Sunday Song Of The Week – The Grey Ship by EMA

Phone home? Nah, lets just get a taxi back to mine...

I’m sure I used to be a metal kid. I definitely remember wearing ridiculous pants and being angry a lot of the time buying a Slayer album once so I must have been.

I still love heavy music. It’s kind of my default position, the place I feel most at home. I can sit down with any metal or punk or rock fan and chat with them about music from a highly informed point of view that has come from fifteen years of following those types of genres. Even if I am not familiar with an artist’s actual music there are good odds that I’ll know something about them; a rough sketch on a shelf in my head formed from various bits of information just waiting to be fleshed out. This knowledge base has nothing to do with why I love the music, it is just to say that my understanding of other genres is far less comprehensive. I might sit down and talk to someone into indie, hip-hop, electronica or folk and while I certainly love artists and albums from all those genres I would not be surprised for them to bring up a load of artists I’d never heard of before.

I’m not trying to present this a bad thing. Far from it, I love nothing more than someone who knows their music telling me about new bands I should check out (I have a shocking memory but if you mention a band to me in passing it’s in the safe and on the list. Although if you want to write it down for me too that’s great). The point I’m trying to make is that I used to think of myself as a fan of heavy music who branched out into other genres when possible. Now though, I don’t know if that’s an accurate assessment. Considering what albums I’ve listened to, downloaded and bought this week I don’t think there is any pattern of adherence to any one genre.

Anyway, this neurotic narcissism is a round about way of saying that if I’d heard The Grey Ship by EMA (from her 2011 album Past Life Martyred Saints) a few years ago I don’t know what I would have made of it. I like to hope I would have heard in it the same wistful, dark beauty I hear now. It reminds me of Warpaint but with more of an edge. The dreamy, woozy first few minutes singing about the coming of the Grey Ship (I’m getting a death metaphor here but then again I get them everywhere, maybe she was waiting for a ferry) break into just the most delicious bassline which is soon covered in an ominous synth and multilayered, repeated vocals that have a hypnotic, lulling quality. The track builds quite stunningly, bringing in Bardo Pond style distorted guitar, as a backing sound to the melody rather than as the climax, and when the track does crescendo it uses staccato rhythm that reminds me of Tool to do so, before that climactic rhythm is itself swallowed up by a cello line that had been tracking the rise of the song all along.

I can’t be sure it’s a cello but that’s my guess.

I should really have some way of rounding out this article that relates to the way I started it. Sadly I don’t. This is prone to leaving the reader with a sense of unease similar to that you might feel if a film simply finished halfway through. It’s not professional I’ll give you that. I used to be such a conscientious writer. I definitely remember sitting through nine months of remedial-level creative writing class despite having an English degree just so I could ask one question about narrative pacing as well as buying Eats, Shoots and Leaves from a boot sale then never reading it planning my articles in advance so I must have been.

 

Sunday Song of the Week – Rolled Together by The Antlers

This tune really reminds me of another song. I can hear the older song start to flesh out in my head so hopefully I’ll have it soon, but for now it’s a killer puzzle, a daymare come to haunt me. I can hear one slowly sliding guitar note that I know is from the song I can’t place. I think it might be a quieter track from a heavier band than The Antlers, but then again it might turn out to be DJ Shadow so fuck guessing for now.

Whatever the song is it shares with Rolled Together a certain elegiac, resigned sense of loss at its core. A sadness that you know will probably pass but that for now is all you can feel. It sounds like a relationship ending quietly, the gentle tides of the world having slowly put so much distance between two people that they know there is no way to reconcile, no way to bridge the gap, and so have submitted to letting each other drift away, eventually disappearing into the distance.

Musically it reminds me of a couple of the quieter tracks from Entroducing crossed with the siren scene from O Brother Where Art Thou. The album it’s taken from, Burst Apart, is a beautiful piece of work and is certainly one of the best I’ve heard this year. Some of the other songs on the album take on a more structured approach with the vocals, and wear the influences of Flaming Lips and Band Of Horses more than Rolled Together does, but the same sense of loss or quiet sadness runs throughout. In that sense the album also reminds me of The XX and track French Exit owes a fairly substantial debt to them, albeit with a slightly more glamorous production attached to it.

This is the kind of album you fall in love with slowly over quiet evenings. Well, I actually got to know it riding the bus to work while half asleep but you know what I mean. Plus riding the bus to work does make me sad in a quiet, resigned way so maybe it was the perfect place really. I still can’t place the damn song this reminds me of. It’s starting to get to me now. Help.

Another late song of the week – Hisingen Blues by Graveyard

You never forget your first love. Well some people probably do but I’m betting a pretty decent percentage of people never forget their first love. This aphorism generally refers to people but I reckon it’s true of music too. For all the new music I’ve got into over the last ten years I don’t think I could honestly say I’ve ever loved a genre more than I loved Stoner Rock for a four or five-year period that started around the end of high school and carried me right through university. I doubt if there were many stoner / retro rock albums released during that period that I wasn’t aware of, and while that kind of dedication is probably only possible if you focus your attention solely on one genre (obviously something I try to warn against in these here ramblings), it was a time in my musical life I wouldn’t change for the world.

Well, maybe I wouldn’t have bought Tab by Monster Magnet. Seeing as it’s not very good and all.

And I definitely would have showered more often.

Anyway Stoner kind of run out of steam in my eyes a few years into the new millenium and while I still listened out I don’t think there have been that many top quality albums in that genre since. All of which brings me somewhat circuitously around to Hisingen Blues by Graveyard. I was plowing through Amazon on a bit of a spree when I saw the album (also Hisingen Blues) in the ‘other customers who bought this…’ section of a band called Earthship. Expecting maybe some thrash metal with a name like Graveyard I ran them through YouTube and immediately fell in love with both the song and the video. If I’d heard this album when I was twenty-one I’d have shit wishes for a month. It’s rocking, it’s bluesy, it’s soulful and it’s always interesting, which was something not all that many stoner bands from back in the day could claim. The song itself is just so much fun; a bouncing, loose rhythm section and a classic retro guitar sound back a wailing frontman singing about holding hands with Lucifer. He actually sings that, it’s amazing. I can’t tell if they’re taking themselves seriously and I don’t really care, I’m happy if the video and the lyrics are supposed to be kind of ironic and I’m happy if (and I think this is the safer bet) these four young Swedish gentlemen are deadly fucking serious.

What I really like about this tune (and this applies to the entire album too) is that they really have written a great song. It’s not just a good riff with some genre vocals over the top (something else a lot of stoner bands find themselves guilty of), this really is well written and catchy as all hell. In essence it’s stoner music that you don’t have to be stoned to enjoy, which is what all the best bands from back in the day had in common all along.

Sunday Song Of The Week – Search-Party-Animal by And So I Watch You From Afar

It’s been a good week. A lot of new music to put some time into and a lot of old favourites making strong impressions too. There have been a number of songs that have really sat me on my haunches in the last seven days: For Wolves Crew by Clark (old favourite), Obeying The Iron Will by Ken Mode and Home by Villagers (new favourites) have all taken my breath away in their own disparate ways. The tune that has had the greatest impact though is a track from the new And So I Watch You From Afar album, Gangs.

Search-Party-Animal is a frenetic, churning, personality-disorder of a song. It was the track that squashed any fears of mine that ASIWYFA may have gone off the boil or gone stale after producing one full album and a couple of EP’s of extravagantly original instrumental rock action. I think with instrumental bands that phenomena is often more of a worry than for bands who have the extra dimension of a vocal line (or lines) to give a song added character or depth.

Listen to the desperation of the opening guitar line, the ferocity of the restraint in the percussion, the thump of the bass rolling in like a tank and the dizzying background pyrotechnics that break open into an aerial bombardment then collapse again into the tiny spark that starts the demolition of a tower block. I like this tune a lot.

I’m still getting to know the album as a whole but I think it will benefit from fewer songs and a shorter running time than their debut. It also sounds like it captures the heady dynamism of their live show more fully. In this medium where everything created is ultimately derivative of something created before it, to find a band with such a fully realised and individual sound (yes there is a little bit of Battles in there but only a damn dash) is pretty special. These guys aren’t only for the headbangers, this is music at the peak of the summit and should be appreciated by everyone.

As Tall As Lions and my own failures as an objective human.

I approach the appreciation of music from a certain ideological standpoint which, however much I might ramble about it, boils down to this: good music is good music. Obvious right? Well it would seem to be until you consider how many people make the choice (and it is a choice) to close their minds and cover their ears. This could manifest itself as the resolute confinement of their listening habits to the first genre of music they ever enjoyed or it could be the stigmatization of individual genres. It could be the notion that all new music and new bands that came about after a certain point in time are no good or it could be the equally ridiculous notion that music only got good from another certain point in time.

Me I’m a fascist for open-mindedness. Every type of music from any age has the potential to be great. It is simply the idiots making bad music within any given genre that are the problem. I used to think there was a time when I would never appreciate Country, R’n'B or Black Metal. Not any more. This isn’t thanks to Garth Brookes, R. Kelly and Cradle Of Filth I can assure you, it’s down to finding artists in those genres making intelligent, credible music with integrity and passion.

So far so “look how fucking awesome I am for being so fucking open-minded THE REST OF YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED! STOP LISTENING TO ADELE AND CONVINCING YOURSELF YOU ARE ACTUALLY ROLLING IN THE DEEP ALONG WITH HER ON YOUR WAY TO WORK I CAN SEE YOU NODDING AWAY IN YOUR CARS!”

(I do quite like Adele really. I’m open-minded like that).

Yes anyway, I attempt to approach all music from a neutral starting point and judge it on its own merits. The thing is I know this to be impossible. The appreciation of music is a subjective matter, and even with the best will in the world you cannot go into that type of field without some level of prejudice or preset ideas present within you. And a perfect example of this presented itself to me on the bus home today.

I had not listened to As Tall As Lions eponymous second album (2006, Triple Crown Records) for probably around eight months. It’s an album that I have loved for several years without really having made an effort to learn anything about the band. I hadn’t read any reviews, hadn’t seen any media coverage hadn’t spoken about the band with anyone who knew anything about them. I’d just come across the album, listened to it and fell in love. Coming back to it today I was suddenly taken by just how gentle some of the music was, and then by the melancholia of the romance in the sound. I started to think about trying to describe just why I loved the album, perhaps in anticipation of writing a piece about it to publish here. I found myself for the first time trying to place ATAL in a bracket with other music and other bands, maybe even within a genre and the first band that came to mind was Coldplay. It honestly came as quite a shock when I suddenly opened my ears to the similarities between the bands. I’m not going to spell them out here, that’s not what this article is about, but if you listen to the ATAL album you’ll hear them quite easily. (The real point anyway is that ATAL, given the right breaks, could sell the same kind of units as Coldplay).

Now, I don’t have an active dislike of Coldplay. I think they have some good songs (The Scientist, Speed Of Sound), some very bad songs (In My Place, Fix You) and some songs somewhere in the middle (the ones I haven’t bothered to listen to yet. Yellow). I’m also not about to argue they are actually as good as ATAL (listen to Stab City to render any kind of debate on this point redundant). Nor are they exactly the same type of band – ATAL are more dynamic and a bit more up-tempo across the length of the album.

Well what are you trying to say then you rambling pleb?

I’m trying to say that my approach to a band like Coldplay - mainstream indie, popular, vastly uncool – is tainted by the very way in which I perceive them. And that worries me. What if it had been ATAL who had sold millions of albums and had the blanket coverage and appeared on the cover of The English Magazine (that’s Q by the way, I’m going for a Macbeth thing there) and what if Coldplay were a band I’d chanced upon in a second-hand record shop that I’d never heard anything about? Would I be telling you right now that ATAL are ok but not a patch on Coldplay (listen to Clocks to render any kind of debate on this point redundant)? Due to my puny mind being subjective it is impossible to say. This does however bring up a couple of interesting questions about perception of an artist that revolve around saturation of coverage.

Firstly, and I think this is something that every music fan is guilty of, there is the ‘I’ve found this band…’ syndrome. To me this is a remnant of discovering new music when you’re actually discovering music itself. The first few times when you felt a connection with a band that your friends didn’t already know about or that you hadn’t heard on daytime radio or seen on the cover of a magazine; for me this was part of starting to flesh out my own identity. I probably spend more time looking for new music now than ever before and I do love to turn other people onto the music I hear that I think they will like. I do it because I want them to hear this great music that I think will enrich their lives but I’d be lying if I wrote that there isn’t a little part of me who loves being the guy in the know. Oh yeah Sleigh Bells, I heard their demo back in 74 don’t you know… You can’t turn someone onto a band who have already sold four million albums. Well you can but there’s either something wrong with you or the person you’re telling…

This brings me to the second point – how does your perception of how cool a band are effect your appreciation of them? I’d love to say not at all, because it really shouldn’t, but it probably does. Lets take another two bands, say Emery and Lost Profits (I’ve done that on purpose which might give you a clue as to which band is going in the decidedly not cool category here). I’ve chosen Emery because I see them as an average kind of band, some good tunes, some filler, rather than band I really like, who have a kind of similar sound and structure to their music as Lost Profits. This is because I have a pretty solid opinion of how much I actively dislike LP. Here’s the point: having never heard of Emery and then coming across their In Shallow Seas We Sail album I probably listened to it eight or nine times, enjoying it for what it was without getting too much from it. If you asked me what I thought of Emery I’d tell you I thought they were ok but nothing special (this track is mint though). If we again transplant LP into Emery’s position here then I imagine that there might be enough hooks and not entirely shithouse songs on one of their albums (I’m not including Fake Sound OF Progress here but neither do I want to talk about it. Still a lot of bitterness on both sides…) for me to have a similar listening experience with them as I had with In Shallow Seas We Sail. What do you think of shitty old Lost Profits? I think they’re ok but nothing special.

This is all conjecture. I really do think LP are rubbish from as objective a point of view as it’s possible for me to take. This is based on having listened to their output over several years rather than a judgement made because of how successful they have been, the way they look, their lack of integrity, shoddy live performances or generic, maximum potential-sales minimum artistic invention ideology. I think they are fucking rubbish (not all that objective probably that there point of view) . But the point that troubles me is if I had come across them purely on a music only playing field, would my opinion be different?

Questions that can’t be answered but I think are worth taking the time to ask. You’re never too on the button to ask yourself – “Am I being a pretentious twat?” The important thing to take away, for anyone still reading, is that As Tall As Lions really are fucking excellent. Gentle, romantic, crooning, melancholy brilliance. Give them a listen to hear how it’s really done. All together now “…and maybe I had too much wine, I hope you come back to mine…”

Insomniac Daze

I had intended to jot down a few words about songs that I associate with insomnia during the bank holiday weekend but sadly finding myself committed admitted to hospital with savage rabies gall stones I was unable to do so until now. Finding myself now in a wheelchair and pooping through a tube I have all the time in the world to write.

(The wheelchair and the tube are not related to the gall stones, I just got round to making some lifestyle choices while laid up in bed).

I think there are several causes behind my insomnia.  One of the odder reasons is getting a song stuck in my head. Obviously this doesn’t happen too often but when it does it can be a little hellish. The last instance of this was with Doublespeak by Thrice from their triumphant 2009 album Beggars (Vagrant Records). The album saw Thrice leave behind their old post-hardcore sound for a stripped down set of classic rock songs which for once and all proved them as wonderful songwriters, as among the best lyricists of their generation and finally allowed Dustin Kensrue to prove that more than just being able to carry a tune he had an exceptional and deeply soulful singing voice. Doublespeak, along with the reflective title-track Beggars, is for me the highlight of the album and having spent one evening learning to play a dodgy version of it on guitar I turned in to find the melody rolling about through my head. And it wouldn’t leave. For eight fucking hours. As I finally drifted off (while sat on the bus on the way to work the following morning) it was still swelling and breaking across my thoughts, a form of auditory hallucination that I guess I’ll take over hearing voices telling me that there are microphones hidden in the trees and that I need a hat made of tin foil.

I’ll make my own fashion decisions thankyou very much.

Anyhoo there are other things that keep me awake at night more regularly than songs based on the destruction of language within a dystopian future. Working through a scenario where I disarm and defeat multiple waves of ninjas Politics for example.

When I do have a sleepless night there are a couple of lines from songs that, dependent on how I’m feeling, tend to flit through my mind:

If my lack of sleep puts me in a reflective mood then I might hear the line “Up all night again, as for sleep – no comprende. I don’t sleep cos sleep is the cousin of death, least that’s what Nas say. Sleep is a state of mind…” A beautiful, gentle, building dream of a song that makes walking the streets at 8 AM in shades not really sure what the hell is going on seem like a good move.

What Sundays are like in Haydock

If I feel the frustration of exhaustion seeping in, an anger at the lack of control over the rhythms of my body, a screaming ball of fury that for some reason I have denied myself something as basic as an evening’s rest then I will definitely hear Casey Chaos screaming “I DON’T SLEEP!” It does little to mollify me but this song always makes me feel a little less isolated in my daze.

If, as happens every few months, I go multiple nights without sleep then I’ll be muttering “Six days no sleep, I keep my eyes wide open” over and over in my head (I’ve never hit six days but don’t tell The Bronx that).

Perhaps, like with songs that reference drugs or drinking, I use these songs more to make me feel like there is a communal element to this certain, negative part of my life rather than simply as my insomniac catchphrases. For whatever reason they float in and out of my consciousness more and more often these days, friendly little wisps of smoke rising from the charred carcass of my desire to sleep.

Finally there is the state my mind settles into after a few days of sleep deprivation. I remember a weary, resolved state that answers sunlight with a grimace and finds the very notion of ever going to sleep again a fiction. Half closed eyes that will neither collapse nor ever fully open again. I remember walking down the road, dreaming of the setting sun.

I get the impression my pain killers kicking in had something to do with that last paragraph. They are for the gall stones and are not a lifestyle choice.

Not yet anyway.

The Phantom Band – The Wants

As is tradition when the end of 2010 came round I started to piece together my own top albums of the year. While I take the selection process seriously I am fully aware of the arbitrary nature of trying to order music by merit and the subjective process of an individual’s listing of said music. The fact that I still compile this list every year is more a testament to my nostalgia for a time when I could happily sit with friends for hours putting together favourite album lists, favourite song lists, even fantasy festival line-ups (Zeppelin headlined).

The other tradition I have is usually to get to the end of January or February and have an album from the previous year make a mockery out of my selection. In 2009 it was the Bats album Red In Tooth And Claw’s continual growth that came to eclipse both Mastodon’s Crack The Skye and POS’s Never Better (which at the time I couldn’t decide between unless drunk). In 2008 it was Genghis Tron’s masterpiece Board Up The House that came to eclipse, well almost every other album I’d ever heard in any given year. And so even as I decided to stick Diamond Eyes by Deftones in at number one for 2010 I had an inkling something would change my mind before too long. Don’t get me wrong, Diamond Eyes is a great album, I’m just not sure if it’s a classic. And I should have picked Heavy Breathing by Black Breath at the time anyway.

Anyhoo I thought I’d found my huckleberry as I started to get further and further into Comeback Kid’s Symptoms And Cures. That album has eclipsed both Deftones and Black Breath for me but before I could pen an ode to that album (and I can assure you an ode will be penned) Comeback Kid they themselves have been gazumped.

The Wants by The Phantom Band goes down as my favourite album of 2010. But that doesn’t matter. That’s just me wrapping up my garbled attempt at an intro.

Firstly, they have form for this kind of thing. In 2009 they released debut Checkmate Savage and it spent around five to six months slowly infecting me. It was the kind of listening experience where at one point or another every single song on the album was my favourite without any song ever losing the lustre that had raised it to the pedestal originally. I can still remember listening to it for the first time and enjoying it but not thinking it was anything special. But something just drew me back time and again the way an album that comes from left field and embeds itself in your consciousness tends to do. I could go on about Checkmate Savage at inordinate length and will do so at some point in the future, but as it’s The Wants currently rattling round my head I’m going to focus on that album alone for now.

  I’ve been listening to this on and off since November and with increasing regularity for the last month in a pattern very similar to how I got into Checkmate Savage. Now it’s reached daily or twice daily frequency but here’s the thing, I still don’t feel like I can write about this album and offer any real insight or do its construction justice. I’m not trying be self-effacing, it’s just such a dense piece of work that I can imagine listening to it for ten years and still be finding new moments to thrill me that far down the line. So before I ramble on about an album that I can’t describe here’s the skinny on the concrete: The Phantom band are from Glasgow and have been playing together under a variety of names since 2002.

Now when I say a variety I mean a shedfull. They spent several years never using the same name for consecutive gigs. There’s a great quote from vocalist Rick Anthony where he talks about how their identity being in a state of constant flux allowed them to experiment with various styles of music. This really explains a lot about the sound they now have. If you wanted to call it indie then I guess you could get away with that but I’d be doing the L-on-my-forehead sign behind your back for the rest of the week. The variety of soundscapes they create on The Wants, often two or three within the same song, is really quite startling. I’m not even sure I have the vocabulary to describe what these songs sound like. Opener, A Glamour, starts with what sounds like someone scratching a wire brush over a slab of stone while an electronic pulse chimes in the background before the tones of a child’s jack-in-the-box being wound give way to a throbbing bassline and dancing, tribal percussion that brings to mind someone with stilts attached to all four of their limbs trying to do a jig in a swamp with a manic grin stretched across their face. That covers all of fifty seconds of the song. After that it builds and builds, driven by the thumping percussion, the sombre, deep vocals and the slashing and yelping of overlayed background noise into something resembling an industrial chant before fading into a gentle piano outro. It’s one of the craziest songs I’ve ever heard and it’s quite, quite genius.

While the Phantom Band definitely have a sound all of their own their songs vary widely enough that they don’t have a template. The flow of the album is held together as much by the mood the songs evoke as any relationship of sound between the songs. It might just be me but there is an ominous foreboding that runs throughout. Lyrical snatches within the songs offer up worrying images: talk of burning books, changing shape, crucifixion and of fleeing into fields of corn. Combined with Anthony’s brooding delivery, and what seems to be a step back from grounding his lyrics in a definite concept compared to the first album, we are presented with a landscape we cannot see clearly and that offers only shadows for us to converse with.

At points the music adds to this sense of the uncanny (the final few minutes of the otherwise peaceful album closer Goodnight Arrow sound like a particularly militaristic Nine Inch Nails circa The Fragile) while at other times it kicks back and rides along on a swirl of melody and panache. There is tranquility and calm; there is darkness and clatter; there is elation and verve. And it’s all exhilarating.

Where they really excel is when they hit a mid tempo groove and layer the thing with melody as on Everybody Knows It’s True (or on Left Hand Wave from Checkmate Savage). There is something just effortlessly cool about the sound they create (it sounds effortless anyway, I can’t even begin to imagine how to write a song like this).

As I mentioned earlier I still don’t feel like I’ve scratched the surface of what this album has to offer. The Wants feels like it has secrets to be unlocked and that it may take years to really comprehend the beauty and potential darkness of this album.