Noisy Dirty City: November 2015

Thursday 26 November 2015

Late Starters: Crackle OK

I love an album that takes the listener on a journey, and I’d wager (“cos booze and dice is never dull”) that there are few albums that can catapult us on a more astronomical and fantastical voyage than this one. Crackle OK, released in July 2014, is the first full-length release from Coventry rock outfit Late Starters and was also the inaugural release on the indie record label Creature Lab Records.

Late Starters are a three-piece band with a modal, riff-led, stabbing rhythmic style. The mastery of this album, though, lies in how atmospherically the baroque story songs of the imagination of Late Starters are captured. Characters from the deepest darkest reaches of the imagination jump out of the musical canvas and become larger than life by way of the music’s jagged illustration. Crackle OK covers astronomical distances, from the smoky rooms of local government populated with ministers and sycophants, to the vast reaches of space and time. Each song is brought all the more vividly to life by the entertaining song descriptions that accompany the lyrics posted up on the Late Starters bandcamp page.

Coursing through the veins of Crackle OK is a certain supernatural energy that is channeled down the lightning conductors of Creature Lab and affects its transformative energy upon the album forwards and backwards in time, particularly on A Certain Pedigree, John Hundred, and Fish Tail. The journey begins in all its grim inevitability with Tin Tack in the salty air of a wartime harbour where

“the seagulls that are circling are crying my name

they beg me not to go but I must go just the same”

whilst barnacled heroes await mighty warriors due to rise from the brine.

A seagull’s flight across Crackle OK’s alternate landmass, Hillman House is for me a fine achievement in the communication of a sense of place via the medium of song, expertly capturing the workaday ambience of the Midlands of England at the same time as its grit and magic. Staring out of the windows of “smoky rooms in Hillman House”, we hear the story of protagonist Sheedy, while the music draws the imagination far out into the sprawling suburbs of a “town of mud and rust”.

“and every hanger on knows the words and sings along”

Mauler is a prime example of the balance that this album strikes between angular riffs and hooks, and the joy and energy that Late Starters can generate when they turn a major corner, in the musical sense, like the throwing of a heavy electrical switch. Deliciously disorientating, the intro allows you jump on board at various beats of the bar and kicks off the track cleverly. The rhythm section then cross-talks beautifully throughout this great track.

“transistors start to pop and sing

the vacuum tubes are screaming”

Perhaps the crowning glory of the album, and certainly the furthest point in its imaginative reach, is Space Opera (Parts 1 and 2). As its name (and Late Starters’ own description) suggests, this is a grand and theatrical tale of interstellar travel that contains all the tragedy and perverse comedy of opera, and is, of course, a song of two halves. Reminiscent in parts of prog rock in the mould of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, it also has an energy that would not be out of the place in the mythical universe of Ulysses 31, the French-Japanese epic space cartoon from the early 1980s that pitted doomed space travellers against the wrath of the ancient gods of Olympus.

“so distant, so cold

when I next breathe I’ll be 10,000 years old”

This comparison can be made not only due to the grand imagery of Space Opera, but also because of the unbeatable riff-driven motifs of the contrasting parts that change gear so beautifully through the eerie reverberating nebula of sounds that connects them (get this on in some big headphones and enjoy!). The song is almost crying out for an animated video and leaves us on a perfectly executed finale.

I thoroughly enjoyed this album and it has been near the top of my listening for 2014 and admittedly, most of 2015. The band have since released a couple of EPs to follow on from this excellent album, and these should hopefully be covered at a later time on Noisy Dirty City. Until then, sit back and listen to Crackle OK and let it transport you on its journey. By the sound of it though, try not to get off the rollercoaster in Chisel Town, and definitely don’t end up on Broken Spear.

"Only the fates could bring me here".

Tuesday 3 November 2015

Mali is Music: reblogged from Cath Annabel's Passing Time

The following post on Malian music is reblogged with kind permission from Cath Annabel's excellent Passing Time blog which covers a wide array of topics, musical and beyond. Here is the link to the original post. Many thanks to Cath (@cathannabel) for letting me share this post and I hope Noisy Dirty City can benefit a lot more from her musical insights.

We should probably have been in a courtyard in Bamako, or Segou. Whole families there, kids and the occasional chicken wandering in and out, meals being prepared and eaten, and the music going on into the night, interspersed with talk, and laughter. We were instead in the august surroundings of Firth Hall at the University of Sheffield, sitting in rows listening to Bassekou Kouyate, legendary Malian ngoni player and griot, with his wife Amy Sacko on vocals, in conversation with Andy Morgan.

As the time went on, you could almost hear the thought processes of the audience – ‘what time was that last bus again?’, ‘I’m going to struggle with my 7.00 alarm tomorrow morning’, ‘Can I discreetly text the babysitter to see if she can hold on for another hour?’. So when people started to slip away, they’d already stayed longer than they’d expected to, and they left wishing they could have stayed longer. We managed quite a nifty slip out of the door whilst clapping manoeuvre. A standing and moving sideways ovation perhaps.

Part of the reason we overran was that Bassekou speaks French and Bambara, so Andy had to tell us what he was going to ask him, then ask him in French, then translate Bassekou’s response. And – a tip for the future – don’t ask a Malian griot to ‘just tell us briefly what that song was about’. Whereas a western musician might be able to say, ‘cars and girls’, or ‘the man who done me wrong’, Bassekou’s answers tended to start with, ‘Well, back in the 13^th century there was a king called x, in the town of y…’.

But the music – the music was sublime. The ngoni is a stringed instrument, believed to be the origin of the banjo, and possibly the guitar (though of course there are other stringed, plucked instruments that could claim that). In Kouyate’s hands it’s capable of virtuosic cascades of notes, and combined with the compelling rhythm that kicks in after the first few bars, and the warmth (and impressive range) of Amy Sacko’s voice, it’s music that moves the feet and the hips, as well as the heart.

Malian music makes me happier than almost any other music from any time or place. It’s the source of the blues, carried over the oceans by the human cargo of the slave ships, and mutating as it mixed with the other folk musics (and the hymns and psalms) of the various peoples of the Americas, until this black American music out of Africa became the music of a whole generation. And as it did so, of course, it travelled back home again. In Ghana the merging and melding of these musical traditions created the highlife music that I used to hear wafting over from the student residences in the evenings in Kumasi. In Nigeria, juju music and Afrobeat. In Mali, a rich diversity of music, from such fine artists as Salif Keita, Toumani Diabate, Tinariwen, Ali Farka Toure, and the young musicians who form Songhoy Blues.

At the end of the concert, Bassekou Kouyate was asked by a fellow West African about the ‘problem’ of western sounds and musical styles taking over indigenous African music. Kouyate was having none of that. The music is theirs anyway – it’s simply coming home again, having changed a bit over the years, and blended with other sounds. There is a vast repertoire of songs there to be rediscovered, interpreted, shared with the world, and as long as this music is being sung and played, and the traditional instruments are being used alongside the western imports, the music will survive, because it’s strong and beautiful. The threat to this music is not of being ‘polluted’ or drowned out by western sounds. It’s from another source altogether, the fundamentalist Islamist groups that have taken over parts of Mali in recent years and where they have done so they have violently suppressed music – not western music, or secular music, but music.

“The world without music? It would be like a prison, right?” (Garba Touré, Songhoy Blues)

Right.