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.

Hudson Mohawke - Satin Panthers

Ross Birchard may hate being described as ‘bedroom techno’ but, like a 21^st century White Town, he is a home made music machine.  When he transforms into Hudson Mohawke he brings forth sounds that are both familiar and startlingly new.  His tracks – keyboard and sample heavy – are a mind-bending mixture of dubstep, techno, jazz, disco and syth pop, blended with gleeful abandon.  Debut album Butter, released on Warp in 2010, contained some revelations.  It included ‘FUSE’, a delirious wave of something sounding like synthesised panpipes.  It was reminiscent of ’80s theme sci-fi music and ’90s Nintendo soundtracks, yet sounded as though it was beamed in from a parallel, awesomely cool future.  It was really rather addictive.

This approach is high risk.  From his name to his staggering cover art – a late 70s charity shop painting of eagles, geckos and moonlight on Butter –  Hud Mo (as journalists seem to call him) teeters on the edge of risibility, yet pulls it off with some serious panache.  Not everything on Butter lived up to ‘FUSE’, too many tracks filling space or failing to catch fire.  Now Satin Panthers, a much anticipated follow-up EP, gives us five new ones to play with.

As always, the beats are the focus of the EP rather than the vocals, unless you count the looped, orgasmic squeaks that march backwards across ‘Thunder Bay’.  This is one of two stand-out tracks, three minutes of further crunchiness, more power drill than bike this time, counterpointed against the squeaking.  It’s fantastic, in both senses of the word.  The other is ‘All Your Love’, about as downbeat at Hudson gets, based on a pile-driving bass and a high-pitched ecstatic female vocal sample.  This is Hudson at his best, overshameless, flamboyant, and strangely moreish.

A cheeky intro, ‘Octan’, showcases a ludicrously crunchy beat that sounds like a motorbike revving through a series of power chords.  ‘Cbat’ is based on an annoying, chirpy, off-key sample that outstays its welcome.  But Satin Panthers is a satisfying offering, wetting the appetite for the next full length album and helping us to add just a little more neon to our lives.

It is sixteen years since Jackie O Motherfucker’s first release, and music has moved on.  Their role at the heart of the scene annoyingly described as ‘Freak Folk’ influenced the sounds of the subsequent decade, helping to free a stream of excellent folk-influence musicians from their shackles, and recapturing the energy of the original folk cosmonauts, journeying to the heart of world music in the early ’60s.  At their best JOMF are essential listening, fed by a culture of improvisation and exploration developed among an elastic group of musicians.  They sought the new in the old, mixing blues, electronics, free jazz, raga, space rock and much else to create something that needed a new label to keep it under control.

Jackie O Motherfucker - Earth Sound System

So where does this leave JOMF in 2011?  Founder Tom Greenwood is still at the centre of the band, surrounded by a different cast.  He seems to be struggling for energy, and it soon becomes clear he’s also short of ideas.  The album opens what appears to be a Velvet Underground tribute song.  ‘In the Willows’ sounds like the Velvets drowning in their own overwhelming ennui.  From somewhere in the miasma, Tom Greenwood groans like a jammed cassette player, muttering “She gathered the sun all in her fist”, marvelling at an act of destiny that seems way beyond him.  Meandering guitar, cymbal washes and howling wind effects create a desolate landscape behind him.  It teeters on the brink of parody, but just about pulls it off.

Then the album delivers the first of two raga-based improvised tracks, ‘Raga Joining’ later followed by ‘Raga Separating’.  The problem is that neither are very interesting.   They seem like experimental box-ticking, included to establish credentials rather than to give us anything new, using electronic percussion and eastern guitar noodlings to no particular purpose.  Over fifteen minutes long in total, they outstay their welcome.

The album reaches something of a nadir with ‘Dedication’, a lazy, self indulgent song which tries the patience of the listener beyond endurance.  It consists of a repeated refrain, “This is dedicated to / the person who / is trying to find / the next right thing to do.” Tom Greenwood’s repeats this grammatically irritating, spectacularly meaningless phrase again and again throughout six extended minutes, daring the listener to call his bluff and switch it off.

It’s not all bad news.  The final track, ‘Where We Go’, suddenly locate the energy that is mysteriously lacking everywhere else.  An agreeably dirty, grinding guitar part, sounding like ‘Helter Skelter’ played by The Stooges, gives us a reason to listen, while Greenwood incants semi-comprehensibly over the top.  He’s not a man with a rock voice, but this is at least a track worth pressing play for, not something that can be honestly be said about the rest of Earth Sound System.

JOMF have high standards to meet, set by themselves.   We need bands that care about their music rather than what anyone else thinks, so it’s a disappointment that they seem shorter on inspiration than ever before.  Pitchfork described Tom Greenwood as “the odds-on favourite to shiv a Fleet Fox”, but on this evidence Robin Pecknold won’t be having sleepless nights.

This new compilation of Roy Harper’s songs is released to commemorate his 70th birthday, and kicks off the re-release of 18 of his albums, from 1966’s acoustic Sophisticated Beggar to The Green Man from 2000.  It’s a fitting way to commemorate an artist who competes strongly for the title of the UK’s most under-appreciated musician, and this despite highly public acknowledgments over several decades.  Perpetually rediscovered, then mislaid again, Harper was lauded by Led Zeppelin (‘Hats Off to (Roy) Harper’) on Led Zeppelin III – the brackets a telling acknowledgement of his eternally low public profile.  Pink Floyd appropriated his anti-commercial, anti-record company stance in ‘Have a Cigar’, which he sings on Wish You Were Here.  He sang vocals on ‘Breathing’ by Kate Bush, and associated with Paul McCartney, Keith Moon, and the Nice to name just a few.

Roy Harper - Songs Of Love And Loss, Volumes One And Two

Not bad for a folk singer, but also a good indication of why he has never become better known.  Harper is hard to categorise, ranging from dense, finger-picking acoustic guitar pieces in the late ’60s, which placed him musically alongside people like Bert Jansch and Davey Graham, to mid-70s music which revels in the pomp and effects that are all over the rock music of the era.  He writes, sings and plays his guitar in entirely individual ways, and the result is some stunning music.

Songs of Love and Loss is a 2-CD survey of Harper’s 45-year career, during which he has made a lot of albums – certainly more than the 18 up for re-release.  It’s therefore only one version of his ‘best-of’, and a substantially different double-disc compilation, Counter Culture, was released on Science Friction in 2005.  The two overlap by only 5 tracks, and there’s no doubt that anyone trying to get the measure of Harper’s vast output needs to own both.  Counter Culture includes perhaps his two best, and best-known songs.  ‘When An Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease’ is astonishing – pastoral, elegiac, and somehow the right side of mawkish.  ‘One of These Days in England’ is a ten-part pocket symphony backed (which works better than one might imagine) by Wings.  Nor does it include any tracks from Stormcock, his best known album, and only one from Lifemask.  The absence of key tracks from Songs of Love and Loss prevents it from being a definitive compilation.  However, the compilers have chosen to focus on at least some of his more hidden material, and they include some very fine tracks.  The best material is drawn from the more laid back of his 70s albums – Flat Baroque and Beserk, Valentine and Bullingamingvase.

To take a random example, ‘East of the Sun’, with its Dylan-esque harmonica and lyrics (‘I can still see her breast on the edge of the morning’) is beautiful and slightly ridiculous, an effect that pervades Harper’s music.  He’s painfully aware of himself, yet not quite self-aware enough to be cool about it like Bob Dylan.  He writes like a dream, but his best lyrics often sit next to his worst.  He writes from personal experience, and doesn’t ever separate himself from what he feels.  This awkwardness makes his songs intensely real and very likeable.  Sometimes, such as on Stormcock, this creates an intensity of feeling that is surprisingly difficult to penetrate, although it undoubtedly repays the listening effort.

‘Naked Flame’, originally on Bullinamingvase (Harper is not above annoying jokey album titles), showcases his mid-70s style.  There’s more space in the chiming, acoustic guitar part than on his earliest music and his strong, yearning voice, and prolix verses loaded with intelligence and paranoia.  Only Harper, always putting an epic spin on his personal troubles, would write “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.”

‘Another Day’, from Flat Baroque and Beserk, delights in the opening couplet “The kettle’s on, the sun has gone”, perhaps not the most elegant first lines ever written.  Lyrics go on to combine the bizarre with the embarrassingly frank (“But I wish that I had, ‘cause I’m feeling so sad that I never had one of your children.”)  But it’s a gorgeous, delicate ballad – irresistible like Harper’s best songs.

A proper discussion of the intricacies of the 23 tracks on Songs of Love and Loss requires an essay rather than a review.  It’s enough to say that we’re very lucky to have Roy Harper.  He is much more than the musician’s musician – he is a true one-off, owed a place among the best.  Decades of depression, including a period of incarceration, have hindered his career.  The time is right for his music to gain the recognition it deserves.

Gang Gang Dance’s new album title positions fixes you in their gaze.  The opening line, “I can hear everything, it’s everything time”, a spoken epigraph, sets expectations.  Terms of engagement are pretty clear: if you’re not willing to open your ears and accept whatever they choose to throw into the mix, this ain’t the album for you.

Gang Gang Dance - Eye Contact

The mushrooming reputation of Gang Gang Dance has grown with their eclectism, with over four albums since 2004, culminating in Saint Dymphna three years ago which was rooted in dubstep sounds. It’s a little surprising, then, that Eye Contact cues up something that sounds rather than ’90s rave.  ‘Glass Jar’, the first and longest track, pitches straight into a soundworld that is familiar and comfortable to those who grew up on the Green and Brown albums. Liz Bougatsos’s vocal float above and behind layers of electronic mist, beats pattering down on all side

But ‘Glass Jar’ turns out to be only a starting point, despite being the kind of track many bands would use to end an album.  ‘Adult Goth’, with its wry and not entirely inaccurate title, is clearly a song written by people who listened to All About Eve as well as Spiral Tribe.  It’s wildly over the top, with buzzsaw electronics, ridiculous piano, unnecessary guitar soloing in unjustifiable places, and an exceptionally overwrought vocal from Liz.  It zooms in, with uncanny precision, on the point where the tackier end of ’80s goth pop bled into the ’90s dance scene, which may well be an era you’d do anything to avoid revisiting.  Depending on your stomach for kitsch, it’s either exuberant and irresistible, or a track that will put right off your dinne

Later, the songs become quite bizarre.  ‘Chinese High’ is a blizzard of treble, horn-effect keyboards and a vocal, sung presumably by Bougatsos, in a comic, high-pitched, Oriental accent.  It delivers a double punch to the solar plexus, followed as it is by ‘Mind Killa’ which wields gargantuan rave beats and some more of that Chinese accent, but this time even squeakier.  It’s a song that no-one who braves the listen is likely to forget, orgasmic cries dissolving in tortured electronic sqeaks and deep voice men singing some that sounds like “Bomp! Bomp! Bomp!”  At this point, it becomes clear that that Eye Contact is a fearless beast of a record, venturing where no one else has contemplated going, possibly for very good reasons.

‘Sacer’ another track that doesn’t contemplate a middle ground, features a prancing, keyboard, which sounds as though its being played by a dressage pony, and Julianne Regan vocals, which sound as though they’ve slipped through time from a recording session of 20 years ago.

Eye Contact is in fact not unlike Ariel Pink’s recent work in its wholehearted embrace of throwaway commercial music.  However, while Ariel Pink reinvents sounds in the process of reproducing them, filtering his music through cheap cassette effects, Gang Gang Dance make no apology for confronting the listener with an unholy mix of musics.  Just as they warn us upfront, there’s no hiding place.  Either you give in, or you get out.  But they’re clearly having such a good time, it’s very tempting to join in the madness.