James Yorkston And The Athletes - Moving Up Country (10th Anniversary Edition)

By Tom Bolton

The ten years since James Yorkston and the Athletes released their debut album, Moving Up Country may have raced past, but it has certainly been long enough to forgot what life before Yorkston was like.  Combining success with a profile just low enough to allow him to get on with what he wants, he is a confident enough musician to have created his own mini-genre, a sort of Scottish country folk.  Associates and admirers come from many musical backgrounds though, including the Waterson dynasty, Alex Neilson, Kieran Hebden and Yorkston’s Fence Collective mates.  Oh, and he used to be a punk.

The tenth anniversary is a fine excuse to hear a fine album again.  However, nothing is straightforward in the Yorkston back story, and explaining how these songs fit into a wider chronology takes James several pages of liner notes on a later album.  Although Moving Up Country was released in 2002, some of its songs had already been recorded and released in limited editions, by Fence and even through John Peel who, along with John Martyn, was an influential early supporter.  The album released by Domino pivots around a song called ‘Moving Up Country, Roaring the Gospel’.  So does Yorkston’s third album, Roaring the Gospel, which came out in 2007.  This superfluity of songs reflects the intensive two weeks the band spent in a Borders cottage, immersing themselves in a new Scottish music, judging by the session photos, using traditional Scottish tools such as Marlboros and Stella.

The re-release differs from the original album in that it includes a new final track, ‘The Lang Toun’, which was left off first time round because the band weren’t sure about it, but came out as a single and ended up on Roaring the Gospel anyway.  Now back in its rightful place on Moving Up Country, it makes a lot of sense.  It is indeed both Lang, at 10 minutes, and a Toun – a loose groove, over a bagpipe drone, that reflects the band’s dynamic live presence better than any other track.  It sounds not much like folk and a lot like something else rather special, a music devised for the sole purpose of expressing what Yorkston has to say.  The warm wail of the acoustic guitar plugged into something not meant for it is the perfect accompaniment to Yorkston’s story of teen passion and betrayal.  The song forms an enclosed space around the listener, and it’s a wrench when we have to leave it at the end.

Moving Up Country survives a great deal of re-listening, not least because of Yorkston’s emotional honesty.  His lyrics are ordinary in the best sense, reflecting stories that seem entirely real, expressed with a clarity that always eludes us when most needed.  ‘Saint Patrick’, a song about getting over one woman in the company of another, contains two lyrics that demonstrate this perfectly: “I swear that I would have called you if I’d been sure you were alone / And doesn’t that drive things home?” and later “And letting things get out of hand / Is exactly what I’ve got planned!”

There are no weak tracks on the album, with is tightly structured.  The first half is about the downsides of love, breaking-up and suffering.  ‘Tender to the Blues’ is first among equals here, with its achingly beautiful melody, its spare lyrics – “I’m no fool, my heart’s just exposed” – and its overt reference to Jackson C. Frank’s touchstone track, ‘Running With The Blues’.

At the halfway point, ‘Moving Up Country, Roaring the Gospel’, is the song that convinced John Peel.  It has a delicious melancholy, underscored by piano, that builds with Kenny Anderson (King Creosote)’s accordion into a much more upbeat track.  This heralds the second half of the record, where the songs are about what happens when love works out, at least on the surface.  ‘Cheating the Game’, for example, has a chirpy music hall bass and washboard backing and a sunny demeanour, although Yorkston’s way of celebrating his relationship involves a surprising amount of contingency planning. ‘I Spy Dogs’ tells a fond tale of watching a bad band in a Paris café with a girlfriend.  ‘I Know My Love’ is the only traditional track on Moving Up Country, evidence of Yorkston’s developing relationship with folk.

The re-release includes a bonus disc, in addition to the full album, consisting of demos, Peel sessions and the offcuts from the recording sessions.  The demos tend to show just what a good job Simon Raymonde did on the production of the album, where the Athletes sound is shown off to excellent effect, creating a depth and warmth that adds hugely to the addictive atmosphere.  An electic range of tracks are released here for the first time, including ‘A Distance Travelled’, which has an almost jazz swing to it, and ‘Saving a Saviour’ which edges towards the narration Yorkston later used on ‘Woozy With Cider’.

The Athletes are the other crucial element in the equation, especially Doogie Paul with his characterful acoustic bass, Faisal Rahman playing a faintly unhinged selection of percussion, and Reuben Taylor on accordion and piano.  Moving Up Country has aged extremely well, and ten years on few musicians have made anything as consistent or quietly original never mind on debut.  Yorkston is touring the album during the Spring, and the Athletes live are not to be missed.

Jack White - Blunderbuss

By Tom Bolton

Jack White is officially adrift, unmoored from his marriage (divorced last year from Karen Elsom) and his original band (the White Stripes, probably gone for good), and now he’s floating into new, solo territory for the first time.  Of course, nothing is as straightforward as it seems with a man who has made a career from disinformation and carefully cultivated mystique.  However, this time there’s just a suspicion that he might mean some of what he says literally.

Blunderbuss is all about arguments, fights, pain and love gone wrong.  Some reviewers have compared it to Blood On The Tracks, which credits Jack White with a level of both self-flagellation and songwriting genius he can’t reasonably lay claim to.  But it’s an intriguing and complex record, full of fascination and some frustration.

The fascination comes from the varied styles on show on Blunderbuss, from stripped back guitars and vocals to layered, complex numbers that sound at times like showtunes.  The opening, title track, is surprisingly gentle for a song about the symbolic qualities of primitive weaponry. Strings, piano, acoustic guitar and female backing vocals amount to a polished production, rough edges lovingly smoothed away. The lyrics have Arabian Nights accoutrements, and the lyrics have the bittersweet allure of the true fairytale, moving in the course of a verse from “I laid you down and touched you like the two of us both needed” to “Doin’ what two people need is never on the menu.”

The tempo, if not the mood, shifts straight away into something more familiar to lovers of White Stripes’ no frills blues rocking and killer riffs.  ‘Freedom At 21’ is a corker, crackling with feedback and positively teenage hyperactivity:  “She don’t care what kind of bruises she’s leaving on me / she don’t care what kind of wound she’s giving me / cos she got freedom in the 21st century.”  The energy hurts and thrills in equal measure.

‘Love Interruption’ is a poised, bluesy track that’s mostly hate, but with love lingering in the margins.  Jack’s vocals are shadowed throughout by a female voice (Ruby Amanfu), rendering lyrics such as “Yeah I want love to / change my friends to enemies / and show my how it’s all my fault” pregnant with double meaning.  The single, ‘Sixteen Saltines’, is loud and jumping, sounding more like White Stripes than anything else on the album.  It observes “Sharp heels make holes in a lifeboat’, but the observer is a jealous, vengeful teen.

‘Missing Pieces’ has blistering guitar and Meg White-esque Animal drums drive a tale of ice cubes, love notes and an unhappy endings with a killer lyric: ‘When people say they just can’t live without you / they lie and take pieces of you’.

Not everything retains the simplicity that made it so hard to forget White Stripes tracks.  ‘I Guess I Should Go Back to Bed’, for example, with its tinkling, cocktail bar ivories, may well be have been discarded by The Magnetic Fields as too directionless and whimsical.  ‘Trash Tongue Talker’ is exceptionally camp, and ends up sounding like a parody of the rest of the record.  The raw qualities of some of the songs on Blunderbuss are occluded by the sheer engineering effort on display.  Much of the record is a long way from vintage amps and analogue recording studios, but the tracks that sounds more like the Stripes and less like Rufus Wainwright work the best.

Throwing up obligatory chaff to distract listeners seeking some final truth in these songs, Karen Elsom sings backing vocals on three of these tracks, which can only add to the murky territory Blunderbuss inhabits, somewhere between real and fictional experience.  This confusion extends to the cover where Jack, raven on shoulder, bears a strong resemblance to the Cure’s Robert Smith.  It’s not clear whether this is intentional.

Blunderbuss, despite overdoing it in places, is an album that delivers the goods.  The best tracks on here are classic stuff, and Jack White’s songwriting inventiveness seems to have found an outlet unavailable through his other bands, Dead Weather and The Raconteurs. He straddles the territory separating genius from ludicrous, but his heightened self-awareness is enough to reign him in when things get too silly, most of the time at least.

Alexander Tucker - Third Mouth

By Tom Bolton

Third Mouth has arrived, and not a moment too soon.  When Alexander Tucker released Dorwytch last year to unanimous approval, there was a sense of excitement that his considerable talents had crystallised into a music that made peculiar sense.  Only Tucker could have made Dorwytch, a collision of layered, drone sound and psych-folk that was rich, deep and strange.  Third Mouth, then, is the next dispatch from an expedition into unexplored territories.  What new lands has Tucker mapped?

I am pleased to report that Third Mouth builds on the kaleidoscopic sounds of Dorwytch, turning on a stream of ideas and invention.  Songs that appear slight become captivating.  ’A Dried Seahorse’, according to Tucker a song about his dad’s shed, carries its fatherhood theme and evokes dry, dusty, delicate interiors and forgotten objects: “a dried seahorse inside the shell of your hand / hoping to please.”  Violins dissolve into dissonant vibration as the song ends.

On ‘Mullioned View’ the pounding of muffled drums and swarming violin noise creates a sensation of watching something happening far away through a window, struggling to interpret figures glimpsed through smeared glass and occluded consciousness.  Everything is hidden and buried, just out of sight: “turning the ground with the palm of your hand / found coins and broken things”.  The title brings to mind the first ever photograph: Henry Fox Talbot’s haunted 1835 image of the oriel window at Lacock Abbey, which simultaneously opening up and closing off a new reality.  The casement may be closed, but light breaks through.  Tucker reaches through to what lies beyond with a tune that is intense, beautiful and seductive.  Then the music breaks down into a pounding, threatening rhythm that suggests sacrificial dance.

‘Window Sill’ is a gentle, creaking coda about the dust and abandonment.  It is characteristic of Third Mouth that this track, the most understated on the album, is its still centre.  It plays out with a minute of bells and trickling water, deeply, pastoral and evocative.

Tucker says that the title track is about the ordinary and the supernatural existing side-by-side, with a memory of his mother matter-of-factly telling him he could speak in tongues.   The song is densely layered with loops of strings, guitar and voices, showing us a state of consciousness drifting way above ground level.

Sometimes the album shakes hands with the found, radiophonic sounds of Ghost Box artists notably on ‘Amon Hen’, an instrumental track that places Tolkien in the context of poltergeist interference, haunted music boxes, and David Lynch-style saxophone solo.  ’Sitting in a Bardo Pond’ is a tribute to the Tucker’s friends and occasional collaborators.  It’s a song about listening that boasts its own naggingly beautiful melody.

Two seven-minute tracks anchor Third Mouth, and move away from conventional song structures to more experimental forms. ‘The Glass Axe’ is multi-layered, xylophone and drone-driven song based on a magical, folk tale emblem.  The track is placed in a between world, which neither “the wasteland” nor “the bright land” but a place where “solid ground is rearranging”.  Faint reverberations of ‘Revolution No.9′ echo within deep in the soundscape, while Tucker merges the otherworldy melodies and themes of electric folk with the swirling drones of bands such as Harmonia and Cluster.  His take on kosmische is more ethereal though, strings gently swelling rather than driving on in search of the eternal groove.

Finally ‘Rh’ is, rather sweetly, a song about Tucker’s relationship with his girlfriend. However, not many relationships get commemorated in eight miles high vocals and vortices of stomach-lurching organ drone.  It’s an affirmation and a delight.  Then the final seconds deconstruct the ecstasy in a flurry of clicks, rushes and groans, as the music returns to the very earth itself.

On Third Mouth Tucker brilliantly links musical ideas to create something both new and familiar.  Its tracks seem draw out themes across several decades of experimental music, showing us something different and exciting.  The sap is rising and strange forces are beginning to stir: Third Mouth is here, and Spring has arrived.

Grinderman - Grinderman 2 RMX

By Tom Bolton

It is entirely appropriate that the last recording from Nick Cave and his Bad Seed colleagues in their Grinderman alter egos should be a remix album, usually the final refuge of the artistically bankrupt.

With typical ingenuity, Cave created Grinderman as a parody band that still manage to work in ways it has absolutely no right to.  Not since Spinal Tap has rock been so deftly mocked.  Cave, with in close cahoots with Martyn Casey, Jim Sclavunos and Warren Ellis, used Grinderman to indulge deep seated desires to grow ludicrous facial hair and make dubious rawwk.  They aped the Stones, but Cave has more self awareness in his handlebar moustache than Keith Richards has gathered through an entire lifetime of living down to expectations.  Grinderman were equal parts hardcore idiocy, unleashed pent up energy, and song-writing genius.   And who except a hardcore idiot releases a remix of their album?  Such a desperate way to buy credibility!  Such a fad, so past its sell-by date!  What was that, Thom Yorke?

Nick Cave has declared cheerfully and perceptively that at least one track on RMX “shits all over the previous version”.  This rather implies that the rest don’t, which would be unfair.  The original Grinderman 2 brims with energy and features musicians throwing everything they’ve got at everything in sight.  How to improve on four hairy rock geezers having so much fun?

As Cave points out, Nick Zinner gets it spot on for ‘Bellringer Blues’. He does away with the original, backwards guitar effects that introduce the original, cutting straight to the buzzing, shimmering right-way-around guitar sound adding, literally, a layer of bells and whistles.  It sounds extra mystic, giving Cave’s voice space to breathe as though he is singing from a mountaintop in the Judean desert.   This is entirely appropriate for a song about a meeting with the angel Gabriel.  It also helps to show just how good a song this is, up with Cave’s best work which is saying a great deal.

The album is mostly occupied by competing versions of the same song, which shows off some very different approaches.  ‘Worm Tamer’ become incendiary in the version by A Place to Bury Strangers, with manic beats and guitar building to the song’s very silly climax (perhaps an unfortunate choice of phrase) with Cave claiming “Well my baby calls me the Loch Ness Monster / Two great big humps and then I’m gone / But actually I am the Abominable Snowman.” By contrast, ‘Hyper Worm Tamer’ credited to Grinderman/Unkle is softer but seedier, and features a new, extra-lascivious Cave vocal.  Cat’s Eyes reclaim ‘When My Baby Comes’ via a layer of waspish interference, a shock female vocal and more singing from Luke Tristram, who gets away with it by not trying to be Nick Cave.  Sixtoes’ version goes strips out everything except Cave, and adds in some David Lynch instrumentation which suits it perfectly.

‘Super Heathen Child’ is less of a remix and more a version with Grinderman plus a squealing Robert Fripp guitar solo, which delivers extra rock returns from the already super-committed ‘Heathen Child’.  Andrew Weatherall’s version sounds more like a remix by someone who does this for a day job than most of the other tracks.  It departs hugely from the original, turning it into a epic, interplanetary journey of the type that echoed across Castlemorton Common towards the end of the last century.  This is no bad thing.

‘Palaces of Montezuma’ is also pretty much an inside job, remixed by ex-Bad Seed Barry Adamson.  He adds extra slinky beats, which add sheen to an inspired love song, that alternates between the hilarious (“I give to you / A custard-coloured super-dream / Of Ali McGraw and Steve McQueen”) and the inventively sinister (“I give to you / The spinal cord of JFK / Wrapped in Marilyn Monroe’s negligee”). The only real dud here is Josh Homme’s dismantling of ‘Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man’, called ‘Mickey Bloody Mouse’. He sucks all the energy from the perfectly poised, menacing original and leaves it beached and dried out.  Perhaps he lacks the self-perspective required for the job.

There are three separate versions of ‘Evil’, not all of which work.  ‘The Michael Cliffe House” remix is creepy but rather too meandering.  Silver Alert’s version ill-advisedly introduces Matt Berninger, lead singer with The National who has a fine voice but ain’t Nick Cave.   Finally, ‘First Evil’ is remixed by Grinderman themselves whose idea of remixing seems to be playing all their instruments at once, with as much distortion as they can muster.  As you might imagine, this is a lot of distortion.

What finer and more apt way to sign off from Grinderman, with a blast of noise Nigel Tufnel would be proud of.  It’s a shame to see them go, but it’s a fair bet Nick Cave has something equally unexpected and awesome up his sleeve. In the meantime, give into to the power of the RMX.

Richard Youngs - Amaranthine

By Tom Bolton

If anyone’s channelling England’s dreaming, it’s Richard Youngs with his baffling, absorbing fragments that seem simultaneously alien and a fundamental part of us. The debate about Youngs always seems to get hung up on trying to describe and categorise: “Is this album more ‘avant-garde’ than the last?” or “Is he still experimental, or has he sold out?” This is definitely missing the point. His music is highly original, and seems to exist to defy and destroy categories. Nor do definitions help to understand what you’re hearing. He experiments, for sure, but the significance of his work is in its ability to help the listener value sounds and musical experiences they might otherwise dismiss.

Amaranthine is the latest instalment in a talented and entirely unpredictable career that stretches back over a series of twenty-plus albums, all remarkably different.  He’s so prolific that it’s easy to miss an instalment or three of his oeuvre, by which time he may well have passed through several distinct phases of creation.  His 2010 album, Beyond the Valley of the Ultrahits, was unexpectedly pop and used conventional song structures to great effect.  Last year’s Amplifying Host definitely did not, sounding like deconstructed folk with the individual elements separated out and fixed with a puzzled, fascinated gaze.

Clearly, it’s the sign of a quality album when you need to look the title up in a dictionary. It’s an even better sign when the title is as well chosen as Amaranthine, which turns out to mean ‘unfading’, after a mythical, dark purple-red flower that never fades. Enya seems to have had the idea first, but let’s skip over that. The album in fact does fade, improvisation fuzzing in and out like a flickering consciousness. It consists of four long tracks. The first, ‘Hopeless Warrior’ begins with tribal drumming rattling and clattering, and Youngs’ thin, high voice declaiming in a distorted, rhythmic pattern. A creaking electric guitar swaps registers, layering over the polyrhythms. It’s impossible to tell exactly what words are being sung, but they include the refrain “It’s just a hopeless warrior I am.” The song is plaintive and melancholy, and intensely awkward in a Jandek manner.

The album then segues into ‘State I’m In (California)’ which seems to mix mental with physical states. The vocals become clearer, but the drums become choppier and even more complex, sharing equal status with the singer. The rhythms are fascinating and impenetrable, and Youngs seems to be in a state of confusion himself. He sings “How can I know? / the state I’m in / don’t come easily / California”’ in a repeating, overlapping round with himself.  It’s a stunning track.

‘Everybody Needs a Sword’ contains the repeated phrase “In London I cannot see / everybody needs a sword” over low electronic throbbing and more mind-bending percussion. Youngs sounds urgent, like a street preacher with a message that nobody will understand in the same way. He sings in a mantic reverie that ‘Nobody needs a vision’, but it sounds as though his vision is just more penetrating than everyone else’s.

Finally, ‘The Power Come Out’ is a sort of ecstasy in which Youngs seems to chant “Ommmm…” as he sings revelations such “Power come out / I heard one thousand calls”. A meandering, treble guitar solo floats over the top, and the percussion whirs and chunters. At times it sounds almost blissed out, although the white guitar noise that cuts in halfway through could either be the hum of eternity or something vast and menacing approaching from a long way off. It’s immense and unfathomable, a song struggling with the contradictory nature of being. And, let’s face it, there aren’t many people around at the moment making music with that level of ambition.

It would be a mistake to dismiss Amaranthine as unlistenable, wilfully perverse music, although some undoubtedly will. It’s disconcerting, at times frustrating, but also rich and strange with the power to repay the listener with compound interest. Richard Youngs is a musician worth listening to, and that really means listening actively, with a mind receptive to the unexpected. Amaranthine is fractured and even distraught, but it’s also a deep purple, unfading thing of beauty.

Karen Dalton - 1966

By Tom Bolton

In the hyper-documented, post-digital world can there really be any unknown great music?  The back catalogues of the 1960s in particular have been trawled on an industrial scale, and the scrapings from the ocean bottom packaged and re-released to fading acclaim.  In the context of rapidly diminishing returns, the low-key arrival of Karen Dalton’s 1966 is positively seismic.  This is the closest we are likely to get to songs that we’ve never heard before, that deserve to be considered with the best.

Karen Dalton was from one perspective a tragic casualty of her time, and from another one of the greatest blues singers ever recorded.  She was a doyen of the early 60s Greenwich Village folk scene in New York, where Bob Dylan heard her perform and described her as his favourite singer.  But while New York launched Dylan and many others to global fame, Dalton hated the city and the attention.  She left with her estranged husband, Richard Tucker, for remote Colorado where they lived in a cabin so far from any settlement that it had no address and no running water.  Nevertheless, fellow singers Tim Hardin and Fred Neil joined her there for a time, and they played and sang together.

Dalton released only two albums, one of which she was tricked into recording under the impression the tape wasn’t running.  Both vanished, and her official output ended there.  The rest of her life was a disaster: she developed a heroin problem, lost custody of her children, spent time living on the streets of New York and died in complete obscurity in 1993, aged 55.  She was a child of the ’60s in every way: talented beautiful, willowy, with long dark hair from Cherokee roots; feckless, irresponsible and deeply self-destructive.

Since her last release in 1971, two further compilations of demo material have emerged, but the discovery of 1966 significantly increased the amount of material that has survived.  The album is reel-to-reel home recordings, made as she and Tucker rehearsed at the Colorado cabin, and they contain some of the most intense music you could hope to hear.  Most of the tracks include nothing more than Karen’s voice and Richard’s banjo or guitar on a crackling, hissing, single track tape.  Sometimes they duet and there’s a little whistling, but that’s it.  Yet the music is a portal into the past, projecting the listener back into a lost era through the beauty, personality, and poignancy of Karen’s voice.

The first track, ‘Reason to Believe’, leaps out of the speakers and grabs at your throat.  Dalton address an unknown man, brutally exposing both his faithlessness and her self-deception: “Knowing that you lied straightfaced while I cried / still I’ll find a reason to believe.”  The dead-pan emotional honesty is shocking and her singing, with long sweet phrases but a rough blues edge, is impossible to disbelieve.  Her singing is mesmerising, crowd-stopping.  Dalton stands dead still and sings, while everything whirls around her – literally in fact, as Youtube footage demonstrates.

‘Katie Cruel’, a traditional folk song and as much of a signature tune as Karen has a rolling banjo and mysterious story of rejection, apparently for making “the young girls merry”.  Sorrow and exile suit Dalton’s voice down to the ground, and her delivery of the lines “When I first came to town they called me the roving jewel / Now they’ve changed their tune / They call me Katie Cruel” is eerily timeless.

Tracks such as ‘Katie Cruel’ appear on other Dalton records, but stripped of any attempt at production these version shine even more brightly.  Further highlights include ‘Green Rocky Road’, a Fred Neil song, and a traditional number, ‘Cotton Eye Joe’.  Dalton induces a similar state of mind on each track, turning each into a warning of undefinable disaster, trailing betrayal and loss behind them.  But she make deep sadness more beautiful than almost anyone.

Dalton sings the blues like folk, and folk like the blues, stripping traditional styles down to their common themes of love, loss and death.  ‘Misery Blues’ just over a minute long, shows her in complete command on a blues standard, while ‘Mole in the Ground’ is banjo blues, relocating southern music in the mountains of the north. Dalton draws comparisons, frequently made, with Billie Holiday with a version of the bleak self-reliance blues song ‘God Bless the Child’.  It may sounds even more like a field recording than the rest of 1966, but it displays her voice to heartbreaking perfection.

Her friend Lacy Dalton (no relation), interviewed in 2007, said “Karen had true, true greatness that had not been recognised.  I said to her, ‘It’s going to annoy the hell out of you but you’ll probably only get recognised after your death.’”  We’ve waited long enough: it’s time to celebrate a singer who sounds like no other.

H. Hawkline - The Strange Uses Of Ox Gall

By Tom Bolton

The Strange Uses of Ox Gall opens with a call to “cut the ballast loose”, but you might want to think twice before joining in.  Things soon get alarming: “Cut your arms off! Cut your toes off!” chants a ragged chorus, backed by a toy organ riff.  When the first full length track, ‘Funny Bones’, kicks in it is tunefully pastoral but also strangely obsessed with body parts.  This unsettling, distorted, acid-soaked perspective washes over the whole album, taking up where Syd Barrett left off with Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

H. Hawkline’s second album is a slice of addictive, gently unhinged Welsh pastoral pop.  Hawkline is Huw Evans, well known in Welsh music circles from various bands, from Welsh language radio and from the Welsh Rare Beat albums he helped to compile. The rediscovered history of overlooked Welsh psych music is the clear starting point for this record, which wears its extensive West Coast (as in Dyfed) influences on its sleeve.  Evans may not be the first Welsh musician to play music in a continuum from the late ’60s via Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci to Gruff Rhys, but a strong tradition has coalesced in Cardiff of a distinctively Welsh brand of music that is the undisputed sound of the West.

Over the course of six minutes ‘Funny Bones’ transforms itself from Pink Floyd tribute track to anthemic weirdness, culminating in what sound like honks from a clown’s horn.  Then ‘Mind How You Go’ develops a gorgeous, harmonica and organ tune, dripping with mountaintop melancholia.  This is a track that, had he written it, Gruff Rhys would have been delighted to include on Hotel Shampoo; given Huw Evans’ appearances as a support act to Rhys, this is probably no coincidence.

These songs are above all else lovely: faded, dusty, transmitting unevenly from apparently damaged recordings, but filtering gently through and drifting into the deep recesses of the brain.  There is something naggingly familiar about the ethereal melodies of songs such as ‘Sea of Sand’ and ‘Surf Pound’, as though heard in a dream.  They seem to have been around for ever, longer than the towns and the cities, as old as the Cambrian rocks.

Tracks are separated with short interludes of apparently casual background sounds.  Although lending to the general atmosphere, they do not contribute to the cohesiveness of the record as a whole and it is, in fact, a little too uneven to be a complete success.  However, the best tracks are so disarming that they more than make up for the weak spots.

The Strange Uses of Ox Gall is available as a download, the only alternative apparently being a 150 copy vinyl pressing.  The record company, Shape, seem to be encouraging the album to disappear without trace, to re-emerge with serious rarity factor sometime in the 2020s.  But really, why wait?  Encase yourself in a shimmering bubble and listen to H. Hawkline’s sweet sounds right now.

Tom Waits - Bad As Me

By Tom Bolton

Until Bad As Me rattled along a few weeks ago, Tom Waits seemed to have settled comfortably into a well-earned musical godfather status, revered by anyone with an ounce of taste but with his best years gradually retreating behind him.  Since his last proper album, Real Gone in 2004, we’ve had only leftovers.  Reviewing and pigeon-holing your career, as he did on Orphans – three CDs of unreleased tracks labelled as Brawlers, Bawlers or Bastards – is the kind of job best left to the obituarists.

Well, the news is good.  Having taken time out to spend time with his back catalogue, Thomas Alan Waits is back with 13 tracks that are by turns new and old, startling and reassuring, funny and sad.  It rocks, jumps, slides, squawks, croons, groans, grunts, parps, and makes some highly characteristic squeaking noises.  It’s good, and not just in a ‘great to see he’s still making albums’ way.  It’s good in a 1980s way, when Waits met and started writing with his wife, Kathleen Brennan, stepping out of his barfly persona into something far more original and disturbing.   A 20–year sequence of albums – Swordfishtrombone, Rain Dogs, Frank’s Wild Years, Bone Machine, The Black Rider, Mule Variations, Blood Money, Alice and Real Gone – contain, for the most part, some of the most remarkable music made then or since, in which Waits picks up musical batons from Captain Beefheart, Harry Partch and Chet Baker and creates a glorious music of his own.  So it’s exciting to discover that Waits is still capable of making an album that belongs in their company.

Bad As Me is notable for three themes running through the songs: getting out, getting old, and getting it on.  These are filtered through an impressive range of styles, from sozzled late night ballads to rampaging stomps.  ‘Chicago’, the first track, is immediately solid Waits territory percussive brass and absurdly deep throated growling on a song about emigration, leaving the place you know because “Maybe things will be better in Chicago”.  It’s pretty clear they won’t.

On “Turn My Face to the Highway”, a melancholy, wintry track, the temptations of the hearth are spelled out.  Waits wants to stay, but for reasons that can’t even be explained his destiny has always been to leave.  “Pay Me” is a counterpoint with a Brel-style harmonium and a story about someone paid not to come home.  The despairing final lines show just how wrong his stage career has gone: “The only way down from the gallows is to swing / And I’ll wear boots instead of high heels / And the next stage that I am on it will have wheels.”

Tom Waits’ idea of good loving is probably not for every woman.  ‘Get Lost’ is a cheerful boogie in which he delivers a very entertaining vocal impression of Elvis as he suggests to someone that they “Roll down the windows / and turn up Wolfman Jack”.  ‘Kiss Me’ is stripped back highlight, just a piano and a bass, Waits at his absolute graveliest, and a call to “Kiss me like a stranger again.”

“Raised Right Men” definitely falls into the ‘getting old’ category, a tongue-in-cheek lament about the lack of the kind of men identified in the title.  All the examples Waits gives though seem to be either destitute or dead.  It’s very funny, as is the title song, one of a series of hilariously manic tracks.  Waits tells someone – “mother superior in only a bra” – why they’re the same kind of bad as him.  It may sound on the surface like ludicrous posing, but Waits is entirely aware of his own potential to be ludicrous and has a great time revelling in it.  “Satisfied” is a riposte to the Stones, doubtless triggered by the presence of Keith Richards on several tracks.  His philosophy is set out very clearly:  “Now Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards / I will scratch where I’ve been itching.”  He’s past the age when waiting was an option.

Perhaps the three most memorable songs come one after another at the end of Bad As Me.  ‘Last Leaf’ is a classic Waits bar ballad.  He used to sing nothing but these: now, when he does, they really hit home.  It’s a semi-serious cry of defiance against the dying of the light, but it’s also rather beautiful, enhanced by rough-edge harmonising from Richards.  ‘Hell Broke Luce’ appears to use a train instead of percussion but reveals itself as a marching song, a controlled anti-war rant about Iraq and Afghanistan.  Waits is angry about the experience of mutilated and dying soldiers who can’t hear what the President has to say to them because they’ve been deafened by explosions.

Finally, ‘New Year’s Eve’ is a tale of woe, a last night out before the narrator leaves for good, packed full of chaotic, drug-fuelled family chaos.  It also includes some of the funniest rhymes this side of Insane Clown Posse – “All the noise was disturbing / and I couldn’t find Irving” being a highlight.

Bad As Me is a real achievement, a varied, fascinating, exhilarating album.  No wonder Keith Richards wants to get in on this: he hasn’t written anything remotely on this level for years.  There’s a danger that we take Tom Waits for granted, without stepping back to consider just how impressive a musician he really is.  He is a true writer, his songs containing not a single careless, poorly considered word.  He’s also a subtle, innovative singer with a voice that no-one else can match.  He’s still doing it at the age of 62, and we just have to pray he won’t be stopping any time soon.

Roy Harper

By Tom Bolton

To celebrate Roy Harper’s 70^th birthday, which will also be marked by a Bonfire Night concert at the Festival Hall, the Believe Digital label is re-releasing his entire back catalogue – 18 albums, 1966 to 2000.  Taking no chances with the first batch of four, they have chosen arguably his four strongest records.

This is very timely recognition for an artist who never became as famous as he deserved. Harper shared similarities with the recently deceased Bert Jansch.  Both were guitar gurus, influencing a generation of musicians with their effortless technique and unmistakable styles. As a result they are both musicians’ musicians, better known to the wider public for their influence than for their own material.  Both also dropped out of the sight for many years, Jansch because of drinking and health problems, Harper through fragile mental health. The two shared musical similarities, developing intricate finger-picking acoustic styles during the mid-60s. However, their paths diverged and while Harper used the ‘70s to discover his inner axeman, Jansch most definitely did not.  These four albums are a great way to hear just how much Harper has to offer.

Roy Harper - Sophisticated Beggar

Sophisticated Beggar

Roy Harper’s first album, released in 1966, is distinctive, mature and intriguing.  Harper himself seems to view it as juvenilia, looking back on it fondly but not performing its tracks.  It deserves better than that.  The opening ‘China Girl’, fades in with the track already underway, as though we’ve just managed to grab Roy by the coat-tails as he strides off.  The song itself is striking, a complex folk-psych song typical of its time, but remarkably confident for a debut album, recorded apparently at the bottom of someone’s garden.  Harper’s engaging voice, and layered acoustic guitar dances around reversed tape effects.

Other songs on the album range from pin sharp, percussive finger-picking to straight psychedelia.  The title track is the best known song, in line with other ‘60s songs about living under the radar.  It delivers a gale of aggressive guitar and a confrontational vocal which pitches Harper as a Timon of Athens-style truth teller, here to mess up your self-congratulatory fantasy life with reality.  He’s “an emancipated firework exploding on your busy street”, but certainly not the Katie Perry life-enhancing kind.

‘Legend’ debuts the dense, disturbing imagery Harper would soon develop to even greater effect.  ‘October 12^th’ and ‘Committed’ are also trademark Harper songs, concerned with depression and rejection of faith.  ‘Committed’, about Harper’s incarceration in the Lancashire Moor Mental Institute, is a manic performance and includes the lyric “The doctor says I’m getting better, less resplendent more respondent”.  ‘Mr Stationmaster’, in complete contrast, is an organ-driven, fairground psych song that could only have been recorded in 1966.  It’s very silly, and rather likeable.  On later albums, Harper’s attempts to lighten the mood would prove less successful.

Roy Harper - Flat Baroque and Berserk

Flat Baroque and Berserk

Four years later, Roy Harper had come a long way.  His album covers point up the changes, from the quirky line drawing of Sophisticated Beggar to the ludicrous decadence of Flat Baroque and Berserk, with its attention-seeking title and cover photo featuring three clashing swirly fabrics, a bad hat and a tiger.  It doesn’t start promisingly, with an opening track that tries to out-Dylan Dylan, and then a spectacularly self-indulgent spoken intro to ‘I Hate the White Man’, featuring Roy trying and failing to explain himself.  However, the song itself is among his best known achievements.  Harper lambasts western colonialism in a way that seems less politically trangressive than in 1970, but significantly weirder.  His palpable anger becomes positively hallucinogenic over the song’s minutes, culminating in lines such as “And through the countless canticles / Of Jason’s charcoal fleece / Are sung the songs of nothing / In the timeless masterpiece”.  This time Dylan inspires his writing in the right way.

An album driven by this amount of wild energy is never going to achieve consistency, and Flat Baroque and Berserk is a rollercoaster.  ‘Feeling All the Saturday’ and ‘Tom Tiddler’s Ground’ are too whimsical, while ‘Hells Angels’ recorded with The Nice is just ridiculous.  But, while a few tracks miss the mark, there’s unmissable material here too.  ‘Goodbye’, a spiky, gorgeous song about death; ‘Another Day’, an elegiac, mini-masterpiece about a lost lover; and ‘East of the Sun’, a gauche, blissful harmonica love song, are all crucial parts of the Harper canon.  This album is authentic Harper, in all his messy, confused, inspired glory.

Roy Harper - Stormcock

Stormcock

Just as Flat Baroque is a messy delight, Stormcock, recorded the following year, is focussed, serious and generally regarded as Roy Harper’s finest achievement.  It consists of only four tracks, the shortest of which is seven minutes long, but Harper has ripped up traditional song structures to suit his digressive style.  As Harper puts it, “I gave myself the space to go deep… and stay there.”  Going deep meant mining his troubled psyche, the title the key to his state of mind and the whole album devoted to understanding the world while finding nothing but contradictions.

The opener, ‘Hors d’Oeuvres’ (a heavy Harper pun on the horses of the chorus), is a commentary by the singer on himself, imagining how critics would condemn his lack of answers or commercial appeal, and in turn condemning them himself.  Given that this is a song Harper now considers rather light, you get a sense of how lyrically dense this record soon becomes.  ‘The Same Old Rock’ is highly digressive, but in general terms seems to be about ways to live your life.  However, literal sense dissolves in the frantic attempts to find meaning, and Harper’s lyrics start to sound like Brian Eno – flashes of imagery, subsumed in the music.  And there’s a Jimmy Page guitar solo that thunders like Led Zeppelin.  ‘One Man Rock and Roll Band’ rumbles across similar wastelands, covering conflict from Nero to Grosvenor Square.  Harper’s vocals are remarkable, reaching for the outer limits.

Finally, ‘Me and My Woman’ takes it back to the personal, using pastoral lyrics that switch from modern to ancient and back again in a futile attempt to understand how love can help explain the universe: “The cuckoo she moves through the dawn fanfare / The dew leaves the roofs in the magic air / I feel a finger running through my nightmare’s lair / Feel most together with my nowhere stare”.  It’s the pocket symphony of musical legend, a song cycle of contrasting moods and instrumentation.  It’s epic, and so is Stormcock.

Roy Harper - Bullingamingvase

Bullingamingvase

From 1977, Bullingamingvase clearly post-dates Stormcock.  It comes at the end of Harper’s ‘70s purple period, when he was writing his best material and recording at Abbey Road.  Three very good albums, still to be re-released, lie in between.  However, this record has much of Stormcock’s single-mindedness.  It is a conscious attempt to examine the meaning of England from an English point of view.  The mood is much more reflective than earlier albums: the anger has ebbed away, but the puzzlement remains.

The album opens with ‘One of Those Days in England’ in which Harper, accompanied by brass, stays in bed with his lover on “one of those days in England when the country’s going broke”, a song for 2011 written 35 years ago.  This is Part 1 of the song, and Parts 2-10 return at the end of the album, mixing mythology with dole queues and a job rolling spliffs for Captain Kirk.  The line “One of those days in England with a sword in every pond” evokes Arthur, while Albion, Avalon and Britannica gaze down over war, memories, family and the “golden red sunset”.  It’s sprawling and beautiful, with a sad, sweet melody and powerful atmosphere.  Roy Harper never sings anything he doesn’t feel, so when he gently intones “Alfred had me made”, quoting the inscription on the Anglo-Saxon Alfred Jewel, we know it has great significance for him.

Bookended by this stunning song are four tracks (and then a coda), which together come close to a perfect album.  Of course, this being Harper, there’s a great big flaw running through the centre in the form of ‘Watford Gap’, a comic song about the service station that sounds unaccountably like The Wurzels.  However, ‘These Last Days’, complete with swirling electric guitar, is a song coming to terms with the imperfections of the world; ‘Cherishing the Lonesome’ is another of Harper’s bitter-sweet lost love songs, with a plaintive acoustic accompaniment; and ‘Naked Flame’ rails against lost love and the uncaring world.  Roy Harper puts a uniquely epic spin on his love life, and only he could get away with writing “The ages pass with the flick of a thumb / love has lost and pride has won / but through old destruction flies new dawn / and I rode the winds into the morn”.  Bullingamingvase is a Roy Harper entry drug: if you like this, you’ll soon find you can’t manage without more.

Wooden Shjips - West

By Tom Bolton

Pressing play on West is a reassuring experience.  From the first chords of ‘Black Smoke Rise’ you are, beyond doubt, in Wooden Shjips world, pretty much where they left it in 2010 on Dos.  The lead guitar lays down an absurdly heavy, frazzled riff that buzzes like a swarm of bees. African killer bees. Vocals are of the stoner variety – minimum effort, maximum headrush. The final third of the song collapses fractured, multi-faceted shapes as Wooden Shjips meticulously dismantle it with a typically trippy guitar solo. And this is just the start.

Sometimes, while swept away with the total conviction of Wooden Shjips’ sound, a suspicion may pass fleetingly through the listener’s mind. Perhaps Wooden Shjips are just a tiny bit ridiculous. It’s hard to imagine what a parody would sound like, but it would be hard pressed to produce more fuzzed out riffs, more relentless, piledriving repetition, or to sound any more 1969. The Shjips are so West Coast it hurts and, just in case there’s any misunderstanding about where they are coming from, their new album is not only called West but for good measure has a great big cover photo of the Golden Gate Bridge.

To the uninitiated maybe this sounds too much, but anyone who heard and loved Dos and Wooden Shjips will be salivating for more. This time, Ripley Johnson is really on a roll. Having completed one acclaimed album already this year – Mazes as Moon Duo, with partner Sanae Yamada, he has returned to Wooden Shjips, but this time in a studio. Previous albums were home-made, garage four-track affairs, but West slips up a gear, using the studio technology to deepen and widen the soundscape, from pulsing bass to wailing guitar top notes.

On ‘Crossing’ the trembling lead guitar solos out of a wall of fuzz, and carries us soaring over the Bay Area, San Franciso from a micro-light, footage from an Imax demonstration film. The beach is hot, the afternoon sun is high, the acid has well and truly kicked in, and nothing will ever change. How could it? This is the perfect state of being. The driving riff separates into exceptionally stoned guitar meanderings, baked in the Californian sun.

Drone bands weave variations on a basic formula, but Wooden Shjips are more than drone. There’s a gleeful enjoyment in their music that makes them irresistible. ‘Lazy Bones’ has a trembling, trebly riff as well as the grinding, bass throb and cheerful lyrics about being taken “for a ride”, and “staring at the sun / it’s staring back at me”. The opening bars ‘Home’ sounds disconcertingly like a heavy metal cover of ‘House of the Rising Sun’, but The Animals never located the groove that Ripley works here. From within his echo chamber he sings “Senses overiiide… riiiiide… riiiiide”, while a triumphant solo blows the song into the fifth dimension.

There’s no let up, but more variation than on previous albums, within a Shjip-shaped envelope. ‘Flight’ slows it down and adds a cosmic organ that only serves to make the band seems even more utterly out of their trees than before. ‘Looking Out’ is simple, one dirty riff over and over again, simplicity itself and very addictive. Finally, ‘Rising’ is truly psychedelic, layering reversed guitars, sitars and vocals over the trademark riffery. An epic, brain-rewiring track to wind up a album that casts an irresistible, hazy, shimmering spell.

Wooden Shjips’ secret is that they are the real thing.  They may not have invented anything new, and but they’ve taken psychedelic, garage, stoner, and drone rock and honed them to the essentials.  They’ve given us back music we know, and somehow it’s never sounded quite this good.