Out of Truro College came I Say Marvin (previously Marvin & The Gayes before a lawsuit put paid to the name), a wickedly spitty post-punk group in thrall to DFA, Test Icicles and !!!, with a frontman called Sam Power and amazing call-and-response breakdowns of “I SAY MARVIN! YOU SAY GAYE! MARVIN! GAYE! MARVIN! GAYE!” As wilfully offensive teenage spunk goes, they had it down. Crammed into tiny, shitty pubs like Truro’s The Swan week after week, tearing at the walls whilst watching this band felt incredible, like we finally had a bit of flipping culture to call our own.

Elsewhere there was Rosie & The Goldbug, who are probably still angrily brandishing their black and white stripy socks and baroque sheet music in Marina’s direction. Probably my favourite local band, however, were My Elvis Blackout, fronted by Harry Pitts (with names like these, how could Harry and Sam be anything but snotty punk frontmen?), who FINALLY put their debut album on Soundcloud yesterday.

Perhaps to you it sounds a bit dated, and it’s almost certainly about five years after they should have released it (some fool conceived the Cornish Live Music Awards, making a previously ace scene competitive and bitchy, record labels came calling to the south west, chewed up some very naive bands, and left the place in tatters for a while, basically), but listening now, it still sounds like that first thrilling, rude awakening to The Fall, The Cramps and garage rock. It reeks of snakebite and sweat and crumpled, baggy roll-ups made outside daggy local pubs.

I Say Marvin and My Elvis Blackout played one amazing show at The Swan in around 2006, 2007, which I reviewed for the local paper. “Some day they’ll scrape the sweat from the ceiling and sell it for millions,” I think I wrote (the clipping’s at home in Cornwall). Obviously I was wrong, but listening to MEB’s album now feels like drinking a heady slurp of that effervescent adolescent effluvium all over again.

Bill Callahan – Baby’s Breath

The inconsequential thoughts I wanted to note down about these two songs have come undone since I discovered that Bill Callahan isn’t actually singing what I thought he was in ‘Baby’s Breath’. It’s taken me nearly a year to realise that… I thought the lyrics went, “And each day I looked out on the lawn/And I wondered what all was gone/Until I saw it was lucky old me/How could I run without losing anything?/How could I run without becoming me?” In fact, it’s “How could I run without becoming lean?”

Mishearing be damned – I’m going to keep pretending that’s what he says, I love the lyric. Every new start or break with the past brings with it the delusion that you could change your personality, start afresh, conceal the disagreeable parts and emphasise the best bits, though it rarely works out that way. The inescapable tethering to one’s character is something that Sharon Van Etten explores on ‘Peace Sign’, the second song from her last album, ‘Epic’. (Its successor, ‘Tramp’, is out on February 6, and it’s stellar, a magical record.) She sings:

“I woke up, I was already me/I was somewhat afraid I was something/Peace Signs/I told you I could no longer see/I was right in the fire, I was on my knees/Peace Signs/Take it back, I felt no longer used/I had nothing to do, I was so you/Peace sign, I was already you…”

And later in the song: “When I woke up I was already me/And I am not afraid I am something/Peace Signs…”

Whereas for Bill, realising the limitations of his personality is a sort of fate, for Sharon – who’s spoken at length about the abusive relationship that inspired her first two records – waking up feeling defined by herself is a matter of renewed confidence, a thing to be celebrated. Sharon’s never been a weak artist – her debut ‘Because I Was In Love’ is quiet, but by no means meek or small – but ‘Tramp’ is her most forceful, cohesive record to date, wrought through with lyrics that wield control over shifting, difficult perspectives, and moving in and out of her own personality with easy grace. It’s my favourite album of the year so far. Here’s the first song to be taken from the record.

]]> http://www.laurasnapes.co.uk/reading-list-1-diane-keaton-then-again/feed/ 0 http://www.laurasnapes.co.uk/reading-list/ http://www.laurasnapes.co.uk/reading-list/#comments Sun, 08 Jan 2012 23:57:58 +0000 Laura Snapes http://www.laurasnapes.co.uk/?p=1005 I’m not much one for making new year’s resolutions, but one thing I do want to do in 2012 is read a lot more. I’m really mercurial about reading – sometimes I’ll chomp through three books in a week, other times I’ll be lucky to read that many in three months. I thought I’d keep a record of everything I do read so that I can feel well proud of myself at the end of the year when I’ve ploughed through, like, 30 books. My awareness of what’s coming out in the book world is limited to the obvious – the Franzens of this world, etc – so any recommendations on tomes I might like based on what I’ve read will always be most welcome. I’m definitely no literary critic, and will largely be writing these posts quickly and without the careful consideration I’d give to an album, so hold back on any desire to get your inner F R Leavis on and call me out for being rubbish at reviewing books. Thanks!

Artist: PJ Harvey

Album: ‘Let England Shake’

Label: Island

Released: February 11

Spotify // Buy

I’m not trying to be contrary by not putting this in my top 20. ‘Let England Shake’ is a brilliant, accomplished album – probably much more so than several of the albums in my list – but I never find myself wanting to listen to it. It doesn’t do anything for me in the way that albums I love usually do (though the song above is the exception).

Artist: A Winged Victory For The Sullen

Album: ‘A Winged Victory For The Sullen’

Label: Kranky/Erased Tapes

Released: September 12

Spotify // Buy

I just came to this too late to put it in my list. The first time I heard it was on the Eurostar to Paris at the end of October, when it made me fall asleep and have such horrendous nightmares that I’m about 95% sure I was trying to scream in my sleep on a train full of families making half-term trips to Euro Disney. In spite of that, I listened to it a lot afterwards – particularly when going to bed in our noisy house – and really adore it.

Artist: Low

Album: ‘C’mon’

Label: Sub Pop

Released: April 11

Spotify // Buy

I love Low, so I must have been having a serious mental blip to have forgotten this when making the list. See also: Mogwai’s ‘Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will’.

Artist: Julianna Barwick

Album: ‘The Magic Place’

Label: Asthmatic Kitty

Released: February 23

Spotify // Buy

Again, I came to this too late, because I am an idiot.

Label: Domino

Released: May 9

Spotify // Buy

Just at the point where I should probably write some profound essay about how much my album of the year means to me, I’m just going to re-run the review I wrote of it for NME in May. Much of what I wrote in it now seems very prescient. It’s probably the best album review I’ve written all year, though if I could edit it, I would like to get in more about how the record actually sounds. In lieu of rewriting it for my own silly satisfaction, I suggest you read Rory Gibb’s excellent dissection of ‘Smother”s tones and timbres in his review for The Quietus. In the meantime, here’s mine:

In 1993, journalist Auberon Waugh established the Bad Sex In Fiction Award while editor of London’s distinguished Literary Review. It was intended to draw attention to what he called the “crude, tasteless and often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in contemporary novels, and to discourage it”. Last year’s winner, Rowan Somerville (key line: “like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with too blunt a pin, he screwed himself into her” – ack), on receiving his award for his novel The Shape Of Her, declared: “There is nothing more English than bad sex.”

Wild Beasts might beg to differ. Since their first album, 2008’s ‘Limbo, Panto’, singers Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming have relished singing about shagging with a kind of ribald nobility, tempering potentially awful leeriness with artful, archaic language and a satirical tongue. The title of their debut single alone – ‘Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants’ – rings with hope and pride for those newly anointed knackers; ‘She Purred, While I Grrred’, on the same album, is more directly lascivious: “My fruit was ripe /She bit/Huffing and puffing on the mattress stuffing/Upon the bunk a fervent funk”. Is that the sound of collars loosening? ‘Limbo, Panto’’s follow-up, 2009’s ‘Two Dancers’, recognised what Somerville might have been referring to as classically English bad sex – the sheer indecorousness of it all, characterised in ‘Hooting And Howling’’s “a crude art, a bovver boot ballet”.

Whether fervent, flaccid or fetishistic, these Beasts have an Attenborough-like touch for observations of the fleshy ritual. It’s only now, with this, their third record, that the idea of sex being inherently “bad” comes into play, their focus shifting to the bare act itself, isolated from its implications and consequences – which, as any dolt will aver, can be jolly fucking bad indeed.

The clipped womp that beckons in opener ‘Lion’s Share’ glowers dangerously, before Hayden’s draggy Kate Bush tones unveil a woman in surroundings far from the Beasts’ typical English streets and (ahem) back alleys: “I find you hidden there a veiled creature of the deep/Waifish as a widow and without sufficient sleep”.

The vulnerability is made creepier by an alternating, uneasy piano that ticks in with Hayden’s lascivious prowl, “I take you in the mouth like a lion takes his game”. About 60 listens in, I’m still not sure if that’s incredibly erotic or wilfully disturbing. Which is the whole point – the unnerving instrumentation (which pays homage to Oneohtrix Point Never while remaining utterly Wild Beasts), the unfamiliar situation, and the one-sidedness of his approach all contribute to the nagging feeling that this should not be happening, and at least not with this person.

In interviews about ‘Smother’, the band have talked about how they were inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Perhaps they were identifying with the feeling of being an outsider, as arguably, no-one comes close to Wild Beasts. But then, just as Frankenstein’s monster turned out to be more than its inventor had bargained for, so does the carnal carry-on of ‘Bed Of Nails’, Thorpe exclaiming, “When our bodies become electrified /It’s alive, it’s alive, it’s ali-e-i-e-i-e-i-i-i-ive” across flashes of warmly cascading guitar and Chris Talbot’s propulsive but unobtrusive drumming.

What Thorpe brilliantly terms “the Shelleys on their very first time” mirrors Doctor Frankenstein’s self-reproach in the novel: “I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but not that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” The more forthright ‘Loop The Loop’, whose splashy cymbals and eddying guitar would have sat handsomely in ‘Two Dancers’’ final third, offers the conundrum, “Desire, oh desire/Is all that the heart requires/Is what it can’t recognise”.

Without making assumptions as to how autobiographical these songs are, a red-handed case of infidelity at the heart of its lyrical themes might be a logical assumption to make given the album’s first single. The Talk Talk-ish fog of ‘Albatross’ takes Coleridge’s classic symbol of guilt, tipping in on Ben Little’s elegantly hocketing guitar and piano alongside some of the record’s most stinging drums (see also: ‘Reach A Bit Further’) – the percussive immediacy of ‘Two Dancers’ is, for the most part, less prominent here after its predecessor’s statement of intent. With guilt comes blame and self-flagellation, in the form of the regretful croon, “the secrets that I should have shared”.

It’s always said the best storytellers show rather than tell, and so it is with ‘Deeper’, where Tom takes lead vocals. Opening on a simple kick drumbeat, he laments, “The breakfast is all laid out/Waiting for you to arrive/The sun is rising/And going down again”. He doesn’t have to explain whose absence left the cornflakes to go soggy, or why; the sense of loss here gapes desperately thanks to the quiver in his voice and the reticently bright synth blooms throughout.

If ‘Deeper’ is physically empty, it’s ‘Plaything’ that’s spiritually moribund. Above skittering, patted drums and a foreboding bassline, Hayden commands “New squeeze/Take off your chemise/And I’ll do as I please” with utter detachment and no hint of affection, objectifying his co-conspirator before rendering himself as lifeless form and function, “flatpacked… for your ease”.

This is post-break-up sex, a ritual tainted by regret both past and present, not a wanton generalisation to be boasted about in bawdy terms that would have made our old friend Waugh’s skin crawl. ‘Smother’ as a whole is deserving of his, and everyone’s, unabashed and unironic praise. Wild Beasts have abandoned observations of English prurience in favour of delving deep into their own internal landscapes, and without becoming navel-gazing bores – they lash themselves with their ever-sharp tongues as much as ‘Two Dancers’’ bovver-booted brutes (case in point: ‘Reach A Bit Further’’s refrain of “I was crude, I was lewd, I was rude, I was not in the mood”).

If that second album was where they first crystallised themselves as one of our smartest, most imaginative and important bands, they’ve not been tempted to make ‘Three Dancers’ to capitalise on that. Instead, ‘Smother’ is deeply sad and lonely, but still a barbed invitation to intimacy; like Coleridge’s albatross, an extraordinarily elegant, stunning, (near)-perfect portrait of how terribly bad decisions can turn out.

Label: 4AD

Released: September 12

Spotify // Buy

I feel a strange sort of disconnect from this record now and haven’t put it on in a while, but it still thoroughly deserves such a high placing. Annie Clark is well on her way to becoming one of the cult musicians of her generation; I’ll be thrilled to tell my grand-nieces and nephews that I saw her play. Here’s a feature I did on her for NME, more after the jump:

SERIAL KILLER RIFFS

St Vincent’s reinvention as an axe-wielding heroine has produced arguably the guitar album of 2011. And, as she tells Laura Snapes, she owes it all to her obsession with murder

“Shit, fuck it up!” Whereas your average strumming Jim might rally his band into song with a steady, “ah-one-two-three-four”, St Vincent – aka 28-year old Dallas native Annie Clark – has different ideas at the London’s Barbican venue, shouting this order at her surprised saxophone player.

That was back in July, when she covered ‘Big Black Mariah’ for a night in tribute to Tom Waits’ feted 1985 album ‘Rain Dogs’, a yarn of salty hounds and seedy coves that doesn’t require much help in the fucked-up department. One minute in, Clark was transformed – snarling, clawing at the body of her Harmony Bobkat guitar (the same brand Jack White plays); a world away from when we last saw her, touring 2009’s elegantly poised ‘Actor’.

Clark has come a long way since being a member of frock-wearing hippies Polyphonic Spree in her early 20s. You might know her from her critically beloved albums: 2007′s ‘Marry Me’, a low-key, sweet debut written almost entirely on computer, full of canny lines like “We’ll do what Mary and Joseph did/Without the kid”. Follow-up ‘Actor’ was less playful, detailing suburban darkness with dizzying woodwind and showboating strings, inspired by watching Disney films on mute and reimagining the soundtracks. Although her guitar skills underpinned every song, she only unleashed the feral fret-frotting occasionally. Hence the surprise at her behaviour at the Barbican show, looking like she’s auditioning for a Slayer support slot.

“I was in a noise band in college, Skull Fuckers,” Clark explains over coffee at a sweaty central London café when we catch up with her later, the Barbican show memory still stamped on our skull. “That band was about getting really aggressive and ugly. I don’t think I’ve ever pushed myself that hard,” she adds, recalling another frenetic live show that came shortly afterwards in New York, where she nailed a similarly ferocious cover of Big Black’s ‘Kerosene’. “That night I unloaded every bit of misanthropic bile in my body, and people cheered!”

It wasn’t just the crowd cheering. The original scribe of ‘Kerosene’, Steve Albini – the guitar legend who has produced everyone from Nirvana to PJ Harvey to the Manics – once proclaimed, “I like big-ass vicious noise that makes my head spin.” “I found out from a friend that he liked the cover. It’s the biggest compliment!” Clark trills.

It comes as little surprise, then, that despite being written and recorded before these two gigs took place, for Clark’s third album, the wide-eyed prettiness of its predecessor is no longer on the agenda. ‘Strange Mercy’ is dark, peculiarly beautiful, and most importantly, one of the year’s greatest guitar records.

Back in January, when battles were raging over the health of guitar music, few would have thought that Annie Clark would make one of the albums that would put the kibosh on that argument. It came as just as much of a surprise to her too.

“I’ve been writing on the computer since I was 14 – I’ve rarely written just on guitar. The closing song is called ‘Year Of The Tiger’ [which ran from February 2010 to February 2011]. It was the darkest year of my life – I lost people that I loved,” she says quietly, pointing her face up at the ceiling and cupping her flat white coffee. “I couldn’t take being in New York any more because it was too overwhelming, so I went on a whim out to Seattle, where my friend Jason McGerr from Death Cab For Cutie has a studio. I wanted to see if I could be the troubadour, and write a proper Neil Young-style song song, on guitar.”

Bored with the filigreed orchestration that had couched her last record, Clark aimed to make “music for the American recession”. Or, in plain English, a record chock-full of focused, dazzling riffs – as on the King Crimson-indebted freakout of ‘Northern Lights’, or the dizzying, deranged ‘Surgeon’.

“I was trying to leave space for your ears to readjust, and let there be air in the room,” she explains. “To let there be life. I wanted to make something people who can’t dance can kind of dance to – sexy, and sleazier than before. Things are more emotionally immediate, there’s more simple form, then when I got into the studio with [producer] John Congleton in mid-February, we put everything through the meat grinder.”

It’s an appropriate word to describe her relationship with long-term producer Congleton, with whom she first bonded over the realisation that they both knew a lot more than was healthy about serial killers.

“I have a very specific memory of my stepmother reading a book called The Mammoth Book Of Murder, a compendium of serial killers from the 19^th and 20^thcenturies,” she laughs. “It described their crimes in really gory detail – on car trips I used to read about how Jack The Ripper got his victims. John had a really similar interest – we talked about Ed Gein, the inspiration for Psycho, the one who wanted to make a skin suit. And Ted Bundy – he was actually very handsome and charming, and he’d lure women into his apartment by pretending he was struggling on crutches…”

Making friendships over murders mirrors the contradictions that run through ‘Strange Mercy’. “It’s about people looking for catharsis through pain,” she explains of the title track. So ‘Chloe In The Afternoon’ details some light S&M – “no kisses, no real names” – and ‘Champagne Year’ is a gorgeous, resigned love letter to disappointment: “So I thought I learned my lesson/But I secretly expected/A choir at the shore and confetti through the falling air”. Whereas ‘Actor’ was masked by the perspectives of different characters, given the sad events that inspired it, ‘Strange Mercy’ sees Annie wear her bruised heart on her sleeve: “There’s less hiding here. I have always revealed myself emotionally in serpentine ways, which I’m less afraid of now – sometimes when you go through something that shows you that life is so short, you realise there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Not that fear is something that anyone will be associating with the formidable shredder any time soon. Frankly, there’s better cause to be scared of her…

“What did I learn when making this record? That I might be a serial killer!” she laughs. “No, the opposite – I learned more about forgiveness, human compassion, and not trying to manhandle and strangle the life out of songs. I think my live show will be harder and darker than ever before. That feels right. That feels natural now.”

ANNIE’S GUITAR PICKS

St Vincent’s favourite guitar shredders

‘Dimebag’ Darrell Abbott, Pantera
Annie: “When I first heard the bizarro Dimebag harmonics on ‘The Cemetery Gates’ at age 13, I thought I was hearing the very embodiment of evil. Which is to
say, I was as intrinsically drawn to it as I was mortified by it.”

Andy Gill, Gang Of Four
“Some guitar players can gently cajole and coerce a guitar to sing. Some
guitar players can make a guitar beg and squeal for its very life. Andy Gill
falls into the latter category.”

Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King, Slayer
“There is jockish musical athleticism, which can be admirable, but lack
emotion. Then there is unwieldy, savant-ish creativity, which can be
fearsome, but unreliable. Somewhere between those is the ideal – this is the
domain of Slayer… plus a whole lot of doom and destruction.”

Label: Dead Oceans

Released: June 13

Spotify // Buy

A consummate album in a similar vein to Metronomy’s ‘The English Riviera’ (though rather more accomplished). I reviewed this album for NME, which you can read here, and interviewed Dan Bejar for The Guardian, which you can read below (more after the jump).

Destroyer and the return of soft rock

Along with Gayngs and Ariel Pink, Dan Bejar’s Destroyer seem to be bringing back the high-gloss, sax-laden radio rock sound of the 80s. But it’s not about irony

Dan Bejar, the creative linchpin of Destroyer, is surprised. “I’ve been making records for a long time,” he says. “So it’s strange to get swept up with some zeitgeist after doing this for over 15 years.” The reason for this surprise is the fact that his ninth album, Kaputt, has inadvertently become the final corner of an indie soft-rock triumvirate, in the wake of last year’s efforts from Gayngs and Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti. There’s no community or geographic connection to bind the three, yet each bears the hallmarks of a sound that was, until recently, revisited only through irony-tinted lenses: brittle, 80s drum machines, languorous sax and a louche smoothness akin to sporting a silk thong under velvet pyjamas.

Each of the three albums is executed with a romantic loyalty to the source material that inspired it, but simultaneously kicks against the mould. Gayngs’s Relayted dripped with a fascination for decadence – their logo is a marijuana leaf crossed with a vagina and a peace sign – whereas Ariel Pink‘s ninth album, Before Today, continued his fascination with bastardising the intricate production of pop eras past, notably the Alan Parsons Project‘s slinky, bizarre catalogue.

For Bejar, though, Kaputt was an exercise in sincerity. “I don’t use music for jokes, but as a life or death kind of milieu. I’m old, so I can’t really romanticise or go digging through the vaults for exotic sounds, because I grew up with that,” he says. “Even if I were younger, I would know better than to do that – it never works.” Bejar points out more than once that he’s due to turn 39 in a few months – he would have been the perfect age to share awkward first kisses to the sound of Hall & Oates, but this was not the sound he was drawn to as a teeanger in Vancouver: “Where I came in as a fan was with shoegaze. I was into David Sylvian, but I kept that secret because it’s not really teenager’s music.”

Rather than using Kaputt to recreate his own youth, or an idealised version thereof, Bejar returned to sounds he had actively rejected at the time – the David Bowie of This Is Not America, from 1985, or late Roxy Music. This was music from the periphery of his awareness, an idea he tried to recreate. “For me, Kaputt evokes public spaces. I thought I would try and make a record that could exist in the background and not interrupt.”

On one hand, this willingness to let his music become part of the everyday is a far cry from his original aim for Destroyer, which was “to combat forces of low art in rock music” (he chuckles as he says that, aware of the statement’s pomposity). However, he admits a fascination with “the choices older artists start to make once they become severely divorced from the reality around them”, and this is an artistic conceit that bolsters Kaputt. Bejar has not had heady, plot-losing success, but he calls his latest record “the biggest work of fiction I’ve ever written; like coming to a lost diary with every four pages torn out”. Its excess lies in the notion of artistic excess itself, interweaving the imagined sleaze of “chasing cocaine in the back rooms of the world” with characteristic non-sequiturs and rich, period-specific backing.

Bejar, then, isn’t in a position to talk on behalf of his soft-rocking compatriots about the sound’s renaissance, but his surprise at the reaction to Kaputt does the job for him. “I wasn’t prepared for young people to like the record, or for those who previously hated Destroyer to come around to it via this kind of music. Perhaps it pushes memory buttons for people; or a younger person who didn’t live through it, who doesn’t have those hang-ups about genre and the politics of the time, might find it interesting.”