Arrivals

I’ve been really looking forward to the new Drugstore album and single. The album in particular looks gorgeous. Clear vinyl, nicely photographed sleeve and insert. It looks and feels like an artifact to treasure. On first listen it is less obviously deliciously sweet, but perhaps that is for the best. Gone are the multiple layers of electric textures that made earlier Drugstore classics like ‘Starcrossed’ and ‘Alive’ so mesmerising. Instead we find Isabel Monteiro and her new gang of cowboys treading a more brittle path, Monteiro’s bruised but warmly emotive voice most often framed by acoustic guitars and subtle background washes. The approach works best on tracks like the gorgeous, ghostly ‘Sinner’s Descent’, the gentle desert campfire strum of ‘Falling Rocks’ and the piano and strings led beauty of ‘Clouds’. Even when the group steps up to the plate at moments in a track like ‘Standing Still’, the sound of electricity is at best a carefully controlled squall, a shrugged squeal of dissipating anger. 

‘Anatomy’ then is perhaps not what I was expecting, but its spacious, stripped-back purity frames a mature passion that feels both poignantly contemporary and classically timeless.

Now there is a link here between Drugstore and another disc that arrived this week. The Land Observation ‘Roman Roads’ single on the Enraptured label is the work of former Appliance guitarist and vocalist James Brooks and as some of you may know Brooks was a sometimes touring guitarist with Monteiro’s cowboys back in the day. Since the dismantling of Appliance Brooks has been firmly focused on his work as a visual artist and it seems clear that some of the themes of his visual work (process, repetition, partial erasure, minimalism) find echoes in his new recordings. 

There is something distinctly refreshing about listening to music that is ‘about’ Roman roads. Such conceptual bravery is to be applauded. It occurs to me that what Brooks finds intriguing about the idea of historic routes is perhaps their fractured qualities; the ways in which trajectories are re-routed over times; sections erased, or left to decay as a barely visible memory alongside something newer. For me these are the ideas that find voice in Brooks’ layered repetitive guitar phrases and the gently motorik rhythms that are themselves as ghosts of the Appliance past. Think of the finest Appliance moment of cycling reference (‘Derailleur, King Of The Mountain’) stripped of electronics and with a more pronounced Deebank guitar voice and you might be getting somewhere close. The limited edition vinyl single is released on August 1st on the Enraptured label. Get your order in quick.

And here’s another link for you: the drawing in my ‘arrivals’ photo this week comes from Rupert Loydell, whose Exeter painting studio Brooks once shared in the Appliance era. Indeed Loydell provided the excellent contextualising sleeve-notes for the epic ‘Re-Conditioned’ triple CD set of Appliance material. In those notes he describes me as a “lanky shy Scotsman” which I admit is about the most accurate description I have read. In those notes he also points out the difference between Brooks’ careful, considered approach to painting (I particularly like the idea of “slow accumulation”) with his own. I think Loydell’s approach (more “cultural magpie”) is captured in the drawing he sent this week. Densely layered, full of relaxed intensity and tensions. Fractured rhythms and notes that clash deliciously. We have a large drawing by Loydell framed in our living room. One of a series of drawings produced in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, for me it reverberates with feelings of loss, quietly suppressed fear and historical inevitability. Perhaps that is the result of nearly a decade of exposure to the painting and the inevitable contextualising of history. But then, that is surely one of the pleasures of art? The way in which layers of meaning can build, erode and build again over time. 

This new drawing by Loydell however will not be framed and hung in the home. Instead it will be a part of a larger conceptual work: this drawing, like several others, will be posted in a public space and allowed to deteriorate according to the laws of nature and (one presumes) the passing populace. I have not yet decided where ‘my’ drawing will be placed, but I rather suspect it will be somewhere along a regularly ridden route so that I can try and record the history of its dissolution.

Comments

[robin tomens]

The Conversation...great film!

[alistair]

Hadn't seen it before. Watched it last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. I usually struggle with the often ponderous pace of early to mid '70s films but this one won me over.

[William]

The Conversation is an amazing film, as is the score by David Shire.

[robin tomens]

Not forgetting the 'yellowness' of 70s films... ;>) You don't know what you're missing!