream, then it’s a refreshingly, fittingly positive spin on that journey. Where many US novelists have endeavoured to reveal the dark side of American aspirationalism, ‘Mr Vertigo’’s narrative evokes the dizzying, exhilirating sense of freedom that The Dream once represented. The novel toys with various rags to riches myths that have had resonance in American popular culture: a boy with superhuman powers, a lovable gangster, a baseball star. What is most impressive, though, is how Auster makes his cultural-historic connections without the reader really noticing: the story itself is so much fun we forget about the layers of allegory and parody beneath.

FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT

Voice of The Hive

7/10

A sombre flute, the clunking toll of a bell, a solemnly plucked acoustic guitar … cue medieval clichés: misty moats, drawbridges, hooded monks, damsels in distress. But hold on, it’s not Led Zeppelin IV … a shimmering drone, Mellotron, and suddenly all manner of spiralling antiquated synths and warped B-movie effects. Thus begins ‘You Won’t Be The Same Ever Again’, the opening track of Greg Weeks ‘The Hive‘, and it is this oddball fusion of synthetic textures and baroque folk that flickers and sparks throughout the album.

Variously described - rather unappetisingly - as drone-folk and chamber rock, Greg Weeks is member of the Espers, whose medieval-inflected prog is very much prevalent in his solo work. The interplay of fuzzy guitar lines, moogs, Mellotron and Rhodes conspire towards the kind of baroque 60s psychedelia that the Flaming Lips toyed with on parts of ‘At War With the Mystics‘ and ‘The Soft Bulletin’. A more synthesised, buzzing soundscape than that of his acid-folk contemporaries, Weeks’ solo output has echoes of Midlake, minus the Fleetwood Mac impersonations, and a hint of Beach House’s waltzing slowcore. ’The Hive’ also bears similarities to the Notwist’s funereal electronic-tinged indie and is a lusher, more accomplished cousin of Tunng’s Wicker Man conceit.

Most of ‘The Hive’’s highlights feature in the first half the album: the Portishead-ish gloom of ‘Lamb’s Path’, for instance, with its little bursts of guitar distortion adding bite to the cello and glockenspiel. ‘Lay Low’ is yearning, jazzy space rock with a dash of Stereolab, while the dream pop of ‘Burn the Margins’ is augmented by blissfully dissonant keyboards and abrasive spurts of guitar noise. The invariability of pace, however, makes ’The Hive’ a little repetitive, particularly in the latter stages. The lengthy title track, for example, is an eight-minute, po-faced dirge; its unironic, hokum paganism begs for some Monty Python-esque medieval cheer in the vein of The Holy Grail.

The title track apart, ‘The Hive’ is largely less expansive - more pop orientated - than the Weeks’ work with the Espers, though it lacks the anchoring beauty of Meg Baird’s Sandy Denny-esque singing. Weeks’ vocals are stretched a bit thin over the course of one album, especially on its more ponderous moments, and are best treated - as on ‘You Won’t Be The Same Ever Again’ - with some shrewd double tracking. By contrast, the delicate, drifting ‘Not Meant For Light’ frames his voice in a more intimate context, and is more affecting for it. But this lightness of touch is conspicuously absent elsewhere on the album, as Weeks manages to turn a pointless cover version of Madonna’s ‘Borderline’ - one of those unfortunately apt titles for a bad song - into a turgid, plodding bore. There is much to admire on ‘The Hive’, especially in the rich musicianship, but it is an album let down by some poor moments.

Carry the fire

9/10

I was initially surprised to hear that ‘The Road‘, a novel I had wrongly thought to be about a post-apocalyptic world populated by zombie flesh-eaters, had won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In fact only one-part of my initial prognosis was correct; the novel is centred around a man and his son’s quest for survival in an America that has befallen some unspecified environmental or nuclear catastrophe. All animal life has disappeared, including most human life, and ash covers everything. Food is scarce, and the survivors have resorted to murder, theft and in some cases slavery and cannibalism. The man and his boy travel the eponymous ‘Road’ to the coast, a quest without any clear objective bar the possibility of encountering other ‘good guys’, and avoiding the ‘bad guys’ as much as possible. Distinguishing whom is whom, however, is not easy, and the tension created by this is brilliantly rendered. Furthermore, and perhaps even more evocatively, is the way McCarthy depicts the protagonists’ struggle against the elements in an unyieldingly huge and savage landscape. Their need to huddle together to sustain warmth in the winter nights is as palpable as their paranoia about getting caught by the ‘bad guys’.

On a recent blog post on John Self’s ever-excellent ‘Asylum‘, he asked speculatively if readers could suggest any decent novels about fatherhood. I made a couple of suggestions but was admittedly a bit stumped. ’The Road’, however, strikes me most as a novel about the depth of a father’s love for his son (the novel is dedicated to John Francis McCarthy) and his will to protect him at any cost. As a father-to-be, for me almost everything else in this novel felt secondary  - at least on an emotional level. McCarthy reserves some faith in the endurance of the human spirit - referred to on several occasions directly as a “fire” that the protagonists endeavour to keep burning - despite framing man as culpable for his own catastrophe. The Road is also a hymn to nature’s brutal permanence - there is no suggestion that the world itself is poised to end, just that humanity is on the brink. Not exactly ‘28 Days Later’ then, with much of the threat (flesh-eating paedophiles etc.) more suggestive than explicit, and all the more frightening for it.

Survival - or “issues of life and death”, as the author put it in one interview - is a theme in many of McCarthy’s books, from the ‘Border Trilogy‘ to ‘No Country for Old Men’. His characters often undergo transformative and transgressive experiences on the margins of civilisation, often pitted against the wilds or manifestations of evil (”the bad guys” again) that seem more spectral, or at least representative, than necessarily ‘real’. Like his frontier-centred novels, The Road is in deep awe of the American wilderness - it’s desolate beauty, it’s emptiness. Has a more desolate novel ever been written? I haven’t read one. Carry the fire.

Micah Blues and Red Rivers

7/10

Micah Blue Smaldone is a former punk scenester from New England who has moved on to sparse, rootsy folk. ‘The Red River‘, his fourth solo record, is dominated by meditative, neo-traditional acoustica with an eye for theatre. While intimate in scale it much less personal than, say, Bon Iver, but more focused on the kind of dust-choked cinematics of recent albums by the similarly named Micah P Hinson or Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan, albeit with a less bawdy vocal style. Fans of Will Oldham and Iron & Wine’s sparser material may find much to enjoy in the rusted, bleak atmospherics here. The Thrill Jockey press release tells me Smaldone sounds ‘like a dead man’, which may seem like hyperbole but there is something spectral about the old-time quality of the music. Like a less wildly impressionistic Grizzly Bear, there is a deliberately spooked mood to ‘The Red River’ - the sense that Smaldone is trying to conjure the ghosts of a past, not just resurrect the music itself. The production quality is as if it was processed through an analogue radio: the skeletal picked guitar, vagabond banjo and viola all sound somehow starched.

‘Pale Light’, the album highlight for me, with its muted horns and mood of dereliction, made me imagine a tramp listening to a Christmas brass band, trying to keep himself warm with a tot of whiskey: very much on the outside looking in. The beautiful, mournful trumpet solo suggests a less glossy version of Calexico’s Dia De Los Muertos atmospherics. Elsewhere ‘The Red River’ is more conventional, pitting Smaldone’s vulnerable Arthur Russell-esque vocals against picked acoustic folk and weeping cello. It’s the kind of unhurried folk tinged with vaudeville and ragtime that would have never been picked up for international distribution 10 or 15 years ago but is enjoying something of a renaissance. In an era where we are not starved for these kinds of moods and textures, The Red River is hardly unmissable, but it is a sad, sometimes beautiful little album all the same.

Season of bad will

7/10

I borrowed ‘A Season In The West’ on the recommendation of my mother-in-law [insert predictable joke here], who suggested I might find in it interesting parallels with Rose Tremain’s ‘The Road Home‘ which deals with similar themes. Both books concentrate on the migrant experience of London life, ‘The Road Home’ reflecting the new economic realities of an expanded EU and - by contrast - ‘A Season In The West’ depicting the experiences of a dissident Czech writer crossing the Iron Curtain for a taste of Western freedom. Such contemporaneous works have a tendency to render themselves a little obsolete in the popular imagination - a casual search for Piers Paul Read on Amazon isn’t encouraging, it seems many of his novels are now out of print. Of course, Iron Curtain or not, the themes are universal, and the moneyed London rather cruelly painted in ‘A Season In The West’ is not dissimilar to the moneyed London of the recent years currently on the receiving end of a critical bashing.

There are a couple of striking things about ‘A Season In The West’, winner of the James Tait Memorial Prize. First is Read’s employment of a rather 19th century style, a slightly tongue-in-cheek omnipresence that the narrator makes light of on several occasions. It gives the book the quality of being a rather cynical, fire-side fable about greed, and the lofty authorial position is so knowing and ironic the novel teeters between satire and parody. Secondly, few of the characters, not even the noble Czech, survive the book totally unscathed. While Joseph Birek maintains his integrity, he comes across as a rather dull and portentous. But the London set fare worse: over privileged toffs, serial adulterers, hacks, bankers and yuppies, all conforming to unpleasant typecast. It’s an undemanding but damning fable of money, class, and cultural and spiritual decay that could acquire new relevance in these credit crunching times.

FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT

Exile on ‘25th Street’

8.5/10

‘NYC‘ is Kieran Hebden’s (aka Four Tet) fourth collaboration with veteran jazz drummer Steve Reid and while I won’t pretend that I have heard the other three, the word in the blogosphere is that this is the most equal of their partnerships, with Hebden given much more license to stamp his mark on the record. Certainly fans of Fridge and Four Tet would be foolish to overlook this, a beautiful and intensely atmospheric mini-album. Although I don’t have the cover artwork to hand it is impossible to listen to ‘NYC’ and not picture a seething, rain-lashed megatropolis. It’s a murky, cavernous record easily redolent of old Scorcese films: steam rising from man hole covers, pimps lurking in shadows, dealers dealin’ (to borrow from Bobby Gillespie). The percussive energy and gently building tensions and atmospherics make it less wilfully difficult than such jazz-electronica collaborations might lead you to expect.

It is interesting to note that while Four Tet’s most recent EP  ‘Ringer’ sidestepped into more synthetic soundscapes, NYC is very much in line with the textures that made Hebden’s name: scuffed, jazzy rhythms; heavily-reverbed splices of acoustic guitar and piano; and a mulchy organic quality that once inspired the horror pigeonhole ‘folktronica’. But folk this isn’t, this is tranced-out bebop - rollicking, sweaty jazz augmented with synths and echo effects. It’s the kind of fuggy cinematic brew that should entice fans of David Holmes circa Let’s Get Killed, early DJ Shadow and DJ Krush (minus the hip hop esoterica), Amon Tobin, and Four Tet disciples from Pedro to Nostalgia 77.

The murky opener ‘Lyman Place’ is a bit of a red herring, as it’s probably the most abrasive track on the album - a pressure cooker of grinding bass loops and rusted-metal percussion. It’s a mood revisited on the dank, clunking ‘25th Street’, which sounds like a network of subterranean pipes rattling and hissing into life, building into a lolloping groove. ‘1st & 1st’ sounds like a gritty 70s cop show theme tune pulled apart and doodled over with freestyle drumming and lots of electronic, dubby ephemera. ‘Arrival’, the album centrepiece, is a meditative, awakening but still somehow urban piece, augmented by shimmering synths, vibrating drones and Reid’s scattershot percussive improvisations. This stunning high is sustained into the bustling ‘Between B & C’ in which Hebden showers sparkling, sped-up synth fragments over a gorgeous piano groove. ‘Departure’ is Four Tet all over: loops of chime-like textures which simmer and subside while Reid grooves sporadically over the top, and occasional beams of pure Bladerunner synth shoot out from the speakers. It’s wonderful, heady, spectral stuff that gets better and better, both throughout its recording time and with each listen - an unexpected delight.

Breezy brilliance from casual genius

8/10

FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT

Arthur Russell’s ‘Love Is Overtaking Me‘ compiles previously unreleased material from the critically regarded but somehow commercially overlooked artist’s archive. Ranging from Dylanesque folk, country and angular art pop from the 1970s through his final home recordings before death in 1991, the album provides a fascinating portrait of a restless innovator and songwriter whose journey reflects two generations of musical transformation. I don’t want to make it sound as if Russell was just a musical magpie since every style he appropriated he made his own, and the tracks on ‘Love Is Overtaking Me’ are linked by a sonic playfulness, a lightness of touch and an melodic insouciance.  They are are also linked in that they depict a particular side of Russell’s work, the - for lack of a better expression - singer-songwriter side (i.e., intimate, lyrical and often romantic) as opposed to his more avant-garde explorations, electronic experiments and disco (some of which released under various pseudonyms). It is also worth noting that this should not be viewed by the novice (for I am new to Russell too) as simply an outtakes and rarities collection for the hardcore fans and completists, as Russell had vast archives of unreleased materials and was known for being a pained perfectionist who could not finish anything. This is a fact belied by the music, which often has a breezy, almost casual brilliance.

Over 21 tracks there is a little, but not a lot, variation in quality; but given the brevity of songs ‘Love Is Overtaking Me’ is not the mammoth collection it initially seems. Many tracks focus on Russell’s lyrical concerns: bittersweet small town narratives, everyman streams of consciousness. The little vignettes like ‘Maybe She’ are deceptively simple at first but have a delicate sadness that gradually insinuates itself. It is fashionably lo-fi, but not devoid of the electronic and art-pop touches for which Russell is perhaps more widely known. The cello - the instrument that is most commonly associated - is also present, but mainly a tool used for subtler shading on these tracks, often little more than a sombre murmur. Nick Drake is the figure that immediately comes to mind listening to the beginning of ‘Love Is Overtaking Me’ - or at least an Americana tinged version of the troubled Cambridge folk singer - but had Drake lived into the 1980s it is difficult to imagine that he would have made the post-punk tinged pop of ‘Habit of You’. The chamber woodwinds at the beginning of ‘Goodbye Old Paint’, for example, recall a melancholy English folk but the singing is pitched closer to Dylan. By contrast, ‘Time Away’ could be the Velvet Underground, ‘Janine’ or ‘The Letter’ could be a wigged-out early Police, and ‘What It’s Like’ recalls Lambchop’s Memphis soul. Russell is such an eclectic figure, with such a formidable back catalogue, that some may not know where to start. Take it from me, you could do a lot worse than starting here. Highly recommended.

Arthur Russell-habit-of-you. MP3

A World Apart

6.5/10

FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT

Returning from the nu-disco of Hercules and Love Affair, ’Another World‘ finds Antony & The Johnsons revisiting the themes and cabaret moods of Mercury-winning breakthrough, ‘I Am A Bird Now‘. Having such a singular singing style is both a gift and a burden: while Hegarty made the transition to the dancefloor with apparent ease, the return to the niche territory of his first two albums may wear the casual listener’s patience thin. We are back in Hegarty’s emotional universe, an oppressively personal place dominated by interlocking themes of transgenderism and emancipation (emotional and physical). While overcoming repressive gender categorisations could make for quite a universal musical subject matter, ‘Another World’ is suffused with such a acute sense of melancholy and isolation to sometimes render Hegarty’s music rather impenetrable. There is no denying the beauty of the music, but sometimes he seems locked in a certain emotional register that can be repetitive. While technically impressive, the quivering vulnerability of Antony’s vocal is so invariable the listener is in danger of becoming immune to its powers.

With a Japanese transvestite performance artist adorning the stark black and white cover artwork, ‘Another World’’s title is misleading, as it is hard to see this EP as a departure. In the main, the Johnsons brand is ostensibly unchanged: the subtle shadings and embellishments very much backgrounded by Anthony’s fragile vocals and piano. Things do, however, get weirder on the skeletal gospel of ‘Shake that Devil’, which pits Anthony’s tremulous singing over stark, ominous drones, a big rockabilly breakbeat and saxophone squeals. Shades of Morphine and Angelo Badalamente suggest new, swampier tangents to come on their next full length. Otherwise it’s honestly much of a sameness, and none of the songs here improve upon what Anthony & The Johnsons have done before.

Ten past three

5/10

The release of ‘3:10 to Yuma‘, coinciding with that of ‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford‘, got some critics excited about the re-birth of the Western. While two films from Hollywood in one year hardly signifies a renaissance, Ed Harris’ 2008 Western ‘Appaloosa’ certainly suggests there is life left in the genre. Perhaps more significantly, films such as ‘No Country For Old Men‘ and ‘There Will Be Blood‘ - while not belonging archetypally to the genre - hinted at the ways in which the frontier myths could be further explored beyond the cowboy paradigm.

Directed by James Mangold, following his decent Oscar-winning Johnny Cash biopic ‘Walk The Line‘, ‘3:10 to Yuma’ is a glossy, hi-octane Hollywood action flick. Those expecting a subtler revision of the Western genre in the mould of ‘Jesse James’ or Clint Eastwood’s peerless ‘Unforgiven’ might be disappointed. Both those films explore the notion of myth and deconstruct the traditional glamourisation of violence in the genre, but 3:10 ignores the revisionism of the latter-day Western, ratcheting up the action and the body count. While those films showed the harsh realities of life in the American West, and the debilitating effect of violence on the human body, 3:10 sees characters recover swiftly from bullet wounds to continue their horseback pursuits.

On paper the cast looks like an exciting proposition, but Russel Crowe severely hams it up as the outlaw baddie, and Christian Bale’s earnest civil-war-vet-trying-to-do-the-right-thing is sadly dull. 3:10’s gun-slinging blood-thirstiness might appeal to fans of Sam Peckinpah more than those of, say, Sergio Leone or John Ford: it is neither grittily realistic nor Golden-age romantic. A remake of a 1957 film of the same name, originally based on 1953 Western short story by Elmore Leonard, there are few surprises in a film that adds little of fresh import or imagination to the genre.

Gang Gang goes bang

8.5/10

FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT

Long-time darlings of New York’s ultra-hip, art-conscious underground music scene, Gang Gang Dance look braced to make a wider breakthrough with their new album ‘Saint Dymphna‘, released in the UK on Warp. Like their contemporaries Out Hud, Gang Gang Dance makes a hybrid of post-rock and electro, punk and dance. But while Out Hud and particularly their sister act !!! (chk chk chk) often veer towards house and disco, Saint Dymphna is mostly scary, volatile stuff. While there are certainly parallels with LCD Soundsystem, GGD’s take on dance-punk has less cross-over appeal and more in common with the darker acts on the DFA roster such as Black Dice and The Juan McLean. Despite the gorgeous Kate Bush-remixed-on-a ZX-Spectrum (if I may) of ‘House Jam’, Saint Dymphna is surprisingly un-dancefloor-friendly - sonically wild and sometimes abrasive. It combines some of the oblique electro sequencing of (fittingly) early Warp acts like Black Dog with a live-sounding spontaneity and ritualistic insistence on rhythm that recalls the Boredoms and ooioo.

With most its tracks segueing together into one passage, Saint Dymphna is a journey of rushing peaks and noodly valleys. Lizzi Bougatsos’s vocals - somewhere between Bjork and Yoshimi Pi We - will not be to everybody’s taste, her spontaneous yelps and howls riding the vagaries of the music as if driven by tribal fervours. The trancelike quality also recalls math-rock mavericks Battles but there is less insistence on precision and groove, more on Dionyisan abandon. Like ooioo there is also a new-agey, cod-mystical influence that creeps stealthily into their music. One minute you could be listening to Autechre, the next (’Dust’ for instance) it’s all tablas and cosmic wonder - the transition is so subtle however, and the music abstract enough, that you don’t begrudge the pan-global pick’n'mix.

There is a raw, un-trebly aspect to the production that reminds me of Portishead’s Third. They have retained the live aspect of the sound, a concert hall reverb (whether real or artificial) tangible in the same fashion as Pit er Pat’s recent ‘High Time‘. ‘Bebey’ begins the album with waves of synths and, er, pitter pattering metallic drums. The melodies at the core are unmistakably oriental and gradually this abstracted, global melodic signature insists itself. I’m very much reminded of Black Dog Productions classic ‘Bytes’, and how very blunt, mechanical textures are layered into pseudo-oriental grooves. ‘First Communion’ bleeds out of the opener with sudden orgasmic yelps from Bougatsos and a thrilling assault of synths built around a punk groove: think Crystal Castles jamming with ooioo. It’s an exhilarating hit of high-octane noise that ends abruptly on a thrilling high.

‘Blue Nile’ is bluesy, a dubby post-rock/house hybrid in the Out Hud school while ‘Vaccum’ is synth-driven prog that reminds me vaguely of Boards of Canada disciples Kelpe. ‘Princes’, with its garage beats and unlikely guest MC spot from UK Grime rapper Tinchy Stryder, seems a bit too zeitgeist grabbing - like those dance hip hop collaborations (Roots Manuva and Leftfield, Prodigy and Method Man) that surfaced in the late 90s. But it works better than it should, a full-on sonic mash-up of cavernous bub bass, insane synths and Stryder’s abrasive East London raps. The flight-of-stairs-falling-down-a-flight-of-stairs electro of ‘Inners Pace’ is like a carnival (or just a riot) in a Tokyo amusement arcade, while ‘Afoot’ finds the singer making what sounds like some kind of political diatribe over massive landslides of dubbed out effects, cascading walls of echo chamber. Avant-garde electronic music for fans of psych rock, Saint Dymphna should suit fans of both. Cacophonous, adventurous, OTT, sometimes relentless but never ordinary, fans of all forms of experimental music should look no further.