LESLIE WINER & MAXWELL STERLING - “Once I Was” [7”](Light In The Attic)
In a completely anarchic opening frame, we only heard a smidgen of this limited edition split single from Leslie Winer(reviewed here 8.26.21) & Maxwell Sterling covering Tim Buckley (the Buckley original appears as the B-side.) Needless to say, while it is hard to judge a song by a sliver. This little piece of the collaboration raced through our heads while feverishly searching for more of it.
BEN CHASNY - The Intimate Landscape [LP](Drag City/Redeye)
Outside of Six Organs of Admittance, guitarist Ben Chasny was given the opportunity to make a Library music record for the legendary company KPM. Like their afternoon-recorded classics, “The Intimate Landscape” carries the same feeling of being both very compositionally oriented and immediate. Chasny takes it in a slightly different direction and makes beauties like “Six Diamonds” also function as clear, concise slices of American Primitive music as well.
Various Artists - BROWN ACID: THE THIRTEENTH TRIP [CD](Riding Easy)
On lucky thirteen, the Brown Acid series explores more of the Proto-Metal side of Rock with several songs that successfully have one foot in the Sixties, the other in the Seventies, and a hand everready to turn the throttle to sail off into the distance. While less “Metallic” than the other entries, this 13th installment of “Brown Acid” leaves you in the contrails of its biker Rock (“Run Run” the only single ever from Max,) Bluesy guitar jams (the Hendrix-esque peel off of Gary Del Vecchio’s “Buzzin’”) and even some Garage Rock ("Good Humore’s “Detroit.”) Elsewhere, John Kitko’s overdriven guitar work is a highlight on “Indecision” and Detroit’s Master Danse conjures up some very heavy Blues from 1974 on ‘Feelin Dead.” Take the trip, these singles continue to exist as untapped wells of earthly delight.
ROSS FROM FRIENDS - Tread [LP/CD](Brainfeeder/Redeye)
“Family Portrait” plays with Garage/House beats and stretching the sounds above it to make textural changes that made his work really stand out. “Tread’ is not necessarily about standing out, but it is largely about creating sounds in opposition to creating songs. The Boards of Canada-esque “XXX Olympiad” is the closest to approaching a single with its hypnotic beat, wavering synth lines, and Soul samples. If this is a new compositional tool for Ross, “Tread” is a much deeper Electronic album than most. Like Leon Vynehall (reviewed here 4.29.21,) “Tread” wants to twist and turn around the beat. Most notable is the dramatic change to the samples AND the beats on “A Brand New Start,” which according to its title is the best way to explain this transitional record from a talented Electronic artist.
PERSONA - Som [LP/CD/DLX](Black Sweat ITA)
Based on a game created for an art exhibition, Roberto Campadello uses the distortions of his image and appearance in gilded glass to construct a separate reality of what we will call “informed psychedelia.” “Som” is a hypnotic series of fuzz guitar instrumental explorations where the object is to deconstruct their composition through repetition to elicit a trance state. Unlike normal “trance” records, the efforts here are rarely conscious they are doing this. Lo-fi percussion is looped through primitive echo to sound foreign. While Campadello’s disembodied voice is the closest to a dreamlike element, his music is spritely (“Introducao/Monte,”) and even driving (the wah-wah showcase on “Fogo.”) As it approaches its big conclusion, a guitar and slide guitar duel for highest heights (“Lago”) before finding a quick and overdriven denouement (“Trovao”) to represent the glass shattering. Fascinating.
ASH RA TEMPEL - Schwingungen [LP](MG Art GER)
Manuel Gottsching’s Ash Ra Tempel is the continuation of that first wave of Psychedelic Musik Kosmiche from the Sixties into the Seventies. At just three songs, the mixture of very effect-drenched guitars and synths look to set you adrift for a while. Like Ummagumma-era Pink Floyd jamming with Can (John L’s vocals are very Damo Suzuki-esque,) the best thing about “Schwingungen” almost fifty years later is how they allow their tense music (for example, five minutes into the Hawkwind-esque “Darkness: Flowers Must Die”) simple emerge from what sounds like formless wandering. With Gottsching’s chordal wizardry and Hartmut Enke’s minimalist trickery, these are great waves of interstellar surf music presented for a lengthy ride.
Various Artists-THE SUN SHINES HERE: THE ROOTS OF INDIE-POP 1980-1984 [3CD](Cherry Red)
The Sixties are framed as fertile even as the tumult of the world is shifting tectonic plates around them. The Seventies are described as a diverse shattering of genre specifics and styles where the best tracks live on in the stained glass image of Pop. However, the Eighties are seen as a mostly pristine Pop and bracing almost violently different Indie music. What about the gulf between them? Where former Punkers and those who were inspired by its DIY ethic were creating their own Pop at home.
“The Sun Shines Here” is another in the C-series of British Indie that is filled with sometimes rudimentary (the pulsating Disco Zombies) and sometimes ornate (the horns, multi-track voices and instrumental peak of It’s Immaterial) post Punk (and yes Post-Punk) Indie Pop. The best aspect of this great box is how it is constructed to know no bounds (much like Cherry Red’s Eighties breakthrough into the retail space “Pillows & Prayers.”)
Unlike its predecessor “Scared To Get Happy,” “The Sun Shines Here” is more devoted to the different types of music that came under the Indie banner. While there are nascent tracks from Pulp and The Jesus and Mary Chain (as well as sought after B-sides from Aztec Camera and Altered Images,) the real value is hearing groups like Prefab Sprout making “maximalist” music with less equipment (and in turn, Weekend’s brilliant 7” mix of “The View From Her Room.”)
Each disc travels in several different directions, the first unveils lost gems like “Better Scream” from Wah! Heat (with Liverpool’s Pete Wylie once in the “Crucial Three” with Julian Cope and Ian McCulloch,) a shimmering Monochrome Set guitar jam “Ten Don’t for Honeymooners,” and favorites at the time like The Wild Swans and Everything But The Girl (whose reductive “On My Mind” should open up a need to hear more demos and ephemera from a duo more associated with sleek recordings.)
The second disc gets more quiet and weird especially with the brooding New Zealand-esque Post-Punk of Five or Six, the pre-twee fun of Trixie’s Big Red Motorbike, and the underrated Pale Fountains. By the third disc, the Indie scene is clearly taking more shape as bands begin to compete for chart position by sounding different. Swallow Tongue funk up The Jackson 5, and The Revolving Paint Dream fill their psychedelic spaciousness with emotional vocals from future Primal Scream-er Andrew Innes.
As always, once you explore the roots of a movement and see it coming together - the next step is to trace all the offshoots. “The Sun Shines Here” renews all interest in that fervent and fertile time when the UK was producing thousands of singles at once.
TAPPING INTO KID A MNESIA
There is a theory that 50 percent of the bands who sign to major labels, fall apart before they complete that first record. Bands who beat that curse and find success often are eaten alive by the need to top what they did. When Radiohead’s “OK Computer” was released to such rapturous praise and commercial success, it would have been easy to just shut it all down because of the pressure on the band. However, despite a bout of writer’s block and with the help and freedom of a new world of Electronic music, Radiohead managed to make an album that is every bit as superb and yet completely different.
Yorke sat down at a piano one day and all the time spent away from composing (listening to Boards of Canada, drawing, and walking) began to stir new ideas. Using his recorder as his tableau, the long-bootlegged demos known as “The Kid A Theory” give you a good idea as to what Yorke presented to the band.
The vocoder-ized “Kid A” probably sounded extremely foreign and daunting to the band. However, hearing it now represents a clearing of the mind of all that was once familiar. “The National Anthem” while immediately brooding and powerful rings out through its effects, like Yorke is doing his best to sound alien. Even conventional tracks with the band playing their instruments on the “Ok Computer”-esque “How To Disappear Completely And Never Be Found” feels strange from the rumbling bass line as its low end and the guitars sustaining notes like synthesizers.
As Greenwood comes on board, the compositions begin taking strange new shapes. In moves that would be considered obtuse and pretentious from any other band, Radiohead began to filter their older style of guitar music through the lens of Electronic music. “Lift” which could have appeared on “OK Computer” harkens back to the anthemic pull of “The Bends.” While “Big Boots” (a/k/a “Man of War”) could have been on “The Bends,” as a predictor of the searing work on “Paranoid Android.” As the band works through the familiar songs during these sessions, you can hear them pushing them in a different direction. “Nude,” which actually does not show up on the album until “In Rainbows,” is recorded in its most simple acoustic setting as Yorke begins to sing not in a voice - but like an instrument.
It is estimated that Radiohead actually recorded nearly 60 tracks for “Kid A.” After considering releasing it as a double album, they shelved a few tracks for the planned companion “Amnesiac.” However, even with the newly added cuts on the “KID A MNESIA” triple LP/double CD (and six more that appear on the cassette version,) there would still be approximately 20 more cuts that were left on the cutting room floor.
In addition, many of the selections on the third disc “Kid Amnesiae” and the cassette were remixes and used as bonuses or B-sides like the bubbling “Kinetic” which accompanied the Amnesiac track “Pyramid Song,” or the stunning Musik Kosmiche-esque “Knives Out” flipside “Cuttooth.”
In reverse order, “Amnesiac” remains the more experimental of the two albums. However, when listening to them all together as they are now available - you can truly hear how Radiohead’s development of the dynamic tension between sounding like their past and pushing beyond even their own expectations opened up a whole new palette for the band to use in the years that followed.
Well, another week, another list of several different styles and pursuits in music for you. Enjoy. Listen again. Share as you wish.
NEW RELEASES lovingly compiled for you from this very week!
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