Cybotron
Implosion
Aztec Music
In which Aztec
continues to reheat remnants from the great smorgasbord of Australian popular
music past, showing us time and time again that a lot of dishes are actually
often tastier the second time around.
There are a lot of
terms I won’t use, and krautrock is one of them (you can go on using racially
abusive words from the first world war if you wish, just remember that’s what
you’re doing). But of course Cybotron knew their German experimentalists of the
60s/70s, and brought their own slant to the sound. The Melbourne studio group existed
from the mid-70s to the early 80s having grown from the seed of Steve Maxwell
von Braund’s early 70s European experiences and friendships he developed in his
hometown around the imported record shops and experimental musicians. Their
third album Implosion came out in
1980 to a generally pretty good response; it’s presented here remastered and
very clean-sounding and featuring six bonus tracks, a number of which comprised
an unreleased fourth album Abbey Moor (hey,
I think I knew her!) which is a lot more clubby and frilly-shirted, e.g. their
very Devo-esque ‘Peter Gunn’ theme – I don’t know what they were thinking, but
I rather like it.
What you get for your
unworthy buck is a great blend of prog and post-punk synth pop: think, for
instance, of the beautiful soundscape stuff the Human League did in their pre-Dare days with those long minimalist
instrumentals. Except whereas a lot of synth groups of that time eschewed any
instrument but synths, Cybotron, by
this stage, had the redoubtable Gil Matthews on drums doing some magnificent
things and Mark Jones on a very expressive and responsive bass – listen to the
title track for a great example of the interplay between these two with von
Braund’s keyboards; they really maximised their possibilities.
Implosion is totally instrumental, and dare I say it one of the most sampleable
records I’ve heard in quite some time. It also sits in an unusual place – it
sounds so fresh for something a quarter of a century old, and I don’t think
it’s just the fact that the old retro-synths made a comeback a few years ago. This
stuff is still visionary.
Don Walker
Cutting Back
I am not even being
slightly ironic when I say this is one of the best albums I have heard this
year, if not this decade. I know I am not being ironic because I can hold my
attitude up to Don Walker’s attitude which is d-ripping with irony. Always
having been a Randy Newman fan myself, at least since the late 70s, I gotta say
Cutting Back is on a par with, and in some ways superior to, the best Randy
Newman (the ways to which I allude are the performative element; Randy was
never as good a comedian in his delivery as
Don; the vocal element – Don has a great voice and fully knows how a voice
should work on a record; Randy, who is one of the greats, has a voice like a
bleating asthmatic fish-sheep; and the tenderness element). I found a lot of
Don’s Cold Chisel work a little overblown and generic. I find ‘No Reason’,
which is hands down the best track amongst hands down brilliant songs, to be an
example of why it’s good to be alive in 2006. Overall, the instrumentation is
sparse but splendid, and the tunes are generally simple but perfect hammers to
hit the nail of the remarkable lyrics. My guess is Don Walker listens to a lot
of Dave Graney.
Douglas Fir
Douglas Fir
(Sony/BMG)
I often like to wander
the op shops of our fair city, picking up ‘interesting’ records and tapes,
quite often items which I don’t necessarily expect are going to be the peak of
cultural sophistication or artistic excellence but which I imagine are going to
transport me somewhere, somehow, even if it’s just into a momentary world of
imagination where I figure out how the hell someone thought such dreadful music
was worth releasing. And, you know, when you spend a long time doing that kind
of thing you can be lulled into a false sense of security about the present.
You listen to crappy old records from the old days and you laugh about the
hairstyles or lyrics or posey front covers and you kind of forget there are
still people making truly ghastly decisions about the songs to write, perform,
sing, record, release and ultimately buy and listen to. I would not be
surprised if Douglas Fir, for instance, were quite a success because people
with no idea are still by some freak of nature being born every day and work
assiduously to make sure they never do get any idea. And if you worked hard to
develop a complete lack of taste or intelligent critical faculty you might find
Douglas Fir’s debut Douglas Fir appealing,
in a wallpapery “I don’t like music much but I’d hate people to think I was
strange so I had better buy some CDs” kind of way. They play this kind of
pallid metally funk with Red Hot Chilli Pepperish thumby bass and their lyrics
are schoolboy poetry bollocks which if they’re lucky someone someday might
explain to them (Revolution, for
instance, is a song in support of fundamental religion over the theory of
evolution, but I’m not sure they know that). Anyway, like a lot of the bollocks
we have to deal with in our daily life, the more you think about it the more it
annoys you, so might I suggest we all ignore Douglas Fir and hopefully they
will quickly dry up and blow away.*
Various Artists
Happy Man
(Off the Hip)
The Sunnyboys were one of the best groups of their era, and that reminds me of a story. As a boy I once rang a south-of-the-river venue to ask what time The Sunnyboys were playing. I can’t remember what time the guy who answered the venue gave me, but I do remember him telling me it would all be over pretty early because no-one would come because they were a terrible band. So appalled was I by the enervated negativity of this anonymous oddity (remember, he worked there) that I didn’t go to the show. I guess that kind of reflects what a pallid youngster I was, although it doesn’t explain why I went on to buy all the Sunnyboys’ records, even the later-period reformation ones. In fact, this whole paragraph has been meaningless and I would advise you not to read it.
The Sunnyboys’ Jeremy
Oxley was (perhaps still is) a venerable pop songwriter. His work – most of
which was released in the first half of the 80s – harked back stylistically to
the mid-60s – Easybeats, Johnny Young, Missing Links, that kind of thing. But
it was also made up of great love/loneliness songs filled with adolescent angst
of the kind only adolescents, or at least people who were just emerging from
it, are capable. The Happy Man album
is filled with covers of these ace songs most of which capture the spirited
spunk of the originals and sometimes add a little bit extra.
Hats off for instance
to The Shimmys for attacking a post-reformation Sunnyboys track, Catwalk, and giving it additional oomph. Hats off to Cherry Smash and Even for
just doing great versions of the redoubtable Show Me Some Discipline and The
Seeker respectively. The Stiffies have a rank name for their band but do a
mean It’s Not Me. I love The Jennys’ Addams Family-style
harmonising in the verse of My Only
Friend. The Indian Givers’ Patrick Fitzgeraldish Happy Man works well, though it’s interesting that in the
delightfully ambiguous line about “I’ve gotta hang up” (i.e. I’ve got to hang
up – or – I’ve got a hang up) they come down decisively on the former.
Geez, you’d have to
hear the original records before you heard this, and just as an aside because
it’s not a criticism of them exactly, but who are all these bands? Even are the only one I was even slightly
aware of. But anything that exposes these great songs further is worth it and
these efforts are far from shoddy.
Scott Walker
The Drift
4AD
A decade ago Scott
Walker released an album called Tilt which
I never heard but which people who loved said ‘you have to listen to it for
ages to start to like it’. If you’re like me, you’ll always have found this
suggestion rather annoying, not least for its whiff of snobbery. Additionally,
the overused (by me anyway) phrase ‘life’s too short’ does spring to mind: I
have to invest time in a record just
so I can start enjoying it? If there was a film you had to see three times before
you liked it, and people could be bothered doing so, then its makers would have
a brilliant hit on their hands, just by dint of making something so
horrendously dense it barely makes sense.
OK. That was Tilt (and don’t even start on Climate of Hunter, his mid-80s album
which I own and cannot fathom). We’re onto his third album in more than thirty
years not counting Walker Brothers reunion records, a record presumably named
with unsexy double entendre for the drift from civillisation or reason, and as
part of that cagey phrase ‘get the drift?’ It starts with a relatively catchy,
if rather metally, ‘Cossacks Are’, goes into a twelve-minute song about a dream
Benito Mussolini has before he dies, and then before we know it a track that
metaphorically explores Elvis and his dead twin as symbols of the Twin Towers,
though if one of those towers was dead I hadn’t heard about it. And it’s not
long before we’re enjoying what appears to be a tape loop of a braying donkey.
So, look, things move fast in the popular music world, and I want to get
you listening to The Drift now, not
in six months when I feel like I’ve started to make sense of it and can write
about it with authority. And you do have to get over a few issues, like, the
album’s spacious and at its most powerful you might start thinking ‘geez, this
is kind of like a heavy metal album with a lot of silence instead of guitars’,
because Scott – who used to have the most stirring deep tone – is now singing
bizarrely high (for him) and very cryptically and dramatically too.
In fact, the album’s not that tough.
What it is is a wild, bleak foray through a harsh landscape. It’s not dinner
party music but what is? It’s not bad acid trip music either (or rather, it is, so be careful). It’s a marvellous
set of portraits in black chalk on a blackboard in a dark room and you’re
wearing sunglasses. Get it, become enlightened.
The Church
Uninvited, like the Clouds
Liberation/Cooking Vinyl
Starting with the
title, I am reminded of Nick Lowe’s 1978 response to David Bowie’s album Low (he made an EP called Bowi). Now the Clouds don’t truly exist
these days but they kind of do and Uninvited
Like the Church makes a lot more sense as a title and it’s much more
self-evidently interesting than Lowe’s EP title.
Steve Kilbey has taken
to painting (oops, I initially mistyped ‘paining’) Church album covers. This
one has the guys in a Mediterranean landscape with their guitars, something
they can apparently go nowhere without (or maybe they’ve gone out to harvest
this year’s guitar crop). There is a babe in the middle distance looking like
she’s glad her head is just the right height so she does not block out the view
of the tree behind her, and there is a 1930s block of flats that is no doubt
low rent as there’s no parking. Oh and there’s that friggin’ weird eye atop a
pyramid thing, Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, and David Lee Roth. I imagine some
of these people were uninvited like the clouds who also have a scanty presence
in the picture. It’s a great cover. Maybe all recording artists should be
compelled to paint their own record covers. I mean just for five years or
something. OK. Got that out of the way.
I think I still have room to discuss the actual record.
It’s hot. As you know
if you know anything about The Church they have made some dodgy records in
their long career and why wouldn’t they, who’d want to make only gems? This
album is simple and unadorned, and if ‘Easy’ is a cross between ‘Waiting for my
Man’ and, hmm, ‘There She Goes’ or something similar – with a touch of the
Lovin’ Spoonful perhaps and a little bit of The Bangles’ ‘Our Lips are Sealed’,
well, those are all great things, aren’t they, and you can hardly quibble with
such reference points (all of which are almost certainly unconscious). ‘Unified
Field’ owes more than a little to Grant McLennan, and other tracks are now and
again a little too stream-of-consciousness lyrically (I have been assessing a
lot of history essays lately and I just know if I was marking this album I’d be circling the line ‘even Jesus was
betrayed by a kiss’ and writing ‘relevance?’ in the margin in red pen but it
would be fair to say this is not a history essay, except by a broad stretch of
definition). ‘She’ll Come Back for You Tomorrow’ has really languid, Jeff Beck
bluesy thick guitars, which I dig something chronic, and for some reason it
also reminds me of another Jeff, Jeff Lynne, though I can’t really explain that
one (‘Telephone Line’ or something? I dunno). ‘Pure Chance’ reminds me for a
split second of that song ‘Babe’ by someone like Foreigner or Toto, I can’t
distinguish between those two (30 seconds online is all it would take, but…). I
could go on playing this soundsalotlike game but it’s lazy, after all, there
are only a finite number of chords and orders they can go in and all it really
does is show an arcane trainspotterish streak which no-one should be proud of.
I just want to let you know it’s a great album, amongst their best.
Pink Mountaintops
Axis of Evol
Jagjaguwar/Low Transit
Industries
Lou Reed meets Arthur
Lee meets Skip Spence meets Melanie meets Lou Barlow meets Michael Hurley meets
Archer Prewitt meets David Crosby meets David Essex meets David Bowie meets
David Blue. Will Oldham meets Bill Callahan meets 4 Non Blondes meets Merryl
Bainbridge meets Simon Day. John Cale meets Robert Johnson meets Ross Wilson
meets Robyn St Clair.
The songs lyrically
reference famous singles and albums by The Beatles, Ray Davies, Dylan, Stones,
AC/DC. Weird that.
The Pink Mountaintops
record is seven songs that seem to have been recorded after intimate affairs
with some of the above. There is a song very similar in feel to the Velvet
Underground’s ‘Jesus’. There is another, ‘Cold Criminals’, which is rousingly
trippy a la the best Sebadoh. You will particularly like the song with the drum
machine.
Kes
The Jellys in the Pot
(Unstable Ape)
The sixties had
amazing folk folk like Nick Drake, Pip Proud and Joni Mitchell, the seventies
had extraordinary bards like Todd Rundgren, Megan Sue Hicks and Joni Mitchell.
The eighties also had people but I am getting bored with listing them all and
I’m not even sure Nick Drake wasn’t really from the seventies. The point is
that each decade throws up unique and exceptional musical individuals who bring
a whole new plate of hors d’oeuvres to the party and reinvent the form
apparently effortlessly, melding traditions while busting those links you used
to think held strong between forms and ideas. At the moment we have Melbournian
Karl Scullin once of the Bird Blobs and now of Mum Smokes but who also performs
as Kes and whose first album is known as The
Jellys in the Pot. Forget for the moment that there should have been an
apostrophe in that title (subsequent pressings will assuredly correct the
problem incidentally making this apostropheless one the noughties equivalent of
the Velvets album with the peel-off banana) and concentrate only the fact that
this album is undoubtedly one of the strangest and yet richest you are likely
to hear. Listen for instance to amazing stuff like Hold on to your Legs, a song that reminds me for some reason of the
way Can reminds me of seventies disco (particularly their seventies disco
stuff). I think partly it’s the relentless repetitiousness of it, underneath a
powerful guitar figure that has that air of Saturday
Night Fever. Of course it is so far removed from disco it’s ridiculous, in
fact most of the album is light and folky and some elements of Evil Twins, the last track, are overly
sugary even if you allow for some kind of irony quota (I don’t know that there
isn’t a law about using a term like ‘din-dins’ in a song). The track What Do You Feed It? is as musically
proficient as John Williams (the Australian guitar virtuoso not the film
soundtrack fellow) yet has pop ability of mavericks like Smog or Laura Nyro.
The Jellys in the Pot is pretty much the album of a lifetime. I
caught Kes playing The Tote a few weeks ago – there’s a real band going on
there now – and these days instead of rivalling the ten or so geniuses I’ve
already namechecked herein he’s invading a different bunch of turfs – like
Brian Wilson’s. But this short (half-hour) album is a nest of gems that no-one
should ignore. Don’t ignore it.
2026 update: I so much couldn't remember this record I went looking on discogs for it, and it's not there.
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