I was hoping to write this little review of Chorusgirl's eponymous album, released in November 2015 on Fortuna POP!, while it was still one of this years fresh releases. Due to the steady march of time, I am belated, but still confident, in saying that this album is one of the most exciting bits of new music I discovered (as usual, by recommendation) last year.
This is gloriously mischievous music from the self-styled noisepop, jangle 'n' roll band from London. I could tell from the outset that this album was going to give me exactly what I was after, as foretold melodically by the guitar at the start of Oh, To Be a Defector. It takes some great musical skill to give the listener such repeated satisfaction like this without being in any possible way predictable.
Probably poppier than my average listening, but in a good way, Chorusgirl for me has an airy and timeless feel, woven with definite echoes of Blondie and the Beach Boys, and what I recognise as real old rock 'n' roll. I feel quite a blunt instrument about giving such musical references, having wagged a lot of the diligent musical schooling that allows one to wax lyrical about who exactly sounds like who or what, but I can definitely tell that there is the energy of more than one decade diffusing through this album.
My obsessive listen has definitely been Girls of 1926, kicked into life by *that* intro, that should without doubt appear in the musical dictionary under the entry "noisepop"; there's something so neat about how the instrumental lines so often "sing" the vocal lines to us, both in unison and in snatches throughout (not just this song, but the album). Oooh, waah ooh. Upbeat though it is, there is a tender touch of melancholy in those two beating hearts that stay forever seventeen.
Above and beyond that though, there is something decidedly naughty, nay delinquent, about how the words fit the music, that just draws me back and back again, to this track as well as No Moon, This Town Kills, and Shivers.
There's part of me that wants to quiz the band in an excited sort of a way and find out what inspired all these songs, what they are all about. I'm tantalised because I'm not quite sure I know what makes it all tick; like a magical toy whose workings remain a mystery, or reading Dickens, that I appreciate deeply but would never be able to write. I've had so much pleasure out of this, and I think that's down to the fact that it's clever, entertaining, and above all, extremely catchy.
I love an album that takes the listener on
a journey, and I’d wager (“cosbooze 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.
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 13th 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)
I came to Evans The Deathafter I discovered the fantastic Sledgehammer on an indie disco playlist, and wanting to hear more of the band, I decided to have a listen to their most recent album, Expect Delays.
This album is an evocative journey through the rain-soaked streets and platforms, electric-lit interiors, and damp-fogged window panes, presumably of Evans The Death's present day London. That being said, the album definitely conjures up memories of growing up in the late 1980s and, in case I'm showing my age, the 1990s. It is this masterful capturing of such an Autumnal mood makes this album so quintessentially British, and ultimately a success. Released in early 2015, it's just coming into its own for me as that familiar bite is coming into the air.
Like those massages where a small person is paid to walk up and down your back, I play this album to lightly pummel my brain, and it effects most agreeable results. Katherine Whitaker's rich vibrato voice is the delivery vector for the poignancy that weaves and threads through this album, both under its own steam in the slower and more measured passages, and with rest of the band "blowin' like a hurricane" (Sledgehammer, Bad Year) and driving the whole thing inexorably along, her vocal still has the power to cut through and soar above.
As I have more than hinted, Sledgehammer is my obsessive listen from this album. It's the tour-de-force for me both of the darkly honeyed vocals and the intricate yet powerful Mosses' guitar (that opening riff!). The guitar and bass on this track, as so often in the rest of the album, trick us with such unexpectedly contrary directions at times. On "it'll take your breath away" and "I'll be there to bring you down" I worry there will be a burn mark on my hard drive from rewinding the track to listen and re-listen to those phrases (+1 volume each time) - everything just builds up so beautifully, and the album's emotion boils just a little over the surface. If the words at the start of the second verse really do go, "I get hammered alone to pass the time", then I am delighted.
A contrast between light and dark was once cited to me as one of the contributing factors in producing effective music. This album has it in spades, from the rough and dirty intro to Terrified to the rhythmically fascinating Bad Year with its close guitar harmonies and delightfully messy conclusion. The title track Expect Delays captures the understated melancholy (this album does not feel sorry for itself, but feels nonetheless) and the the opening bars and voices that chatter behind speak to me of damp Monday mornings. I have always had an obsession with the extremes in the hours of daylight we experience in these northern climes, and they have undoubtedly touched this song, along with the entire album to which it gives its name.
Fundamentally though, having written all of this, I listen to this album because it makes me happy.
Prominent on my headphone playlist this week has been the newly released EP from Duck Thieves, Act One. This three-track hurricane lifts my house up by the foundations and dumps me down into a stomping marionette puppet show with Duck Thieves in the starring roles. They weave into their music the humour, energy and imagery of their highly entertaining live shows.
To kick us off, The Birds unleashes a chiaroscuro of chaos upon our unsuspecting ears, with black-and-white boardroom antics ("he's got stock options") ignited immediately into glorious technicolour (although not before the sky darkens) with the attack of a deadly swarm of birds in what I can only describe as a musical whumpf. Prokofiev would have been proud of their mean and punchy guitar riff had he been visited by a time travelling Duck Thief to suggest a new theme for Peter and the Wolf.
Popcorn Girl, particularly its delicately layered introductory passage dripping with minor expression, reminds me of the creative influences of The Sequins (a band to which of course some members of Duck Thieves formerly belonged). This song of improbable and unrequited love, "with protons and quarks so alike", reminds me that we are all, like Duck Thieves, creatures of energy. Justin's obsession with Brian May might indeed be that, but provides a true and faithful interpretation, as throughout the EP he injects real sparks of Queen-esque guitar, with a mastery of guitar effects that is difficult to match.
My favourite track is Drive. I have always been a fan of a good upbeat finale, and I am driven to transportations of joy by the refrain of "what about the jobless... they don't drive". I have to say that even without a knowledge of the "copy and paste concrete" street blocks, I am actually starting to care where Morrissey lives at. Particularly skilful in my mind is the call and answer of the backing vocals (i.e. "so young, and so alone..."). This is really accomplished musicianship, supremely rhythmically intelligent, and adds an epic quality to the track, and a grand statement though it may be, it is really in this track that I hear a true touch of Queen. The EP really ends on a high, and it was with a genuine and wide smile on my face that I finished the first, second and third listenings to this track.
I particularly enjoy Justin's rich lead vocal performance throughout Act One, with the ability to inject real humour to proceedings, while having an impressive range both in pitch and dynamics. Knowing something of the reputation of this band for impressive live shows, this is an important transition to recording which I think has worked extremely well.
Welcome to Noisy Dirty City (mark 2). I originally had this blog for various musings including musical ones, but it never quite had a purpose. Recently, I wanted somewhere to put some of my writings on music so I'm reclaiming the blog title for that! I make a bit of music, listen to plenty, but my trips out playing and to gigs are extremely few and far between compared to your typical musician, I would say. Living in the musical city of Sheffield, I also feel like a bit of a satellite of the Coventry music scene as I am fond of several bands and musical things going on there at the moment. I'm going to put up reviews and posts about stuff I've heard and liked, but not really be too strict about whether that is new releases or stuff that's just new to me.
