JORIO – “Prayer”
I now understand exactly what all of the people who’ve been bemoaning lowest common denominator trance music have been complaining about. Despite the “hook” of being a trance reinterpretation of an operatic aria, absolutely nothing about this record can save it from mind-numbing badness. Records like this make me see Tanya’s point of view a little clearer…
Went to see my old MP at the House of Commons last night, and am pleased to report that the Mother of Parliaments uses the Mother of all Hand Dryers.
Strangers Bar (which is where the plebs are allowed) is a great bar, mainly because you aren’t allowed to buy a drink yourself – only MPs and Parliament Staff can do this. I suspect this is under the terms of its licence as a Members Club, but part of me would like to believe that it is some quaint convention about buying an MP a drink being considered to be a bribe. That would ‘fit the model’ as it were – a pint and a packet of crisps risks corrupting the moral fibre of our legislators, but freebie jaunts all over the world and hotel bills paid for are perfectly acceptable. Sometimes, the truth disappoints…
Everyone’s written a love song ‘ silly, serious, heart-felt, ironic, and all the various permutations throbbing and convulsing therein. Often, the best ones try to reconcile these conflicting traits ‘ for instance, Elvis Costello’s ‘Allison’, where he both pines for and scorns the girl. Or the Cardigan’s “Lovefool”, where the girl asks for her heart to be broken, and won’t be satisfied with anything less. Where V/VM & his Sick-Love CD fall in all of this, I can’t be sure ‘ it’s at once alien to these concepts, and also painfully aware of them.
This disc features twenty-one tracks, with V/VM taking love songs of all types & mulching them electronically to create an interesting distortion of said love and said songs. For instance, one track consists of the introduction to Michael McDonald’s ‘I Keep Forgetting’ repeated over & over, stumbling over itself, never getting anywhere. For you Chris DeBurgh fans, his ‘big hit’ shows up here as ‘The Lady In Red (Is Dancing With Meat)’. I’ve only made it through the tenth track (the subject of this write-up), but it’s an amazing piece of work. The song he starts with is ‘Take My Breath Away’, by Berlin, an exemplary example of 80s new-wave fluff. For what it is, it isn’t bad ‘ there are worse things to dance to at your junior prom / wedding. However, V/VM smothers the music in buckets of Urban Decay make-up, slowing the beats and synth burbles down to a funereal crawl. The lyrics, meanwhile, are essayed by a voice that could’ve been pulled off of The Pop Group’s Y album, assuming Mark Stewart was a character from Tron being digitally flayed by the MCP at the time of singing. It’s a tortured song, the red bouncing ball hitting the words with a dull thunk & picking up a coating of blood & bone fragments. And it sounds like the logical extension of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’. This IS ‘love’, post-rending ‘ howling in pain, confused, asking for someone to pull the trigger. When the chorus comes around, the words ‘take my breath away’ sound like a death wish, not an estatic hope or a passionate exclamation. It’s a harrowing sound. It’s a brilliant sound.
1.
It’s June 8 2001 and I’ve a few hours to kill in London, so I walk. It’s a sunny day: most people look bored and in a hurry. Every now and then I stop and pick up one of the daily papers, which are all full of election talk. Arithmetically nothing’s happened – five seats lost here, six gained there, but the great blocs of party power are still intact. Look closer, though, and you can see eddies in the electoral current, small tics and tremors which suggest not just disillusionment but a twitchy volatility. A crushing majority for a single-issue independent. Turnout at its lowest since World War I. Twelve thousand fascist votes in Oldham. And all the record shops are playing Amnesiac, this strange little Number One album. “After years of waiting, nothing came / And you realise you’re looking, looking in the wrong place” sings Thom Yorke in a voice like hammered lead. “I’m a reasonable man, get off my case.”
How silly or skewed would it be to take Amnesiac as a political album? An album about the state of things, in a world where “things” have expanded to the very limits of what you thought was your privacy, and contracted to the point where you can’t even name who’s in charge? No sillier than taking it as an experimental record, or a rock record, or a record about a band’s last record, I think. After all, part of the conventional wisdom on Radiohead is that they are, as a band, about something. They’re Serious.
What exactly they’re about you might be forgiven for not grasping – capitalism, or fighting against capitalism, or the uselessness of that fight, or just how horrible it is to be Thom Yorke? This isn’t, quite, a criticism: horrorstruck or not, Yorke knows that in pop a well-placed phrase can set your head buzzing better than a finely-turned argument, and it’s a trick he’s getting steadily better at pulling. Lyrically, OK Computer was as disconnected and lateral as anything the band have done since, but the density of words made the album come off as a big (if vague) statement. Since then they’ve been paring the lyrics down and letting the moods and sounds – claustrophobic, messy, wrong – carry the content.
So Amnesiac is scattered with stabs of unsettled lyric, poking up through the mix, each making little connective sense: “You forget so easy”; “There’s someone listening in”; “Knives out, catch the mouse”; “There are secret doors”; “Crack your little souls”; “Think about the good times, never look back”. All these frightened epigrams build up into a familiar Radiohead picture: the individual powerless, stricken and paranoid in a hostile world. Amnesiac feels like a more explicitly political album because where songs do cohere they often address themes with some directness. “Dollars And Cents” covers global economics, “Life In A Glass House” talks about the media, and “You And Whose Army?” is ‘about’ Tony Blair.
Lyrically, though, “Dollars And Cents” and “You And Whose Army?” are the weakest songs on the record – their straightforward subject matter works against them. But they have to be there to anchor the other, more mosaic songs, to lend the album coherence. They’re the signposts to this interesting way of hearing Amnesiac, not just as a New Radiohead Album but as a record about living in Britain (and the world) right now. The personal and political being inescapably intertwined, Amnesiac takes place in inner space as much as public space – listening, I’m reminded of Byrne and Eno’s My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, and its balance between the cut-up chatter of talk show geopolitics and a haunted personal interior. The directly political songs aim at specific targets, and other songs conjure more general moods – doubt, frustration, anger, ruthlessness. Amnesiac is at is best when it turns entirely inwards, though: the “Pyramid Song” / “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” medley is extraordinary, taking visionary mysticism out of the hands of acceptable eccentrics and taking it somewhere grander and less comfortable – before dropping it in the Top Ten.
2.
Of course, you don’t have to listen to Amnesiac like this at all. But its curious coherence as a record, however you explain it, is one of the most surprising and pleasing things about it – there’s not a single track I like as well taken on its own as I do hearing it in the whole. Why surprising? Because Amnesiac is so beautifully eclectic – a hideously overused word which in this case fits. People who complain that Radiohead aren’t formally groundbreaking overlook the fact that the Aphex Twin or Mouse On Mars or Autechre or Beck or who-bloody-ever tend to release albums that sound like ten tracks of themselves. Whereas track-for-track Amnesiac sounds something like this:
1) Underworld jamming with Schneider TM
2) John Cale meets GYBE! with lyrics by David Tibet
3) Pole soundtracking Twin Peaks with bass by Luther Campbell
4) Underwater doo-wop and mutant MOR
5) Indie-Dance
6) Radiohead
7) Easy-listening primitivism
8) Orchestral jazz-rock
9) Loren MazzaCane Connors
10) Kid A played backwards
11) Thom Waits
On paper, then, this looks like one of the best albums of the year. And the really amazing thing is, in your ears it actually sounds like one of the best albums of the year: Radiohead have not just found the rock/electronica Third Way, they’ve hit on a creative method which seems elastic enough to allow any number of disparate elements room to manoeuvre and merge.
The proof of this, perhaps, lies in how pop an album Amnesiac sounds. After even one listen there were bits of almost every track lodged in my head, and after perhaps forty listens it still seems packed with unexpected hooks and wonderful sounds. The bass on “Pulk/Pull”; the bassline on “Dollars And Cents”; the strings on “Pyramid Song”; the gets-you-every-time way the band bisect their songs between foggy first half and full-on second; the vocal hook on “Packd Like Sardines”; the youthclub-disco beat on “I Might Be Wrong”; the chorus on “Knives Out”; the delectable, subtle cut-ups on “Hunting Bears” – these things make for fabulous pop. Even Thom Yorke – cranially perhaps their powerhouse, but vocally still their mumbly, mannered weakest link – matches performance to song in superlative style on “Life In A Glass House”.
Brainfood and earfood it may be, but Amnesiac isn’t perfect. Radiohead could certainly afford to be less grand, sometimes, and more joyful sometimes too. There also, you imagine, must be something in them which looks on the ham-fisted imitations of “Fake Plastic Trees” clogging the charts, and wants to show them not only how to do it well, but make it fresh too. Fresh like Amnesiac, because this is an excellent album, by some way Radiohead’s best. The idea of them turning back from this to make the kind of imposing but limiting big rock they made on OK Computer seems ludicrous: this is the sound of a band with more potential than ever.
Train comes; I don’t know its destination…: I hereby declare June 26, 2001 Sugababes Day. Their debut record (One Touch) was released in the US. Their song “Overload” (a blissfully atypical pre-fab pop track, which means it’s damn good – never mind Tom’s grousing) has been nominated for a Brit Award. And I found this Sugababes site – Sugababes Online – which features the entirety of One Touch in Windows Media format (which is playable via Winamp, in case you’re worried about compatibility). And while (upon initial listen) “Overload” sounds like the best track on the album, there’s plenty here worth checking out. (Even the ballads!) Keep these girls away from the hair dye & the nookie playas, if you please.
Aint No Party Like A Sussed Club Party: like plucky kids in a Children’s Film Foundation epic, last Thursday saw DJs Cabbage, Carsmile and Cockfarmer take to the half-working decks in a flooded nightclub and entertain hordes of partygoers in triumphant style. So triumphant, in fact, that after toting up the bar receipts they’ve invited us back! Thursday July 5 sees the return of Club Sussed at Club Latino in Oxford. £3 on the door, playing things that make you go ‘aw’. More details as I get them but all sorts of thrilling innovations are mooted including a new face in the DJ booth (a nation gasps). Whether or not I’ll be allowed to get away with this is less certain….
THE INCONSISTENT BEATLES
You know, being the most respected rock’n'roll band that ever existed must have been a difficult gig. Not only were they constantly tortured by the self knowledge that they were actually crap, but the Beatles also had to suffer from their words being taken literally. Just as Elvis Presley has The Church Of The Latter Day Elvis, there are two factions of a Beatles religion fighting a fatwa (or Ringo – aka The Fat One) over the one true Beatles Religion. Much like the heresy of Protestantism there is merely one schism which separates the two creeds, who would otherwise be joined in their belief that All You Need Is Love (pacifists), that Tomorrow Never Knows (anti-determinists) and Baby, They Can Drive My Car (thieving Scouse bastards). Even as we speak people are dying in this cause to show that theirs is the true way, light and that Octopus’s Garden is actually a metaphor and not a pile of nursery rhyme wank. Let us examine the case:
IN THE RED CORNER: The One True Church Of The Beatles And All Their Solo Projects (except Ringo’s All Star Band). A blend of Catholicism and hippy George Harrison shite – the One True Church believes in the sanctity of stable marriages and therefore tends to favour the work of Paul McCartney. As such eating meat is frowned upon, and a firm belief in Yesterday is encouraged. Scrambled Eggs are also big on the menu. The main tenets are Letting It Be, attaining the nine major Revolutions and saying Hey to people called Jude. Heretical belief: “Money cannot buy you love”. (cf Lines 5, 12,13,14,,18,19,20 – Can’t Buy me Love).
IN THE BLUE CORNER: Seventh Day Rubber Soul Adventist. Favour the solo projects of John Lennon, and hence believe in Instant Karma – not just as a really bad album but as a guide to enlightenment. Stay in bed a lot. Also firm belief that the Taxman is trying to tax their feet and hence keep all their money in a big brown bag inside the zoo. Therefore easy to steal from. Heretical belief: “Fun is the one thing that money can’t buy”. (cf Lines 8,22 – She’s Leaving Home / Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band).
So what is it the truth? Can money not buy love as well as fun. The Rubber Soulers use the quite good argument that She’s Leaving Home was recorded after Can’t Buy me Love and therefore shows the ineffable band revising their previous views. The First Church however have a stronger line that is it patently untrue that money cannot buy fun. If it couldn’t then why would there be so many multinationals making movies, videos and porn to keep people entertained? Also they point out that Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band is a rubbish old piece of vaudeville dressed up as a concept album.
In the meantime, while the remaining Beatles keep schtum sectarian killings are still going on in Liverpool. Perhaps we would would have been better off if the Beatles had never existed.
No perhaps about it.
Charlotte Raven today: “[The British are] committed to making stuff happen in the short time they’ve got. We’ve got a genius for compression. That’s why we’re so good at pop songs.” Hmmm.
STOOGES – “REAL COOL TIME”
adapted for the stage, a play in one act.
dramatis personae:
me – me.
her – her.
setting:
suburban bedroom(s), 1969.
[a telephone rings. a telephone is answered.]
her: “hello?”
me: “can I come over tonight?”
her: “why?”
me: “can I come over tonight?”
her: “no, no, i got that much. what i want to know is why?”
me: “what do you think I wanna do?”
her: [sighs]
me: “that’s right. can I come over tonight?”
her: …
me: “i say we will have a real cool time tonight.”
her: [grudgingly] “oh, alright.”
[cue air-guitar solo to heavily wah-wah'd track]
Tiny Mix Tapes Gone to Heaven: is a music weblog. May be too indie for some of you, but good luck to it – the more the merrier!