Best of 2008: Now It's August - Pt. 2

This is the second part of the selection, from the whole of 2008 up until the month of August. Part One was posted recently here, and a previous selection started in April. The third part of Now It's August will be six songs from Irish artists.

August - Part 2 (it's looong)

4. Patti Smith & Kevin Shields - Performance I, Part 1, of The Coral Sea.

5. Grails - 'Take Refuge' from Take Refuge In Clean Living.

6. Matmos - 'Supreme Balloon' from Supreme Balloon.

Patti Smith & Kevin Shields

The Coral Sea is Patti Smith's elegy to her close friend Robert Mapplethorpe - the photographer who took the iconic cover image for Horses - who died of AIDS, aged 42, seven years before the publication of the tribute in book form in 1996. The double-CD set is a live recording of her reading of The Coral Sea accompanied by Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine on guitar. There are two performances, both recorded at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London in 2005 and 2006.

It's a long disc - this is the first of six tracks that make up the first performace, and as of writing I haven't even got around to the second disc and performance, which is supposedly broader and more energetic. On this track, Shields's guitar rises very slowly from being barely audible to having a physical, moving presence in the recording, while the whole disc captures the full climactic arc. Even if this part is less exciting or attention-grabbing, it wouldn't make sense to start anywhere else.

Patti Smith and Kevin Shields are important artists for me - and for most other people, to a greater or less extent, I would imagine - for two respective records: 1976's Horses and 1991's Loveless. Essentially, that goes without saying. Patti Smith - whose other output is far more prolific than Shields - although as I only have Easter and Radio Ethiopia, I can't speak too much about the overall quality of her work; though those two are very good, even excellent in places. Kevin Shields has achieved a lot of recognition for doing very little after Loveless, recent MBV reunion notwithstanding. He did do the Lost In Translation soundtrack, play with Primal Scream, and did a lot of work on Gemma Hayes's latest album, The Hollow of the Morning. However, it is little enough to make an appearance like this interesting, and considering the calibre of the artist he is playing alongside, very interesting indeed.

I won't pretend to be arty enough to be able to enjoy this album effortlessly, but I do enjoy it, and I think you should too. Free associative poetry, shaped into a mostly prose tribute, about a deep and philosophical human relationship; balanced with ethereal, cacophonic guitarwork; it is art. Sometimes the metaphors seem overworked, especially when isolated by Patti Smith's either soft or declamatory delivery - an ocean takes on the appearance of a "Rothko"; or was that Roethke? But elsewhere, it's a truly emotional, literary as well as sonic experience.

Grails

Grails can be marked down, for me, as yet another great find from Zen and the Art of Face Punching. Last year's epic, but highly focused album Burning Off Impurities made it to the top five of his 2007 list and introduced me to their Eastern-influenced, post-rock charms. I still like his explanation: "Grails are not new-age. They are incredible-age."

(I was looking at some earlier Grails stuff, specifically the album The Burden of Hope, and found via bandtoband.com that local Portland musician Timothy Horner played violin with Grails as well as on the post-Moss Icon project Breathing Walker. Only connect...)

Take Refuge In Clean Living is no Burning Off Impurities, for a variety of reasons. But it is Grails, and that basically means it's awesome. Really, to my mind, Grails are quite possibly the best post-rock band around today, and that's in quite a wide genre. Part of their own appeal is the breadth of musical styles. Grails is somewhere between metal without the guitar distortion (thanks, josephlovesit), 'spaghetti-western'/'eastern' rock, stoner rock and Godspeed-like classical post-rock. The more recent origins of Take Refuge In Clean Living are described below:

"The 2006-07 touring incarnation of Grails included good friend and drummer Ben Nugent, allowing Emil Amos to switch to third guitar for the band's live instrumentation. The DNA of this "guitar-dense" lineup allowed for new types of songs and bigger melodies. In early 2007, the then-five-piece entered Steven Lobdell's (Faust) Audible Alchemy to document the new songs written with this augmented sound, and the resultant sessions make up Take Refuge In Clean Living. (The group has since returned to the original four members). Opening with a nod to Syd Barret's Pink Floyd, the album begins with Morse Code before dropping into one of the heaviest slow-burn grooves in the Grails canon. Sounding something like Hawkwind and Ravi Shankar scoring Bladerunner, it's lysergic and earthy in a new way. The rest of the album moves from blissful Eno-inspired ambience and epic Morricone rock hymns to an unexpected take on a Ventures tune that returns the listener back to the very beginnings of instrumental rock music."

(Amazon.com review)

With the Dionysian cover art, the album feels like a slight indulgence in the territority of jam bands. The first half of 'Stoned At The Taj Again', 'PTSD' and '11th Hour' (the Ventures cover) doesn't particularly jump out at me, although there's plenty of interest there to explore over time (I'll have to wait until I get the LP.) It's the second half, the pairing of the two songs 'Take Refuge' and 'In Clean Living', which attracts. 'Take Refuge', which in the words of one review "pushes the band far East past the gypsies and into Mahavishnuvian grandeur", opens with Eastern drums and drone (the later blending almost perfectly with the close of the preceding Coral Sea track) more reminiscent of Burning Off Impurities than anything else on the disc so far. However, it's not a simple retread of that album's sound, but something different and of equal if not better quality. A few introductory guitar chords, a winding Indian lead-in, and then the bass-heavy, mind-melting distortion begins to kick in. Briefly and softly at first, then louder and more sustained, until the riff becomes more and more obviously stated and reaches to dominate the song, although it always keeps a sense of separatedness, bleeding into non-duality.

After just about three-and-a-half minutes - the optimum length for a pop song, or so it's said - 'Take Refuge' drops back into a quiet, moody organ interval for a moment before starting all over again, but with the pieces all arranged in place so as to reach the heights again with pleasurable speed. The centre of the song, that heavy guitar riff, is unusually rock-ish in the context of the clean, almost Velvet Underground-like jangly sound of Burning Off Impurities. Its appearance reminds me of the last song on Envy's side of their forthcoming Jesu split EP, 'Life Caught In The Rain', which featured a similarly prominent and oddly out-of-place hardcore riff. In both cases, of course, what results is a fascinating, melodic hook. Deeply infectious, fluid and worthy of Junior Kimbrough's psychedelic blues, 'Take Refuge' shimmers with a clarity that only I suppose true stoner rock could. And as if to further the effect, the closing track 'In Clean Living' echoes the grandiose riffage with its own, ascetic, piano rendition.

Matmos

Matmos - the San Franciscan/Baltimore duo of M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel - are named after an extraterrestrial lake in the 1968 film Barbarella, which is also the name of the original groovy lava-lamp manufacturers. So it's not necessarily normal Hardcore for Nerds fare. In fact, the only reason I encountered their music was the fact that they were headlining the bill for the first day of the Future Days festival this year, with Si Schroeder and on the day of my 21st birthday (live review here.) As it turned out, it was a very impressive show on both counts, Si Schroeder and Matmos, with the latter having the added benefit of discovering a new artist. Perhaps an acquired taste, this album is either the duo's "latest offering of found sound scavenger hunt stylized schizophrenic video game soundtrack perfection" (Burning Down The Dreams of Forever) or a record with "an ambient title track that goes nowhere beyond wiggly test-tones for 24 minutes - a long time to go nowhere, no matter the concept." (The A.V. Club). Naturally, that 24-minute long track is the one I've chosen for this selection; partly to go with the general theme of largesse and expansiveness, but mostly because it is a really interesting, if aggressively ambient (is there such a thing?) piece of - firmly electronic - music.

Supreme Balloon appears to be Matmos's sixth release for the Matador label, and a move to "a purely electronic direction" and "crafted entirely out of vintage synthesisers" (allmusic review). I don't know enough about electronic music to make any connections, but I think if I were to describe this as Dan Deacon for advanced learners I wouldn't be too far off. Road describe it as:

"...another suitably bonkers collection of weird psychedelic electronica from matmos but also one of their most coherent and beat friendly collections to date. imagine what the bbc radiophonic workshop people would sound like jamming with mouse on mars and you are at least getting a bit closer to the sound of matmos. its full of throbbing moog like sounds with plenty of pulsating aphex twin like drum patterns. you wont be dancing to this too much but as ever matmos never fail to stretch the boundaries of modern electronic music. may 2008"

Admittedly, I found this song to be largely torture live - at full volume, after having been on one's feet for about an hour previous, and having imbibed a modest amount of alcohol - but that's not to say it wasn't interesting to listen to, and some people (mostly hippies, from what I could see) even managed to get dancing to it. Pitchfork - who give the album a decent 7.5 - describe 'Supreme Balloon' as "a chasm-wide, slow burning bit of analog psychedelia that conjures up very obvious comparisons to Vangelis and Tangerine Dream in their mid-70s heyday". They also manage to include the phrase "eponymously-titled". But of course.

In fact, the album aside from this title track might be a bit too odd and diverse for me to spend much time listening to it this year. The double LP is tempting, however...

The Wire: Season 5 - tonight!

"Omar Little is the gay stick-up man who robs drug dealers for a living on The Wire..." (The Guardian Guide, July 19-25)

Monday 28th July, TG4 10.30 p.m.

It's finally here on terrestrial TV, the fifth and final series of the superb US crime drama. TG4 is the Irish language national broadcast channel, who showed the previous four series at various times in the graveyard schedule. There's nothing Irish about the Wire (except for Aiden Gillen - Carcetti - and a few other things to be mentioned below) and it's not subtitled into Irish (though that might help... sometimes). In fact, TG4 do a good line in quality US television - Cold Case, Without A Trace, a weekly Western, and a while ago now, the equally cult (and fantastic) show Carnivale.

Obviously this season of The Wire has been on HBO already in the States, and it started in the UK on cable channel FX last week, hence the Guardian TV guide. So I've had to wait a little while, which meant I wasn't able to follow the coverage in the AV Club or elsewhere. Not to fear, because the Irish Times music writer and Phantom FM DJ, Jim Carroll, is devoting a thread on his blog every week to The Wire. Best part is the Tyler Durden-esque rules he's laying down:

"The first rule of On The Record on The Wire? "Casual viewers? Fuck the casual viewers".

The second rule of On The Record on The Wire? If you’re not a fan, don’t read it.

The third rule of On The Record on The Wire? Sheeeeeee-it, you have to ask? Clay Davis for Taoiseach, of course."

So I'll be following that, as well as the AV Club TV Club, the excellent, literate Wire blog Heaven and Here, and josephlovesit on Geek Down. The Wire is nothing short of the cultural apotheosis of modern television.

But other than its incipient awesomeness, what reasons do I have for mentioning The Wire on this particular music blog?

1. Tom Waits, 'Way Down In The Hole'. This is the theme for The Wire, performed by different artists every season (including Waits himself on the second season). It's covered by Steve Earle for this season.

2. Baltimore, MD. Whence not only The Wire comes, but also (it's a big city, obviously) a wide variety of alternative music including Dan Deacon's Wham City collective, Matmos and, of course, the superb post-hardcore group Lungfish. Not just Lungfish but the various associated bands such as Asa Osborne and Daniel Higgs's Pupils, Nathan Bell's Human Bell, and the punk preincarnation of Lungfish, Reptile House.

3. Baltimore, Co. Cork. Yeah, the original Baltimore is a small town in west County Cork, on the south coast of Ireland. It's pronounced slightly differently - 'Bal-timore' rather than 'Ball-timore', and I don't think anyone's ever called it 'B-more'. I can't find anything about crime statistics, but it was sacked by Algerian pirates in 1631.

4. Did I mention it's awesome?

Si Schroeder, Matmos - Live @ Andrew's Lane Theatre, Dublin 12/06/08

Last night was a surprisingly good gig. So good, in fact, that I don't much mind now not seeing the other acts in the Future Days festival (Jape & Dan Deacon, Low and Bonnie 'Prince' Billy). I'd wanted to see Si Schroeder for a while now and didn't much mind who was on the top of the bill. Matmos looked interesting, but a bit like Xiu Xiu last month, I wasn't expecting much. (And like Xiu Xiu, this was Matmos's first visit to Ireland)

Andrew's Lane Theatre (A.L.T.) is a new venue in Dublin. The new hip venue, to be precise. A former play theatre, it's been revamped and redecorated with a new coat of purple paint and - inside and outside - graffiti murals by 'Maser'. It's shockingly hip - but apart from that greasy undercurrent of attitude, it's a perfectly pleasant place to spend an evening. The sound quality was very good - having heard some negative, but generally mixed, reviews on that front - especially as both groups on the bill could be considered audiophilic.

Si Schroeder, in the form of his debut album Coping Mechanisms, is one of the most talented and interesting Irish electronic/alternative artist around today. It's a sort of 'fits between' (for me) Xiu Xiu, Lungfish and My Bloody Valentine.

A review on another blog of his support slot for DeVotchKa was unimpressed by his solo show. I was hoping myself for the full band, as that's the way it works on the record and because live videos I had seen (such as this one for 'Lavendermist') with the band were indeed quite impressive.

As it happened, he came on stage for his first song alone. Normally I'm not too receptive to that sort of thing, but considering as well that the last solo guitar player I saw performing was Lou Barlow, I found nothing to complain about. I'm not sure what the song was - I've heard it before, I think - but he played well, attentively, even locking into a breakdown groove on his semi-acoustic. Then the full band came on, and they played a series of songs from Coping Mechanisms - 'C4' I think, 'Lavendermist', 'The Reluctant Aviator' and 'Eyes Wide' - followed by a couple of new songs. The latter were quite interesting; one with metallic, swiping guitar played off against a drum roll, another with waves of shoegaze-y guitar glancing off repeated waves of drums.

Permit me, since it was just my birthday, to try and coin a new - to me, anyway - term: post-shoegaze. Because that's what Si Schroeder sounds like to me; the whole waves of sound are there, but only towards the end. The band seem more interested in the quiet parts that lead up to and surround it, though not to any detriment to the end result, which is a seriously impressive and loud experience of ensemble playing. My friend and I worked out that the songs operated on a continous curve, right from finger-picking quiet to shuddering loudness - gradually increasing and never at any time dropping back down. It's a curious dynamic. but one that works to great effect on their songs. And live, which is where a band's sound can take on a really distinctive and vibrant form, it came into its shimmering, blissful own.

Si Schroeder, 'A Little More' (video) and 'The Reluctant Aviator', Airfield Sessions

Si Schroeder, being both singularly impressive and deceptively quite loud, allowed us to retreat from the floor for the interval in happy knowledge of a good gig so far. At this stage, I still didn't know what to expect from Matmos - which is often a good way to go into a show. A San Franciscan duo, who recently moved to Baltimore to continue their work, they seemed rather inexplicable. Their latest album, Supreme Balloons, was released this year and is being stocked in sweetbabyjaysus's record shop 'Under The Mooch' as "their latest offering of found sound scavenger hunt stylized schizophrenic video game soundtrack perfection". The AV Club review wasn't too positive, declaring the songs "jubilant... but slight in a way that suggests much of Supreme Balloon would have been a lot more fun to make than it is to listen to. That certainly applies to an ambient title track that goes nowhere beyond wiggly test-tones for 24 minutes - a long time to go nowhere, no matter the concept." (Reliably astute, an AV Club commenter pointed out that ambient tracks, by definition, aren't meant to go anywhere).

There was a lot of interest in Matmos, however, when we went back in to find the floor at least half-packed with people ranging from a few teenagers right up to one behatted man in his 70s with his wife (well, at that age, one presumes). On stage, in darkness, were the duo - joined by noted collaborator J Lesser, and dressed at least patially in suits, shirts and skinny ties. Various glows and sounds emanated - there's no other word for it, really - from their tables of equipment. A few initial adjustments were required - having taken apart some of their 'playhouse' to facilitate Si Schroeder, which they reckoned was 'well worth it'. Matmos were surprisingly personable chaps, which is probably a good thing considering their music.

They played four songs before an encore, each accompanied by stunning visuals. Stunning isn't the right word, quite - more like mesmerising, or mind-fuck. The first song - which built up from an initial assortment of totally alien, tactile screeches and bloops - was an inverted, almost motionless shot of a test subject, her eyes cupped and ears covered by headphones, apparently reacting to auditory stimuli. The second was a soft-porn video of a guy pleasuring himself in a hot tub - but with the grainy video distorted, chopped and generally messed around with, while aural destruction and aggravation went on around us (there's a live video of it at the end of the post). Ironically, because it is in fact the source of Matmos's name - "the seething lake of evil slime beneath the city Sogo in the 1968 film Barbarella" - this reminded of the scene from that film, where Jane Fonda is trapped by the evil genius in the sort of whole-body organ, which tries to play/pleasure her to death. You'll either know the scene or you don't, I'm not going to try to explain it any further.

The third song was probably the best, a bizarre blend of country and funk played out against a backdrop of maps of America, which was interesting right from the start but got seriously heavy and, um, funkalicious - J Lesser was performing duties on bass, by the way - for a large section. The following song, however, I have to describe as torturous. [Upon listening to it, I reckon this was the title track to the album.] It may have been the after-effects of my slightly less-favoured blend of malt whiskey, but the combination of bass frequencies and shifting matrix of black-on-white dots - fascinating to the mathematical mind, though - for the visuals left me feeling physically uncomfortable.

As the song unfolded, I literally spent five minutes following a conversation in my head about the nature of 'entertainment' and art - why one expects a gig to entertain you, but will read an uncomfortable book, watch a depressing film or play or even listen to a discomforting album. Here the experimental nature of the music, and the ambient nature of the music and visuals, come together into an artistic experience you have to decided yourself whether you want to enjoy or not. In a way, Matmos gives its listeners a profound sense of agency while appearing to alienate them. Reviews say you can't dance to Matmos, but I think you can; only when you're not, and you see people who are, you wonder what they hell they're doing.

It was at that point in the gig - coming up to 11 o'clock - that people started drifting out. I won't say I wasn't tempted to join them, but at the same time Matmos remained quite fascinating. Challenging, yes; and difficult, extremely; but musically, there is plenty there to interest you. (Perhaps less musically than sonically so, but there is a bit of both) The gentle exodus allowed movement towards the stage, and so I had a pretty good view for the encore, which involved a gong in Drew Daniel's lap. At this point, I realised that Matmos is something like Battles for advanced learners - devoid of almost all commercial accessibility, but still profoundly innovative.

While the gig had elements of science fiction bizarreness about it, man and machine, performer and audience coming together in a brave new music venue, there was still something touchingly human about it. It was enjoyable in the sense that it was an odd soundscape, tough going in parts but rewarding with some beautiful aspects.

Matmos, 'Exciter Lamp and the Variable Band' (video) from Supreme Balloon, and 'Public Sex for Boyd McDonald' (watch if you dare) with saxophone, live performance

The excellent Sigla Blog: Musical Room series: part 31 - Matmos (and also, Part 32 - Dan Deacon)

Best of 2008: Year End April

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This might seem a little odd, but at least one other person has done it so far, and at the end of March no less (commonality: Foals, Antidotes). I had the idea about a week ago, when I realised that I bought exactly five new albums that I could say, with a high degree of likelihood, would end up on Best of 2008 list. So those are the first five releases pictured above, roughly in order of preference. The next two and, later, three are a slightly more complicated story.

But first, to the mixtape:

01 - 14:25

1. Ham Sandwich, 'St. Christopher'

2. Human Bell, 'Hanging from the Rafters'

02 - 09:04

3. Foals, 'Balloons'

4. The Black Keys, 'Lies'

5. Shooting at Unarmed Men, 'This Song Comes With a Picture'

03 - 07:43

6. Chequerboard, 'Penny Black'

7. Sinaloa, 'Tread, Not Trudge'

04 - 08:31

The Jimmy Cake, 'Red Tony' (long-form version only)

Year End April, 7 tracks

Year End April (YEA 01-04), 3 tracks + bonus

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Artist/Album/Track title:

Ham Sandwich/Carry the Meek/St. Christopher

From listening to their singles on the radio and from seeing this band live in February, I would already have a very high opinion of Ham Sandwich. But this album is really, really good and I would have surprisingly little hesitation in saying this will probably still be my #1 record by the end of the year. It's solid to the point of being flawless, with hardly the one song of filler and keeping up its energy throughout.

'St. Christopher' is the opening track, with a little piano melody leading into the rhythmic post-punk/pop-punk/whatever sound of the group. Just as any of the other songs on the album, the combination and trading off of the male/female vocals work very well. And from there it goes, keeping its beautiful melody and trading up its dynamics until the end of the song explodes into a repeated chorus.

This whole album is very loud, and pace Bob Dylan's comments on modern sound recordings, I haven't enjoyed the production of an album so much since I first heard American Steel's Jagged Thoughts. If it's done with the right degree of sensitivity, good production can make an album into something shimmering and wonderful.

Original post: Ham Sandwich - Live at Whelan's, 23/02/08

Human Bell/Human Bell/Hanging from the Rafters

This is one hell of a post-rock record. I bought the Human Bell LP basically because it was on recommendation at Road Records (where I've bought more than half of this list), and specifically because the description and pedigree caught my eye. A collobaration between Andy Heumann and Nathan Bell, the latter a former member of Lungfish, this is seven instrument guitar songs of a variety of different styles. The 'more bluesy kind of Slint' part from the Road blurb caught my eye, and really this is a bit like Lungfish covering Chulahoma-style Black Keys.

This track, the opener to side B of the LP, is the longest on the album at over nine minutes, although most of the other songs average out at about five or six. It has a short intro before the main rhythm of the song kicks in, and then it's all hypnotic guitar blues, scuzzed-out background and snappy drumbeats. Like Lungfish, there is something hugely hypnotic about this band's sound; and like the Black Keys, there is something heart-jerking and colourful about its expression.

The important point to make is the variety of the songs on this album: as I say, there are seven of varying lengths, centred on instrumental guitars but also bringing in Nathan Bell on trumpet at times; and exploring different aspects of the post-rock sound from Slint or the For Carnation to Mogwai. I said previously:

"Human Bell experiments with a variety of grooves, and a variety of minimalist approaches to music. If the combination of richness and minimalism isn't a glaring paradox, then that's what it means to toll the human bell:"

Original post: Human Bell - Human Bell

Foals/Antidotes/Balloons

Apparently 'Skinscore' (Skinxc?) is now a word - at first I thought this was a slightly redundant phrase describing, I don't know, Oi or something else with actual skinheads in it, but then I realised it meant bands associated with the (excellent) TV show Skins. Since at the moment it basically only consists of Foals and Crystal Castles, it's not the most solid of genres with regards to quality: but despite its pejorative origins, it does throw up some music of considerable interest. This same place where I found that term was a Drowned in Sound article trying to trace Foals back to all the other math-rock bands, everything apparently from Slint to Q and not U.

This is taking the view of Foals as a breakthough math-rock band comparable to the success last year of Battles - which, in fact, Foals do quite resemble on their full album. 'Balloons' is one of the two singles, the other being 'Cassius', to make the cut for that album. Jerky, angular guitars, with frenetic pacing and the colour of a jazz saxophone, make this out still as an excitingly oblique take on what I - and many of the readers here - would find more familiar from listening to Q and not U. (This week a new limited-edition 7" from Irish band Hooray for Humans came out, by the way; so expect something on the blog about that soon, assuming that I am able to pick it up)

The whole album, however, is largely just as energetic as these two singles and encompasses a wide range of interesting sounds and styles. It may not be the single most complex thing to be released this year, but there is plenty to engage and challenge the listener, with post-punk stylings and repetitions and more than a touch of electronics. Particularly if it ages well, this album is assured a high placing in an end-of-year top 10.

Original post: Foals, 'Cassius' video + vinyl rip

The Black Keys/Attack and Release/Lies

This album completely crept up on me, sending me into a flurry of illegal downloading and then trips to HMV to fork out over-the-odds money for an admittedly rather nice gatefold. The 'Strange Times' single makes for a pretty good encapsulation of their 'new' sound, which isn't so much new as their trademark blues rejigged and enhanced by the inspired production of Danger Mouse. But considering my disinterest in their last two full-lengths, I was going to need more than a catchy single for convincing.

'Lies' was the second song up on the band's Myspace page, and basically is there to represent the bands softer, balladic side. I read on a message board a conversation between some guy who had his own advance copy and was itching to share the news with everyone of how good Attack & Release was. He mentioned that there was one really good slow-ish song, and someone else asked 'is it Lengths good?' (that being a pretty awesome slow, countrified number from Rubber Factory); he said 'it's better than The Lengths', and the reply went to the effect that that was a physical and scientific possibility. Well, it ain't, 'cos this song is very possibly better.

So, long story short, the spacious and semi-exotic sounds of Danger Mouse as added to the Black Keys' rejuvenated groove have made this song, along with all the others on their new album, into fantastically novel blues-rockers. Attack & Release has totally reaffirmed my belief in the Black Keys as important, progressive and sonically powerful artists. As well as an album that's immediate to your ears, it's also paradoxically something that you can get lost in the sound of.

Original post: The Black Keys - Attack & Release, Chulahoma

Shooting at Unarmed Men/Triptych/This Song Comes With a Picture

Jon Chapple, the bassist and singer from Mclusky, moved to Australia with his new band in the last few years. Having previously released the rather good album Yes, Tinnitus! and a few singles, this was something to look forward to when it got a European release, which it did on March 31st this year. Although, as I explained in my review of the gig, I find the Future of the Left an impressive band I still prefer this side of the post-Mclusky tree.

Triptych is, as the name suggests, a triple-disc album. Spread over those three discs are twelve (well, actually thirteen when you include a 'hidden track' at the end) songs, but don't worry, they aren't anything near 15 minutes long each. In fact, the first disc - from which this song is taken from - clocks in at a little over nine minutes in length. Overall it seems as if Shooting at Unarmed Men had just too much material to fit on one CD, and instead of going for the too-ordinary double album, decided things come better in threes.

Which is what they do, because Triptych works rather well. It's difficult to explain if you're not familiar with Mclusky, but the Jon Chapple 'part' of their sound was in a large part the broad, expansive post-hardcore foil to Andy Falkous's scatterfire punk; lots of complex, epic bass rhythms carefully wrapped up in three-minute punk songs. Which isn't exactly what's in this track, 'This Song Comes With a Picture', but is part of the whole tapestry of the album. Triptych lines up bursts of lo-fi, rock'n'roll sounds which almost hark back to 70s punk (and a shade more on the British side of it, as well) with more extensive strips of hardcore and post-. Altogether, it's an interesting listening experience and one which brings together the catchiness of their earlier work.

Original post: Shooting at Unarmed Men, 'Girls Music' (Promo Single)

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So they are the five albums which originally came to mind; I think, if five equally good albums come up every four months in the rest of the year, that should leave them with on average a 2/3 chance of being in the top 10 (my probability maths is a little rusty, but basically 10 over 15). The middle three I all bought on LP, so - having got my first record player in January - they make an important introduction into the world of modern music on old formats for me. Top is the only one I've caught live, although I could have gone to see (3) if I didn't mind the Skins-core fans, and (4) I saw a couple of years before the current album.

In addition to those five, are a couple extra that I've been getting into this year. Chequerboard's Penny Black is a bit of a dark horse, not because of any lack in quality, but because it's a bit 'out-there' in terms of the music I listen to (it's been played on Lyric FM - only by John Kelly though, naturally). Classical Spanish guitar over glitchy electronica, if you liked the Si Schroeder track from the 21st Century Bites mix, you should really like this too; but if you didn't, then probably not. Chequerboard is all one man, John Lambert - musician, producer and full-time graphic artist. The album is a beauty to behold, as you can see from this example of the artwork below (from The Indie Hour):

I bought his earlier album, Gothica, recently and the CD booklet was entirely taken up with a comic book short story (graphic novella?). Penny Black has a kind of Victoriana theme going on, and it's probably just my imagination but the music does seem somehow reminiscent of late-19th century Ireland.

The second extra track, from Sinaloa's new album, is more of a white horse for this list - as genuinely really good modern screamo record. I first got into Sinaloa from their 2006 Ampere/Sinaloa split and which I still think is probably their best work, but their full lengths are excellent too. They don't just play modern technical hardcore, but also have a strong vibe of the original Moss Icon/Indian Summer sounds. A certain person commented on Zen and the Art of Face Punching that they thought Sinaloa was the blandest of the new emo bands (and subsequently what sort of punishment they would deserve for saying that). But I can see at least in part where they are coming from; Sinaloa's sound is quite repetitive and that dreaded word, same-y - even after listening to them quite often and quite closely. The thing is, their style is just so purely and powerfully emotional that it just doesn't matter. I guess it's a bit like saying that all blues songs are bland, if you didn't appreciate the emotion in them.

Oceans of Islands is an album I'm pretty sure I want to get on LP, and if I order it from Purepainsugar in Europe like I'll have to, I should be able to get the latest repress of Indian Summer discography along with it. Woo!

Finally, the fourth 'bonus' track in the long-form download is from an album which has made a big splash in the Irish indie scene when it was released in the middle of last month. (I hadn't got it at the time of first making up the mixtape, which is why it's only on the long form version, and to tell the truth I haven't listened the full way through yet). The last Jimmy Cake album was released when I was about fifteen, so they haven't been a group that I've been aware of apart from very generally, but their long-awaited new album Spectre and Crown sounds very very good.

The Jimmy Cake are a sort of post-rock musical collective, who've been rotating members over the last five years. Lots of instruments, and a lot of different sounds, but all very good. You can read all about their album launch show here and here. This opening track sounds a bit like Ham Sandwich strung out on opiates and as performed by GY!BE (although the Godspeed comparison isn't allowed, because it's both too easy and too inaccurate). Jazzy, layered, and rather beautiful.

The album artwork, too, is extremely aesthetically pleasing. It was commissioned from a Japanese artist, Atsushi Kaga, who is based in Dublin. The whole CD case is this beautifully smooth black, with the iconic image on the front and tracklistings written elsewhere in a calligraphic, wispy font which is almost unreadable. The spine (the green bit in the picture) is a detachable peace of card which, along with all the information in Japanese (I have a copy of the Ramones' Leave Home with the same thing) has the tracklisting in a normal font and the barcode, usefully located away from the main artwork. Really, for the best album artwork of the year, it's between Chequerboard and The Jimmy Cake at the moment.

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