Claire Birchall’s
album PP – her second,
and the first in eleven years (there was another by her presumably former band
Paper Planes inbetween) is a serious contender for the best of 2012.
The strength of
Birchall’s extraordinarily adept and captivating songs are demonstrated by the
fact that the two covers on the record – Prince’s song for the Bangles, ‘Manic
Monday’ and Will Oldham’s ‘Riding’ – are two of the four weak tracks on the
album (the other duds are the nonsense ‘Texas’, about which the less said the
better, and an untitled joke hypnotic-synth hidden track at the end). It would
have been better if these errors of judgment had remained in the hypothetical
stage; but happily they are at least at the beginning and end, leaving a
seamless core of truly great originals as the other 2/3 of the album.
Birchall made a
sound and style for this album which cocks numerous snooks at the hi-fi
possibilities of home recording, and shows up the dumb lie of the MP3 as some
kind of approximation of crystal clarity (with standard ambient noise, your
iPod appears to give you a sound with depth; Birchall’s take on 2012 listening
preferences takes the whole back to its origins in musical birthday card
tinniness). Most tracks feature distorted drum machine, synthesizer and
feedback guitar; you could say it’s the Cramps meet the early Human League.
Birchall is a singer-songwriter; she’s not making spattery soundscapes or
exploring the artistic potential of distortion. The sound is a (wry?) background
to a series of near-perfect compositions.
The first of the
seven great songs is ‘Loser’, a carnivalesque ballad which might hypothetically
go on forever (it fades out with Birchall still singing). ‘It’s all about the
music’, is part of the (sarcastic or at very least sardonic) lyric; the central
figure is probably part-hero, part dick, but this listener is consistently
distracted by the siren-like hook of the chorus and the evocative chugging of
the plodding rhythm – evocative of the music machine, whoever he or it may
be.
The second is
‘Same Old Mess’, an epic power-glam disco track which packs a definite punch in
the intro to its chorus; the verses are increasingly overlaid with plaintive,
sinuous and writhing guitars. Birchall sounds hungover, restive and agitated.
It’s followed by ‘Move On’ (ostensibly the ‘single’) which owes nothing to Joy
Division’s ‘Isolation’ but initially hits the listener that way. As it
transpires, the song is more of chugging and Stooges-y than anything anything
any tired goth could muster. Here’s where the drum patterns, keyboards and
guitar finally merge: it’s virtually impossible to tell where one of those
three instruments ends and another begins.
‘Leaving this
Town’ could be a Scott Walker tune from the late 60s, had it been written and
sung by Scott Walker. Birchall intones against a keyboard figure of dynamic
simplicity, folky in the chorus and bluesy in the verse. A persistent,
irritating (but infectious) faux cymbal or tambourine beats throughout. If
‘Move On’ reminds me of ‘Isolation’, I have to say that – unfair as it feels to
mention it – ‘It’s a Monster’ reminds me of ‘Zombie’, by The Cranberries. That
might just be because it’s metaphorically ‘about’ something very unacceptable, personified (well, in
truth, it’s fairly difficult to know what it is ‘about’).
‘Really Got Me Down’
is another classic plodder (on the wavelength, musically, of the cover of ‘Riding’);
this and ‘Got the Blues’ are as bombastic and caustic as anything Neil Young
and Crazy Horse mustered in the early 70s, and indeed the latter could almost
be some great lost track off Everybody Knows This is Nowhere but Neil held it over for another album
because it was too good (and then got distracted). Weirdly, the multitracked
vocal gives it the feel of an time earlier than 1969 and at the same time, of ‘Long
May You Run’ (!).
Ultimately, then,
in the world of rips and downloads, a success story is born: the mildly
entertaining covers and jokey songs can be enjoyed briefly then dispensed with,
and they disguise the delectable kernel of a great album hidden within.
Alongside the exceptional Paper Planes CD and singles of a few years ago Claire
Burchall is revealed ultimately as a genuinely brilliant songwriter who should
be lauded more frequently and play live more than once a year. I hope this
happens, though in the meantime selfishly I’m just happy I have a copy.
