Reviews: September 2009
THE CLEAN
Mister Pop
(Arch Hill/Remote Control)
Over the course of their 30-plus-year career, New Zealand pop institution The Clean haven’t mellowed with age, they haven’t gotten weirder or boring, they’ve just… well… stayed magical.
In most instances a trio, made up of brothers Hamish and David Kilgour and Robert Scott, they’ve continued melding wistful pop hooks with discordant passages of indie squall to create a blueprint that bands such as Yo La Tengo have heavily borrowed from over the years. For only their fifth album proper, it’s again a sound that couldn’t come from anywhere other than New Zealand, with an effortless effervescence bubbling up from ‘Are You Really On Drugs’ and ‘In The Dream Life U Need A Rubber Soul’.
Somehow the exploratory, sparkling guitar cart wheeling through ‘Asleep In The Tunnel’ is almost childlike in its execution, but still vibrantly saturated. ‘Back In The Day’ and ‘Factory Man’ however are everything you think of when recalling the trinity of The Bats, The Chills and The Clean – and the Flying Nun Label that housed their classic sounds of the 80s and 90s. Scattered throughout the album are several absolute gems and instrumentals, ‘Loog’, ‘Moon Jumper’ and ‘All Those Notes’ mixing keyboards and yearning words into a seductive mix of hypnotic and dreamy twilight colours.
Were The Clean a new band of young’ins, then it’s doubtful whether anyone would take notice, but thankfully decades of perseverance doing what they love has left them beautifully out of step and in a universe of their own – gifted with music alive with vivid colours and a beautiful optimism that’s a joy to experience.
HEALTH
Get Colour
(Love Pump/Pop Frenzy)
25 years after their parents forged together new world electronics and danceable rhythms with armageddon noise and bare-boned metal, the children of Cabaret Voltaire have risen up to stake their own claim to the soundtrack of modern chaos we are all responsible for creating.
What this quartet does with guitars, keyboards, drum loops and electronics is nothing new in musical terms, it’s just that it hasn’t been heard for quite some time now. The first generation of Skinny Puppy, Coil and Einstürzende Neubauten scraped off shards that germinated into second-generation groups like Fuck Buttons and now Health. All that said, the group’s second album Get Colour is a densely packed sandwich of sounds, from ‘Die Slow’ which is a dancefloor neurosis that even The Faint aren’t capable of, to ‘Nice Girls’ with its Boredoms-styled feast of percussion.
This album, in parts, doesn’t say much more than the traffic on the freeway. Tracks like ‘Severin’, however, do translate all the noise and turmoil into a language that will certainly spark your neurons and, in the case of ‘Eat Flesh’, make it all sound like a herd of rampant elephants stampeding in unison down that same highway, crushing everything underfoot! There are strange respites though, such as the Jacob’s Ladder descent of ‘Before Tigers’, filled with sirens calling your soul to Hades.
This is post-punk noise that sounds LSD induced, is real heavy on the surrealist Manga visual connotations and could well be the explosive aural equivalent of pure euphoria… as long as you don’t handle it with care.
THE CRIBS
Ignore The Ignorant
(Wichita/Shock)
This is The Cribs’ fourth album, but given recent happenings it might as well be their first. This British trio have, since their inception in 2002, consisted of brothers Ryan, Gary and Ross Jarman, but that changed with an avid fan coming to them wanting to collaborate only to end up as the band’s fourth member… that fan was Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr.
So throw away past conceptions of what this band should sound like because Ignore The Ignorant is a reinvention, a huge evolutionary step and the sign of a band that has gone from making music for “now”, to being a band that can craft timeless indie pop tunes.
It would be deceitful to lay the fruits of the group’s labour at the feet of its newest member because the Jarmans are definitely in control of some great songwriting skills – ‘Cheat On Me’ is the first tune of the 12 offered to elevate your senses. But it’s that timing, that sense of melody that Marr possesses that can make good songs sound great and he’s done that here – even at times time-warping us to his 80s heydays with tunes like ‘Last Year’s Snow’. That groovy crunch that The Cribs have always had is in full swing in ‘City Of Bugs’ and ‘Stick To Your Guns’, only now with the added shimmering sound of Marr’s steel strings taking once virulent emotions and emancipating them.
The Cribs’ sound possesses an inherent humility that means they’d never be a barnstorming Pulp or Blur; still, this album has every right to place them alongside the songwriting skills of those other lads. Out of step and immersed in gloriously chiming melodies, The Cribs circa 2009 are a definite beacon of hope that pop and rock still has a lot to say and enjoy.
GIANTS OF SCIENCE
Live At The Troubadour
(Plus One)
It wasn’t until they returned to the fold that it became apparent that something vital had been lacking from our beloved rock’n’roll scene in not just Queensland, but Australia-wide. Standing at the foot of the stage, arms held aloft, late on a Friday night in April just past, The Giants Of Science reignited a rock’n’roll flame neglected for too long.
Time, the endless road and giving all until you’re empty put the Giants to sleep for a few years, but it’s this recorded show that was their return from a long hibernation. I’ll be the first to say that it was with fingers crossed that I walked up the Troubadour steps. After years of devastatingly great shows, the Giants return had to be good – anything else wouldn’t have made sense.
This recording is pretty fucking good for a live document, even though it can’t push the air like the boys do on stage. The moment that ‘I’ve Tried’ shifts into gear and takes off is that exact moment when you fall in love again with how these four manhandle rock’n’roll.
The Giants here are as good as any time in their career, in fact, due to the quality of this live recording, these songs are, if anything, a little cleaner and polished than they’ve been before. Salter and Tuite’s vocals are right out there, and some of the grit and grime hasn’t made it through the microphones, but that matters little, simply making it easier to totally absorb all of ‘Here Is The Punishment’, ‘Marcia Brady’, ‘Anchors Up’ and the formidable ‘Complete This Progression’.
This live CD is great and this band is better. If you weren’t at the front of the Troubadour stage, this CD should push you to the front of every future gig these boys deliver.
SOULSAVERS
Broken
(V2/Shock)
Rich Machin and Ian Glover, the epicentre of all things Soulsavers have again gone about taking their downbeat and orchestrated electronica and make it a fulltime family affair. In 2007 they dropped It’s Not How Far You Fall…, which saw the vagabond Mark Lanegan steal the show with his soothsayer lead role.
Well, if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it, and if it is broken – as the title here suggests – get as many people in as possible to lend their weight. Our front of our motley troupe once again is our dark prince, narrator of all things nocturnal, Mark Lanegan. But this time around Soulsavers have drawn in Will Oldham to pen a tune, Jason Pierce, Mike Patton and Gibby Haynes to lend their vocals, Sonus Quartet to provide the strings, Dustin O’Holloran to light up the piano and still many, many more folks in this broth of mood and melody.
So much talent, so many subtle parts that spark your imagination and still this album doesn’t add up. Why? It’s not that this album is broken, it’s just that it was poorly built. Everything here has been smoothed off to a perfect satin finish. The subtle electronics at the songs’ foundations absorb and sew up all the human emotions and hand-made inflections, leaving these 13 songs listless like trip-hop without a punchline. Lanegan can work well outside the rock spectrum, but take away the grit, the weatherboard timbre of his voice and his magic, his power, is lost. The same goes for the majority of the musicians here, known for their warts-and-all confessionals, their rustic power – now just bit players in a smooth jazz heist.
Portishead recently re-emerged, reinventing the wheel they had long ago made. Soulsavers have carjacked that ride and driven it straight up a dead-end street.
NICK CAVE & WARREN ELLIS
White Lunar
(Mute/EMI)
Everyone has their light and shade, their darkness and their pomp. Nicholas Cave and Warren Ellis are men who’ve made a career moving between those two vast poles. And so the man who only recently was consumed with the midlife crisis that was Grinderman has here retreated with his violinist partner in crime, into the beauty and twilit intimacy of their collective soundtrack work – White Lunar is, if you like, a best-of collection of the duo’s commissioned work.
These 33 pieces, spanning two CDs, come from the films The Assassination Of Jessie James, The Proposition, The English Surgeon, The Girl From Phnom Penh, the soon-to-be-released The Road, as well as the duo’s own vaults. Despite the music coming about over a four-year period between 2005 and 2009, if you ignore the tracklisting and immerse yourself in the arrangements and orchestration, you’d be hard pressed to not hear White Lunar as a seamless tale with a narrative all of its own.
While often based around sparse arrangements, this music does not merely consist of Ellis’s violin or Cave’s piano and guitar. This music is – for the most part – orchestrated, whispering sombre tones and casting long shadows with the occasional murmuring of Cave (‘Kerrison’s Punch’). Some moments strike you with familiarity, having already been released, and then there’s ‘Rat’s Tooth Forceps’ for example, which is in fact the central melody of The Dirty Three’s ‘I Offered It Up To The Stars…’. And in places this music could be The Dirty Three… if it were three plus another 15 or so.
You’ll find nothing amongst this music that’s ragged, unhinged or filled with brimstone – this is music with a deep sense of catharsis and opaque splendour, reaffirming the place of these two individuals as exquisite orators of the human experience.
RICHARD HAWLEY
Truelover’s Gutter
(Mute/EMI)
This British gent just exudes elegance and sophistication – his fragile but intricately detailed pop tunes have long seemed like the lost songbook of Lee Hazelwood. Speaking in the language of personal interludes and dog-eared memories, this album seems filled with things that have not existed in music for a good half-century.
‘Open Up Your Door’ – you can just see Sinatra standing there crooning the tune as the strings swell up behind him. ‘Ashes On The Fire’ – it should be a backdrop for an intimately lit, latter-era Johnny Cash. This scenario is common throughout these eight songs and that’s not to say that Hawley doesn’t have a voice of his own, but there exists something, finely interwoven into the notes and Hawley’s resonant timbre, that dictates a craftsmanship of the most enriching and flawless nature.
The anguish that peppered both his lyrics and previous four albums seems much more tempered in Truelove’s Gutter. His understated guitar work is both delicate and impassioned (‘Remorse Code’) and his accompaniments truly sublime – the aching saw work in ‘Don’t Get Hung Up In Your Soul’ a standout. But it’s the fact that nothing is ever overstated; only once does he feels the need to raise the rafters with ‘Soldier On’. More often, though, he’s a songsmith at his most potent when drawing the tension out of the music’s subtleties.
With half the album’s songs spanning a good six to 10 minutes each, various moods hang thick in the air in the way Scott Walker can fill the room with redemption. As absorbing as the album’s various narratives are, there’s no punchlines or real pearls of wisdom to be found, but it scarcely matters – everything here is so beautiful that it easily carries every moment out of the stereo and straight into your heart.
HOPE SANDOVAL & THE WARM INVENTIONS
Through The Devil Softly
(Nettwerk/Shock)
Whether it be with Mazzy Star or The Warm Inventions, Hope Sandoval emits the same sense of intimacy and candlelit warmth. It’s a candle that’s been burning low for some time now, with her second album with cohort Colm Ó Closóig coming a lengthy eight years since the eloquent Bavarian Fruit Bread.
The familiar sense of yearning and desire is present from the outset of ‘Blanchard’, slide guitar epilogues nestled up to Sandoval’s echoed whispers. Subtly scattered instrumentation fills these 11 tracks – a bit of lost harmonica here (‘Wild Roses’), a pitter-patter of piano there (‘Sets The Blaze’), nothing is overplayed or overemphasised as everything here is delivered with more than a hint of suggestion, which has always been the key to Sandoval’s emotive power.
Even with Closóig’s musical talents (now split between The Warm Inventions and My Bloody Valentine) and a host of guest musicians, everything here revolves primarily around Sandoval and her vicarious siren’s call. If you’re looking for warm reinventions in Through The Devil Softly then you’re unlikely to find anything to fill the hole.
There’s no doubting that this is an extremely beautiful album and in most cases, that should be enough… but to be honest, it’s not enough. Sandoval has headed a good many, very beautiful albums for close to two decades now and while this one can be chalked up as a slightly more pastoral articulation of her muse, this is a collection of songs that sound achingly familiar for good reason.
If, when soundtracking those late night episodes with another, you’ve worn out Sandoval’s previous albums, then happily reignite those moments with this latest chapter – otherwise there is no need to hang brightly this album.
AARON MARTIN
Chautauqua
(Preservation)
The sounds of dogs, birds, bells and whistles, the sounds of nature coming inside, mark the beginning of Arron Martin’s latest aural experience – one that’s a menagerie in the making. But such expansive space and vast use of sounds both traditional and interpretative make Chautauqua a place so seemingly distant that it doesn’t even make it onto a map.
Rooted in a classical mindset, Martin has on his third album successfully interwoven an aural history that bobs and weaves the likes of roots music, soundscape and avant garde into a calming ocean of songs that’s very satisfying to wade into. The plucked banjo in ‘New Madrid’ both complements and is at odds with the strings it straddles… it all depends on your mood. Chautauqua is like a book you can read again and again, each time coming up with a different plot line and ending.
Quite often sparse and definitely barren in parts (‘Orange To Eyeball’), you could never equate it to empty or boring. The desert is a barren place, at once desolate while also brimming with life, a landscape waiting to be transformed – and that’s what you’ll find here. A Silver Mt. Zion and Califone trod a similar path, even Boards Of Canada tried it once, but Martin doesn’t seem to be weighed down by similar constraints of genre, there being scant evidence of any such thing throughout ‘The Slowest Flood’ or ‘Two And A Half Acres’.
It is however when history takes hold or, in the case of ‘Sugar And Dirt’, when the cellos take hold – that the ethereal nature of the compositions are angelic in a way that even the most hardened atheist would fall in love with. Chautauqua is an album made not only for pleasure, but for time and tide as well.
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