100 reviews #15: Amanda Brown

 

Amanda Brown’s Eight Guitars is advertised as her first solo album, which it is and it isn’t – she’s had two soundtracks released under her name (2002’s Incognita and 2008’s Son of a Lion which is twenty mainly short tracks by her and one 16-minute track by another artist). But the case can of course be made that those were commissioned works – designed, I guess, as accompaniments to someone else’s production – and that this is a standalone product for which AB takes sole responsibility. On the other hand, the front cover lists eight names aside from Brown’s – the eight guitarists showcased on each track, which doesn’t negate it as a solo album obviously but instead, to my mind, puts it in another category – I can’t quite get a handle on what that category might be, however. The assertion that it was twenty years in the making is a whole extra bit of strangeness I can’t quite get on top of either.*

 

The danger, to my mind, is that the listener might feel invited not to listen to the songs or their content, but instead understand Brown’s songs on this album (she contributes six originals alongside a cover of ‘The Unguarded Moment’ and a cowrite with Steve Kilbey) as created for these virtuosos (all men, if that’s important) to strut some stuff. Which I’m sure isn’t true. Actually overall the idea seems needlessly complicated, is what I guess I’m actually saying. Why foreground the guitars, rather than the songs? I’m not saying the guitars are not good, but Amanda Brown is a sensational songwriter aside from of course being an excellent instrumentalist herself with major capacity as a player and arranger. (She told Michael Dyer in the SMH on 2 March ‘I much prefer to be a musician backing someone else.’) None of this paragraph is a criticism – it’s only an observation. 

 

My favourite track here (at this early point in what is bound to be many listens to this album in many different contexts) is ‘The Deal’; for what it’s worth the guitarist on this track is Shane O’Mara. What follows it, the cover of ‘The Unguarded Moment’, is a good complement as both are very sparse and rhythm-oriented; drummer for most of the album is the very seasoned and empathetic Hamish Stuart. 

 

By the way, the album sounds tremendous. 

 

*This might be reference to the Kilbey cowrite which dates back to the start of the century. 

100 reviews # 14. Skaldowie: Ty, Pretenders: Pretenders, Deaf School: English Boys, Working Girls

These three LPs came in the mail today from a Danish supplier. One reason I like getting records in the mail is the way in which it is very similar to someone curating albums I might like because of course by the time I get them I've forgotten what I have ordered. Pretenders is an outlier here because I have owned this album since it came out but I needed to replace my scratched up copy (but, a la Wild Planet, I still don't have, but really want, Pretenders II). 

NY Daily News 18 September 2005

I have been a big fan of Skaldowie for decades but only by dint of one album of theirs I bought probably more than twenty years ago at that weird second hand shop in Smith Street that then became a hairdresser. I can't understand why more people don't love them (I imagine if they had recorded in English that might have been a plus for their appeal outside Poland/ Polish speakers: the titles are translated, for no good reason, into English and that's what I'll be referring to henceforth). They did record in German occasionally, the only other record I have of theirs is a 7" EP in German. The album I have had all this time is Cała Jesteś W Skowronkach which google translate tells me means 'You're all in the larks', obviously I'm missing something there. This one is called Ty, which means 'you', I think singular 'you' (because it also means 'thou'). 

Knowing precisely 0 about the group except they are from Krakow, a city I have spent about 24 hours in and which I enjoyed greatly and would like to see more of one day, and speaking absolutely 0 Polish, I found myself rather regretful when wiping presumably 50 years of fingerprints off the vinyl before playing Ty, and thinking of course if only those fingerprints could talk about what the eyes of the people who bore the fingers who made them (the prints) had seen. However, in the meantime I will just be satisfied with the wonderful rich bass sound of this record, hollow and wandering not entirely unlike the sound Carol Kaye made her own on (for instance) Pet Sounds, and the solidly simple drums, and the virtuosity of a group with one foot in folk, no doubt hamstrung as far as what it could 'really' sing 'about', almost certainly hearing some music from the broader zeitgeist but, like the Australians of the period, getting on with their own thing and not letting anyone's perception of the supposed superiority of the Stones or Carnaby Street or, I don't know, Woodstock cow them. 

Side one is a fine bunch of pop songs in a late 60s style. Had anyone had the slightest imagination (actually it's not really a matter of imagination - more like, lack of imagination) they should have been translating things like 'Yearning', dreamy pop a la Jimmy Webb with a little bit of dour chanting to boot, and shopping it around to the aspirant next-gen Harry Nilssons and Glenn Campbells of the era. I daresay Tin Pan Alley, or whatever the LA equivalent was, had enough cheap 'n' cheerful songsmiths as it was, but then again, a hit's a hit and 'Yearning' had hit written all over it. Barbara Streisand would have done wonders with it. As for the soft-shoe silliness of 'Hymn of the Narrow-Gauge Railway Workers', well... to be honest musically it would have fit pretty nicely on something like the Bee Gees' Odessa, except probably better than most of that album, and the Bee Gees, whatever their strengths, would not have thought up something as dinky as the 'Girl from Ipanema'-style ending. 

Side two grabs me in greater detail. It starts with a piano-based pop song called 'A Man is Born' with a 'Hallelujah' in the chorus which makes me assume that it has a religious aspect to it. It also has french horn, chanting, organ, and the sound of a baby crying in it in which at first sounds like... something was really broken, which might be the point? Don't know. I get a little kick out of a group in cold war Poland getting away with what seems to be a song about Jesus, although at the same time, I am not very interested in regarding Christianity much less Catholicism as anything radical. Things pick up from here: 'You' i.e. the title track is a light jazzy pop song with a fabulous very punchy, balloony drum sound in the verse which I really think a lot of groups then and since would kill for. However, I have to say it's the funky 'At Railway Stations All Over the World' which really makes this side. It's not idiotic to describe it as evocative of a Monkees track I'll remember soon enough (um, possibly 'Tear Drop City') and perhaps a bit of 'The Beat Goes On'; clearly the verse is meant to evoke a railway train, an old trick (probably old even in 1970) but done well, the outcome is pretty grand, and these guys are clearly tight players as well - whoever plays the keyboards is really Keith Emersoning it up at the end and it's sensational, and just drums, bass and keys go for a bit of a crazy loop before the whole comes to the end. (In case I haven't made it clear, I'm not really saying that Skaldowie are imitating anyone, it's at worst the zeitgeist, at best their own creative genius). 'The Last Scene', a bit of a folk-rock opera, adds a massive slavic bass line to some gentle if disturbing harp and a classic example of Beach Boysesque balladeering which I have to say (viz mentions of Carol Kaye above) is a real element of the Skaldowie sound, and then, um, of course - a truck driving away (!?). The last track is 'Epilogue', which true to the times ends in mad tape-speeding-up craziness, is a bit of a frenetic bit of hilarity as is and you can sort of imagine this knockin' then dead at the Krakow clubs while smileless guards watch on from the surrounding dark corners. 

It seems that in the late 1970s Rolling Stone magazine supplied a syndicated column to newspapers, 'hence why' (as they say) when you search for Deaf School's third album on newspapers.com this same review appears a billion times, though only once I think (here, in the Ithaca Journal 27 May 1978) zanily crediting the record to 'Dear School'. 

To tell the truth, on early listenings (I will keep trying I think) English Boys/Working Girls is a bit of a disappointment after Don't Stop the World, which I love, having bought it on spec from a good record shop in Preston for cheap. EB/WG is the third Deaf School album (DSTW the second) and I guess by 1978 the band might have been thinking, well, who are we and what do we do exactly? There were way too many members (8) and probably also just too many ideas, if that's possible, and I think it might be, particularly when another big pervasive idea is 'crazy intellectuals can't new wave'. God it must have been difficult and I guess this is the kind of problem Split Enz had (but got over, somehow). 

Listening to English Boys/Working Girls you get a strong sense of the kind of showmanship that must have been a big part of Deaf School; a whole lot of guff going on at once, seemingly everyone doing their own thing, then sometimes they would click into unison and you'd realise it was all rehearsed. 

Songs like 'All Queued Up' are totally of the moment (the 1978 moment), and could be Blondie or, um, something off the Starstruck soundtrack or... well, the moment, and it was quite a moment. The sound of people who thought things were going to be better by now. Partying till they drop the atom bomb (I was talking to someone much older than me last week btw who mentioned how despairing his grandchildren were about the future because of the environment - I didn't quite say it right but I sort of said - jeepers, everyone who was sentient before 1990 had the same kind of despair re: nuclear annihlation I'm sure). (Actually both - the atom bomb and the environment). (And it's not like the atom bomb has gone away, but no-one thinks about it anymore except regarding Donald Trump and he's gone (for) now). 

'I Wanna Be Your Boy' is one of those songs that just goes everywhere, three directions at once like the Marx Brothers all in a huge suit. What Deaf School clearly 'needed' (though I'm glad they didn't get it) was a producer who took their songs apart and said no, don't do this bit, just concentrate on this amazing riff, and forget trying to make the song some kind of 3D hologram of an explosion. (Oddly enough the producer was Mutt Lange, who went on to work with people whose music wasn't complex, like AC/DC and Def Leppard). 

So that's my assessment of English Boys/Working Girls. Too many people in the band, too many ideas in the songs, funnily enough not a problem with Don't Stop the World. A long time ago I had an idea for a kind of, I don't know, studio group who would take whole albums that were considered problematic for significant artists (I guess things like Their Satanic Majesties), and remake/repair them (basically, rerecord them, but show how they could be made to work). A thoroughly 'academic' exercise that no-one would have time for in the real world, but it did appeal. If I were to do that to this album every song would be three songs. It would be a triple album. Tell you what though, the last song ('O. Blow') really tells you everything you need to know about where Madness found significant support for their sound/style. 

Which leaves us with Pretenders. Serious?! I don't want to listen to this album now. It does have four of the best songs of 1980 though, hands down: 'Precious', 'Private Life', 'Mystery Achievement' and 'Up the Neck'. Wow! Not to mention 'Brass in Pocket' which I guess 41 years ago for all I know today I spent a day going from radio station to radio station on a little transistor radio hoping one of them would play it. Maybe if I drink a bit more of this Salmiakki I'll play side 1 (but I'll yank it off before that fucking 'Space Invaders' track, what a dog). 

100 reviews # 13 part 2: side 2 of wild planet

One thing about the B52s in their early days was their unwillingness to fuck with the formula. Someone might have had a talk with them along the lines of: this is going to be a hard thing for the mass market to swallow so if you're going to launch this on the world in any sense, you have to basically not deviate from it thereafter. 

I shouldn't pronounce on this because to be honest I don't remember ever having heard a full B52s album aside from the first two (there have been seven plus an EP that's about as long as most albums,* still, a pretty tiny output for a group that's been in existence for 45 years - it's one song every 219 days, including cover versions. 

I have really hurt my back. I am not sure how it happened I think it was when I was trying to put a harness on Nancy to slowly introduce her to the idea of going for a walk on a lead. I have completely abandoned that idea, not because it was hard to get the harness on, though it was, but because when we got to the door she didn't want to do it and indeed turned around and got out of the harness almost immediately. I guess at that stage I wasn't that aware of having pain but it developed soon afterwards with a vengeance. Now it's that interesting situation where you start to get a vague idea not of how your muscles work but that they certainly do have a complex arrangement when you go to do things. It's not great lying down completely, it's better sitting, it's initially uncomfortable but ultimately fine standing/walking, but getting between those states is really, really painful. I'm not here to whinge, it's better this morning than it was last night, as long as I don't throw to many discuses or play too much squash I am sure I'll be fine. 

Side two of Wild Planet only has four songs on it, of varying durabilities. As usual the comedy component is the thing that wears out first, so 'Quiche Lorraine' for instance which reeks of mid-to-late-70s improv and which doesn't even really stand up too well (I know what that's like) on first listening, is the most throwaway (also the storyline makes me uneasy). '53 Miles of Venus' is a kind of faster, sparser 'Planet Claire' and while its emptiness is perfectly evocative of emptiness, and it's a good thing it doesn't have any lyrics (aside from the words which make up the title) so there's no riff on Venus (wolf whistle) Mars (hunting horns or something else warlike) Pluto (woof woof) Uranus (uh-oh), it still feels unfinished. That, or it's a pleasant wind-down after the frenetic work out of the previous eight tracks. 

'Devil in my Car' is possibly the hidden delight of the album and a song I had never really thought about before. If you slowed it down, oddly enough, it would be not unlike one of REM's hits, I can't remember which one because it's too hard to think of one tune while listening to another, but I think maybe 'Radio Free Europe'. It has a little more of an Americana, country feel to it, the - um, bridge? (the 'freeway to hell' bit) - is a bit reminiscent of American X, too, something like 'White Girl'. In any case, it's a keeper. 

I bought the single pictured above of 'Strobe Light'/ 'Dirty Back Road' when it came out, forty years ago, and unlike so many things I have retained it ever after. They are good songs (I like 'Dirty Back Road' the best) but I don't know why the hell I purchased this, considering I could have bought the whole album for a bit more outlay. Anyway - 'Strobe Light' is a pretty interesting take on, sorry to come back to this but all things considered - a pretty interesting take on heterosexual lovemaking/seduction - the thing where Fred rings the girls and they respond with such contempt/disgust/ennui is still pretty funny to me. The later bit about kissing the pineapple, I don't know where to go with that but I will sit with it. 

So looking back on the whole, this album is completely formulaic, in the sense that it's to the formula of the first album and every track is a parallel universe version of tracks from that album; they're not entirely in the same sequence but they almost are (admittedly there's no equivalent to the 'Downtown' cover on The B-52's on Wild Planet but that is by far the weakest track and poorest performance, so there being no quavery/sullen 'Que Sera Sera' or 'The Beat Goes On' here is a plus. Wild Planet is just slightly more electro (I think the drums on 'Quiche Lorraine' are drum machine, for instance, and come to think of it that might also be true of '53 Miles West of Venus').

Thanks for indulging me in this I had a good time. Now to get comfortable to do my real work - 1500 words of book chapter at least. 

*Wild Planet has nine tracks and is just under 35 minutes long; the 'European version' of Mesopotamia, which was marketed as an EP, has six tracks and is six seconds shy of 33 minutes long. The 'European version' is, according to discogs, 'much more raw and electronic'. The US version (which is also the Australian, and the Canadian, version) is 25:43 minutes long.  

100 reviews # 13 part 1: side 1 of wild planet

I wonder how I would have felt about the B52s in 1980 when I was 15 if I had known they were 4/5 gay.* I had a very ambivalent attitude to the gayness of others during my teens because of some odd episodes that I now realise were just part of life but no-one talked about things like that then. I always knew I wasn't gay but like a lot of other things I didn't realise that my desire for people to not discuss things that went outside a (my) very heteronormative (etc etc, elite) world view wasn't just a wish for people to be civilised and tasteful and logical but a wish for people to deny a core element of themselves for my peace of mind. Luckily, my opinion didn't matter and also, it had fully changed within a few years. To be clear, though I was terrified of being thought of as gay, I was never hostile to gayness, but I certainly didn't want to know about it. 

The other side of the story is of course the B52s completely sidestepped from any discussion of - um - anything at all really, because they just went with this kitsch weirdness look, and a sound that at the time I thought of as retro but I now appreciate that was just me responding to visual stimulus - I mean, 'Planet Claire' off the first album was a step beyond Kraftwerk really, and there were quite a few other songs (I'm thinking for instance 'Dirty Back Road' on this album) which were just set and forget grooves which could have as easily been tape loops as a band playing (probably to a click - if they did that then - I think they did, otherwise how could they have done that party remix album). So that's kind of modern, and there is an extra disco oomph to a lot of the songs here which were possibly so common for the time no-one noticed. Then there was the other thing they did, which was often very Fred Schneider-directed, with his public-announcement voice half-singing, half calling a square dance. A propos of that, I'll just say that the song 'Private Idaho', which closes side one of Wild Planet, is the song that shows up how much of a progression (in terms of instrumentation) Wild Planet is from the first album, basically because it doesn't fit on Wild Planet and it would have easily fit on The B52s. 'Private Idaho' is not a terrible song I guess but it already felt old hat in 1980 whereas 'Give Me Back My Man' was a very fetching new hat. I'll get this out of the way now: that 'I'll give you fish, I'll give you candy' is fucking ridiculous and someone should have had the hard talk with the 52s back in 80 about the wisdom of ruining your chorus with something that embarrassing: 'do you want to be singing that for another forty years?' (Ricky: 'wouldn't mind').

So, let's look at the side as a whole: it starts with 'Party Out of Bounds' wherein the gang crash a gathering and bully the attendees. Best bit: the really awful trumpet noise half way through - or the fucked up walkie-talkie grind noise at the end. But I love the way it's partly a recipe for social success, partly for social suicide. It has a slightly threatening vibe which I have to deal with every time. 

'Dirty Back Road' is this album's '52 Girls' and it's got all the same ingredients: Cindy and Kate in unison sing a vocal melody which seems to come from nowhere - certainly not from the fairly pedestrian instrumental track created to be featureless to let them do their stuff - and which fits perfectly. 

'Running Around' is the 'Dance This Mess Around' of the album, and while it's very energetic, it's probably not as good though the interplay between Fred on the one hand and K&C on the other is very engaging. 

'Give Me Back My Man' is everything that's good about pop music, including that execrable fish-candy chorus line. They get to it almost immediately. It's Cindy singing solo and her voice (I wonder if this would have hit me at the time?) has a certain edge to it that wasn't common to female pop singers then. The way John heard traces of Yoko in the B52s says more about how glibly sanitised pop music was in 1979-80 than it does about Yoko's influence on them I suspect but it's still a thing.** A voice like that not only cut through in terms of sound but also, while you never for a moment thought that anything the B52s sang about was important to them in and of itself or had resonance for them or genuine feeling (at least, not on the first couple of albums), there was something more genuinely expressive about it (kind of 'help! I'm trapped in a fucking pop song'). Along with the evocations of Lesley Gore, etc, which added to the overall. 

I never really got this forty years ago but subsequent reading has made it clear to me that the first two B52s albums are really testament to the wayward (?) genius of Ricky Wilson, a guitar player who apparently devised his own unique tunings and came at the material intuitively. If you just listen to the guitar on side one of Wild Planet you hear things you wouldn't get from any other record I can think of, although there are probably traces of for instance Television in there.*** 

I have always wanted to own Wild Planet but I never did until Saturday and while other records are presently also clamouring for my attention, this is top stuff. I expect to turn it over some time later in the week. I also want to see One Trick Pony again. 

*I went on a wikipedia search on all their lives and it would seem that not all of them knew it then so it would have been testament to my gaydar if I had. 

** Hilarious moment at the end of John and Yoko: A Love Story when John calls Yoko to tell her about 'new wave' and how it's what she was doing ten years before. Was he listening to the B-52s on the radio when he made that call? Probs.

*** After writing this I read that the only non-B52s recording RW did was when he played on a song on a Tom Verlaine album. So I'm right. 

Boston Globe 22 August 1980

100 reviews # 12: Holly Days

I wonder who won the holiday and whether they also made an album 

What were you doing in 1977? Well at least for a short part of that year Paul, Linda and Denny were hanging out at Paul and Linda's Scottish farm and Paul having recently purchased the rights to Buddy Holly's songs they decided to bash out an album of Buddy Holly covers for Denny to sing. When I say they, I guess I mean Paul decided: 'On the four-track recorder Paul laid down the basic tracks, overdubbing each instrument himself. Denny and Linda added a few licks and all three joined in on the vocals... Denny singing lead and Paul and Linda harmonising.'

The gentle contortions that led to the creation and attribution of the resulting album Holly Days are therefore pretty interesting in McCartney 70s lore, and the 70s let's be fair is his (as opposed to 'Beatle Paul's) most interesting period. As I said, Paul owned the rights to Holly's songs (I don't really understand how this works/worked, to be honest, since Holly was generally only a cowriter of most of his songs, but I guess he and his collaborators were all signed to the same music publisher and the songs were bundled up as 'Buddy Holly songs' for convenience - ?) so that was one new toy to play with. He had his little home studio 'a wood-lined, tin-roofed shack known as Rude Studio', another toy. I'm not going to call Denny Laine a toy, he seems to be largely a decent chap and journeyman and let's not diminish the importance and value of someone who, for instance, co-wrote one of the biggest hit songs of the second half of the 20th century, by which of course I mean 'Mull of Kintyre'. I am going to suggest that putting Denny's name on this record, and prioritising him on the sleeve (there are 17 pictures of Denny Laine on the record, although the front cover is a picture of a really beautiful horse)* and there is also one picture of Paul McCartney, alone, and some of him in the same frame as Denny) is a way to make a record and let it come out under the radar, so to speak. It publicises Buddy Holly songs, which Paul owns, and it gives them a bit of a 70s twist that BH might not have imagined i.e. it puts forward some serving suggestions (one of the songs here is 'I'm Gonna Love You Too' which Blondie released as the first single of Parallel Lines a few years later. It wasn't a hit, except in the Netherlands, but the fact that it seemed like a good idea at the time suggests that Paul's idea to update/repackage was also a good one). I also would like to propose that Paul was kind of scared of John Lennon's scorn, or at least aware of it. He wouldn't have wanted to do a whole album of Buddy Holly songs himself in case Lennon then went into some kind of public paroxysm about how McCartney'd never be Buddy fuckin' Holly, or Holly spinning in his grave or whatever. So he did do one himself, and Denny Laine did all the lead vocals. 

The Holly Days album comes between Wings at the Speed of Sound and London Town, (actually it comes between Wings Across America and London Town but of course WAA is a live album, so I'd tend to look at that as a kind of stocktake/stocking filler/statement of chops than anything else) but it has much more of a feel of Wings Wild Life leading into McCartney II than anything else. I have a particular fondness for the experimental stuff, not just because obviously Paul McCartney's throwaway albums are more consequential and valid than most artists' career-defining ones. On something like Holly Days, Wings (for that's who it is) don't have to be anything other than creative people producing something fun and friendly. A 'Denny Laine solo album', the very title of which indicates 'no major life-redefining cataclysms to see here', allows them to be as funny and strange as they want, and if they get to mess around with some great pop songs, so much the better. Wings were already controversial and the records they made scrutinised (and criticised) to within an inch of their lives, and it must have been nigh on impossible to make good records under those conditions, even notwithstanding they often sold in their millions. There's so much nothing like 'Silly Love Songs' here, in any sense, except I suppose in the sense that there might on some level be a similar value placed on the disco beat of 'Silly Love Songs' and the casio (?) drum machine used on a few of these songs. Oh, and that it's silly. It's a silly bunch of love songs, I guess. 

I'll get the silliest silliness out of the way: the speeded up voices on 'Take Your Time', which was sensibly placed as the second last track, just before the instrumental 'I'm Lookin' for Someone to Love'. So often with PMcC you wonder what he's driving at with his various peculiarities and while it's tempting to say he just doesn't care/ can't self-edit, I suspect it's closer to the way one is when one knows that one has been an inventive innovator in the past, and putting weird speeded-up voices (not that this was such a huge innovation - Alvin and the Chipmunks etc) on a track might be the way of the future. Or perhaps it just made the kids laugh. Or it made stoned PMcC, LMcC and DL laugh. It's not exactly bad (it adds texture) but nor is it exactly explicable. 

That said, there was obviously some serious muscle put behind this album, notably the promotional and production work put into 'Moondreams' which was released as the second single ('It's so Easy/Listen to Me (Medley)' was released before the album, the effort of reading let alone announcing its title surely enough to put off any DJ). 'Moondreams' is a crafted gothic ballad not a million miles away from, let's say, PMcC's 'Waterfalls' from a few years later. As a pop record it undeniably works very well. Other stuff - like 'Fool's Paradise', would have fitted nicely into any Wings album, probably somewhere in the middle of side two. 

Each side ends with an instrumental, which I'm going to take as a kind of 'Singalong Junk' approach - 'we didn't necessarily quite finish these, but we like them as they are.'

So I do sort of wish that Denny had been inspired to, that he had been encouraged to, write at least one song of his own for the album, something that fitted, in the way that PMcC had three songs of his own on Run Devil Run in amongst the 50s covers. But that's OK not having something like that to focus on means we can better the regard the album as a whole, a pristine concept. 

Oh just one more thing: remember how people used to pore over Beatles albums for clues to shit, well, here's an intriguing detail I think we need to know more about. What did Paul, Linda and Denny get from Western Australia that they're so keen for us to know about?! 

*I had to say that, because if I said 'a horse' it would come across as if I was saying 'wtf', but of course all horses are all beautiful.

100 reviews # 11 Mount Trout EP on Rough Skies

I am sure this has happened to you – sometimes, probably very occasionally (i.e. every couple of years) you’ll hear a record that you feel completely aligns with your tastes and interests, something you had hitherto no experience of or knowledge about, and you’ll have a range of positive responses. Right? I hope so for your sake.

Wouldn’t it be funny if I then said ‘But, yeah, this ain’t one of those moments’.

Actually it is. I have had a good solid selection of varied musical experiences this year as a consumer, from bland europop in Polish shops to extraordinary synth rock in a Finnish bar and plenty of great Melbourne/Australian bands as well of course. But this kind of takes the cake for me in 2016 (so far. I hope it gets better but could my tiny mind take it?!). I’ve always had a strong disposition towards controlled shambling, and this Tasmanian boy band nails that, with two tiny instrumentals and two polished new wave songs that could or would have been underground hits in, you know, 1979.

I'll keep listening to this record, if I have anything more intelligent to say than 'I really like it', I'll let you know.

100 reviews # 10 Bad Moms at the Finnkino, Tampere

So, not much else going on for me this evening so I decided I would take myself to the cinema to see something that was not at all demanding. Actually, that didn't quite work out because Bad Moms is kind of a tricky one to work with. I did occasionally laugh, and that I think is due to the excellence of the three female leads who play the trio of 'bad moms'. Particularly Kristen Bell and that takes doing because in a sense her character really was the weakest. Doubly - she plays an actual weak person but also not a terribly well developed character. But then again, there are tons of elements in the movie that a less gung-ho director would have been finicky about; for instance, Christina Applegate's character, who's an appalling bully with a huge amount of money for whom power is everything and who runs the PTA at Whatevery Heights High with an iron fist, should surely have children at the school. But we never see them. Even in the 'run along and play' kind of sense. I am not even sure they are mentioned. Ditto Kathryn Hahn's ex-husband. He may have been mentioned - perhaps even by name, but I don't think so - but he is certainly not seen. Early in the film the dog gets sick, with vertigo which apparently means he is going to have diarrhoea for two days. Does he? Probably, but we never see it, which is fine, I mean, that's good, but it is also never mentioned again: there's no 'I'm glad the dog's better now' (we do see him later on, once I think, and he is fine).

It doesn't really matter because it's all trope, trope, trope. It kind of powers through on the strength of its own preposterosity, which I have to say I admire in lots of ways. Mila Kunis should probably be doing better movies (maybe she is - I don't know), Kristen Bell definitely should be doing everything (though damn it, I never saw the Veronica Mars film - I suppose I should have) and Kathryn Hahn is larger than life here and does pretty well with an inexplicable character who talks about dicks all the time. 

Truth is I'm more interested in talking about the experience of seeing a movie in a Finnish cinema. So I went in (I won't bore with the details of how weird the crazy behaviour of the ticket machine was - lucky I got there early enough to sort that out though). They showed advertising slides on a loop, I remember one was for Fanta the other ones I couldn't really fathom. There was quiet noise of talking and music behind them, which I wasn't sure about - whether it was meant to be deliberate, or whether it was bleeding through from another theatre or what. Then we had a bunch of ads for things like paint, insurance I think, Ikea (which the Finns pronounce 'ickier'), I can't remember what else. A man two seats away from me who was there with a woman i.e. on a date I suppose, started exploring his practice of loudly snorting and drinking his snot, which was a little distracting and it made me reflect one more time on entitlement - something I've been musing on a lot this year - in Australia I would feel much more irate about this disgusting practice. For some reason in another country I feel sufficiently distanced from it to not be completely repelled (though I was pretty fuckin' repelled). 

So the film itself - it was subtitled in both Finnish and Swedish. There were quite a few times when the subtitles were more indicative than comprehensive, and I guess except for rare instances, everything had to fit on one line because there would always be two lines of text on the screen. Quite an achievement for the translators, really. These aren't great examples but I never knew when really good examples would come up, of course:

These are all from an early sequence when Mila Kunis is trying to 'get laid' as they say and she is demonstrating how clueless and boring she is, at a club where apparently men are only interested in talking to interesting women, which maybe I don't get out much anymore, but I'm really not sure that's the main thing at clubs. BUT WHATEVER...

OK so the film has some interesting stuff going on. One thing is the ambivalence it has towards motherhood, or at least, it tries to tick too many boxes, of the girls goin' wild but then getting all teary about how much they love their horrible children. There is one scene where they're in a restaurant bagging their kids who are sitting at another table, then they start to get choked up about how much they love their children. Given the way the rest of the film's been going, you kind of expect some kind of punchline, to deflate the emotion. But no: emotion stays. There's more of that towards the end too. 

I know you're never, ever going to see this film but I figure I don't want to tell you the very end here but it's also really freakin' weird, and if you saw it you'd know what I mean - let's just say, after all that, because she's got money it's OK?! Or what is it supposed to mean? 

Yep. So, this is kind of trickle down from Bridesmaids, I get that, and it's also a bit Mean Girls, I get that too, that works for me, and it's also a little bit Sisters too. I'm not really selling it, I know. I don't want to or need to. 

It has a really good exchange between Mila Kunis' character and her son about entitlement which I wish I had written down. 

OK. Done. On the way back to my digs I saw these things: 

Goodnight! 

100 reviews # 9 - Shotgun Wedding. Mayo Thompson with the Sven-Ake Johansson Quintett

First of all, the question has to be asked, htf did this record release pass under my radar? I thought I was a magnet for all Mayo Thompson-related releases. Perhaps I was just guilty of imagining that Drag City was the only label with the expendable income (?) and good taste to release MT things, so I only looked at the DC site to see whether there were new Red Krayola releases (there hasn’t been one for a few years now, but the last one was freaken awesome) and didn’t delve further afield. Well, there was this, apparently and it came out a few years ago totally secretly. And the internet and any informants I thought I may have had just didn’t know either or in any case failed to let me know.

It’s one of those reinterpret-my-hits albums, with no new songs. Apparently Albert Oehlen was given the job of choosing which of MT’s back catalogue would be good to reinterpret with a freeform but pretty bangin’ Swedish/German jazz ensemble. Being a bigger MT fan than anyone in the world makes me judgmental in the extreme, and I have to say I wouldn’t have chosen most of these songs. There’s a trio from God Bless the Red Krayola, and good ones too – ‘Ravi Shankar Parachutist’, ‘Save the House’ and ‘Coconut Hotel’, but then everything on that album’s unbelievable, so hard to go wrong really. Then there’s a couple from the Corrected Slogans/Kangaroo records (I think they’re both on both albums), ‘Born to Win’ and ‘Plekhanov’. Always liked ‘Plekhanov’, not so sure about the other (since writing that originally I have come to greatly enjoy this version of the song; particularly the slightly atonal piano that tweets throughout). The others are random – nothing from Corky’s Debt, and the newest song is about thirty years old – it’s ‘The Sloths’, probably the weakest track on Black Snakes and probably the weakest here, too (also the longest).

So, we get a mix of interpretations of trippy sixties psychedelic art-rock; interpretations of overly verbose leftwing early seventies transatlantic Art (yes capital A) rock; and some other even less categorisable works that even fall outside ‘80s indie’, remade by a very sympathetic and vibrant group who most definitely have a strong pop sense. Johansson himself is a stupendous drummer – Thompson only works with the best from Jesse Chamberlain to Epic Soundtracks to god, you know, the others. Um, George Hurley. And more.

But in truth I think the most honest thing I could do is leave this review here for now and, in a few months when I have more insights from frequent listening to this incredible record, come back and scrub it all and write something with depth. If I still can.

Update: I didn't/couldn't

100 reviews # 8 - Nothin' to Lose, the Making of Kiss 1972-1975 by Ken Sharp with Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons

‘We were caught up in this idea where everybody you knew in school was getting up in the morning and working nine to five, getting married, and having kids, and here we were living on the road, just being rock-and-roll gypsies.’ Gene Simmons, Nothin' to Lose (p. 250)

I don’t care about Kiss. Did I ever care about them? I quite like some of their 70s hits, and I liked them when they did disco. Probably my favourite Kiss record is either ‘I Love it Loud’ or ‘Kiss Army’ by Norman Gunston.

Yet, when I had the chance to borrow the new Kiss memoir Nothin' to Lose from the Moreland Library (Coburg branch) I grabbed it, and found it fairly unputdownable. I have noted the tendency in many of my coworkers to recreate with literature unconnected to their day job (the orking of cows), usually thrillers or detective fiction. Well, I have to say, I did interrupt Nothin' to Lose to consume the latest Garry Disher (Bitter Wash Road, highly recommended). I also took time out from it to read Mark Opitz’s Sophisto-Punk (which was interesting, though less compelling).

What is perhaps most impressive about Nothin' to Lose is the incredible cast of interviewees that Ken Sharp (presumably - Stanley and Simmons don't really seem to be much more than key informants) has assembled. Fans, industry insiders, members of other bands some now obscure and others infinitely successful and famous still, photographers, Kiss family members. Even a few people now firmly dead (not sure how that was managed, and I cheatingly looked up some Amazon customer reviews to see the critique made that some of the credited quotes are from other sources with no actual dates applied). (I also noted with interest that the most popular and respected of the Amazon customer reviews was by someone who mused about whether he'd actually bother reading the book or not given the 'sliver' he had viewed). 

The interviewees are not only varied and many but they also present variety in their views: not everyone is overwhelmingly positive about Kiss, then or now. Since I have no general view one way or the other (I'm listening to Kiss Alive on youtube as I type this now, and I have to say, I can't see them ever being faves, but of course I am nearly 50 and I've heard a billion things like this before, including I suppose a lot of things that were influenced by Kiss or at least made with knowledge of their work) I'm glad that there's light and shade here. Nonetheless, there is a lot of content clearly designed for the seasoned Kissophile to respond to (in a 'wow, that is so Peter Criss' kind of way). I guess I was really keen on seeing their context; so Kiss emerged around the same time as the New York Dolls and I guess they were generally seen as a poor second runner to that group. Once again, I've never really heard too much NYD (I'm listening to their first album now) and it's better than Kiss but you can sort of see a lot of similarities, particularly the formulaic music (or was the formula only developed since?). 

There are a lot of interesting bits and pieces throughout. One bit is the discussion of characters developed on the road: Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson, for instance, worked with Gene Simmons and Ace Frehley to create a figure called 'The Bag': 'I'd wear a paper laundry bag over my head that I drew a face on, and I wore it over a particularly gross costume which was just sweatpants with my arms tucked in the legs coming out the knees'. Peter Criss created a frenchman called 'Monsieur Louie' (p. 303). Other pieces are the degree to which Kiss' manager Bill Aucoin was keeping ahead of creditors in the band's early days, funding tours on his Amex card (is that actually possible? Did Amex cards not have a limit provided you paid it off at the end of every month?). Another is the recruitment and reaction of new fans. Another is - surprise surprise - the terrible attitude to women. 

In sum, the book is a pretty triumphalist overview of Kiss' rise to stardom. It does put across a version of the early 70s in the US (the New York '72 period comes out particularly well). It doesn't say why Gene Klein decided to change his last name to Simmons, which you'd have to admit, is an odd thing to do given the fame of the actress Jean Simmons. It also doesn't entirely explain why, given that Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons are plainly pretty down on Ace and Peter, these last two (who haven't been constants in the group at all) were happy to be involved in the book. 

There are also a lot of photographs, which don't impress me much but might interest some people. It's not their fault but Kiss were pretty ugly guys when they weren't wearing makeup, but then again, they look pretty ridiculous with makeup too. I don't know if you ever noticed that. 

100 reviews # 7: The Saints, King of the Sun

If you had told me a few weeks ago I’d soon be enjoying with gusto a new album by The Saints, I would have said something like, what a strange thing to say or perhaps ‘really? How interesting’ while thinking, ‘that is exceedingly unlikely, and also, who are you to tell me what I will and won’t like’. But the fact is a few weeks ago on RRR I heard a song that I thought was terrific – angular and lyrically strange verse punctuated by odd bells, followed by a rousing chorus with lush brass orchestration, and I was most surprised to discover that this was a song from the new Saints album. It struck me so solidly I actually went to JB and bought the album – with very little expectation that any of the rest of it would be anywhere near as good as that one song (I just don't trust old songwriters, you see).

I am not one of those people with that boring obvious attitude to Chris Bailey’s Saints. I don’t care that Bailey continued on with the Saints after he and Ed Kuepper ended their creative partnership. I care as little now, in 2013 as I did in 1979 or whenever Bailey made that decision, or it was made for him. Kuepper couldn’t have continued the Saints without Bailey because everyone knew Bailey as the singer. Bailey might as well have had the band name, especially since no-one else could have it. But why anyone in the world thinks it’s any of their business now or at any time in the past 34 years to pass judgment on that arrangement I can’t imagine.

Of course, what a lot of antiBaileysainters will tell you is that they think Bailey is soppy and derivative and not punk and Kuepper in the punk Saints tempered that and gave it an edge. I have to admit I’m very au fait with the first three Saints albums and that after that (there have been 11 albums) my knowledge is patchy, though I think The Monkey Puzzle, which was the first real album after Kuepper, is excellent and I would listen to that anytime. The 80s singles (‘Ghost Ships’ etc) I like well enough, but I could live without hearing them again for a while longer in fact possibly the remainder of my life. I have some of those 80s albums in a little box set that Stewart Anderson gave me because he bought it on spec and was repelled by its unpunkiness. Didn’t want it in the house! There was another album they did about seven or eight years ago (OK I checked – 11 years ago) with the nonsense title Spit the Blues Out, which I also thought was more than tolerable, but it didn’t really take. I had been pretty oblivious to the records since then. Now this.

Like the song I heard, the album is called King of the Sun. The copy I picked up has a picture of a small posh boy from the century before last on the cover – why, why, why? 

Doesn’t matter. The album opens with the amazing title track. Which itself opens with a piano, then a somewhat plaintive and very esoteric series of couplets (which sound like a disconnected sequence of random lines) and into the rousing chorus, then rather than returning to a vocal verse, just a version of the verse with a solo and so on in it, and what can I say, then it goes back to the chorus then it ends. You don’t need this kind of recommendation, building your hopes up and so on, to make you like the song (you may already have heard it, particularly if you clicked that link) and it’s ok with me if you don’t anyway, but of course what you really need to do is happen upon it without knowing it’s this 40 year old band (or at least a permutation thereof – there’s no-one left of course from the original group except Bailey) you probably already have an opinion of.

So the other odd part of this story is that the rest of the record is largely pretty amazing too. I don’t know who the other members of the band ‘are’ (aside from their names). I don’t know if the drums are programmed, they sound like they could be but it might just be really good, precise, well-tuned pop drums. I don’t have a clue if anything on the record was just bashed out in a more or less in-the-studio, random way; sometimes it sounds like it may have been (even the great ‘King of the Sun’ sounds like it could have been a lucky studio jam, or at very least an imprecisely decided/inadequately rehearsed bash-it-out recording then fixed and/or ‘written’ in ‘post’; I’m thinking for instance of the eccentric way the drums change going back into the final verse, which do have an element of je ne sais pas pourquoi about them).

The low points include the occasional drossy lyric, or more precisely, drossy rhyme. There are bulk lazy non-sequitur couplets (the one employing the white cliffs of Dover springs to mind). We don’t need to go into them too deeply, but let’s just say there are more examples of this towards the second half of the record, which suggests to me that someone (presumably Bailey) knows when he’s doing it with one hand tied behind his back (and the hand in question is the one that comes up with the innovative or at least interesting stuff). There’s nothing that makes me want to scream, as I go towards the back half of the record, but compared to the five excellent songs at the front, it is definitely diminishing returns, with the exception of the quite funny final song.

I remember the time in the mid-80s when people used to talk about The Saints in the same breath as the Triffids or the Go-Betweens (or the Wet Taxis in their late phase or Sea Stories or The Odolites) and indeed that is sort of the space they had come to fill, as lush pop balladeers. It worked.

Here, I particularly like the ballad ‘Duty’, which, once again, doesn’t always entirely cut it in the lyrics department and then DOES, with total compunction. If I were a songwriter, and I wrote two songs as good as ‘Duty’ and ‘King of the Sun’, I would give myself free reign to fill up the rest of an album with total half-arsed rehashes of them, or ripoffs of other songs. Bailey doesn’t do that, and even if the misfires of tawdry lyric or bluesy workout rear up occasionally, that’s probably less a case of lack of inspiration, and more a case of ‘I’m just a jobbing musician, don’t take me too seriously, I’m not pretentious like some people you could name.’ Actually, I’m very, very impressed. 

*PS a few days later: The copy I bought also had a second CD in it of what I assume to be old 80s Saints music - I am only guessing because I recognised some of the top 40 hits like the abovementioned 'Ghost Ships'. It was a weird thing to find in there mainly because there was no indication on the sleeve or anywhere else that there was a kind of semi-greatest hits CD in there, so it could hardly be called a selling point. After I wrote & posted the above review I went online - no wait, I already was - and looked at a few other reviews, most of which were appallingly lame, polite and pedestrian, which is fine, I can dig that. But one or two did mention the great hits CD. For what that's worth (not a thing).

100 reviews #6 Shirl

I seem to be barely able to keep pace with Jeff Apter, the Barbara Cartland of rock bios. Apter’s Shirl has popped out so soon after his contentious (to me) book about Marc Hunter that one would assume he had a secret, except reading the books show it’s no secret: he bashes this shit out, and that’s all.

I wish I was Apter’s friend, or perhaps his mentor. I would love to have had the conversation, having read Shirl in manuscript form, along the lines of:

Jeff: So, mate, waddya think? I reckon I really nailed this one, this, er, ‘Shirl’.

Me: Yeah, Jeff, I read it over the course of a day.

Jeff: Amazing, ‘cos I wrote it over the course of… never mind. Any comments, but?

Me: Jeff, I had a few things I thought you could develop.

Jeff: Aw geez, ‘develop’, ‘things’… that’s all I ever hear from you!

Me: Well, like Louisa Wisselling. That’s an interesting angle.

Jeff: (sigh). Why. Who is that.

Me: I didn’t know she was the first co-host of Shirl’s Neighbourhood. You should have tried to track her down.

Jeff: Look, I put a whole week into the research. What do you want?

Me: She was the Judith Durham replacement in the mid-70s Seekers, they were huge. In a way, she might have had an even bigger music career than Shirl – some sources say that ‘The Sparrow Song’ was their biggest hit, and that group sold 50 million records or more.

Jeff: (looking out the window) Uh

Me: You could have asked her whether she ever talked with Shirl about their respective careers.

Jeff: (looking at his fingers) Uh

Me: You could at very least have mentioned she had a huge music career in the mid-70s, like Shirl. I mean, Shirl had ‘cred’ somehow, at least some of the time, but let’s face it, they were both hacks in their way.

Jeff: Gawd. Alright, I’ll put me Keith Lamb bio on hold for two more days.

What gets me about Apter – as I probably mentioned in my review of his Hunter book – is his lack of curiosity, his ‘straight-down-the-line-ness’. He is a clever horse who puts on the blinkers to get to his destination faster. He doesn’t bother to seek out Louisa Wisselling or even mention her background (or, apparently, even type her name into a search engine). He is very focused on the notion that Shirl gave up rock and roll in the late 70s, to the degree that when he mentions Shirl’s early 80s work with the Party Boys (as a touring lead singer) it’s as an afterthought. It doesn’t fit with the narrative, and so there’s no point in talking to any of the other Party Boys from that tour, and nor is there any point in talking about the actual record they made. I remember Kurt Vonnegut once writing about the plotting of a novel – was it Slaughterhouse 5? Breakfast of Champions? Was it actually part of the narrative of one of those novels, or did he write about it elsewhere? Anyway, his method was to draw different coloured lines, characters’ lives, parallel to each other across a large piece of paper. This is pretty much Apter’s approach. Do not deviate, do not pontificate. Fremantle to Midland, stopping some stations.

It was probably a little painful for Apter to work on Shirl who was – if not a hack – a moneyminded showman (ok, a hack), whereas I suspect he enjoys artists who at least bother to muster a sense of artistic vision. This is not a putdown of Shirl. I like Shirl, I liked him when I was 10 and I like him now, long-dead. I think his honesty about his showbusiness career was refreshing, and on this I think Apter and I agree.

The fact of the matter is the best book on Skyhooks was written by Jenny Brown in 1975, at the height of their infamy (and, as it transpired, just months after the height of their success, unless you count as Shirl might the height of their success as being their lucrative reformation tours of the 1980s). Brown’s is a book that satisfies every requirement a Skyhooks/Shirl afficianado might have except that of historical perspective – it’s of the moment – and detail about Shirl’s working relationship with Louisa Wisseling, because that had not yet happened. There was another Skyhooks book, Jeff Jenkins’, which similarly has good points, though Jenkins like Apter is another ‘rock historian’ who is all rock, no historian.

One of the things Apter can do, for which we should be grateful, is (as was also the case with Hunter) get to the dead man’s relatives, and assure them that while this will be no hagiography… nah, it will be hagiography, pure and simple. So for what it’s worth, the parents and so on will talk to him, and for all I know he lets them approve the MS in draft form (and look, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that – your informants can validly demand a say in how they, and in this case their loved one, is presented).

To go one step further: Apter basically just doesn’t write the kinds of books that satisfy me. Today I heard on the radio of a Simple Minds – the Church? – Models? I can’t remember, old ‘heritage acts’ event, that’s on next week or something, a completely gross event that makes me want to laugh except it might turn to vomiting. Also today listening to The Now Show on BBC radio 4 there was mention of some racist political party’s website which glamourises the old days of Britain (pre-immigration or something – only there aren’t actually that many people alive now who’d remember that period) as a golden age. It was pointed out that the 'golden age' is just whenever the beholder was young - whenever that was, 20 years ago or 40 years ago. This is why Apter et al bug me. If you believe in the golden age, you have just given up. To my mind, the task of the historian is to put the present into perspective, or as we periodically joke about in my workplace, to ‘show relevance’. It’s not to wrap everything up neatly and take a stroll through it to confirm how great our childhoods were (which – sorry to break this to you – they were not).

So in summary:

1. This book has a lot of interesting material in it. Frustratingly undeveloped interesting material.
2. The lack of development is either for a secret reason of the author’s or because he can’t be bothered
3. It is for people who remember the 70s/80s and think they were great times.

As I so often say – ‘But then, I read it from cover to cover’. That is, I found it compelling. But it’s only half the book it could have been. That possibly says more about the publishing (and nostalgia) industry than it does about Jeff Apter, the cog.